{"id":109399,"date":"2017-03-29T14:43:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T18:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109399"},"modified":"2017-03-30T14:28:02","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T18:28:02","slug":"bob-silvers-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Silvers\u2019s Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Silvers made his writers want to be equal to a possible image he\u00a0had of a possible you<\/span><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Robert B. Silvers<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I was thirty when Bob Silvers first sent me a book for review\u2014a collection of Nabokov\u2019s translations of Russian poetry into English. This was toward the end of 2008. I revered The<\/em>\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/em>; it was an ideal supranational habitat. The unexpected FedEx package, with its accompanying modest note making the proposal, as if continuing a permanent\u2014if ineffable\u2014conversation, made me dazzlingly anxious. A couple of weeks later, he e-mailed\u2014on New Year\u2019s Eve, which was also, I would discover, his birthday\u2014to say that while reading \u201cwith admiration\u201d a book I had written, he had noticed an error in it that might be corrected in a paperback edition. I had quoted the duc de Saint-Simon\u2019s portrait of \u201cMadame\u201d from his Memoirs<\/em>\u00a0and glossed this as a portrait of Madame de Maintenon. \u201cSaint-Simon was referring not to Madame de Maintenon,\u201d wrote Bob\u2014or, as I was to find out, dictated Bob, \u201cbut to \u2018Madame,\u2019 i.e. Elizabeth Charlotte, Palatine of Bavaria, second wife of \u2018Monsieur,\u2019 duc d\u2019Orleans. She was in fact German.\u201d<\/p>\n

I felt a rush of total love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A few months later, we sat down on a sofa in the Review<\/em>\u2019s offices on Hudson Street to discuss the essay on Nabokov. (Bob sprawled magnificently on sofas. One time I remember noticing that in order to talk we were both essentially reclining, cheek to cheek.) And while we spoke, my anxiety only increased, as I realized that not only had nearly all the moments of historic significance in the essay\u2014Nabokov\u2019s argument with Edmund Wilson, Nabokov\u2019s argument with Robert Lowell\u2014taken place in the pages of the NYRB<\/em> itself, but that Bob was mentioning by their first names <\/em>everyone I had written about: Edmund Wilson, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Lowell, Nabokov himself.<\/p>\n

His gravitas was the most glamorous quality I had ever known.<\/p>\n

And as I remember all this now, it feels important not just to attend to these miniature memories but to try to attempt some kind of definition. Bob\u2019s charisma was due to a particular bundle of charmed values\u2014justice, precision, intimacy, \u00e9lan\u2014which in turn were rooted in a philosophy so comprehensive it could only be examined through specificities. There\u2019s a wonderful moment in Henry James at Work<\/em>, Theodora Bosanquet\u2019s memoir of working as Henry James\u2019s amanuensis, when she sketches her vision of his vision: \u201c\u2018When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenseless children of light.\u201d I always thought that something similar was true of Bob, too, if you were to delete the\u00a0adjective \u201cdoomed.\u201d His great intellectual passion (which placed him in an Atlantic European tradition whose center, I guess, was Isaiah Berlin) was to identify and analyze predatory power\u2014where it was located, how it might be resisted. It meant that he was characterized by what should be an oxymoron: a broad depth<\/em>. He was remarkable both for his polymathy and for his precision. This is not, after all, so usual. It was always as if he had just met world history at a party. To be precise about power\u2014this was roughly his lesson\u2014really required a double precision: of erudition and of personal style. For power was always an assault on individual integrity. Power preferred the communal blur. It could only be resisted through the specifics of one\u2019s knowledge and bravura.<\/p>\n

And so, as a writer for him, you wanted to be better than you were, equal to a possible image Bob had of a possible you\u2014and sometimes, at happy moments, it seemed that he believed that you were. What interested him was the particularity of a mind\u2019s adventures. Everyone should have a metaphysical vision, a particular intellectual project, and he gave you the opportunity to believe that you had one. He gave you the courage of your interests and intuitions. The last book he gave me for review was a novel for which I\u2019d already provided a few sentences of praise. I pointed this out to him, worrying that perhaps I should include a demurral. His reply was conspicuous not just for the comical exaggeration of its flattery but for the precision of its ethical ideal: \u201cOur view is that if a distinguished writer like yourself makes a brief statement about a book,\u201d Bob replied, \u201cit\u2019s all the more appropriate and indeed morally right to say more.\u201d I was only one of his junior writers, after all, but I so wanted to be equal to this utopia.<\/p>\n

This exacting idealism was visible within paragraphs, too. I know that Bob has been mythologized for his manic work ethic\u2014and his attention to small problems of vocabulary or punctuation. But for me the most constant and inventive lesson was his attention to obscurity: his notes in the margin of the galleys posing apparently minor questions, small cajolings to perhaps find a greater clarity for a paragraph. All obscurity was a failure of intelligence\u2014or of soul. It was a lapse in your imagination of the reader. And although there might be obscurities of style\u2014where a rhetorical trick was being used to conceal an inconsistency or a gap in the argument\u2014the greatest obscurity was in not following a thought through to its end. His editing, therefore, oddly expanded your writing. It refused to allow you the consolation of abandoning a sentence at moments when you felt lazy or tired or lost. For those, in the end, were the points of greatest interest.<\/p>\n

This lesson in criticism was really a lesson in life: the demands of style were endless. And it became, when on my own, when writing a novel, a method to be mimicked. I think when I first met Bob I had enjoyed being the novelist as perverse aesthete\u2014for whom style and character, or style and politics, were pristinely separate\u2014but now, nearly a decade later, I am much more somber. For what one writes, of course, is corrupted and enlivened by one\u2019s history\u2014and the history of that history. And this transformation, I think, came from him, from the process of his editing. He became the imaginary editor of everything I wrote\u2014its hidden executive producer, headlining an invisible credit sequence.<\/p>\n

Ah, he represented an impossible sprezzatura, the kind of person equally interested in Madame du Deffand and Karl Marx. He had the only glamour worth admiring\u2014the glamour of gluttonous precision. Once, when I said I was going to Beirut, he reminisced about a time in the sixties when he had taken a plane from the Riviera in order to lunch at a seafood restaurant in Byblos. This was the same man who entered late a drunken, hilarious party in an East Village apartment for a novel I\u2019d written, and stood there by the fridge, with his red L\u00e9gion d\u2019honneur discreetly visible, pinned to his suit jacket, advising Lorin Stein that I should be sent by The<\/em> Paris Review<\/em> to interview V\u00e1clav Havel. For Mitteleuropa<\/em> had been another grand experiment in power; he understood the detail of its historic machinations\u2014and therefore he had also known its grand heroes of resistance: Havel, Kundera, Ki\u0161 \u2026 And so, of course, I went.<\/p>\n

An editor\u2019s work produces a serial\u2014not a sequence of individual works. Or so runs the usual thinking. But as I think about Bob, and the meaning of editing, I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s true. The other night, mourning him, desolate, I found myself reading an issue of The\u00a0New York Review<\/em> from the eighties, where Joseph Brodsky was writing on Derek Walcott, Alfred Kazin was writing on William James, and E. H. Gombrich was reviewing Svetlana Alpers\u2019s brilliant book on Dutch painting, The Art of Describing<\/em>. There it was: the miniature, patient, cosmopolitan universe he\u2019d invented with Barbara Epstein\u2014and which will always remain my ideal society. And then I also realized: but each issue was<\/em> a work! It\u2019s a different kind of work, of course, from a novel or a film, but still, a magazine\u2014or paper<\/em>, to use his term\u2014is an art form of its own. And that this art form is collaborative, minute, gigantic, that it is a form of ongoing and international process, perhaps only hints that it may be the most modern, most urgent form we have in this era of exorbitant power.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam Thirlwell is <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>London\u00a0editor.<\/em>\u00a0His most recent novel is<\/em> Lurid & Cute<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Thirlwell remembers Bob Silvers, who gave his writers \u201cthe courage of your interests and intuitions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":280,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[15416,23322,19729,28084,135,20537,28085,2111,28074,758,19287,14504,272,6830,2865,232,113,28083,75],"class_list":["post-109399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-bob-silvers","tag-book-review","tag-clarity","tag-courage","tag-editing","tag-in-memoriam","tag-intuition","tag-love","tag-mentorship","tag-new-york-review-of-books","tag-obscurity","tag-power","tag-publishing","tag-robert-b-silvers","tag-robert-silvers","tag-style","tag-writer","tag-writer-and-editor","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Memoriam: Bob Silvers\u2019s Vision<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Adam Thirlwell remembers the New York Review\u2019s Bob Silvers, who gave his writers \u201cthe courage of your interests and intuitions.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bob Silvers\u2019s Vision by Adam Thirlwell\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 29, 2017 \u2013 Adam Thirlwell remembers Bob Silvers, who gave his writers \u201cthe courage of your interests and intuitions.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-03-29T18:43:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-03-30T18:28:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/silvers-head-shot.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"801\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Adam Thirlwell\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Adam Thirlwell\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Adam Thirlwell\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6ffafcff5212eed076cfde9a93d8e5ed\"},\"headline\":\"Bob Silvers\u2019s Vision\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-03-29T18:43:47+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-03-30T18:28:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/\"},\"wordCount\":1484,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/bob-silvers-vision\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/silvers-head-shot.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Bob Silvers\",\"book review\",\"clarity\",\"courage\",\"editing\",\"In Memoriam\",\"intuition\",\"love\",\"mentorship\",\"New York Review of Books\",\"obscurity\",\"power\",\"publishing\",\"Robert B. 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