I was convinced that Dave Petzal was wrong when he declared categorically that nothing favorable to hunting had ever come out of the New Yorker.
I was cautious because, you know, DAVID IS NEVER WRONG. When I was writing Good Guns, I made a less than reverent remark about John Moses Browning. A note came back in the next post (it was before email) saying simply “Consider in the bowels of Christ that thou mayst be wrong!” It was a quote from Cromwell. Although it showed a certain audacity to quote Cromwell to a half Irish writer, he was right.
But something kept nagging me. I was walking past my bookcase when my eyes fell on my first edition copy of Vance Bourjai5tgfrly’s 1968 book on bird shooting, The Unnatural Enemy. I was doing something else so threw it to Libby and said “See if it has a New Yorker reference!” It did indeed. On the page after the title page it said “The Goose Pits, and my title chapter, The Unnatural Enemy, appeared originally in The New Yorker.”
From my Sportsman’s Library: “It is important to know that The Unnatural Enemy first came out in 1963, because although its essence is timeless, it might not exist in the form that it does were it not for a fortuitous convergence of disparate forces. Which is to say: It is a book about bird hunting, a large part of which appeared in the New Yorker, which is illustrated by the impeccably urban David Levine and haunted by Hemingway’s brand-new ghost, and the publishers seem to think the reader will find all this perfectly normal.”