 Who was said to have been blinded by meningitis as a child in the passage?
At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. 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. "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. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight.
 Mehta
 Mehta  Kahn  Myshkin  Brown