Robert B Silvers, a founder of the New York Review of Books, which under his editorship became one of the premier intellectual journals in the United States, a showcase for extended, thoughtful essays on literature and politics by eminent writers, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Rea S Hederman, the publisher of the Review, confirmed his death.
The New York Review, founded in 1963, was born with a mission – to raise the standards of book reviewing and literary discussion in the United States and nurture a hybrid form of politico-cultural essay. Silvers brought to its pages a self-effacing, almost priestly sense of devotion that ultimately made him indistinguishable from the publication he edited, and it from him.
He shared editorial duties with Barbara Epstein until her death in 2006, but it was Silvers who came to embody the Review’s mystique, despite, or perhaps because of, his insistence on remaining a behind-the-scenes presence, loath to grant interviews or make public appearances.
“I put my name on the paper, and the rest I don’t care to be known,” he told Philip Nobile, the author of Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and The New York Review of Books (1974). In a 2008 interview for the online programme Thoughtcast, Silvers said: “The editor is a middleman. The one thing he should avoid is taking credit. It’s the writer that counts.”
He arrived at the office early and left late, if at all, to the kind of heavyweight cocktail party that was, for him, a happy hunting ground for writers and ideas. For many years, his companion was Grace, the Countess of Dudley, with whom he shared a passion for opera and a vacation home in Lausanne, Switzerland. She died in December. Silvers is survived by nieces and nephews.
His myriad enthusiasms found their way into a publication that was edited for an audience of one. When asked to describe readers, he once said, “I really don’t know too much about them.”
He was happiest surrounded by stacks of manuscripts by the writers he pursued with flattery and guile; in one typical instance, he drafted Jonathan Miller to write about John Updike’s novel The Centaur for the first issue of the Review by waylaying him after a performance of Beyond the Fringe on Broadway. He would inundate them with newspaper clippings, afterthoughts, helpful notes and suggestions for further reading as they toiled over their assignments.
It was routine for him to hunt down contributors on their vacations. The Christmas-morning phone call was not unknown.
Most writers regarded him with admiration verging on awe.
“He was one of those rare editors who is also one’s ideal reader,” Ian Buruma, a marquee writer for the Review since 1985, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2011. “He was not only sympathetic, but you knew that he would get it, and not try to rewrite because he really wanted to be a writer. He was unusual in being interested in so many things, in a profound way – a polymath who knew a tremendous amount about many subjects.”
Robert Benjamin Silvers was born on December 31st, 1929, in Mineola, New York, a village on Long Island. His father, James, was a businessman who left Manhattan to live the rural life. His mother, the former Rose Roden, was the music critic for the New York Globe, long since disappeared. A precocious student, he left high school in Rockville Centre at 15 and enrolled in the University of Chicago. He pursued an accelerated two-year programme, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
An introduction to George Plimpton led to a post as managing editor of the newly created Paris Review, a journal in some disarray and badly in need of an editorial guiding hand. “It seemed to me quite a natural thing,” Silvers told the Guardian of his decision to take up editing as a vocation. “It was something I could do without even making a choice.”
Interviewed by Nobile for his book, Plimpton said of Silvers: “He was rather shy but formidable, and a strong voice amidst all this sturm und drang. He made The Paris Review what it was.”
John Fischer, the editor of Harper’s, hired Silvers at the recommendation of Plimpton’s father, Francis, a corporate lawyer, to oversee literary articles and book reviews at the magazine in 1958.
In that job, Silvers became known for bringing in new writers like Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Kingsley Amis and Alfred Kazin, and for orchestrating theme issues. Most notable was one titled Writing in America, published in October 1959 and later issued as a book, with an essay by Silvers from which he removed his byline.
For that issue, he commissioned Hardwick, a literary critic, to write an extended essay on the state of book reviewing in the United States. She dismissed the reviewing in American newspapers and magazines as tepid, perfunctory, shallow and, in a word, noncritical. Her main target was The New York Times Book Review.
Three years later, a typographers’ strike shut down nine major newspapers in New York.
The timing was perfect.
Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, and his wife, Barbara Epstein, a freelance editor, had proposed the idea of a new publication in discussions with Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell. They had in mind a literary review on the model of the Times Literary Supplement in London, or the literary section of the British magazine The New Statesman under VS Pritchett: a forum for writers to discuss books, ideas and politics at length, provocatively.
When the newspaper strike deprived book publishers of their main advertising outlets, the pipe dream took on solid form, and Jason Epstein immediately called Silvers, who had been thinking along similar lines, to engage him as an editor.
Gathering in the offices of Harper’s at night, Silvers and his co-conspirators worked their way through stacks of review books and compiled a list of ideal reviewers.
When a trial issue of the Review was published on February 1st, 1963, many of those names were in its pages, writing free of charge: Kazin, McCarthy, Miller, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, William Styron. The print run of 100,000 sold out.
In an astonishingly short time, the Review had not only turned a profit, but also established itself as a rival to two other magazines, Partisan Review and Commentary, a US counterpart founded in 1945. But unlike them, it made its starting point the world of books and publishing.
Silvers liked essays that both made an argument and settled it. “We like important questions to be dealt with by experts with strong views,” he told Time magazine in 1967.
He also liked to let writers roam, figuratively and literally, freed from the constraints imposed by most US publications.
“What we saw was that the book review is a form that is capable of being used to address nearly any kind of issue, and any kind of question, because there’s always a book,” Silvers said in an interview at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism in 1999. “Book reviewing can be a way of bringing critical perspectives to bear on the most intense political issues.”
Over the years, the Review became famous for wide-ranging essays that often dealt only glancingly with the multiple book titles, sometimes as many as a dozen, nominally under consideration.
Silvers liked to match writers with unexpected subjects. After noticing that Mailer had left McCarthy out of the discussion when he assessed “the talent in the room” in Advertisements for Myself, he assigned Mailer to review McCarthy’s novel The Group. Applying the same logic to political writing, he sent McCarthy to Hanoi, Vietnam, and a reluctant VS Naipaul to the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.
When Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, travelled to El Salvador in 1982, Silvers coaxed a series of long dispatches from her on the difficult situation of a country in the grip of a right-wing dictatorship. It later became a best-selling book, Salvador.
The editing process was a characteristic performance by Silvers.
“How Bob edited Salvador was by constantly nudging me toward updates on the situation and by pointing out weaker material,” Didion told the Paris Review in 2006. “When I gave him the text, for example, it had a very weak ending, which was about meeting an American evangelical student on the flight home. In other words, it was the travel piece carried to its logical and not very interesting conclusion.
“The way Bob led me away from this was to suggest not that I cut it (it’s still there), but that I follow it – and so ground it – with a return to the political situation.”
The journal flirted with the New Left and became a byword for radical chic. The issue of August 24th, 1967, epitomised its political stance. The left-wing journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote a scathing review of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?, dismissing its author as hopelessly out of touch and accommodationist, while Tom Hayden contributed an analysis of the race riots in Newark that was accompanied by a diagram on how to make a Molotov cocktail.
With the windup of the Vietnam War, Silvers opened up the pages of the Review to a host of British writers like Frank Kermode, A Alvarez, Isaiah Berlin, AJP Taylor and Christopher Ricks, who lent the magazine a more sedate literary tone, which made it seem less a successor to the brawling political journals that dominated New York intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s than to majestic Victorian flagships like the Edinburgh Review.
Politics never faded entirely from the picture. From the outset, Silvers made human rights and the need to check excessive state power his preoccupations, rising at times to the level of a crusade. Petitions and essays on behalf of political prisoners and victims of human rights violations were a constant feature.
“I don’t like accepting anything as having its own necessary authority,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “That includes skepticism about government, which is a crucial point of view we have had from the first.”
Silvers, despite the magician’s aura and the seemingly sacred status of the Review, came in for his share of criticism. He seemed to have little interest in younger writers and, particularly in the 1970s, the Review seemed to suffer from an advanced case of Anglophilia.
Despite its self-image as an arena of intellectual combat, it could be staid, even boring. The same writers showed up in issue after issue, and for a time, the Review was jokingly called the New York Review of Each Other’s Books. Silvers could blow hot and cold on his writers, courting them assiduously, then dropping them without explanation or apology.
After the election of President George W Bush and the advent of a more interventionist US foreign policy culminating in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Silvers recast the Review as a leading critical voice. Recapturing its militant spirit of the 1960s, he filled its pages with long, scathing critiques of the government’s diplomacy, its conduct of the wars and its record on civil liberties.
In a slightly astonished appreciation of the publication’s re-engagement, Scott Sherman, in the Nation, praised “the re-emergence of The New York Review of Books as a powerful and combative actor on the political scene”.
For Silvers, the Review had never changed, only the circumstances of the world around it. Its personality and its mission had remained constant since the days of the newspaper strike.
"I feel it is a fantastic opportunity – because of the freedom of it, because of the sense that there are marvellous, intensely interesting, important questions that you have a chance to try to deal with in an interesting way," he told the New York Observer in 2005. "That's an extraordinary opportunity in life. And you'd be crazy not to try and make the most of it."
© 2017 New York Times News Service
