Franz Kafka wrote "America" without ever leaving Europe, which contributes to the heady strangeness and sense of romance of the book. I've never been to New York, and in my imagination it has become not merely a symbol of America but a symbol of the whole world, the first truly global city where Armenians and Ugandans and Irish and Colombians all meet in the Big Apple (so called because Puritans compared the city to the apple in the Garden of Eden, or so the urban myth has it); the capital of Western culture, with more galleries and museums and more happening than, say, fifty years ago in the entire world; the epitome of East Coast sophistication, not really a part of the Middle America of malls and drive-ins (another impression formed from a distance)
Like any distant El Dorado, the very placenames of New York are imbued with their own mystique and charisma; Upper East Side, Queens, West 22nd Street, Central Park, Harlem, Broadway, 42nd Street, Grand Central Station ("By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" by Elizabeth Smart has, along with "From Here to Eternity", the best title of any book ever), Union Square, West Side, the Bronx - all merge into mental cartography which doubtless bears little relationship with actually finding your way around New York. Patrick Kavanagh's poem "Stony Grey Soil" (you know it, it was on the Leaving) concluded with a litany of placenames, which marked "Dead loves that were born for me" - loves he would have had if things were just that little bit different - just as like my romantic dreams of New York, the World City are fed by these names; a life of sophisticated, world-weary socialites and eager young intellectuals, of elegant sophistication and the frenetic labour of a great city, of the greatest wealth and the greatest squalor, of "Metropolitan" and "Taxi Driver", of infinite promise and infinite heartbreak; bright lights big city indeed.
And the main influence on this na�ve, romantic view is The New Yorker. This magazine represents all the wit, style, diversity and sheer quality that everyone should aspire to. God is in the details and The New Yorker's most endearing characteristic is the small, incidental pleasures; the captions, the little summary phrase on the header of every page, the Goings On About Town, the listings section at the start of the magazine, the Departments ("Our Far-Flung Correspondents", "A Critic at Large", "The Talk of the Town", "The Current Cinema") - all radiate an effortless, inborn wit and natural sense of style.
Goings on About Town at the start is a summary of the sheer diversity and range of cultural activity in New York; summarised pithily and with more insight than in more verbose listings and criticism (Backstreet Boys; "The teenybopper singing group that makes thinking people everywhere wax nostalgic for New Kids on the Block") Other avatars of style and wit in the pages of The New Yorker are the famous cartoons, probably the first thing most readers look at when flicking through the magazine. Such legends as James Thurber, Charles Addams (of "Addams Family" fame) and Peter Arno helped create what we now understand by the cartoon-with-caption; their successors still pull off the rare trick of being both sophisticated and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.
The quality of the writing is second to none, with commentary on culture, politics (particularly, in recent times, the Lewinsky affair), society and most other issues that is truly insightful and influential. In almost every issue there is at least one article which I read again and again. The New Yorker is also that endangered species, a general-interest magazine. In these days of niche-marketing, where there's a magazine for each possible demographic, and even towards sub groups within that demographic; the concept of a general interest magazine, in which various issues and topics are dealt with, not just those proven by marketing theorists to appeal to an easily definable social group (and hence easy to advertise to) is an essentially noble one. The belief that, in an age where quantity of content (but not quality) is at a historical high with no end in sight to its growth, people will still buy a publication knowing that they'll read every word, even if the topics might not immediately be the first they'd tick as being of interest in a marketing survey. You find yourself engrossed in the early careers of the latest Supreme Court appointee or a gubernatorial race in Wyoming. Admittedly The New Yorker's demographic, as evinced by the advertising it carries, is undeniably more affluent than not, but the actual content makes no concessions to anything except intelligence.
The New Yorker may seem an Institution as old as New York but it was only founded in 1925 as a lean comic weekly with the legendary Harold Ross as editor. The Roaring Twenties of Scott Fitzgerald seem to breathe through the magazine's pages to this day; Ross attracted such legendary figures as Dorothy Parker, Thurber, Alexander Woolcott and Arno. The magazine actually prospered during the Depression, leading into its second great phase, under the editorship of William Shawn, in the years of Second World War and after; the magazine became serious with the war and prosperous with the antebellum boom. Shawn had a new generation of writers; Pauline Kael redefining and refining film criticism, much of JD Salinger's fiction (including his last published story) appeared first in The New Yorker, James Baldwin's incinderary The Fire Next Time was first a New Yorker piece; other great writers from this era include John Updike (still a regular contributor), Rachel Carson, Edmund Wilson and AJ Liebling (of "people everywhere confuse what they read in the newspapers with news" fame). The New Yorker was now a bona fide institution, and with time, or so I'm told, a sense of institutional stuffiness set in.
I would love to pretend that I was a reader of The New Yorker since birth, but I am of course a veteran of only the Tina Brown years, so I can't comment on the various controversies that followed the appointment of the English editor of Vanity Fair to the throne six years ago. All I can say is, if Tina Brown "destroyed" The New Yorker as some of her critics claimed, it must have been quite simply the greatest cultural artefact of all time before her advent, a force for good unlike any other in human history.
I have a postal subscription to The New Yorker, which means that generally they arrive six to eight weeks late, sometimes slightly torn. This is slightly annoying but also allows a sense of perspective; for example the slight delay in the coverage of L''Affaire Lewinsky showed how much other media followed their lead. Many of the pieces have a timeless quality that is a sign of great literature in any case.
The New Yorker acts not just as the voice of the greatest city on earth (meaning "great" in the sense of "immense" and not necessarily as praise) It is a bulwark against the endless fragmentation of our culture, the endless niche marketing and division into ever more precise demographics (18-30 year old A1 males who want to be a bit of a lad but also want to work out and stay healthy, 30-45 year old single women poised between Cosmopolitan and Prima) and makes a definite stand towards some kind of shared, universally relevant experience for us all. The stakes are higher than you might think. Buying The New Yorker is taking a stance against the fragmentation and the paradoxical homogenisation of our culture.
