Once upon a time, if you wanted to know what was going on in the world, what was right, and what was wrong, and what might make things better, you picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books. The Review, as fondly known, had an uncanny knack for collecting a remarkable plethora (yes, this is the way they talked) of disparate (there it is again) books which shouldn’t go together, but somehow did. That—juxtaposition—all by itself, was informative, innovative, and brilliant.

And not just that.

They would weave the seeming grab bag of books into a brand-new formulation of how some critical part of the world works—creative reviews. One never imagined such a system, but when it was explained, it made perfect sense. Shocking. Enlightening. Electrifying.

Who was it who could perform the literary magic trick of the Review? The editor.

Emperor of the Holy Word

Robert Benjamin Silvers was no ordinary human being. This phenomenon jumped four grades.

Nobody jumps four grades, okay? He graduated from high school at fourteen, then from the University of Chicago at seventeen. This is a genius, okay? (Should anyone know of any reason this is not true, speak now or forever hold your peace.) Over the years, very, very bright writers working for him have marveled at his astonishing ability to seemingly master every realm of knowledge. Well, there you go.

Robert Silvers was real, real smart.

For a year and a half he attended Yale law school, then moved on to the higher, more ethereal realm of . . . editing. Now, a curiosity of legal education, vaguely alluded to by law professors, is that it is primarily about cognition and language (e.g., see Schlag and Skover’s Tactics of Legal Reasoning, and Sunstein’s Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict).

Conversations analyzed. Eyewitness statements doubted. Definitions challenged. Ambiguities showcased. Improbable claims questioned. Records reviewed, and missing data noted. Falsehoods assailed. Reasoning shown to be plausible, but flawed. Weak arguments challenged by strong arguments.

Truth, that bourne of linguistic evidence and reasoning, relentlessly pursued. Robert Silvers’ editing of the Review was, in a sense, a virtuoso legal attack on what he saw as fallacious research, thinking, and writing.

At the Feet of the Master

Working for Silvers, it appears from the comments of those who worked on, and for, the Review, was a little like serving under General George Patton in the Third Army. A casual slave driver, relentless, exacting, profoundly ambitious, obsessed with excellence, but also . . . immensely successful.

Robert Silvers was the wagon master of an intellectual juggernaut—trashing trash and canonizing virtue, world-wide. He was the Lone Ranger of Language, tracking down crooked commas, lying semicolons, and evil-doing dangling modifiers with fearless gusto. He was Sir Galahad, seeking the grail of clear thinking and writing, his literary mission a holy quest.

Robert Silvers was Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt, and his blazing associates, like Barbara Epstein and Elizabeth Hardwick, and his assistants and writers, were his loyal troops—"Someday, we who serve shall strip our sleeves, to show our wounds and scars, and we shall say, ‘We were there, we few, we happy few, on Saint Crispin’s Day, with Silvers, when the flower of the literary world triumphed over the Bad Sentences’”.

Yet . . . Bob was forever polite, well-spoken, good-humored, amusing, and faultlessly dressed. No topic out of bounds, no source too obscure, no point of view not worth considering. Therefore, good company at dinner—a boon companion (though, no doubt, he would . . . eschew that sobriquet).

He was, “Everything . . . and more”, as Dickens said about Christmas.

And loved by all.

The World According to Silvers

Robert Silvers; drawing by David Levine @NYRB

What follows is a set of principles of analysis and expression—good writing—based, largely, on comments presented in the Review about the legend that was Robert Silvers, comments generated by admiring, astonished people who worked with, and for him. In addition, some of these principles are based on personal recollections, from back in the day when . . . red and white pennants snapped in a warm Aquarian wind above Greenwich Village, down Riverside Drive, at Rockefeller Center, along the Avenue of the Americas, and every pennant read: NYR.

Love the world. Frames of reference are ubiquitous in thinking, and highly influential, but subtle, non-obvious (as the sociologist Goffman pointed out in Frame Analysis). It’s part of Robert Silvers’s genius that his omnipresent frame of reference for editing was his love of humanity, his broad awareness, and lively compassion.

For all those who were lost and lonely. For all those who suffered unjustly and grieved. For all those in the cold, and the dark, who sought the light.

The Review was that light.

Tell the truth. Easy to say, hard to do. Silvers’ unshakable integrity amazed the people who wrote for him. If he thought something was right, he thought it was right, and that was that. If a piece took an unpopular position, but its facts were verified, its reasoning was solid, and its compassion was manifest, he stood behind it. Unhesitatingly. Maybe even a little amused.  

“Let them rant. They’re wrong.”

Be a generalist: Silvers had a phenomenal memory, and a fantastic instinct for falsehood, but part of what made the Review a cultural beacon was that there wasn’t much of interest and importance in the world that the Review neglected. If you needed to know about it, Silvers told you.

(Of course, it helped that his desk was knee-deep in recent literary releases, and he routinely shot through piles, and piles, of new books sent to him by eager publishers.)

Reach for arete—standards of excellence written in gold. Let’s face it—good writing is hard work. And, truth be told, when the croissants are all gone, and the coffee is cold, and the hour is late, it’s tempting to cut some corners.

Nuh-uh. No way. Not on Silvers’s watch. It was perfect, or you did it again.

That was the agony and the ecstasy, apparently, of working for an editor like Bob (Hi-yo, Silvers!). The demands were brutal, but that was the thrill—everyone knew, and deeply felt, that they were part of a glorious, hard-riding, straight-shooting, idealistic enterprise, perhaps unmatched in the literary and journalistic world.

Use your head. It’s easy to criticize, and everyone’s got an opinion. But in critiquing a system, think clearly about it. Every system operates within practical limits—money, personnel, and competition. Some expectations, however fervently held, just aren’t realistic (as the hard-core New York cognitive psychologist, Albert Ellis, pointed out; see A Guide to Rational Living). Unreasonable expectations result in literary criticisms of marginal meaning, then in controversies poorly grounded, then in readers distracted by—zounds . . . trivia!

However, it all can go the other way, too. Some politicians, CEOs, and administrators do present themselves, rather slickly, as pious and responsible. Yet, behind the scenes, they are secretly nurturing self-serving problems, damaging to the wider world.

A change might be in order. Look carefully. As he used to say, this Dr. Samuel Johnson of the Big Apple— “See what can be done”.

Soft power. False prophets who broadcast from a moral desert, faithless occupants of some shining Siege Perilous, impostor denizens of corridors of power, are paranoid about criticism, however legitimate. Every sensible counterpoint is a slippery slope, harbinger of a personal Armageddon. No threatening criticism, however valid, must go unpunished!

But Robert Silvers understood that the world is watching. And if the world sees that a bellwether of the culture, like the Review, is willing to criticize the social system in a cogent manner, that courageous stance reassures the world as to the trustworthiness of the society. That trust translates into good-faith soft power.

Goodness . . . is good for civilization.

The academic connection. Journalists tend to write splashy, romantic prose, but are typically lacking the cautious precision and respectful objectivity of scholarly writing. By contrast, scholars know their fields, but their writing typically lacks the frisson and panache of good journalism.

An . . . amalgamation . . . would be . . . salutary.

Therefore, the strongest exposition of important issues, à la the Review, combines journalistic flair with academic exactitude. Scholarly analysis should unfold in a riveting, coherent cavalcade of logically linked observations and ideas, expressed in comprehensible language, persuasively leading to an innovative, but useful, conclusion.

Thus—the Silvers quest to improve the world, through the laws of language.

Write good. Don’t know what good is? Scan The New Yorker. Reread War and Peace. Memorize Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Dig into the bible of classicism, Thomas and Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth. If you’re desperate, check the Chicago and MLA style books.

Or, read the Review! No vagueness, no fallacies, no clichés, no trendy trivia, no clumsy, wandering sentences . . . with bits and pieces . . . placed here and there . . . on the way to . . . somewhere . . . possibly . . . someday.

Here’s the idea: the writing per se must be perfect.

Silvers wasn’t editing for the average Joe in Pensacola. He wasn’t even editing for the average NYU graduate on the Upper West Side. He was editing for Professor Sherlock Pettifogg, lately of Harvard and Cambridge Universities’ Departments of Literary and Legal Studies, currently sipping a Drambuie on the front verandah of The Breakers in Palm Beach. One touch of sloppiness in the Review, and the professor would be on the phone, dripping with sarcasm, bemoaning the universal and tragic plummeting of intellectual standards.

The reader is king/queen. Literature, and journalism, serve the reader. In getting the ideas and the language right, it’s easy to forget the reader. Silvers was scrupulous about both. Constantly zigzagging back and forth between the content and the consumer helps keep the information relevant to the readers’ interests and needs, and helps keep the information from drifting into glittering abstractions which, regrettably, lack pragmatic value.

No readers, no “paper” (as he liked to call it).

Impact. There’s an old saying, “The pen is mightier than the sword”. Of course, such a dreadful cliché would never appear in the Review. But that idea formed the cornerstone of the Review’s ideology. In the Silvers view, faces of brutalized heroes haunted the world’s skies from east to west, reminding the compassionate to, “See what can be done”.

Review writers weren’t just writing, they were building the berms protecting civilization from the raging sea of bad taste, shabby thinking, and cruel notions. They were throwing lifelines to vilified scribes, swamped in the prisons of tyrants who don’t read Remembrance of Things Past, or even Batman comics. They were James Joyce’s literary smithy, forging the grand conscience of Madison Avenue and Wall Street, the City of London and 10 Downing Street, the Élysée Palace and the Brandenburg Gate.

In the ending of Chaplin’s City Lights, famous in movie history, the Little Tramp asks the Flower Girl (previously blind), “Can you see now?” She answers, “Yes, I can see now”.

That was the mission of the Review.

Dinner. As T.S. Eliot remarked, “Let us go, then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/There will be time, there will be time/Time for you and time for me/And time yet for a hundred indecisions/And for a hundred visions and revisions”.

Despite being a language and logic fanatic, Bob remained, at root, a charming bon vivant, in love with people, the world, and life. Nothing must obstruct good writing, but gourmet dining, fascinating conversations, and splendid theater should not be forgotten. Salut!

Fare Thee Well, Voyager

Steve Davidson is a clinical psychologist in Laguna Beach, California, and a contributing editor to The Montreal Review. He has developed a new theory of personality and psychotherapy called human operations. It conceives of people as goal-oriented systems aimed at surviving and thriving, as described in his book An Introduction to Human Operations Psychotherapy.

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