Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos

One: Between the Sheets: Editing and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos

37 one between the sheets Editing and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos It was not the printed word that was its chief power: scores of editors who have tried to study and diagnose the appeal of the magazine from the printed page, have remained baffled at the remarkable confidence elicited from its readers. They never looked back of the magazine, and therefore failed to discover its secret. Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok Frequently placed on coffee tables as a shrine of literate sophistication , the New Yorker magazine enjoys an iconic status perhaps unparalleled in U.S. periodical history. In the introduction to his About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, Ben Yagoda recounts the overwhelming subscriber response (“nearly seven hundred cards and letters”) he receives to his reader survey: “You couldn’t imagine,” he surmises, “a survey about Mademoiselle , Popular Mechanics, or U.S. News and World Report eliciting this kind of response” (12). Today, mugs, calendars, framed calendars , joke books, and Christmas-themed collector’s editions are all indications that the New Yorker still captures loyal followers, eager to align themselves with or define themselves by its iconic image. I, for instance, am the proud owner of a framed cover by Helen Hokinson, a calendar, and my very own digital copy of the entire New Yorker, which faithfully renders each page so that it appears just as it did in the original. Yagoda’s claim certainly holds insofar as it describes the New Yorker, but the speculation about other publications shouldn’t fol- 38 Between the Sheets low so easily. In fact, other magazines have claimed to inspire similar intense devotion, or so those connected to these largecirculation magazines have boasted. Flashback eight decades and witness, for example, this characterization by Edward Bok, who served thirty years as editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal: “Thousands of women had been directly helped by the magazine; it had not remained an inanimate printed thing, but had become a vital need in the personal lives of its readers. So intimate had become this relation, so efficient was the service rendered, that its readers could not be pried loose from it.... They explained to their husbands or fathers that The Ladies’ Home Journal was a necessity— they did not feel that they could do without it” (179). This relationship, Bok explains, did not develop automatically ; he purposefully designed and nurtured it by assuming an audience of “intelligent” women, rather than “intellectual type[s]” (374–75). He aimed, in other words, to attract an audience of curious bright readers but to exclude the nineteenthcentury specter of the female pedant, the woman who carried intellectual curiosity to quixotic extremes. Ladies’ Home Journal was and always has been a mixed bag in terms of literary variety and quality, but Bok did publish, among other genres, personally inflected, groundbreaking social memoirs by women including Jane Addams and Helen Keller.1 It is this intellectual and political content that Bok highlights in his autobiography. He tells how he “encouraged and cajoled his readers to form the habit of looking upon his magazine as a great clearing-house of information ” (Bok 174), as a textbook of sorts. He supplied a thirty-fivemember editorial staff who immediately supplied answers to readers’ questions. According to Bok, the subscribers came to rely on this information service and wrote letters that “streamed in by the tens of thousands” and eventually into the “hundreds of thousands , until during the last year, before the service was finally stopped by the Great War of 1917–1918, the yearly correspondence totaled nearly a million letters” (174). Even after the discontinuation of the service, letter-writing readers did not disappear but, 39 Between the Sheets instead, hovered in reserve. On several occasions, Bok mobilized his literate subscribers, rousing them to write letters lobbying for civic causes. For instance, when he saw that power companies surrounding Niagara Falls were threatening “America’s greatest scenic asset,” he urged Ladies’ Home Journal readers to campaign: “Very soon after the magazine reached its subscribers’ hands, the letters began to reach the White House; not by dozens, as the President’s secretary wrote to Bok, but by the hundreds and then by the thousands. ‘Is there any way to turn this spigot off?’ telegraphed the President’s secretary” (Bok 353). As different as the New Yorker and Ladies’ Home...