GARDNER BOTSFORD.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 11-OCT-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Every meeting with Gardner Botsford--down the hall; on a street corner, unexpectedly; at your doorway before dinner--began the same way, with your own "How are you, Gardner?" and his firm, upbeat "Never better!" You came to count on this and to laugh at it with other friends and colleagues of his--some of us even began to call him "Old Never Better"--and only with time did you sense how well the riposte served him, diverting attention from sadness or symptoms, encouraging the social or conversational pleasures just ahead, and also stepping off an elegant little distance away from intimacy. Botsford, who died last week at the age of eighty-seven, was an editor with this magazine for almost forty years and a continuing presence around the place in the two decades after he stepped down. His long and famously happy marriage to the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm--it was the second for both--had its roots in their editor-writer attachment, begun when she was a young contributor of shopping columns, and maintained...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.