Martin Scorsese, left, and Robert Silvers
As the New York Review of Books approached its 50th anniversary in 2013, editor Robert Silvers and his staff wondered if words were enough to honor one of the world’s signature literary publications.
“Should we do anything at all, rumble along in our usual way, or should we make an occasion out of it?” the 87-year-old Silvers recalled during a recent interview at the Review’s offices in Greenwich Village, bookcases unavoidably nearby. “We thought we should do something that was good for us and good for our readers. We thought — maybe a documentary.”
They agreed on the ideal director: Martin Scorsese. “The 50 Year Argument,” which airs Monday on HBO, mixes archival footage with contemporary interviews, scenes from the Review’s office and highlights from an anniversary celebration at Town Hall in Manhattan in 2013. The film is co-directed by Scorsese and David Tedeschi, who edited Scorsese’s documentaries on Bob Dylan and George Harrison.
Scorsese, interviewed by telephone, said he has been reading the Review for decades and has piles of old issues around his apartment to prove it. His affection dates back to the magazine’s beginning, when he was a student at New York University and spotted the Review at a favorite newsstand.
“My family wasn’t in the habit of reading — there were no books in our apartment — so this was a period of really challenging everything that I had thought and I had believed,” said Scorsese, adding that the Review’s broadsheet design stood out compared with such rival publications as The New Yorker and Dissent.
“The paper itself made you want to read it, the actual texture. It wasn’t intimidating — until you read some of the articles.”
The documentary appealed to the director of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “GoodFellas” in part because it’s a New York story. The magazine was conceived late in 1962 during a Manhattan dinner conversation among four literary figures: Poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and Random House editor Jason Epstein and his wife, editor Barbara Epstein.
As the film’s title suggests, the Review has also been a forum for the high-minded to bicker. Silvers and Scorsese had worried how to visualize literary history, but the Review helped inspire one of the great television confrontations. In the early 1970s, the magazine published a Gore Vidal essay in which he likened Norman Mailer’s views on women to those of Charles Manson. Dick Cavett soon invited the two authors to appear on his show, where a seething Mailer not only referred to the Review, but also read aloud from a copy.
“Sometimes it was very bitter,” said Silvers, still amazed — and proud — that the Review became a prop on network TV.
In its 51st year, the Review has adjusted well to the digital age, with worldwide circulation of around 150,000, up from 120,000 in the 1980s. Silvers himself remains youthfully curious and engaged, leaning forward with excitement, dark eyes brightening as he holds up the current issue, which features several essays on philosophy, along with pieces on everything from Ukraine to a biography of Coco Chanel. Hillel Italie, AP
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