Silvers' golden age

Robert Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books, died last week in his mid-80s

Book reviews occupy an odd niche in the publishing world. They aren’t quite trade publications, they aren’t quite magazines; they aren’t quite news, they aren’t quite op-ed pages, and they aren’t quite essays. At their best, however, they combine elements of all these. They are grounded in the headlines, and thus avoid the trap of intellectualising for the sake of it; they have to refer to other people’s views – the “review” part – and so aren’t completely self-indulgent; and they bring a touch of distance, and of real thought, to their analysis and so avoid the process-fixation and the thrill-seeking of much news coverage. 

And the finest example of such reviews – both in the sense of actual book reviews, and in the larger sense of a publication that is a review of books – is the New York Review of Books. The NYRB, as it abbreviates itself, is an institution with a power far beyond what its measly subscriber base of 120,000-140,000 would suggest. It’s the house organ of a particular, old-fashioned liberalism, the creed of its long-time editor Bob Silvers — who, sadly, died last week in his mid-80s. 

Silvers, with his colleague Barbara Epstein, took the NYRB to greatness in the late 1960s and by and large kept it great for the decades since. It was very self-consciously not a real newspaper or magazine — in fact, it was founded during a newspaper strike in 1963. In its first years, it didn’t quite have Silvers’ voice, but acquired influence nonetheless — in particular, through its opposition to the Vietnam War and because it became the home of the then quite new radical campus left. Noam Chomsky became who he is because of a series of essays about American foreign policy in the pages of the NYRB. 

Its transition to a more pragmatic liberalism – some would say compromised, others would say stodgy, yet others would say realistic – began in the 1970s, an institutional reflection of the maturing and taming of 1960s radicalism. Silvers was a New Yorker of the best sort; in other words, the sort of man who saw his city and its intellectual tradition as being suspended between “old” Europe and “real” America, part of neither, but speaking to both. He himself had the aura of New York patricians of past generations — many noted he dressed in dark, old-fashioned suits, sometimes with the French Légion d’Honneur decoration on his breast. In an article published when he turned 82, the New York Times described him as “a voluptuary of sorts… He thinks nothing of flying to Europe to see the latest art exhibition or to hear the latest tenor… He has no objection at all to the company of the rich and titled.” The NYRB, with its lavish reviews of the finest blockbuster exhibitions worldwide, its underlying assumption that European and American high culture overlapped, reflected and proselytised Silvers’ tastes. 

Silvers’ politics were linked, naturally, to his tastes. If anything, he was an old-fashioned European social democrat in a country where social democrats were too far to the left and a city where they were too far to the right. The Chomskian left, or the provocations of Gore Vidal, had no place on the pages of the NYRB from the 1970s on, replaced by the more moderate, but always pointed, voices of Ian Buruma, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Ronald Dworkin. 

Yet to accuse Silvers or the NYRB of compromising with conservatism, as the left often does, is to go too far. During the depressing run-up to the Iraq War, as one intellectual icon of leftism or liberalism after another gave in to war-hysteria and wrote in favour of invasion – Christopher Hitchens, David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff, Bill Keller – the NYRB’s pages stoutly refused to do so. A series of blistering essays – I remember Norman Mailer’s attack on George W Bush-as-cowboy the best – kept the notion alive that not every liberal, nor liberalism itself, would abandon its principles because of 9/11, because of America’s climate of fear, or because a popular president sought to harness patriotism in the service of warmongering. Frankly, I don’t know how I would have survived 2003 without Jon Stewart and the NYRB. 

That was not, however, when I first recognised the importance of the NYRB. That realisation came to me a few weeks after I landed in America in 2000, when I picked up an issue sometime in September and read Pankaj Mishra on Kashmir. The stories he told of violence, repression and torture, and the voices of ordinary Kashmiris he highlighted, were all new to me. They shouldn’t have been, of course; we had been fighting in the Valley since 1991. But the difference between what Mr Mishra was saying in the NYRB and what anyone said in the pages of India’s newspapers was stark. 

In its opposition to the Iraq War; in its decision to give Mr Mishra space to discuss an ignored insurgency half a world away; in its willingness to allow Tony Judt to argue effectively for a binational state in Israel/Palestine, and to warn that “Israel is now bad for the Jews”; and in so much else, Silvers’ NYRB was a reminder that holding firm to old-fashioned, stodgy social democracy requires as much courage as any form of fashionable radicalism of left or right. Silvers has passed just as another crisis descends on us, with the liberal world he loved under threat from the sort of raging, anti-intellectual populists he detested. I just hope the NYRB, without him, can somehow retain his voice and his spirit.