The Press: Fadiman Quits

Said New Yorker Editor Harold Ross: “He came to me and said he was 40 years old and wanted to do something else.” Added the ‘New Yorker’s bookeditor: “I thought it was time to move over and give someone else a chance to sit in that seat.” Thus amicably last week the New Yorker and pudgy, eruditeClifton (“Kip”) Fadiman parted company. In ten years Fadiman had become thesmartest, probably the best-known, and at times one of the most influential book reviewers in the U.S. Now, said he: “I’m through with reviewing.” The resignationis effective at year’s end, unless a replacement is found sooner.

Moneyed Boy. Isidore Fadiman’s boy Clifton earned his first money when he was barely old enough to run errands in his native New York City. Because his druggist-father was poor, Clifton Fadiman paid his way through high school by working in an insurance office and selling rare books. At Columbia University he tutored campus numskulls, was a waiter, sold magazine subscriptions. On the side he was a night clerk in a branch post office. Summers he lectured on French Symbolist poets and once translated Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. He aver aged $1,000 a year and earned, in addition, a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Moneyed Man. After college Fadiman taught high-school English (1925-27), then became a manuscript reader for Simon & Schuster, book publishers. Soon he was editor-in-chief. In 1933, still hanging on to an S & S editorial job, he joined the New Yorker. Naturally a fast reader, he became even faster after zipping through Walter B. Pitkin’s The Art of Rapid Reading. By wolfing his fact and fiction, he had time left for a score or more of profitable extracurricular ventures.

In 1938 he became the master of ceremonies of radio’s Information Please, for which he reportedly gets $1,500 a week. He lectured widely, for fat fees. He edited I Believe (1939) and Reading I’ve Liked (1941). He bought stock in a wine company. With his two brothers, Edwin and William, he operates a flourishing radio talent agency, Fadiman Associates, Ltd. He is on the editorial committee of The Readers Club, a book-of-the-monthly sort of organization that deals in $1.25 classics. Estimates of his income go as high as $100,000 a year, beside which his New Yorker salary was peanuts.

Information Phaser John Kieran once said of Fadiman: “He is able to deliver in at least four languages. But be careful tc specify when ordering whether you want English, French, German or medieval Latin. Delivery terms are C.O.D.” Fadiman has made no bones about his ambition to make a lot of money. Says he: “I’m a business man, not an esthete.”