“The New Yorker offered him a deal”:
All my life, I’ve heard about this thing, “the New Yorker story”. I hadn’t investigated this term in depth, but I understood it to mean “a short story that is meandering, plotless, and slight—full of middle-class people discussing their relentlessly banal problems”.
Not only were these stories similar to each other, but they also seemed quite different from other literary stories. These stories were mostly marked by their extreme restraint. They didn’t just eschew plot, they also eschewed lyricism, symbolism, surrealism, or any other devices that would call attention to themselves. Their plotlessness made them seem highbrow, but their unadorned style made them highly accessible.
If you’ve ever seen a New Yorker cartoon, you understand this early style of New Yorker humor. It’s not meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. Instead it’s mordant, dry, and slightly obscure. The journal assumes the reader will understand whatever is supposed to be funny.
The editors of the journal encouraged prospective writers to use this style.
This [] requirement [to decline ‘dizzy’ stories, i.e., those with a more florid, maximalist style, or lots of figurative language,] was in part necessitated by the editor, Harold Ross, who absolutely refused to print any story that he couldn’t understand. Ross also hated any discussion of sex or immorality. Even adultery could only be hinted at or alluded to. His magazine couldn’t contain anything that might give bad ideas to a child.
The New Yorker story was defined by three things: the first was Katherine’s determination to print something very different from what you’d see in other journals; the second was Ross’s mandate that all stories be perfectly clear and comprehensible and clean; and the third was the literary ambitions of The New Yorker’s stable of contributors.
By 1940, the New Yorker’s fiction had already gotten a reputation for slight, insubstantial, and concerned primarily with the quotidian problems of middle-class people.
These stories, “The Lottery” and “A Perfect Day For Bananafish”, still feel recognizably like New Yorker stories. They’re told in the same flat, matter-of-fact style. They’re about simple, easy to recognize situations. But they also contain something truly mysterious, something that’s not easy to understand.
Mizener says that a New Yorker story consists of two things: a simple subject that can be easily understood by the upper-middle-class reader (i.e. the commuter or the shopping lady); and a casual, knowing tone—a voice that is so quiet that it seems to bear very little mark of the individual author.
But the way The New Yorker treated fiction was completely different from any of these other journals. Remember, The New Yorker didn’t (and to this day still doesn’t) have any cover-lines: the magazine’s cover gave no hint about the issue’s contents. In this era, The New Yorker didn’t even have a table of contents—they wouldn’t add one until 1969. That meant you just opened the magazine and started reading. You had no idea what was in it.
And the fiction section was also quite peculiar. Generally the first story would be a humorous piece, something by S.J. Perelman or James Thurber or E.B. White or Peter De Vries. Something light. This was called the ‘B’ slot. Then there’d be a more serious story, the ‘A’ slot. That’s where all the stories we’re talking about were published: John Cheever, Harold Brodkey, Mavis Gallant, J.D. Salinger—they usually got published in that spot. (There was also a ‘C’ slot, but that’s too complicated to discuss now.)
And that strangeness extended to the presentation of the pieces. None of the pieces had the author’s name on the first page! There was no initial byline! Instead, they just had a title and then they launched anonymously into the story. And you only got the author’s name after a dash, at the very end of the piece. That meant until the story was over, you had no idea who you were reading.
The New Yorker had this very complicated system that I know way too much about, where they gave their favored authors a first-look contract. If you signed this contract you had to send The New Yorker all your best stories and give them right of first refusal. And there’d be bonuses in this contract if you sold them four or six stories in a given year.
If you had this contract, you got paid substantially more for your stories. But one of the oddities of the New Yorker was that you never quite knew how much money you’d get paid for a story—they would just send you a check for some weird amount! What relationship this bore to your story and your contract was unclear.
In 1949, John O’Hara asks The New Yorker for a kill fee because he claims that if he writes a story for The New Yorker and they don’t take it, then nobody else will—because it would read too much like a rejected New Yorker story.
During the fifties and sixties, the New Yorker’s fiction is characterized mostly by what it won’t publish. It doesn’t want sex. Doesn’t go in for lyricism, stream-of-consciousness, self-referentiality, or other surrealism. And it wants a plain, journalistic style. There should be a minimum of plot. And The New Yorker prefers stories that gesture at an Olympian lack-of-judgment. You’re not told what to think, you just infer it from the events.
That, to me, is the genius of The New Yorker. It specialized in a form of fiction—the New Yorker story—that was capacious enough to accommodate the individual ambitions of a genius.
The ‘sameness’ of these New Yorker stories meant that readers could dive into a short story without knowing anything about it, without even knowing the author’s name, and trust that the story would satisfy.
Non-privileged formulas, like the military science fiction or cozy mystery story, tend to formalize themselves into subgenres and can even create their own institutions, their own awards, and their own critical literature, which openly acknowledges the existence of the formula. But the privileged formula is different. Because it never acknowledges itself openly, the privileged formula always leaves open a lot of doubt as to whether it existed in the first place.
In the case of literary fiction, part of the formula is pretending there’s no formula at all.