A Life of Privilege, Mostly, by Gardner Botsford

The bargain-basement Odysseus

It's still hard for most of us to get our heads round the notion of an American "upper class". But it clearly exists and Gardner Botsford, who was a longstanding editor at The New Yorker, clearly belonged to it. This memoir of his time at the weekly in its heyday is informed by a truly patrician modesty, as well as a veteran's warmth and wisdom. His mother's family effectively owned the small town of Quincy; his stepfather, Raoul Fleischman, belonged to the junior branch of a fabulously wealthy family. Botsford bobs and weaves through adolescence and early manhood with the kind of insouciant defiance we associate with the aristocracy: he does a six-month bunk to the Far East, he steers cows when he should be studying, he swigs champagne at the parties of debs he has never met. Just as he's got the girl, the baby, and the job at The New Yorker, the draft summons arrives. Part One, "Mostly", concerns his time as an infantryman during the Second World War.

Of course, he had been hoping for something cushier, something in Special Services maybe. But a clerk gets his file wrong and a sergeant, after pointing this out, decides to stick with the clerk's mistake. One of the great charms of this book is its author's unwavering refusal to puff himself for our benefit. Botsford does quite a few heroic things but you never get the impression that he counts them as such. He goes awol to see the liberation of Paris and has an eerie encounter with an old friend whose job as war correspondent has made him more gung-ho than any soldier.

When he returns to civilian life, back to his wife and a little girl who takes months to accept his presence, let alone offer him love, he finds it dispiriting and sluggish. But there's still The New Yorker, and, for the rest of the book, we get to know it very well. There's Harold Ross, the founder, who can draw out a world of wonders from the constitution of a golf ball, William Shawn - his successor - meticulous, charming and monomaniac. What is evident above all is that these journalists, the bullish mavericks of the earlier era as much as the urbane mavericks of the later, had style. Wolton Gibbs observes in his advice to editors: "Efforts to avoid repetition by using 'grunted', 'snorted' etc are waste motion and offend the pure in heart." Maeve Brennan writes to Botsford: "Dear Much-Feared... the sea has been so loud that I cannot remain angry."

This memoir is oddly wrought: to start in the middle of things, with the military chronicle, was enterprising but it doesn't quite work. As he himself puts it, with customary aplomb, at the end of the first part, "Hang on, who is this bargain-basement Odysseus returning from the wars?" Well, quite, and, for all the writer's flair, he can occasionally sink into the slightly benumbed voice of the veteran in this section. Very late on, the author gives us an intimation of something we had been suspecting for some time: that The New Yorker's star writers, endearing, exasperating, often insufferable, were distressingly prone to crashing and burning. But all of them, whether in thrall to demons or haunted by devils, are presented with tenderness and respect. It's a pity that the book ends - perhaps has to end - on a slightly sour note, with its author's resignation from The New Yorker.

But what on earth does "editor" mean in the States? It seems here to suggest anything from proprietor to sub. This is only one instance of the writer taking a lot for granted. The "names", the people who one might have thought would be at least part of the selling point, are obviously not the point for Botsford: Harpo Marx is made much of in the blurb but appears only once; Charles Addams of "Addams Family" fame gets only a few mentions and his famous cartoons none; James Thurber appears, but only to be criticised for his unkind memoir of Shawn; Dorothy Parker is grazed in an aside. Though it would be unfair to say his treatment of his family is perfunctory, the author's considerable warmth is here largely reserved for his colleagues.

The reason for these apparent lacunae isn't far to seek, however. For this truly is a memoir, not a journal, not an autobiography. At the end of a long life of service to journalism, Botsford, who died in 2004, obviously felt no need to please. He isn't really writing for us but rather for his successors in the business and, you feel, in his bloodline. This memoir therefore has the feel of one for the grandchildren, and one for the intimates of that world.