At first I didn’t quite get it. It seems like a regular issue, dated this week, but a little odd. The people in the cartoons wear my parents’ clothes. Then there is the lineup of authors—John Updike, Frank McCourt, Theodore Roethke, Veronica Geng. I had to turn to the Contents page, called here New York Stories, to see that what I had just pulled from my mailbox was “The Archival Issue.” Perfect timing.
And filled with treats. On page 31 is a Richard Avedon portrait I would have found stunning even if it hadn’t been of James Baldwin. Would it be shallow of me to mention first that, in the portrait, Baldwin’s haircut looks like one you could, if you knew, get right this week in some trendy place in Brooklyn? Or that I would rush out to buy the tee shirt he is wearing? Or that the plaid jacket folded on his lap would probably, in another moment in another magazine, get its own caption, ending “price upon request”? I am a pushover for 1940’s Style. Capital S. But yes shallow, sorry, given that the picture accompanies Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which is a letter we desperately need right now. He’s writing about God, church, and heaven at a moment when Martin Luther King called 11 o’clock on Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in Christian America” and we are re-reading it at a moment when evangelical Christian voters helped put the current administration in place. Baldwin’s essay ends, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
Indeed, much of the old material in this issue has time-traveled a little too well. There is a cartoon in which a woman asks a travel agent, “Which country is the least mad at us” and another in which a man turns from his newspaper to sputter at the reader, “I’d just like to know what in hell is happening that’s all! I’d like to know what in hell is happening! Do YOU know what in hell is happening?” That one reminds me of a friend’s Facebook post the other day, “Ever wake up in the morning thinking how the fuck could it be that Donald Trump is Pres?”
But there is also a fun Nora Ephron piece ostensibly on cookbooks, in the way “Car Talk” is about ostensibly about cars, and a Nancy Franklin story on her first Manhattan apartment that recalls movies starring Rosalind Russell or Vera Ellen that even I am barely old enough to remember. The issue’s cover, by the Mexican artist Matias Santoyo, ran on April 2, 1927; eight other vintage covers are grouped inside.
Then another stop-you-in-your-tracks moment: Hannah Arendt beginning a piece on W.H. Auden, “I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age where the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another.”
But for me the absolute treasure is Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Icehouses” in its initial public appearance, sprawling across two pages. This one truly felt like a gift, a chance to look at this poem as if for the first time. And wow.
In an archival moment, I’m thinking, thanks for the memories.