On "An Editor's Burial"

How could I resist a title like that?

Don’t think less of me because the title drew me in.

“An Editor’s Burial.” Oooh, it would be wrong to admit that might have been something that crossed my mind occasionally throughout a 25-year newspaper career, wouldn’t it?

I like the way Mark Twain, whom I wrote about yesterday, expressed similar sentiments on that matter. “I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all other recreations and attend it.” That’s about the way I felt about most editors. (And maybe the way they felt about me.)

"An Editor's Burial" - The title drew me in - Remembering days at The New Yorker

Actually, “An Editor’s Burial” is a curious little volume that I happened to spot in Savannah in E. Shaver Books (an exceptional bookstore!) recently. And it has a strange little history. The filmmaker Wes Anderson, known for his quaint, stylish and off-beat films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom) made a movie about putting a weekly magazine (a-la - The New Yorker) together and the various and peculiar ways these exotic characters - writers - assemble the stories and for Anderson, he decides to have it all take place in Paris. (He explains he’s had an apartment there for years “and any time I walk down a street I don’t know well, it’s like going to the movies.”) Oh.

The resulting film, “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s homage to The New Yorker. “The French magazine in the film, “ he explains, “obviously is not The New Yorker - but it was, I think, totally inspired by it. When I was in 11th grade, my homeroom was in the school library, and I sat in a chair where I had my back to everybody else, and I faced a wooden rack of what were labeled “periodicals.”

They were copies of The New Yorker. And he was hooked. “When I went to the University of Texas in Austin,” he explains in an interview that opens - and explains - the book. “I used to look at old bound volumes of The New Yorker in the library because you could find things like a J.D. Salinger story that hadn’t been collected. I somehow managed to find out that UC Berkeley was getting rid of a set, forty years of bound New Yorkers, and I bought them for $600.”

So, “An Editor’s Burial” (a line from the film) is a collection of articles that mostly originally appeared in The New Yorker from some of the magazine’s most noted writers. We’re talking about writers like James Thurber, Lillian Ross, James Baldwin, Brendan Gill, Mavis Gallant, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell and my personal favorite, A. J. Liebling.

Liebling, who I came to know from his marvelous book on boxing - “The Sweet Science” - contributes two pieces on his true pastime - eating. “Memoirs Of A Feeder In France: A Good Appetite” which are delightful and somewhat mind - and stomach - boggling. He writes enviously of a friend’s lunch “of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pink in rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne…” I’m reaching for the Tums already.

Lillian Ross, whom I’ve written about before and her famous Hemingway profile “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?,” is also included here, offering a brief profile of (at the time) a noted French comedian. She finds a way to bring him to life, as she did, famously, with Hemingway on his 1950 visit to New York. (I’ve attached that Substack from February 2025 at the bottom here.) She finds ways to get her subjects talking in surprising ways.

Jacques Tati tells Ross that the comedian who makes him laugh is the late W.C. Fields. “He admires (Charlie) Chaplin but for the most part Chaplin doesn’t make him laugh. “Chaplin is full of ideas,” Tati said, “I am so busy watching the working out of his beautiful ideas that I never find time to laugh.”

There are also several reminiscences of the legendary two editors of The New Yorker, Harold Ross and William Shawn that give you some sense of what it must have been like to work there. It’s probably fair to say that just about any serious American writer aspires to write for The New Yorker and reading these reflections on those two men who edited the magazine, you get a sense of the pressure, their lofty expectations and the stress that goes along with trying to put out a superbly written magazine each and every week.

As for the film, “The French Dispatch,” which stars Bill Murray as the magazine’s editor. Arthur Howitzer Jr., I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. But I will. Reading “An Editor’s Burial” is the next best thing.

If you missed my Hemingway-Ross Substack from 2025, here it is.