Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker:
The Invisible Art of Editing
By Ved Mehta
Overlook Press, $32.50
ISBN 0879518766

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Here but Not Here:
My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker
By Lillian Ross
Random House, $25
ISBN 0375501193

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It is a startling coincidence to have, in one season, the appearance of not one but two memoirs about William Shawn, the former editor of the New Yorker -- Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing and Lillian Ross's Here but Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker. But perhaps more interesting is that, while each is an elegy for Shawn, the two books couldn't be more different.

The differences make Mehta's and Ross's memoirs complementary; indeed, alone, each is only a partial picture of Shawn, the New Yorker's editor-in-chief for more than three decades. In his book, Mehta, a staff writer at the magazine from 1961-1994, depicts the platonic but intense affection between a writer and his editor. In her book, Ms. Ross, also a longtime New Yorker staff writer, delivers without apology the confessional tale of her over 40-year-long affair with the married Shawn.

Mehta's memoir -- which is as gorgeously written as his magazine pieces and his previous 20 books (Remembering is the eighth in an autobiographical series entitled Continents of Exile) -- is a lament not only for Shawn but for a bygone era of chivalrous good intentions and courtly behavior in the literary world, an era of editorial paternalism and excellent manners. Shawn's New Yorker -- which lasted from 1952-1987 -- was less a business than a family, peopled by the likes of J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Renata Adler, A.J. Liebling, St. Clair McKelway, and Maeve Brennan, writers to whom Shawn demonstrated fatherly allegiance. Not only did Shawn respond like a "Talmudic scholar," to his writers' work, says Mehta, he frequently ministered to their more personal needs -- including, in some cases, forgiving them messy debts and hospitalizing them when mental illness or alcoholism overtook them.

In Here but Not Here, Ms. Ross covers similar historic ground, but laments more directly the loss of Shawn as a person. Ross's purpose is to make the reader see the real Shawn -- hopelessly in love, plagued by phobias, blocked in his own writing, and overwhelmed by his own invisibility as an editor and a human being. "Responsible as he was, toward the magazine and the lives of all the creative people involved with it," Ross writes, Shawn "could do nothing to help himself."

In late 20th-century America, when the line between the public and the private has become utterly blurred, Mehta's is the decidedly public memoir of Shawn and Ross's the utterly personal. Ross's book complicates and completes Mehta's reverent portraiture, but raises the question: How is one to reconcile the two William Shawns -- Mehta's Algonquin-frequenting, dignified father figure and Ross's obsessive lover? In the end, these memoirs are twin halves not only of Shawn, but of an era in American culture (the early to mid 1960s), a time of public good taste and, behind the scenes, some very private secrets.

Julie Checkoway is the author of Little Sister: Searching for the Shadow World of Chinese Women and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.