Old Friends Help New York Review Celebrate 50 Years

The eager crowd milling in the lobby of Town Hall on Tuesday night looked ready for the opening of an A-list movie. For one thing, Daniel Craig was present. “James Bond is standing over there,” a man said. A stranger next to him, a woman in a large furry hat, peered over. “Is he really How exciting!”

The occasion was brainier, if less glamorous, than a 007 premiere: the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books, the literary institution that began during a citywide newspaper strike in 1963. Robert Silvers, the publication’s 83-year-old editor and co-founder, emceed a night of readings and reflections by some of his longtime and more recent contributors.

Though charming and literate, a less visually dynamic public event is hard to imagine. Still, ticket holders were kept waiting outside for about 30 minutes after the scheduled start time while a handful of high-owered cameras were set up inside the auditorium. (Martin Scorsese and a crew have been filming the journal’s celebrations this week to help it commemorate the anniversary.)

Even knowing that Joan Didion was among the readers scheduled to appear, the crowd still let out a few audible gasps when Mr. Silvers announced that the writer would be the first to take the stage. Ms. Didion did so daintily, the rock-star essayist now visibly a lioness in winter at the age of 78. She sat at a table and read, with the aid of a magnifying glass, part of “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” her 1991 essay for The Review about the Central Park Five, the teenagers wrongly convic! ted of beating and raping a jogger.

While The Review played to its fans inside Town Hall, there was criticism of it in other circles. Joseph Epstein wrote on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal that he had canceled his subscription to The Review last year after receiving it since its inception. “I felt no need to read any of its political articles, which came to constitute more and more of the journal, and whose conclusions held no surprises,” Mr. Epstein wrote. He bemoaned that it was always the case that The Review’s great literary critics (Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) existed alongside offerings like “a callow journalist named Andrew Kopkind [reminding] Martin Luther King Jr. that ‘morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun.’ ”

The politics expressed at Tuesday night’s event were indeed unsurprising, like Daniel Mendelsohn’s skeptical analysi of movies that portray 9/11 and the war on terror and Mark Danner reading dispatches from the presidential campaign trail â€" hopeful ones from 2008 about candidate Barack Obama; deflated ones about the president from 2012.

But contributors also struck deeply personal notes. Michael Chabon described working on his first novel while precariously perched over an ancient computer in a crawl space of his parents’ home in Oakland, Calif.

Darryl Pinckney offered the night’s most stirring moments, speaking lyrically about his relationship to the work of James Baldwin, from his introduction to it as a child to his criticism of Mr. Baldwin’s novel “Just Above My Head” for The Review in 1979. “I’m embarrassed by the knowingness of that review,” Mr. Pinckney said Tuesday.

Mr. Baldwin’s landmark essay collection “The Fire Next Time” was reviewed by F. W. Dupee on the front cover of th! e magazin! e’s first issue in 1963. A facsimile of that inaugural edition was given to attendees on Tuesday night. Its list of contributors included W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy. If The Review’s writers have since become less towering figures in the culture at large, they were treated as titans by Tuesday’s crowd.

At the end of the night, the speakers took the stage and occupied a line of chairs that had sat oddly empty next to Mr. Silvers throughout the readings. The room was opened up to questions, and after one audience member shouted a friendly query about the next 50 years and Mr. Silvers gave a brief response, there was a deep silence. Mr. Silvers peered out, and with no takers, judged that the crowd was “satiated.” It was; but intimidated was another word that may have fit.