Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Here at by Brendan Gill Brendan Gill, Here in Westchester. BRONXVILLE B RENDAN GILL, the urbane drama critic for The New Yorker, is almost as hard to catch up with as the White Rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland—he's usually late for one or another important engagement. In addition to his reviewing responsibilities, Mr. Gill is the author of a biography of Charles A. Lindbergh and a book of short stories, “Ways of Loving.” He has also been a mainstay of historical‐preservation groups in the metropolitan area. A cosmopolitan suburbanite, he rises in his Bronxville here at 6 A.M., shuttles to his office in Manhattan, works through a busy day of appointments and writing, then goes off to see a play. Besides the 40 to 50 Broadway openings he attends during a season, he will see 20 to 30 Off Broadway shows and take trips to visit regional theater groups. He refuses to feel chastened by fairly widespread criticism that his memoir, “Here at The New Yorker,” is a “snobbish” book, laughing it off with the comment that “they always call me that, and I'm always indignant.” He won't be fashionably pessimistic about the future of New York City, and he won't be fashionably cynical about the virtues of suburban life. He recently completed a public lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on “Utopian Suburbs,” with talks on “Grooming the Wilderness,” about Llewellyn Park in New Jersey and Tuxedo Park in Westchester, “Parnassus by Rail,” about Lawrence Park in Bronxville and Garden City, L.I., and “Ghosts of Green Gardens,” about Forest Hills and Sunnyside in Queens. “When Mr. Lawrence invented Lawrence Park, his intention was to make it an artists’ colony,” Mr. Gill said. “Artists, as they do today, became extremely rich in those days, and there were lots of rich and middle‐class artists—the equivalent of Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Willem De Kooning and those people. “Around the turn of the century, there were from 16 to 20 nationally and internationally celebrated artists living in this bourgeois nest, including Will Howe and William T. Smedley, a contemporary of Winslow Homer's.” Charles Dana Gibson also lived there, and it was in his former house that the five‐daughter, two‐son Brendan Gill clan made their home until recently. Since their children have reached maturity, the Gills have moved to slightly more modest quarters, but remain in Bronxville. “All the utopian suburbs were only a half hour from New York by rail,” Mr. Gill beams, comfortably clad in a tweed jacket, brown pants and a snappy green, tie over his checked shirt, amid the clutter of his working papers. “The speed with which our ancestors could get out of town is equivalent to, or better than, the speed with which we get out of town now,” he said. “It was 28 minutes to Bronxville a hundred years ago, and it's 28 minutes today.” His own move to the community, shortly after he was first employed by The New Yorker, was prompted by a sense of the needs of his children. In addition to their living quarters, the Gills converted an extra house on their property into a gymnasium, with a basketball court and a homemade theater. Drop‐in participants in amateur theatrical productions included people like Charles Addams, the cartoonist; Kevin McCarthy, Robert Whitehead, and Sarah Lawrence students and faculty members friendly with either of Mr. Gill's daughters, who attended the school. Mr. Gill acknowledges without embarrassment that such genial bonhomie is antithetical to the acerbic image of the drama critic. “I'm certainly the most social of all the reviewers,” he said. “They don't applaud in the theater, they never laugh, they practically never evince any emotion, and they certainly never applaud in the end.” He is less often attacked by angry playwrights and performers than are his critical brethren, because “I'm the soft underbelly of reviewing,” Mr. Gill said. “I don't ever review ad hominem, I don't ever attack anybody as a human being and I think probably, on a statistical basis, I have more favorable things to say than most reviewers,” he said: Mr. Gill believes this is an ideal time for drama critics and theatergoers. “Broadway has never been so popular,” he said. “There are more people coming in from the suburbs to Times Square than ever before. People are starving for live action on stage, and far from television's killing theater and live performances, it has induced a hunger for them. “This is the only explanation, as far as I'm concerned, for the emergence of dance as a fantastically popular art form,” he said. “Dance, above all the other art forms, is the one where failure is intensely imminent. There's no possibility of failure on television because less and less is done live, and things are bleeped out and corrected.” “People are dissatisfied with that emotionally, and there's a conscious hunger for the real thing,” Mr. Gill said. “Everything looks as though we're going back ‐to ritual activities among ourselves—on the streets, in restaurants, in churches. Everywhere, there's a need for communication among human beings on a real level of touching them, facing both their successes and failures.” To Mr. Gill, whose enthusiasm is as prodigious and contagious as his energy, all this is “a wonderful thing.” “That's what they're starved for out in the suburbs,” he said. “So what they try to do is create an environment which will reproduce in a nice, clean‐ cut Dutch Cleanser way what was given up because it looked gritty and terrible. As said, the city is civilization.” Mr. Gill has been active in the attempt to renovate midtown Manhattan. “Of its length, 92d Street is the greatest street on earth,” he contends. “If you begin at the U.N. and the East River, then go to Tudor City, the Ford Foundation, the Chrysler building, the Commodore Hotel, Grand Central Station, the Public Library, the Grace building, Times Square, the theaters and then the piers, there's scarcely 10 feet of 92d Street that isn't thrilling.” Despite his enthusiasm for areas like Times Square, which are often described as seamy, Mr. Gill, who graduated from Yale and was a member of its exclusive secret society, Skull and Bones, keeps being charged with snobbery. He is annoyed in his own defense, and angry when such claims are made about the magazine for which he works. He is.unruffied by the possibility that his drama reviews may’ go uncollected. “If a publisher wanted them, I would be delighted,” he said, shrugging. “But I wouldn't worry about its being fugitive —journalism by its nature is meant to be so. Most of the paste‐ups you see suffer from their timeliness.” As evening and theater time approach, Mr. Gill's grayish‐black hair shines, his conversation leaps and his bluff manner conveys the sense of a man hugely enjoying life. Although he estimates that he works 20 hours a day seven days a week, he is appalled by the idea of taking a sabbatical. “Oh no,” Mr. Gill said. “Gee whiz, I want everything to go on just as it is for the next 200 years, but I know that's crazy. I dread the day when it turns out I have less energy.” Still, Mr. Gill is able to make a quick getaway from dismal opening nights. “Bronxville has the great advantage that you are still able to take a taxi there,” he said. ■ ISBN 13: 9780394489896. Brendan Gill sold his first story to the New Yorker in 1936, when he was 21, and has worked there ever since. When his irreverent memoir appeared in 1975, it caused the most delightful of frissons, because the outside world then knew little about his workplace. Gill declares that "in the old Ross-Shawn days, what hadn't happened at the magazine was more worthy of note than what had." In reality, of course, a great deal was happening, and Gill seems to have heard and remembered it all. (This edition also contains a 1997 introduction, complete with acute and politic comments on the Bob Gottlieb and Tina Brown regimes.) But Here at the New Yorker is far from an exposé, consisting instead of the recollections of a lucky man who loves his work and many of his fellows. Each reader will have his or her favorite anecdotes. Gill remembers taking the subway with Marianne Moore, who was squeezed next to two high school musicians. "Miss Moore stared with admiration at the drum, then said to the boy holding the drumsticks, 'Sonny, when the time comes, give it a big bang just for me.'" And, speaking of big bangs, the old New Yorker was far more squeamish--an organ in which bare nipples were nowhere to be found. Its first editor, Harold Ross, shown a cartoon complete with one such entity, growled: "Take that goddam tit up to Mrs. White and ask her what to do about it." His successor, , shared his modesty though not his speech patterns. When Mr. Shawn asked the novelist Henry Green what led him to write Loving , Green's reply wasn't quite what he had expected. Alas, readers, you must turn to page 386 of this endlessly charming book for the offending response. Obituary: Brendan Gill. Brendan Gill, journalist: born Hartford, 4 October 1914; staff writer, New Yorker 1936-97; married 1936 Anne Barnard (two sons, five daughters); died New York 27 December 1997. Brendan Gill was associated with the New Yorker virtually from its inception. Born and raised in comfortable circumstances to Irish-Catholic parents in Connecticut, Gill attended , where he first displayed the traits of a truly social animal, immune to the ethnic prejudice that lingered. He was so popular, in fact, that he was "tapped" for Skull and Bones, the grandest of Yale's "Secret Societies" - which are hush-hush undergraduate versions of the grander clubs on St James's. Leaving university, Gill began contributing short stories to the fledgling New Yorker and soon, at the ripe age of 22, became a staff writer, a position he held for over 61 years. Now in many ways indistinguishable from its commercial competitors, the New Yorker was once home for America's finest writing talents. The writers involved were maverick and highly individual; there was little commonality of character between, say, E.B. White, , and Dorothy Parker. Yet the diversity of the magazine's contents - "Talk of the Town" reports, extraordinarily long profiles, short stories, arts reviews, poetry, even racing and golf reports - none the less projected a unified impression of urbanity, wit, and grace, magnified by its origination in what was then America's hub of cosmopolitan values, New York. Gill's early efforts for the magazine were short stories, but he rapidly found his true metier as a non-fiction writer, contributing profiles, book reviews, and countless "Talk of the Town" pieces - the latter, in a pre-byline era, inevitably anonymous. He particularly excelled as a rewrite man, and gave a consistency in tone to the "Talk" pieces which greatly contributed to the magazine's editorial voice. His interests were predominantly social and architectural (and often a productive blend of both) and were both firmly rooted in the city of New York. A fierce defender of Gotham's heritage, he took a high-profile part in defending its landmarks, and most memorably helped Jacqueline Onassis lead a successful fight to preserve Grand Central Station. Of Gill's several biographies, perhaps the best is Many Masks (1987), his life of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he established a close friendship, despite the manifest contrast between the awkward midwestern visionary and the suave Easterner author. His more social side is seen in Tallulah (1972), his biography of Tallulah Bankhead, which, like its subject, is slight but entertaining, and in Cole (1971), the life of the musical composer Cole Porter, whose vitality was perfectly matched by the compulsive conviviality of his chronicler. A life of Charles Lindbergh, Lindbergh Alone (1977), is duller, but proved a best-seller. Of Gill's 15 books, few remain in print, and unsurprisingly it is Here at the New Yorker (1975) for which he will be best remembered - as well as for the length of his association with the magazine, since, uniquely, he worked under all four of its editors. Gill's history of the magazine was enormously successful and remains a marvellous read, full of anecdote and often brilliant pen portraits of the many artists and writers (some flaky, some not; all talented) who graced 25 West 43rd Street. The book was not without its detractors, however, who found in Gill's bouncy account a smug self-satisfaction that grated and struck them as undeserved. Some of his views of New Yorker colleagues seemed patronising, and inappropriately so. Lamenting John O'Hara's social insecurity (apparently exacerbated by his fellow Catholic's manifest social success), Gill seems unable to recognise O'Hara's considerable gifts as a novelist, perhaps out of his own well-suppressed jealousy. More damaging was his treatment of the New Yorker's founder Harold Ross: Ross was an aggressively ignorant man, with a head full of odd scraps of information and misinformation and with little experience of the arduous discipline of taking thought . . . He was rumoured to have read only one book all the way through - a stout volume on sociology by Herbert Spencer. The truth was that he had read other books, but not many. This completely ignores the fact that only Ross's perseverance and eye for talent established the magazine as a cultural nonpareil. As Ross's biographer Thomas Kunkel makes clear in Genius in Disguise (1995), few members of the magazine's staff were fooled by Ross's playing the fool - except, ostensibly, Brendan Gill. But it is hard to take lasting offence at a man always ready to mock his own mild self- conceit as well as make fun of others: "Even when I am caught out and made a fool of," he once confessed, "I manage to twist this circumstance about until it becomes a proof of how exceptional I am." Join our new commenting forum. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Eighty-Five from the Archive: Brendan Gill. This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted. At Brendan Gill’s memorial service, in 1998, George Plimpton said of the prolific New Yorker writer and historic preservationist: “The only things Brendan hadn’t been able to save in his lifetime were the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, the Maisonette, Alger Hiss, the Reichstag, the Edsel, and the passenger pigeon.” Gill was that rare figure—a celebrated writer who was also a lion of New York’s civic and social worlds. He contributed more than twelve hundred pieces to the magazine, including Profiles, Talk of the Town stories, and theatre reviews, and he also served as its chief architecture critic from 1987 to 1996. One of the few writers at the magazine to work under all first four editors, he somehow found the time to advocate for architectural preservation, ultimately joining with Jacqueline Kennedy to help restore Grand Central Station. In a postscript published after Gill died, characterized him as “avidly alert to the power of art in general.” In the seventies, Gill wrote a two-part Profile of the actress Tallulah Bankhead. A tabloid celebrity before tabloid culture truly existed, Tallulah became famous—or rather infamous—in the twenties and thirties not only for her talent but also for her outspoken nature, her partying ways, and her many sexual affairs. She would later serve as inspiration for Tennessee Williams when he wrote the part of Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” In Part I of the Profile, which ran in the issue of October 7, 1972, Gill’s lithe prose adroitly underscores his subject’s volatile personality: The restless life force with which she was born was always ravenously seeking something worthy of containing it, or, with luck, consuming it, and the search was nearly always in vain. Howard Dietz’s remark to the effect that a day away from Tallulah was like a month in the country was clever and just, but even at the moment of laughing at it one couldn’t fail to wonder how such a remark must have struck its prompter. What was she to do with the thing she had become? She was different, and not alone in respect to her talent and vitality. She flailed about in paroxysms of disguised bewilderment, drinking and clowning and cursing and showing off. She was valiant and silly, and she knew it. But she was not rubbishy, and she knew that, too. Out of exceptional qualities, she invented by trial and error an exceptional self, which with a child’s imprudent pretense of not caring she flung straight into the face of the world. Caught off guard, the world flinched and applauded, and it went on applauding to the end. Any favorite New Yorker articles come to mind? Send us an e-mail. ISBN 13: 9780306808104. For over sixty years Brendan Gill has been a contented inmate of the singular institution known as the New Yorker. This affectionate account of the magazine, long known as a home for congenital unemployables, is a celebration of its wards and attendants—William Shawn, Harold Ross's gentle and courtly successor as editor; the incorrigible mischief-maker James Thurber; the two Whites, Katherine and E. B.; John O'Hara, "master of the fancied slight"; and, among a hundred others, Peter Arno, Saul Steinberg, Edmund Wilson, and Lewis Mumford. Brendan Gill has known them all, and by virtue of his virtually total recall, keen eye, and impeccable prose, his diverting portraits of these eccentrics in rage and repose are amply supplied with both dimples and warts. Here at the New Yorker —now updated with a new introduction detailing the reigns of Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown—is a delightful tour of New York's most glorious madhouse. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Brendan Gill sold his first story to the New Yorker in 1936, when he was 21, and has worked there ever since. When his irreverent memoir appeared in 1975, it caused the most delightful of frissons, because the outside world then knew little about his workplace. Gill declares that "in the old Ross-Shawn days, what hadn't happened at the magazine was more worthy of note than what had." In reality, of course, a great deal was happening, and Gill seems to have heard and remembered it all. (This edition also contains a 1997 introduction, complete with acute and politic comments on the Bob Gottlieb and Tina Brown regimes.) But Here at the New Yorker is far from an exposé, consisting instead of the recollections of a lucky man who loves his work and many of his fellows. Each reader will have his or her favorite anecdotes. Gill remembers taking the subway with Marianne Moore, who was squeezed next to two high school musicians. "Miss Moore stared with admiration at the drum, then said to the boy holding the drumsticks, 'Sonny, when the time comes, give it a big bang just for me.'" And, speaking of big bangs, the old New Yorker was far more squeamish--an organ in which bare nipples were nowhere to be found. Its first editor, Harold Ross, shown a cartoon complete with one such entity, growled: "Take that goddam tit up to Mrs. White and ask her what to do about it." His successor, William Shawn, shared his modesty though not his speech patterns. When Mr. Shawn asked the novelist Henry Green what led him to write Loving , Green's reply wasn't quite what he had expected. Alas, readers, you must turn to page 386 of this endlessly charming book for the offending response. About the Author : Brendan Gill (1914–1997) was a staff writer for the New Yorker for over sixty years. He was the author of over twenty books, including his memoir, Here at the New Yorker (also available from Da Capo Press/Perseus Books Group), three works of fiction, and biographies of Cole Porter, Tallulah Bankhead, and Charles Lindbergh.