Of the many great lines in Annie Hall, my favourite occurs during the scene where Woody Allen is watching basketball on television in a bedroom during a publisher's cocktail party. His wife comes in and tells him to turn it off. Ever the smoothie, he responds by suggesting they have sex—an advance she spurns with the immortal line,"There are people out there from the New Yorker magazine! My God! What would they think?"
Allen's wife is an unattractive caricature of the pretentious, New Yorker-worshipping American intellectual, but I must confess to feeling a twinge of sympathy. I find the New Yorker incredibly seductive. It's not just the articles and cartoons; there's a part of me that fetishises the magazine a little, perhaps the way Russian teenagers used to feel about Levi's jeans, or the Japanese about Manchester United.
So it would be hard to overstate how delighted I was a few months ago when it looked as if I was about to have a letter published in the New Yorker's notably selective "Mail" page (singular). Every week, the pages feature three or four letters from people around the world who have a beautifully articulated insight into a recent article, or who know something that the New Yorker doesn't. Not surprisingly, most of them seem to come from anoraks of some sort or another.
My letter concerned a throwaway comment made by a very distinguished Pulitzer prize-winning Harvard professor towards the end of a long article on Ezra Pound. The professor had argued that the title of a book written about Pound, Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (1971), was "deliberately ironic," because the point of the book was that "a Pound era never happened." I happened to know that the title was not ironic. Not only that, I could prove it. A few years ago, when I was doing some research for my doctorate at the Beinecke Library in New Haven, I chanced upon a letter that Kenner had written to Pound saying that he planned to write a book called The Pound Era "because it has been The Pound Era right enough; and it was The Pound Era during a crucial period."
You may think that this was hardly a matter of pressing importance, even allowing for the fact that The Pound Era was, in its day, an incredibly influential book. But my ego was running amok. Within 30 seconds I was pacing around the flat explaining to my girlfriend why this Harvard egghead was wrong. I then spent half an hour rummaging through boxes trying to find the evidence, before sitting down at the computer to compose my letter. All of this, I should add, took place around midnight on a Sunday.
The next morning, I presented all the relevant material to a couple of colleagues, just to make sure I wasn't dancing all over this guy's mistake in error. When I got the go-ahead ("that's what letters pages are for," said one), I did one last edit, during which I charitably excised the word "dumbass," and sent the letter on its electronic way. I was now officially past the point of luck. Not only had I spotted a whopper in the New Yorker, of all places, but I had proof—in the form of an unpublished letter that in all likelihood no one else but the writer and recipient had ever seen—that the magazine was wrong.
I soon received an acknowledgement, which struck me as very mannered for a letters page, but I figured this was just part of the New Yorker's legendary fastidiousness. Then a week or two went by without a peep. I began looking at my emails late at night if I couldn't sleep. After about two weeks, I realised the grim truth: my letter was so damaging to the reputation of the Pulitzer-winning Harvard professor that featuring it on the letters page would inevitably result in his suicide. Publishing it was not an option.
But then it happened. The magazine sent me an edited version of the letter and asked if I was happy to have it printed. They also asked me to confirm that I had in fact written it, and could I please call or email them immediately to let them know. So I did. They then mentioned that I was now being "considered for publication," something I completely disregarded, assuming that if they had taken the trouble to edit my letter and solicit my approval, they were bloody well going to publish it. But I was wrong. I had only made it to the knockout round.
For a week or two I basked in the glow of my small personal victory. I imagined people I hadn't seen for years opening the New Yorker and seeing my glorious rebuttal staring out at them. Perhaps my old high school English teacher, who'd failed me and forced me to go to summer school. Maybe a prospective employer who wasn't sure I was up to the task. Or a long-forgotten love, now unhappily married and pining for the life of the mind we might have shared together.
What actually happened was the appearance of that cover of the Obamas: Michelle draped in belts of bullets, Barack in a turban, the pair of them sharing a terrorist fist-jab. This meant that the next issue, the one I was due to appear in, devoted its letters page entirely to mail about the image. They did at least take the trouble to send me a rejection letter: handwritten by one of the 30 or so permanent staff who no doubt man the letters page.
