 Who was said to have been blinded by meningitis as a child in the passage?
Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death.
 Mehta
 Mehta  Kahn  Myshkin  Brown