Alice Quinn may be the last magazine editor in New York City to receive submissions bound with green yarn. Certainly she is the last to welcome them. Sitting in her corner office on the 20th floor of the Conde Nast building in Manhattan, Alice Quinn smiles with obvious affection as she speaks of Belfast poet Michael Longley, the man who still sends his work to her this way. No question the yarn thing is unusual, both in the sending and in its warm reception. But Alice Quinn is the poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. And business here is not conducted as usual.
The magazine in the US is a species in transition. Gone are the Number Two pencils, the carbon paper, the pink routing slips and the long-hand correspondence between editors and writers. Gone are the comfortable sofas where naps and nervous breakdowns were permitted. Gone is the Friday-night Scotch consumed during closing. The sabbatical - a quaint notion where the bedraggled writer pries himself off the tree for a period and goes off to contemplate the forest - is becoming a memory.
Evolution works this way, it can be argued. Patience has been replaced by speed, deliberation by the pressures of competition. It's a faster world now and the accepted wisdom is that the one who gets there first wins. No time for letters or even to leave a telephone message. Give me analysis, give me sparkling prose, give me the Tusculan Disputations dammit, but give it to me via an email and give it to me now.
How does a literate weekly survive in this world, much less one with nagging delusions of increased profitability?
A new generation of mass-market magazines launched by publishing giants seems to have an idea or two. Martha Stewart's Living tells you How to Make a Bed. Oprah Winfrey's O tells you about Five Fabulous Things to Do With Strawberries. And Time Warner's hot-off-the-press glossy called Real Simple advises you on The Fastest, Easiest Way to Clean Your Bathroom. Sharing coveted newsstand space with these titles and 8,000-plus others in the US is the New Yorker - a magazine which started on February 21st, 1925, whose legend and history has both propelled it to a unique position in the modern publishing world and occasionally threatened to bury it. Last weekend, the New Yorker marked its 75th anniversary and, many would say, its literary and commercial rebirth, with a weekend-long celebration in New York. As poet Eavan Boland put it: "Now, this is an event."
On Friday night at 8 p.m., 13 fiction readings are held simultaneously around the city, at locations ranging from the hushed, dignified surroundings of the Players Club in a 19th-century mansion off Gramercy Park to the famed folk music club called the Bitter End on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village.
The evening's marriages - Annie Proulx with Donald Antrim, Muriel Spark with Julian Barnes, Tobias Wolff with Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro with Richard Ford, Stephen King and Matthew Klam, Edna O'Brien and Tony Earley, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Antonya Nelson, William Trevor and Jhumpa Lahiri - are part of the fun.
They are also a window into the magazine's audience, which now numbers 850,000 souls, with an estimated three readers per subscription. Its subscriber renewal rate is 77 per cent, the highest in the industry.
At the Players Club, a mostly grey-haired crowd listens respectfully as Cynthia Ozick, author of the novel The Puttermesser Papers, renowned essayist, short story writer and respected woman of letters, delicately takes her place to read from her work in a small, fragile voice. The lighting is pink and subdued. The applause is polite and appreciative.
Downtown, way downtown, at a defoliated-looking concrete club called Tonic on Norfolk Street, Jeanette Winterson reads for over an hour to a rapt audience of young things with tattoos and pierced parts. Afterwards, the British author (who is perhaps known more in the US for Sexing the Cherry and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit than for her Virginia Woolf scholarship) perches on a chrome stool and signs books in the dark. Somebody finds a candle. A chipper Winterson calls out to no one in particular, "Hey, can I get a Jameson with ice?" One of the Manhattan hipsters turns to a pal and wonders what a Jameson is. "It's Irish whiskey!" says Winterson.
It was an educational kind of weekend.
To hear the literati tell it, the New Yorker has been raised from something worse than death; it has been saved from a brush with celebrity culture, a passing unwellness that threatened to end its reign as one of the most important magazines in US history. Created in 1925 by Harold Ross, who remained its editor until 1951, the magazine asserted what scholar Mary Corey called a "magical authority" as a voice of the intellectual urban community, whatever its actual geography. Its mix of cultural criticism, journalism, humour and cartoons continued under legendary successor William Shawn until 1987, when he was unceremoniously given the shove by Conde Nast, the conglomerate that had purchased the magazine three years before.
Shawn's departure was handled with insensitivity by the new corporate parent and his successor, Robert Gottlieb, was greeted by a pack of literary Rottweilers, but the decline of western civilisation they predicted failed to occur. Gottlieb's tastes were not so different. No, for real infamy it took the arrival of Tina Brown in 1992. It was she who did the unthinkable, bringing photography, a graphic redesign and an allegiance to Hollywood, with all that that implies, into the mix. The scritori went into mourning.
Of course some argue, with considerable justification, that Brown simply brought the magazine out of medieval times. In any event, she moved on to another venture in 1998, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist David Remnick, then 39, was named editor. It is Remnick who is now credited by many with a not-unimpressive feat; simultaneously moving the magazine back to its roots and forward into a new era of quality writing and youthful edge.
"I read the magazine all the time now," says Eavan Boland, who heads the Creative Writing programme at Stanford University. "It's livelier, more connected. It touches a community of great wit and taste and literary interest." Boland remembers when she first bought a box of old New Yorkers at a boot sale in 1981 or 1982 for £2. "Reading through all those issues gave me this panoramic view. And because Frank O'Connor and Mary Lavin wrote for the magazine, it always had a relationship with Ireland." Like several others, Boland had far less enthusiasm for the magazine when it was edited by Tina Brown, and in fact considered it almost too coarse an environment in which to publish her poetry. Today, she finds it "a generous and supportive place, part of a changing adventure".
Anne Fadiman, editor of the American Scholar and a well-known non-fiction author, remembers her first piece for the New Yorker. It was commissioned by Gottlieb.
"It was a 35,000-word piece about the Hmong (immigrants from Laos) and epilepsy," says Fadiman. "The day I turned it in Mr Gottlieb was fired and Tina Brown was appointed. My friends and I laughed later. It would have been hard to come up with three elements Tina Brown could have been less interested in than the Hmong, epilepsy and 35,000 words." The piece was killed, and Fadiman, then stuck with a lengthy essay unlikely to be published elsewhere, decided to turn the piece into a book. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award in 1997.
"I am one of those people who have mourned every change at the New Yorker," says Fadiman. "I hated when they moved offices. I miss the multi-part series. But the day David Remnick became editor was a day of celebration at our house. He has restored morale. The best poetry and the best fiction anywhere is most likely to be found there."
Frances Kiernan, a New Yorker fiction editor for 15 years until 1987, and author of a widely praised new biography, Seeing Mary Plain; a Life of Mary McCarthy, who has in the past been critical of the magazine, says Remnick "is the best thing that could have happened. The magazine is not just something that has survived. It is still very vital. It seems to me the New Yorker has more buzz now. People are talking about it again."
Kiernan says that new young writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, published last year in the magazine, have been a wonderful surprise. "When I first read her I thought: `This is incredible. We would have published her in the old days.' I ran out to read her stories." Lahiri, aged 23, has just won the Pulitzer prize.
For his part, Remnick makes the matter of editing his magazine seem rather straightforward. People who work with him describe him as unfussy, determined and decisive, but with a temperament that would keep the dinnerware intact. There is no precise formula for editing here, he insists, and the history of the place must be put into perspective. A week after he collected three National Magazine Awards, Remnick said his goals are simple.
"It takes time to build a record. First and foremost, we are here to publish the best contemporary writing. This is not a museum and I'm not a curator. It's exciting to do new things," he says. "This is a magazine of its writers, reliably funny, ambitious in many different senses."
IT is Sunday afternoon, and the final event is getting underway at Bryant Park, just behind the New York Public library in mid-town Manhattan. Somebody back at the office has had got the bright idea of concluding the weekend by bringing together a half-dozen or so Pulitzer Prize winners along with a Nobel Prize winner, altogether 12 of the best poets in the world, setting up a stage suitable for rock stars, calling it Poetry in the Park, and inviting everyone for free. Maybe they would come.
It is an oppressively hot day, which it was not supposed to be, and any sane New Yorker will have gone to the beach or an air-conditioned cinema. But there is little sanity afoot when it comes to poetry, and more than 2,000 people are sprawled out over every spare inch of lawn.
Derek Walcott (Nobel, 1992) moves from behind the stage area and heads for the grass, where he lies propped on one arm listening to his colleagues.
Eavan Boland wows the crowd and is interrupted by applause, as she reads works by Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath before reading two of her own poems.
Remnick, somehow looking cool in a crisp, pink shirt and khaki trousers, hovers efficiently, talking to the bearded soundguy, making sure the speakers are properly adjusted.
The line-up is stunning. Phillip Levine, Robert Pinsky, the US Poet Laureate Mark Strand, the former US Poet Laureate Charles Simic, Marie Ponsot, John Ashbery, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell. There is even much-loved Stanley Kunitz, aged 95, who has won everything from the National Book Award to the Pulitzer.
Alice Quinn, the poetry editor, stands to the side of the stage watching each poet ascend the stairs. She makes sure Kunitz has not misplaced his hat. She makes sure the cars are there to shuttle the poets to the party later.
The event is a raging success and Quinn is more than beaming. For 13 years now, Quinn has been a New Yorker editor, shepherding what one friend of hers calls "the heroic language" to the masses. It is, she says, in the tones of a woman deeply married and still very much in love, "the best job in the world".