Adam Gopnik talks to us about the invention of poetic journalism, lunch with Joseph Mitchell at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, life in New York during the pandemic, and his popular online course, Adam Gopnik: Reading The New Yorker, which is part our new 92U: The Great Thinkers series of master classes.
You’ve written for The New Yorker for decades. What is it about the magazine that demands continued readership and reflection in the way that we would normally read Shakespeare, Rousseau, or Middlemarch?
Indeed, I have—nearly 40 years. I’m not sure I would put the magazine quite in the category of the First Folio or the greatest English novel—but I would say that a great many really superior writers have worked for the magazine, and that at least for most of its history, they have shared the reciprocity and parental influence (and Oedipal murder) that is what we mean by a tradition. Lillian Ross and Alec Wilkinson are unimaginable without Joseph Mitchell; Sid Perelman and Jerry Salinger, as they called each other, engaged in a lifelong shpritzing session that reveals much about the genius of each. That kind of inter-office joshing, stretching out over the decades, and even including the dead, is what makes a tradition distinct. And some of that tradition is nameable: a respect for fact not for its own dull sake but for what it illuminates—the love of “a wild exactitude” to use Mitchell’s beautiful off-hand formulation, offered to me over a shellfish pan roast at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central one weekday afternoon. Which means, as I concluded at the end of the first series, above all a feeling for the large in the small—the belief that specific objects are no bar to enormous subjects. This is the belief that connects poetry and journalism, and makes for literary reporting.
What’s the role of long-form magazine journalism and serious cultural criticism in our current media landscape? What’s made The New Yorker thrive where so many other magazines have struggled?
Well, The New Yorker’s thriving is always contingent and fragile—ours is a boat out on the same stormy sea and in my own near 40 years I have nearly seen it sink. But there is an obvious reason for its continued readership: readers, not all readers, but enough, have in an age of quick-hit toxins an appetite for slowly-unfolding ointments—I say that without apology. One of the true tasks of good writing is to drain the melodrama from our language. Even in a time like this, of national emergency, we need to talk sense to win battles.
The first iteration of your class was extremely popular and beloved by everyone who attended. What’s new in the second iteration of the class? Are you focusing on new writers, different eras, different perspectives from the magazine’s history?
I’ll talk about Updike, the greatest writer that the magazine produced who was still entirely within its orbit (Alice Munro, let’s say, may be an even better writer, but she was a more remote contributor from Canada, gracing the magazine more than shaping it). I’ll talk about several women writers—nervous about seeming to ghettoize them in any sense but recognizing that there is a continuity there, and that, whatever other faults might be found in our past—and I try to define several in the session I devote to James Baldwin and Jervis Anderson—the magazine’s history with women writers is distinguished.
As a wise French writer once said, the only duty a writer has is to have none, and I hope that none of these choices will seem dutiful: the chance to get people to pay attention to a writer as wonderful and relatively little-known as Maeve Brennan is the point, and the purpose.
Why did you choose to focus on these writers (Liebling and Mitchell, Salinger and Perelman, etc.)? And why did you choose to pair them?
I talk about those I love. No other criterion, only a love for their skill in sentence-making and sentiment-shaping. Writing is sentences, shapes and structure—the frisson of a real thing captured and got down right, the passing of the light of the real world through the prism of a sensibility, leaving sun patterns on a page—everything else is just editorial cartooning and journalism and belongs in the Times. The pairings seemed to me self-evident: Liebling and Mitchell, because they invented the tradition of poetic reporting; Salinger and Perelman, because, unlike as they are, they both are writers made out of early reading.
What are you working on right now—either for The New Yorker or otherwise? What have you been reading and thinking about during the pandemic?
Like everyone, I have lived a split life during the pandemic: a public life, taken in from the internet, of distress, despair, and I hope growing expanding compassion. I do the same Doom Cruise as everyone else in the middle of the night. We even watched the 7 PM applause begin, grow, subside and now end. The suffering it represented was profound. Internally though, in my own home, I have been lucky—a writer’s life changed less than anyone else’s, since we are accustomed to being locked in one room for six hours a day, seven days a week. The only real change in my schedule is that I now work out in the back hallway instead of the nearby gym, and use Mercato to have groceries delivered instead of trudging for them myself. But a writer’s work, more than a painter’s or musician’s, is both as citizen and as artist, and I have tried to bear witness both to the plain facts of the closing down of New York as well as to many of the strange curlicues its transformation presents to the mind. I am prouder than I can say that we stayed in New York, and look forward to looking reproachfully, and forever, at those who did not.