Chicago owes much to New York. We don’t often admit it, but it’s true. This place was pretty much started by New York land speculators. Our first mayor, William B. Ogden, was a New York lawyer checking on his brother’s real estate holdings. We still use nicknames New Yorkers gave us, like “Windy City,” describing, not our icy gales, but the blasts of ballyhoo trying to snag the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
And “Second City” — the title of a three-part backhand that A. J. Liebling published in The New Yorker in 1952, a gleeful vivisection of Chicago as a dreary cultural backwater. Not a proper metropolis at all, but “a theater backdrop with a city painted on it.”
Chicago rolled with the criticism. One of the many improv comedy groups sprouting in the 1950s took “Second City” as its proud moniker. And to far less renown I took an angry line scribbled on a postcard to Liebling, “You were never in Chicago,” and used it in the title of my city memoir.
The New Yorker celebrates its 100th anniversary this month, thriving still in a hellscape of blasted mainstream publications. While it is off-brand for a Chicago newspaper columnist to note the occasion, so what? We defy parochialism. Credit where due. What started as an arch romp for Manhattan sophisticates turned into an engine driving liberal American culture, from John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” to Ronan Farrow helping spark the Me Too movement with his 2017 expose on Harvey Weinstein.
Too many to cite. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” Busloads of masterful writers: Joseph Mitchell. J.D. Salinger. Humorists from Robert Benchley and Woody Allen to Ian Frazier and Simon Rich. Genius artists — from Saul Steinberg, no relation, alas, and Charles Adams, Bruce McCall and Roz Chast.
The New Yorker certainly was a polestar for me — I’ve lived in a house that subscribed to the magazine for my entire life. My father, a product of the Bronx, always subscribed. As a teen, I wanted to be James Thurber, and modeled myself on him so much that when college ended I didn’t bother applying for a job. Somebody would introduce me to my E.B. White and I’d be set. As a career strategy, that worked about as well as you’d expect.
Writing my first book, a history of college pranks, the question arose whether to cover Caltech’s Ditch Day using available published articles, or spend a chunk of my advance getting to Pasadena. “What would John McPhee do?” I asked, then booked a flight.
At least that got published. Battering myself against the barred door of The New Yorker was the same futile effort for me that it was for most writers who fall short of the mark. Except for one short story, “Mascots Reign at Fall Show,” a parody of trade shows at McCormick Place. The British quarterly Granta had accepted, then rejected, it. Which emboldened me to dare send it to The New Yorker.
An editor, Dan Menaker, phoned. The story, he said, is terrific — it reminded him of Donald Barthelme. I hung up the phone and let out a scream. We worked together, improving it. But in the end, editor Tina Brown didn’t like it. I kept sending in new work, not realizing that I’d already had my Moonlight Graham moment. The rest of the submissions got increasingly formal rejections. But that one story. “It was like coming this close to your dreams, then having them brush past you, like a stranger in a crowd,” as Burt Lancaster says in “Field of Dreams.” “I thought, ‘There’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize, that was the only day.”
Not quite true. I did have two sentences published in The New Yorker — cartoon captions. I went to school with ace New Yorker cartoonist Robert Leighton, and gave him a couple of set-ups and captions that he kindly submitted, and were printed. The most recent shows two mice pressed against the glass wall of a boa constrictor tank. “Hey!” says one. “How come our names aren’t on the plaque?”
That pretty well sums up my life — maybe all writers’ lives. There was one other New Yorker moment I cherish. The magazine’s longtime fixture, Adam Gopnik, was visiting Chicago. The first time we met was in a cab going to the Berghoff so I could introduce him to the joys of Thuringer sausage and lager at the stand-up bar.
“So … a newspaper columnist in Chicago,” he ventured. “That’s sort of the writer’s dream, isn’t it?”
“Eh,” I said, dismissively. “You know how it is.” I pointed at him.
“But you! The New Yorker’s man in Paris. Now that’s the writer’s dream!”
“Eh,” he replied. “You know how it is.”