American magazines, including this one, do not begin fully formed. They start out, depending on the times, with high spirits or with a stern sense of mission, but the idea itself, the complete set of ingredients that might make a magazine distinctive enough to last—that’s almost never in place. And yet when The New York Review of Books made its début––Volume 1, No. 1, dated February 1, 1963, appeared in the midst of a four-month-long printers’ strike at the Times––the idea for an intellectually vigorous books magazine was so perfectly cooked, and its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, so skilled and connected, that an extended family of friends and sympathizers rushed to fill the chairs at a vast table of contents. The poets Auden and Warren, Lowell and Berryman were there; Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, and F. W. Dupee were among the critics; Elizabeth Hardwick, William Styron, Mary McCarthy, and Norman Mailer all set fiction aside for the moment and wrote essays. And that’s only the half of it. The result was surely the best first issue of any magazine ever.
Epstein and Silvers, who were then in their mid-thirties, never wrote for their own magazine, except ceremonially. But their sense of mission did not lack for ambition, or even ego; their editors’ note in the first issue said that the Review, if it ever took off, would not bother to write about books “trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud.” None of the writers got paid for their efforts, the editors announced; Volume 1, No. 1 was really just an experiment “to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.”
The Times soon returned, of course, but, by June, so, too, had the fledgling Review, and for forty-three years Epstein and Silvers kept it going at the highest level.
“The whole thing was so Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney,” Barbara would always say. “A bunch of friends thought it all up at dinner one night and the next thing you know the show was on––forever!”
They really did it all themselves, or nearly so. The two worked in adjoining offices, and, like the fabled Collyer Brothers, they were dwarfed by a perilous cityscape of galleys and manuscripts that always seemed in danger of toppling, and crushing them. Into their seventies, they worked the hours of first-year law students. Any writer hoping to call the main number with the idea of leaving an apologetic voice message on, say, Tuesday at 2 a.m.––“Sorry! But I swear the piece will be in . . . very soon!”––would more than likely get Bob (“New York Review!”) or Barbara (“Um-m-m . . . ye-es-s-s?”).
Barbara used to call the office a kind of “ma-and-pa operation,” and that was true even after the sale of the paper to a benevolent Mississippian, Rea Hederman, in 1984. (Barbara always called it that––“the paper”––as if a biweekly featuring, say, Isaiah Berlin on the origins of Fascism, Murray Kempton on Mussolini, and Joan Didion on the Unabomber were no less ephemeral than the daily reporting of Cindy Adams.) The rest of the editorial staff, like the court of a small duchy, has always been very loyal and unimaginably small.
Now Silvers, who is seventy-six, will edit the Review alone. Barbara Epstein died earlier this month, of lung cancer.
For all the seriousness of Barbara’s work, and for all the time she put into it, her friends knew her as perhaps the least self-serious serious person imaginable. Personal warmth and oblique suggestion was her editorial technique. (“This bit,” she would say gently, pointing to the weak underbelly of a manuscript. “Well, it’s brilliant, of course, but it might be a little broad, do you know?”) Her favorite compliment was “divine.” In this, she was democratic. Her young writers––and there were many––were divine. The pizza at Orso was divine. Jamba Juice was divine. Fred MacMurray in “Alice Adams” was divine. “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was divine. She loved a party; she loved gossip and fun. She seemed to know everybody, and once, when a young writer eagerly asked her what a particular celebrity was “really like,” she smiled her wicked, pursed smile, lowered her eyelids, and said, “Well, she’s a masochist, which is always adorable!”
In 1953, Edmund Wilson encountered Barbara while she was on her honeymoon, a transatlantic voyage aboard the Île de France with bottles of champagne supplied by Doubleday, where both Barbara and her husband, Jason Epstein, were editors. As Wilson recounts in his diaries, he (and Buster Keaton) spent a night drinking and dining with the Epsteins. But it wasn’t until the sixties, with the rise of the Review, Wilson thought, that Barbara, “who before was so quiet and kept herself in the background,” came fully into her own.
“I spent a good deal of the time sitting on the stairs with Barbara Epstein,” Wilson wrote of a New Year’s Eve party at Lillian Hellman’s place in 1965. “I have never seen her so vivid, so good-looking and so amusing. The Review has done a lot for her.”