George W. S. Trow

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George William Swift Trow Jr. (September 28, 1943 – November 24, 2006) was an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and media critic. He worked for The New Yorker for almost 30 years, and wrote numerous essays and several books. He is best known for his long essay on television and its effect on American culture, "Within the Context of No Context", first published in The New Yorker on November 17, 1980, and later released as a book. This was one of only four times that The New Yorker has given an entire issue to one piece of writing.

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[edit] Biography

Trow was born in an upper middle-class family in Greenwich, Connecticut. His father was a newspaperman and expected Trow to carry on the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt: that is, to be responsible for maintaining the civic virtues in American culture. He took on that responsibility throughout his career, rebelling against it late in life. (His 1999 book, My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998, is his declaration of independence from this obligation.) Trow studied at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated from Harvard University in 1965. There, he was president of the Harvard Lampoon. He later served as an editor for its offshoot, the National Lampoon, working with young humorists like Michael O'Donoghue. He served on active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard.[1] In 1966, Trow took a position at The New Yorker, writing articles for the magazine, especially in the section "The Talk of the Town," and contributing short fiction. He worked under editors William Shawn (1951-1987) and Robert Gottlieb (1987-1992), whom he saw as mentors.

In 1994, when new editor Tina Brown invited Roseanne Barr to oversee a special issue on women, Trow quit the magazine in protest. He abandoned the house he was building in Germantown, New York, and traveled around North America, living in Texas, Alaska, and Newfoundland. Several years before his death, he moved to Naples, Italy. He died there in 2006, officially of natural causes.

Trow's identity was complex. In My Pilgrim's Progress, the half-Irish, half-WASP Trow writes, "this book is the story of an Irish soul (mine by right) struggling with a great deal of Angle-Saxon cultural information (also mine by right...)" Trow was a homosexual attracted to working-class men. Trow was also socially ambitious: throughout his life, he was "striving to be part of the '10 percent of people at Harvard who wear tuxedos to their own little events in their own little buildings and you can see them out on their balconies with their tuxedos and their often very beautiful girls who are also similarly there from the Vanderbilts and the Astors.'"[2]

[edit] Writings

Throughout his career, Trow analyzed mainstream American cultural institutions to understand how the culture had changed from the newspaper-reading, eastern Establishment-dominated world of his childhood in the 1940s and early '50s, to the ahistorical, tabloid sensibility born in the Jazz Age and spread by television.

Trow's reputation rests on his long nonfiction. These works have received mostly positive reviews. Highly literate readers, as well as reviewers in newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have been thrilled by Trow's brilliant and prophetic insights; wide-ranging references to serious and pop culture; and aphoristic, sometimes post-modern literary style. But the appeal and value of Trow's work can be difficult to communicate, because the style "in its very essence resists summary. Summary, of course, flees from detail, whereas for Trow the details are the notes without which there is no song.” [3] Other critics have found these works impenetrable and elitist; some argue that Trow's nostalgia for the pre-television era was misplaced, because the subsequent civil rights movements had made American culture more democratic.[4]

Trow's only novel, The City in the Mist, (1984) did not impress critics. They were put off by its usually minimalist style, and its lack of plot, narrative momentum or involving characters. The book, which moves trom the mid-19th century to the present, tracks the energy in three intertwined families, from the masculine vitality of a thuggish Irish immigrant to the weak flame of his elderly bachelor grandson, who lives on his income in two rooms in New York City, and spends his time socializing and caring for his clothes. The central concerns of the novel, the decline of masculine energy and the replacement of masculine social authority by feminine social authority, are later addressed explicitly in My Pilgrim's Progress.

Within the Context of No Context, which was edited by New Yorker editor William Shawn, was published in book form in 1981 accompanied by Trow's profile of music mogul Ahmet Ertegün. In 1997, "No Context" was reprinted with a new introductory essay, Collapsing Dominant.

In "No Context," Trow lamented the destruction by television of American public culture and sense of history. "Middle-distance" institutions that had long given Americans' lives real contexts (such as fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, and women's clubs), had been abandoned when people stayed home to watch television. Television shows were false contexts designed to be just attractive enough to keep people watching. Without the middle-distance institutions, what remained as real options for people to live in were "the grid of two hundred million" (the U.S. population at the time) and "the grid of intimacy" (the immediate family). Only celebrities, who had a real life in both grids, were now perceived to be complete. People became lonely and, in order to feel complete, wanted to be on television in order to become celebrities themselves.[5]

Because television sells products by pleasing demographically defined groups, viewers learned to think of themselves demographically. In consequence, demography had replaced history as the context for understanding the world. People understood themselves as members of lateral demographic groups rather than as part of a linear flow of people from the past into the future. Things were now valued not on an absolute scale, but by discovering if one was in tune with one's group. Trow illustrates this point with a reference to Family Feud, where a contestant was asked to guess "what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman. Guess what they guessed. Guess what they guessed the average is."[6]

“No Context” ends with a narrative memoir of Trow’s experiences working two summers as a guide at the 1964 New York World's Fair. His take on the Fair: "At the Fair, one could see the world of television impersonating the world of history.”[7]

"No Context" remains a touchstone for many intellectuals, and is taught in university media studies classes. In an obituary for Trow, the novelist and screenwriter Michael Tolkin is quoted as saying that "No Context" is no longer fashionable because "It's not a polemic for change. It's just a cold description of where things are going. There aren't many books that are unafraid to be that negative."[8]

In his essay The Harvard Black Rock Forest, Trow criticizes another mainstream American institution, Harvard University (which he had attended). The Black Rock Forest, 50 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River, had been donated to Harvard as a nature preserve for scientific studies. Trow writes about the Harvard administration's indifference to the property except as a profit opportunity, and its eventual rescue and dedication to educational nature studies.

A memoir and a sort of prequel to "No Context," My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 is focused on the cultural world of the Fifties. It is written in a conversational style, sometimes transcribed from audiotapes. Trow "swirls" between pop and mainstream cultural icons, such as Doris Day, Alfred Hitchcock, Elvis Presley, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The book cover has a photograph of President Eisenhower, whom Trow admired as "the guy of guys". A major concern of the book is the models of masculine authority that American culture presents to boys. For Trow's Boomer generation, the models of masculine authority presented to them by mass culture were so unattainable or irrelevant that television (ironic attitude to self) was the only possible option.

Reviewers of Progress have generally found it insightful and worth reading, although a lesser literary achievement than "No Context." Some reviewers have been put off by what they see as haughtiness or elitism in Trow's repeated statement of authority, "You'll have to trust me on that one."[9]

According to a close friend, Trow was "extremely upset" by the critical reception of Progress.[8] After that, he only published one known article, a critique of television news anchor Dan Rather.[10]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hertzberg, Hendrik. "The Talk of the Town: Postscript: Swift" The New Yorker December 11, 2006 (82:41), p. 42, 44
  2. ^ Levy, Ariel. "The Last Gentleman", New York Magazine, March 26, 2007, quoting close friend Jacob Brackman.
  3. ^ Birkerts, Sven. “After the Fall”, The Atlantic January 21, 1999.
  4. ^ "The failure of Trow's essay [Within the Context of No Context] is its failure to note the following: The old boys club had to be blown up. It had to be. And if it had to be, then the resulting world, a world of more equalized life chances and stiffer competition, would of course result in less continuity, more yuppie striving, and a more vulgarized pop culture." Metcalf, Stephen. Within the Context of WASP Context: Assessing the legacy of George W. S. Trow, Slate, December 8, 2006
  5. ^ Thus, Trow foresaw the rise of reality shows on television because of the viewers' experiences, not because these shows are cheaper to produce than scripted shows. The reality show form had actually already been pioneered, with the 1973 PBS television series An American Family.
  6. ^ Trow, George W. S. Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), p. 88
  7. ^ Context, p. 116.
  8. ^ a b Bernhard, Brendan. "A Death In Naples: Appreciation" New York Sun, March 6, 2007.
  9. ^ For example, Marzorati, Gerald. "Still No Context," New York Times Magazine, February 14, 1999.
  10. ^ Is Dan Mad? The Mind of an Anchorman (c. 1998)
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