VANITY FAIR

JANUARY 1984

Dear Reader,

In thinking of the new year (improbably 1984), I have indulged in an old passion, riffling through early Vanity Fairs. And in the January 1917 issue I came upon a New Year's Day essay by P. Brooke-Haven (P. G. Wodehouse's nom de guerre) in which Jeeves's creator assures, "New Year would not be New Year without its resolutions...Well, I believe in resolution more than resolutions. And words being not only a vocation but an avocation, I am asking that we be resolute in not battering them. Why "orchestrate" this, "choreograph" that, find "resonance" in any slurpy shadow, declare so much to be "relevant" that nothing is relevant at all? Chewing up language. The decline and fall of conversation. That's what Tracy Yxing's "Citizen's Arrest" in this issue is all about.

It is, we firmly believe, a function of a responsible magazine to war against the debasement of language—by which we do not mean inventive language, language as it is shaped (not "crafted") to give us thoughts, emotions, intuitions, facts. Peter Schjeldahl's essay on Willem de Kooning; Eudora Welty's "Learning to See"—a life dedicated to language; the specialized vocabulary made accessible in "Driving the Soft Machine." How distant their understanding, their usage is from a White House description of a recent Caribbean incident: "predawn vertical insertion." What could it mean? Invasion? A sexual act? Consider, when you turn this page, Murray Kempton's "The State of the Nation." He is lighting a candle and cursing the darkness in this New Year of 1984.

Editor in Chief