Let Me Finish (26 page)

I was luckier than most, for I had first encountered Hahn under unforgettable circumstances. One day when I was twelve years old, she stepped out of a cab in front of our house on East Ninety-third Street, carrying a monkey in her arms—a monkey for me. Because my mother was
her editor, she had heard about my boy-naturalist inclinations and had determined, all on her own, to find me the most ravishing (and most inconvenient) pet imaginable. "Don't let her bite you," she said, handing over a small, solemn-faced, greenish-brown macaque, with a belt around its waist. "If she does, bite her right back—bite her on the ear—and she'll never do it again." She was right about that, it turned out, but by then I was convinced that she always knew exactly the right thing to do.

Another Hahn moment has stayed bright in my mind. One morning in 1962 I was alone in a Down elevator at the office, when the door slid open at a lower
New Yorker
floor to admit Hahn. "Why, Roger—how are you?" she said.

"Not so hot, Emily," I said. "In fact, right now I'm headed for Idlewild, to fly to Juarez for a divorce."

"Well, good for you!" she cried instantly. "Trying to make yourself happy is the only thing anybody can do. That's what I've always said, anyway. Try not to worry about it."

 

The Mickey Hahn story (her mother gave her the nickname) remains fresh and vivid, even in the broad scale. Born in St. Louis, she grew up in a powerful and iconoclastic family sisterhood, and took a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin, mostly, it seems now, because no one there expected a woman ever to do such a thing. She took a cross-country trip in a Model T (E. B. White had already made the same pre-writer hegira), and arrived at an early age in the pages of
The New Yorker,
thanks to her perfeet pitch in the little arias of the casual. Her trip to the Congo lasted longer than she expected (she'd gone broke), but changes of scene and fortune came easily to her. In China next (where she became an official
New Yorker
correspondent), she had an extended affair with a married Chinese artist and poet, Zau Sinmay.

The main event of her life, one can say, began with a scandalous adventure: she fell in love with a British officer, Charles Boxer, and bore a daughter, Carola, out of wedlock. He was imprisoned by the Japanese after the fall of Hong Kong, and their reunion and marriage had to await the end of the war. She had remained free by claiming to be Eurasian (she looked the part), and contrived ways to visit him under the eyes of his captors. When it came time for her to accept repatriation she brought their child to her father's prison in a rickshaw, past the barbed wire, for a movielike farewell. She writes about the moment with her usual economy: "Charles was waiting. He must have guessed I would take some such risk this last time. He turned and started walking step for step with the coolie, and I broke yet another rule and turned my head and looked straight at him. So did Carola."

Given this flamboyant early résumé, and Hahn's ceaseless postwar journeys and writings (ultimately, there were fifty-two books), it should not come as a surprise if we sometimes overlooked both how lighthearted and how complicated she was, and what it was that she cared about in the end. What she tells about her two years in the Congo (in her early published diary,
Congo Solo,
and in a novel,
With
Naked Foot
) isn't just the romance of being a lone young American in such a place but the cruelties that white men inflict on African women. Hahn's move to China and her affair with Zau Sinmay placed her in a cosmopolitan and historically turbulent milieu, which she wrote about in her best-selling biography of the Soong sisters; but her long-running series of placid
New Yorker
casuals, in which Zau becomes Pan Heh-ven, lingers on the ironies of colonial life, and of a traditional Chinese wife who is not permitted to cross the street alone. The best thing that Hahn wrote about her straitened years in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation was a story, "The Baby-Amah," about Carola's nurse, who had to be left behind in 1943, when her employer had a chance to go home. A two-part Reporter at Large piece about that long trip home with her child, via India and Cape Town and Rio, with a shipload of missionaries and exchanged prisoners of war, barely touches on the risks and fears of a wartime journey but turns instead to the alcoholic misdeeds of some returning merchant seamen, whom she liked better than anyone else aboard.

Hahn gravitated toward the unexpected and the informal. She was an even more spectacular reader than world traveler. Her daughters remember mealtimes at home in Hertfordshire, with everyone at the table behind a book: their father invoked a rule of silence at meals, and their mother always broke it, with giggles and whispers. Hahn resolutely refused to learn the first thing about cooking, her younger daughter, Amanda, who was born in England after the war, cheerfully recalled the other day. "She kept offering to make us rice, but who wants rice?"

Hahn turned out major works of reporting—on the Philippines, and on diamonds and their history, for instance—as well as biographies of D. H. Lawrence and Raffles of Singapore, but an almost greater concurrent flow was made up of low-key memoirs and books and novels for children. In a multipart 1958 Reporter at Large piece, "Last Days of the Maharajahs," she makes small talk with a maharajah's wife as they sip a Coca-Cola at Phoolsagar Palace, and then finds out that Her Highness of Bundi has never visited the nearby city of Agra. She has never been anywhere, in fact. "You see," the Maharanee says apologetically, "I'm in purdah."

The central preoccupation of Hahn's later writing years was zoos and monkeys and wildlife preservation, and particularly primate intelligence and animal communication. She became a distinguished scholar of the subject, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "Either you have gibbons in your blood or you haven't," she once wrote disarmingly, but of course it was a chance to dwell among the voiceless—how eagerly she seized it!—that drew her into the company of celebrity chimps and gorillas, like Washoe and Booee, Colo and Toto, and their painstaking keepers and researchers. When I went into her empty office (she'd given in and accepted one, after she reached her nineties) a couple of days after she died, I spied a bulletin board that was overflowing with yellowed newspaper stories and photographs of gibbons and tamarins and chimpanzees and gorillas. "OPEN-HEART SURGERY PERFORMED ON ORANGUTAN," one headline read. The photographs made me smile, the way monkey pictures
do, and I thought of how Mickey Hahn had looked—that gleam of everyday transcendence—at the moment when she cut them out and pinned them up on her wall.

i. The Music of the Spines

Shawn's office and Gardner Botsford's office were close to each other at the magazine, down at the east end of the nineteenth-floor corridor, but galactically separated in tone and context. An appointment or shy summons to see Shawn took you past an outer minion and through his rarely opened door; inside (he rose as you entered) he'd be at the middle of his long, altarlike desk, with ancient columns of manuscripts and galleys rising on either side. Many staff members, sharing notes later, found that any meeting with him, even a two-minute session, felt significant and uneasily exciting. If there was something deadly about these encounters, it was probably your fault: you'd half-wanted to be taken in on a major decision or to become the recipient of another of Shawn's astounding compliments. Leaving, you let out a breath and hung a right into Botsford's place, a low-pressure chamber, where persiflage and laughter were encouraged, and high-level work was conducted in a low-key manner. Botsford's invariable reference to the magazine as "the comic weekly"—it was an early Ross description of his brainchild—was not intended to disparage Shawn or the complex and very different magazine that grew during his reign, but only to laugh a little at the immense seriousness that hung about the place in its
upper middle age. Shawn actually appeared to believe that his
New Yorker
had come to represent something much larger than its individual issues, its Comment page, its range of talented contributors, and its loyal readers; perhaps it stood for, or even
was,
Western civilization itself. Botsford, his first lieutenant and most important and reliable editor of non-fiction, thought this was bushwa. He allowed himself pleasure over a pretty good issue, or a surprising Profile, or a telling Rovere column, but went home at the end of the day for an angst-free martini with his friends, and sometimes got through an entire evening without ever mentioning
The New Yorker.
Here's a passing bit of news about him I wrote in a Talk of the Town piece in 1999, after he'd retired:

 

A departing dinner guest at the Gardner Botsfords' apartment on Gramercy Park can find himself at a sudden loss for words, right in the middle of the thanks and farewells. The process is always the same. Somewhere between the promise to meet again soon and a parting hug, the visitor's gaze falls on a narrow, six-shelf wooden bookcase, there beside the elevator, where, willy-nilly, wandering attention picks up the book titles "Beginning Polo," "Music in Geriatric Care," and "Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva," all on the same row. What? Just down the line comes "Pray Your Weight Away" and "Selected Lithuanian Short Stories. " The elevator arrives and the thanks are distractedly resumed, but a helpless backward glance discovers "Toilet Training in Less
Than a Day," on the shelf below, not far from "Modern Volleyball"and "The Sexual Christian." The door clanks shut, and up (in the little round window) go the host and hostess, who are smiling. They understand.

The Botsford apartment occupies the upper floors of a handsome brownstone, which means that the elevator hall and the bookcase are part of the place, too. And what better spot to stash "Gardner's Library," as old friends think of it—a unique selection of volumes never to be taken down and opened, never to be discussed, reviewed, collated, or arranged? You can't tell a book by its cover, but in this case you can. Their owner and curator, the narrow and amiable Botsford, who is eighty-four, was once an editor at this magazine, with an office just inside the anteroom where inbound, not-yet-published books, destined to be sent along to reviewers or cast aside, accrued in teetery stacks. Running his eye week by week down the non-fiction titles, he became impressed by a sweep of unexpected subject matter and the acute seriousness of certain obscure authors—which, when combined, promised extremely low sales. He began to pluck out some of the unlikeliest volumes—"The Law and Your Dog," "Septic Tank Practices," "Successful Fund Raising Sermons"—and stashed them in a bookcase in his office, where, slowly gaining company during the sixties and seventies, they became a solace for him and his colleagues. When he retired, in 1982, writers and editors and artists found themselves mourning "The
Handbook of Wrestling Drills," "Creative Insomnia," "What Can I Do with My Juicer?", and the rest, but not to worry: Gardner's Library went with him, carefully boxed up, and can still be visited by its exegetes.

"
I don't believe there's as much of this kind of publishing anymore," Botsford said to a visitor. "The special special book, the book with an audience of three—I don't know where it's gone. " He went on to explain that two broad principles had governed selection of the treasure, which now numbers a hundred and six volumes. There were to be no joke titles—you had to be rigorous about this—and no work that didn't bear its title on the spine. "That's because no one will ever open any of the books," he said. "They are not for reading. Some people don't understand this.
"

The visitor pointed out that certain themes appeared to recur. Here was "The Personality of the Horse, "not far from "Breaking Your Horse's Bad Habits. " And would a geographer be drawn first to "The Passaic River" or to "Hamtramck Then and Now?" Might not a scholar wearying of "Refrigeration in America" be tempted to skip over to "Father of Air Conditioning"?

"
Pure coincidence," Botsford said sternly. "And please don't move a book closer to any other book. These are arranged on the John Cage principle. Chance makes the music. Look here"—and he gestured toward "All About Guppies" and its neighbor "The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum.
"

The visitor, freed at last into art, made a random cast across "Haikus for Jews," "An Essay on Calcareous Manures," "Meet Calvin Coolidge," and, yes, "Who's Who in Saudi Arabia: 1978–79," nestled together on the right-hand side of the second shelf, and felt a twangling chord of happiness descend.

"
It would be nice to find a few more," Botsford said, "but I have to rely mostly on friends. Tom Nagel, a professor of philosophy at N.Y.U., brought me this one not long ago." He pointed to a paperback by Kendall Crolius and Anne Montgomery, with its title prettily printed in red,: "Knitting with Dog Hair.
"

Knitting what—mittens? And with whose hair? Could time and love produce a Pekinese tea cozy? Saluki socks? A Lab lap robe? A guilty but familiar impulse crept over the visitor, and when his host departed briefly, summoned by the telephone, he sneaked down the book and began to read.

 

ii. Never Better

Every meeting with Botsford—down the hall; on a street corner, unexpectedly; at your doorway before dinner—began the same way, with your own "How are you, Gardner?" and his firm, upbeat "Never better!" You came to count on this and to laugh at it with other friends and colleagues of his—some of us even began to call him "Old Never Better"—and only with time did you sense how well the riposte served him, diverting attention from sadness or symptoms, encouraging the social or conversational pleasures just ahead, and also stepping off an elegant little distance away from intimacy. Botsford, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven, was an editor with the magazine for almost forty years and a continuing presence around the place in the two decades after he stepped down. His long and famously happy marriage to the
New Yorker
writer Janet Malcolm—it was the second for both—had its roots in their editor-writer attachment, begun when she was a young contributor of shopping columns, and maintained (through her nine books and ninety-odd reportorial and critical pieces) until the end. He relished her success and his own anonymity. Once at a splashy New York party, she introduced him to a well-known gossip columnist who had been seated at her table. "And what do you do?" the lady asked without much interest. "I'm a bowling instructor," Botsford said.