BOOKS: NEW YORK, NEW YORKER WRITERS LOOK AT HEYDAYS, GRAY DAYS OF MAGAZINE.

Byline: Tom Nolan Special to the Daily News

``About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made''

by Ben Yagoda 

(400 pages, Scribner; $30)

``Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker''

by Renata Adler

(256 pages, Simon & Schuster; $25)

The New Yorker - arguably the most celebrated and influential magazine in American history - celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, an occasion marked by the publication of two books that examine, in whole or in part, the history of that legendary journal.

Hugely different in tone and scope - Ben Yagoda's measured history (``About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made'') comprehensively covers the bulk of the famous Manhattan weekly's three-quarters of a century, while Renata Adler's slimmer chronicle (``Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker,'' part essay, part memoir) skims her own near-three decades as a New Yorker contributor - these divergent works arrive at the same conclusion:

Although a magazine bearing the New Yorker's name is still printed each week, the periodical that sustained and in a way defined entire generations of readers (so that a New Yorker subscription, Yagoda notes, was often passed from parent to child, ``like a religious denomination or a set of sterling silver'' - the real New Yorker - is no more.

It's ``a thing of the rapidly receding past,'' judges Yagoda. More bluntly from Adler: ``The New Yorker is dead.''

But if the once-revered publication's best years are behind it, its true spirit survives in the work of writers raised on its ethos - including Yagoda and Adler, whose books seem to exemplify varying traditions of (in Adler's words) that ``beloved, complicated institution'' that was the New Yorker.

If Adler's quirkily ironic account recalls the sort of indulgent and intermittently brilliant piece often found in the New Yorker during the 1970s (usually bearing the byline of Renata Adler), Yagoda's graceful and engrossing narrative resembles one of those multipart New Yorker profiles of the 1940s or '50s: working carefully within close limits toward cumulatively powerful effects, convincing, definitive.

Yagoda (author of a splendid biography of Will Rogers) does a superb and thorough job of telling the New Yorker's life story from its inception and first golden age under the gruffly inspired Harold Ross, through the more complex era of Ross' successor William Shawn. (An epilogue sketches the years after Shawn's 1987 dismissal; the author sees his main story as ``a two-act drama'' - and ``when Shawn made his exit, the curtain came down.'')

There are vignettes of the great pre-World War II staff (James Thurber, E.B. White), remembrances of the postwar non-fiction that shaped sensibilities and carried moral weight (John Hersey's ``Hiroshima,'' James Baldwin's notes for ``The Fire Next Time,'' Whitney Balliett's great jazz pieces, Hannah Arendt's ``Eichmann in Jerusalem,'' Rachel Carson's ``Silent Spring''), celebrations of fiction writers who illuminated whole decades (Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie).

Sprinkled throughout are analyses of everything from New York City's evolving demographics to what makes a successful cartoon - but always in the context and service of an overarching narrative, always leading the reader unobtrusively from one theme to the next.

It's a method that eschews fireworks and melodrama (or even drama), but it's not uncritical. Yagoda chides the magazine's weaker fiction of the 1950s and '60s for its ``gentility bordering into blandness, with not infrequent excursions into outright dullness.'' He further observes, ``It is difficult if not impossible to determine whether the magazine was so successful in the '50s because or in spite of its overall tepidness.''

Under Shawn's guidance, the New Yorker grew more interesting in the 1960s and '70s. It also became an increasingly odd organization, whose peculiarities reflected or stemmed from the boss's idiosyncratic personality and managerial style. A ``deceptively passive'' and ``unusually secretive'' man, Shawn (in the words of one underling) ``ran the magazine the way Algerian terrorist cells were organized in the battle of Algiers - no one knew who anybody else was or what anybody else was doing.''

A greatly gifted editor (``a poet with a pencil,'' says Yagoda) who brought out the best in many writers, Shawn also had great flaws. Unwilling or unable to say anything critical, he might say nothing. Pieces might not be rejected; they could simply not be mentioned, for months or years. Every new story submitted, writes Adler, ``put Mister Shawn in the predicament of having to decide whether to publish it. If he rejected it, there had to be one kind of painful conversation. If he accepted it, he was put under the pressure of publishing it.''

Out of this peculiar tension grew what Adler calls: ``The ethic of silence ... There began to be feeling that it was vulgar, perhaps morally wrong to write.''

This and many other things in time created what Yagoda terms an ``essential dysfunctionality'' at the New Yorker: ``It was simply a creepy place.'' Eventually Shawn was forced out by new management, an episode Yagoda deals with concisely but which Adler relives at length and in pained detail.

Adler also dissects the post-Shawn New Yorker, often to devastating effect. Greatly dissimilar in objective and achievement, these books are somehow complementary; and each is well worth reading: ``About Town'' as a sensitive and objective account of an inimitable cultural entity; and ``Gone'' for the passion, recollected in relative tranquility, of a participant who sorely misses the squandered loss of something uniquely good.

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