American Scholar Bids Farewell To Anne Fadiman
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
SCHOLARLY DINNER The American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, held a farewell dinner for its departing editor, Anne Fadiman, at a private Midtown club. The event also honored the publication’s board, staff, and some of its contributors. Attendees included Peter Gay, who served briefly as the magazine’s editor; a professor at CUNY Graduate Center and author of “Gates of Eden,” Morris Dickstein; Honor Moore, who is writing a book about her father, Bishop Moore; a professor at New York University, David Levering Lewis; a sociology professor at Columbia University, Todd Gitlin, and others, including the Knickerbocker, who was a contributing editor to the American Scholar.
Writer Brian Doyle was unable to attend, but wrote an entertaining “Letter from the Far West” that was read:
I would be among you, laughing in the corner with Cynthia Ozick and a bottle of wine, but today is the first practice for the Hallinan School Hawks fourth-grade boys’ basketball team and I am the coach and my twin sons are the starting backcourt, so there you are.
However may I say that it has been an extraordinary honor to be edited with such sharp pens and brains as the Scholar staff has plied among the muddy rivers of my prose; and I have been delighted hundreds of times by nuggets and prayers and rants and musings and epiphanies among these pages; and many times I have had not a minute to read the Scholar in the Chaos & Hubbub of my days but did so anyway immediately with joy and awe, and then ran like hell for the last train; and I am humbled and abashed (as much as an Essayist can be) by the sheer bravura and dash and courage and integrity and substance of my fellow contributors; and this magazine, under these editors, mattered like mad, mattered enormously, was about Real Things, was about love and grace and truth, unlike so very much else we are slathered & occupied by in these muddled times; which made it all the more a pleasure, a poem, a prayer to be among these pages, speaking to such readers.
Now I cease & desist, but before I go I ask that you do two things:
1. all rise! and bow silently toward Cynthia Ozick, who in Irish lore would be called seanachie, master storyteller, a communal mind and heart who elevates our nation; and
2. a round of applause for Anne, leader of the motley crew that made such an exquisite magazine for such an exquisite moment. Her Scholar does not die as long as we remember and tell its tale.
And with that adieu from the West.
As instructed, the crowd dutifully arose and silently bowed toward Ms. Ozick, and then gave Ms. Fadiman a round of applause.
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ASA, ARCHIVIST Baron Briggs of Lewes (Asa Briggs) is a social historian who has written widely on the Victorian era as well as on other topics, such as the history of British broadcasting. He is a former provost of Worcester College, Oxford (1976-91) and served as chancellor of the Open University.
The Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center sponsored a program at which Mr. Briggs was keynote speaker. The evening honored Sheryl Vogt, head archivist of the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research at the University of Georgia, who received the Archivist Award sponsored by the Scone Foundation.
Presidential historian and journalist Richard Reeves introduced Mr. Briggs, who spoke on the subject of “Archival Adventures.”
Mr. Briggs said when he agreed to write a history of the BBC, “I didn’t realize that I was giving myself a life sentence.” He eventually completed a five-volume history of broadcasting.
Mr. Briggs told the audience he had been working on a history of Longman publishing. His book was to be called “The Triumph of Longevity.” When Longman was absorbed into Pearson, he said that he decided he would have to change the book’s title to “The Perils of Longevity.”
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‘NEVER BETTER’ The late Gardner Botsford has been remembered by a small silver plaque attached to a long wooden table at the Coffee House club in Midtown. At The New Yorker, Botsford edited such fabled writers as A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell.
The rectangular plaque bears Botsford’s name followed by the laconic response he invariably offered when asked how he was doing: “Never better.”
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CULTURE STUDIES The American Historical Association annual meeting in Seattle will have a panel on January 7 entitled “Michael Moore: Cinematic Historian or Propagandist?”…Could there be kissing or hugging when the University of Rochester hosts a graduate student conference in April on “Public Displays of Affection”?… A Jewish Theological Seminary of America professor of Hebrew, Edna Nahshon, moderated a panel in Chicago at the Association of Jewish Studies. The subject was “Jews & Shoes.” Papers were delivered on topics such as “Footwear in Rabbinic Literature.”
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VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS Life magazine editor Robert Sullivan read from his book “Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission” (Diane Publishing).
Mr. Sullivan began by saying his talk would “deal with flying mammals,” but not rodentia. He said he was sorry if anyone had come thinking he was another New Yorker contributor named Robert Sullivan, who wrote a book on rats. The New Yorker magazine’s December 20 and 27 double issue had confused the two Robert Sullivans in its listings. “Yet another vaunted fact-checking department down the tubes.” Mr. Sullivan, the Reindeer author, joked.
The audience was amused when Mr. Sullivan related how the White House, under President George H.W. Bush, had issued a statement instructing aircraft in or around the area of the North Pole on December 24 and 25 to “be on heightened alert for red sleighs traveling at expected speed of 650 miles per second at a cruising altitude of approximately 30,000 feet.”
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DECONSTRUCTIONIST DATE New York University is planning a memorial tribute to deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida on January 21.