Bob’s wounded pride and obstinacy prevented Ellen from being given a full editorial role at the Voice, Bob deploying a her-or-me ultimatum that was eventually lifted after mutual friends and colleagues, tired of being tugged in the middle, impressed upon Bob that his gruff resolve made it appear that he still hadn’t gotten over the breakup despite the intervening years, which wasn’t very flattering to Carola, who was by then his wife. I had no great opinion to drop one way or the other on the scale of justice because I never quite “got” the Ellen Willis cult of genius, the whole Rosa Luxemburg mystique aureoled around her curly Ed Koren cartoonish head and goggled squint. Written as if her words represented the patter of rain, Willis’s pop music reports for The New Yorker had none of the toreador flash and headlong plunge of the best rock writing being done in the sixties and seventies; they lacked the authority she stamped into her political essays, as if she were doing a series of liner notes, keeping the grown-ups informed about what the kids were up to. Not that I liked her political writing any better. I liked it less. It ground forward like an earthmover along with the worst liabilities of left-wing pamphleteering, her Marxist-feminist-Reichian calls for erotic freedom and social liberation laid down with the iron clang of railroad spikes hammered to the heavy metronome of jargon. It was evident from the worship and emulation Willis inspired that she possessed a personal charisma that transcended the page, but that charisma and I never cloud-mingled, so all I had to go by were pieces that seemed weighed down by their pedagogical intent, bottom-heavy correctives to liberal orthodoxy, and radical cant that made the pages you were holding in your hands turn to lead. But I was in the minority when it came to Willis’s acuity and importance and would remain so, not that it mattered then or now. What was important then was this sense, this supposition, that sixties scenes-bursters such as Christgau, Willis, and Goldstein were destined to inherit or hijack in slow motion the intellectual-journalistic establishment of The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent and become the presiding grown-ups of this generational power bloc. They had the brains, the ambition, the range and grasp, and the lengthening track record of a countercultural commissariat set to inherit the big desks in the editorial offices and give culture its marching orders. Yet it didn’t happen, they never assumed command; their schemas never got off the drawing board. Ice formed on the ceiling, the elevators got stuck between floors, they were no match for Harvard—choose your own metaphor, but the upward push that seemed inevitable was somehow arrested and the books never completed that might have planted their flags on the surveying heights. That’s one of the advantages of sticking around in life long enough: you get to see how other people’s stories turn out, though it doesn’t do your own story any good, the future having laid its own special snow-covered wolf traps just for you.
Having done just about as much damage as I could do to the circulation department short of embezzlement, I was promoted to a writer-receptionist’s job on the fourth floor, a hybrid role almost as lottery-winning as landing a rent-controlled apartment. It provided the ideal setup for a pinball-machine brain embedded in a body content to be indoors, off the streets—wherever the action wasn’t. Three days a week I was assigned to man the reception desk for the fourth floor, where staff writers had their offices, some of them outfitted with cots for those all-night word-bashing deadline-looming marathons and, presumably, the occasional tryst or hangover nap. My job entailed sorting mail, answering the phones, clipping articles, doing some light filing, nothing requiring heavy mental lifting or seamless multitasking. The two days I wasn’t desk jockeying I could retreat to my own private Yaddo and attend to my own articles. Today writers would murder to have their own offices and the opportunity to interrupt one another’s work (one reason there will never again be Here at the “New Yorker”–like memoirs is that there is no more office lore to mine—writers are now relegated to their own bobbing life rafts, requiring guest IDs to enter the editorial mother ship), and here I was in my early twenties with a sunlit parlor of my own. I didn’t have a cot or napping sofa. More than once I stayed up all night to meet a deadline and slept curled up on the floor, stiff as a carp. But there was something romantic and borderline roughing it about staying up all night writing and crashing on the floor—this was one of the reasons one came to New York to become a writer, to impress yourself with your own determination. The writer with whom I shared receptionist duties had an even sweeter deal, or so it seemed to me. He only had to cover the desk the two days a week that I had off. Not being given an office of his own, he wasn’t obligated to occupy the premises for the other three days; he had liberty leave to do whatever he wanted—go to the movies, visit museums, do library research, sit on a bench and study humanity, or just stay home and make with the jeweled prose there. But I didn’t reckon with the passionate hold of the nesting instinct for those looking to consolidate their position from within, hoping to secure their niche inside the editorial command module. I didn’t understand that in New York, real estate trumps everything, that the territorial imperative didn’t care how small an amount of square feet was involved.
The co-receptionist’s name was David Tipmore. I wonder what became of him. His was an individual talent, even for a boxing academy like the Voice, where the rumble of rough promise kept the thunder going. Tall, blond, thin (after he close-cropped his hair, he was teased for looking like an Oscar statue), T. had a lavish way of expressing himself, especially when ladling out superlatives. “I love Blair,” he would verbally skywrite about Blair Sabol, the Village Voice fashion writer whose father was the head of NFL Films; he would say it in anticipation of her arrival on the fourth floor and repeat it again once the elevator had deposited her back on the ground floor for her reentry into society. I began to look forward to her visits; it was like having Princess Margaret drop by. David could make me laugh by the catholic enthusiasms he displayed and then would laugh at my laughter, as when he exclaimed, after reading one of Al Goldstein’s foulmouthed, turd-brained tirades in Screw magazine (where all the porn-star fornicators looked like topiaries with their hippie hair), “I love Screw magazine!” Sometimes he forgot to fasten the safety lock on his mouth, and his impromptu expressions of delight would go badly astray. Once Christgau punctured our airspace with his presence, looking uncommonly fluffy. “Bob,” David exclaimed in congratulatory surprise, “you washed your hair!” It was his transparent lack of malice that made this most backhanded of compliments hard to resent, and Bob accepted the comment with near-gracious chagrin, mentioning something about a new shampoo. The exclamation marks that punctuated Tipmore’s talk were astringently absent from his writing, which had some of the tactically efficient lack of affect, eyewitness testimony, and finely manicured irony that George W. S. Trow was making a house specialty at The New Yorker, to which Bret Easton Ellis would later add a chic coat of anomie. Tipmore’s best sentences had a white birch quality, lean, upright, singular. He did a review of Peggy Lee in performance at the Empire Room of the Waldorf that remains a gleaming artifact of sly dissection: “With a burst of white light Miss Lee appeared stage right in Stavropoulos chiffon, acknowledged the audience reception, and segued directly into ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Love You Like I Do).’ She was difficult to see because intense lighting gels obscured her face in an opaque sheen. She was difficult to hear because the orchestra, which Miss Lee conducted periodically during the show, played with Sousa-march volume. Scanning the orchestra, I saw three violins, French horn, clarinet, saxophone, synthesizer, electric guitar, an intimidating percussion section, and, in the far corner, a black back-up trio, whose names Miss Lee did not seem to remember.”
He and I were the supporting players on the floor, the star roster consisting of staff writers such as Clark Whelton, whose cover story about staying overnight in Central Park, an assignment that in those crime-ridden days was worthy of combat pay, was ridiculed by an up-and-comer named Jamaica Kincaid; Lucian K. Truscott IV, the combative gr
andson of a decorated general who had served under Patton (“Lucian was probably one of the few urban sailors who could spot a corpse floating in the river … and then write about it for the Village Voice” [McAuliffe]); and Ron Rosenbaum, whose orange-red beard burned with biblical fervor and Blakean prophecy. “Ron’s the real genius of the Voice,” a writer named Robin Reisig whispered just loud enough for posterity to hear. (Reisig was given to gnawing on a pencil in a state of spellbound distraction, emerging from inner transit to ask, “Did somebody just say something?”) Rosenbaum’s genius aura, unlike Ellen Willis’s, did have a dynamic element, a roaming shadow existence. Investigating far-out terrain and the machinations of secret societies closed off to all but the chosen, he seemed to haunt the night like an Edgar Allan Poe story, alternating between his apartment and his office at the Voice, a restless nocturnal commuter. The columnist Nat Hentoff, whose beard was as wise and Talmudic as Rosenbaum’s was insurrectionist, tore articles out of the Times as he walked the Village and tucked them into his pockets; by the time he arrived at the office, he had so many columns of newspaper clippings spilling out of his pockets that he seemed to be going into leaf. His wife, Margot, a contributor to the New York Review of Books, had a sharpshooter mouth that could knock a tin can off your head from across the room. Other contributors were more raconteurish, their bottoms finding a home on many a bar stool, their sentences leaving footprints across the sawdust floor. As, for instance, Joe Flaherty, who wrote a ruefully funny memoir called Managing Mailer about his misadventures as Mailer’s campaign manager for his mayoralty run in New York City (Mailer’s running mate was Jimmy Breslin); their campaign went afoul when the candidate laced into his loyal supporters at a rally for being “spoiled pigs.” And Joel Oppenheimer, who personified the poet as billy goat and whose lowercase columns were devoted to the Mets, losing his teeth, and the valuable protein in semen. But a weekly paper like the Voice was more than the clashing palette of its high-profile personalities. It was ribbed with writers who went about their work with self-effacing dedication to their beat, such as the theater reviewers Michael Smith, Julius Novick, and Michael Feingold. The dance critic Deborah Jowitt had the fine-boned fortitude of a frontier settler with eyes forever fixed on future horizons; her merciful consideration of even the most flailing effort and her descriptive set pieces suitable for framing set her apart from the tomahawk throwers. The classical music critic Leighton Kerner, with his stooped posture and ever-present briefcase, resembled a sad pachyderm covering Willy Loman’s old rounds. Andrew Sarris, the chief movie critic and godfather of the auteurist school of film criticism, had the dark circles under his eyes of an honorary member of the mole people, the wag of his head and his staccato laughter the marks of a man who was pacing inside his head.
Upstairs, on the fifth floor, there was enough snapping-turtle turmoil to keep The Caine Mutiny afloat. Office renovation removed private sanctuaries for a more open cubicle layout that allowed greater visibility for frank exchanges of differing opinions that could be overheard the length of the floor, depending on wind conditions. Monarch of his midtown principality, Felker never conned himself that he would be welcomed and embraced as an emancipator below Fourteenth Street, but he couldn’t have anticipated how much resistance he would draw as the Voice’s new stepfather. “Why am I being thwarted?” he would bellow. Accustomed to barking orders, he didn’t expect to hear so much barking back, often from the very editors he had hired to execute his game plan. Sometimes the back talk was accompanied by rude slapstick, as when Richard Goldstein poked Clay in the panda stomach. Felker would also find himself at the receiving end of Ron Rosenbaum’s dramatic farewell when Rosenbaum crumpled up his paycheck and flung it with bite-me gusto at Felker, who reportedly asked in bafflement after Rosenbaum steamed off, “Who was that?” Felker ran into headwinds trying to install punctuation, proper capitalization, and paragraph breaks into Jill Johnston’s cataract of free association, and his top lieutenant, Judith Daniels, would face the wrath of a writer scorned when Truscott, just back from the Middle East on a reporting mission, gave a command performance of outrage and invective comparable to Jack Nicholson’s monologue in Carnal Knowledge. Standing over Daniels’s desk, Truscott railed, “While I was risking my fucking life over in the Middle East, you had the fucking nerve to not run the fucking pieces that I was fucking over there to do”—or words to that fucking effect. (In McAuliffe’s book, he has an exchange where Daniels, over drinks, explained to Lucian that his pieces had just sort of “evaporated,” to which Truscott exploded: “Evaporated? … What do you think my typewriter prints—little teacups full of water?”) Unlike for others who left the Voice during the transitional trauma, it panned out for Truscott. He went on to write a best-selling novel about West Point called Dress Gray, adapted into a made-for-TV miniseries scripted by Gore Vidal. Years later, ringing me up for reasons obscure, Lucian asked me if I knew how long fame lasted for a best-selling author. Unfamiliar with the experience, I said no. Four years, he said. The first year, you’re in the exalted thick of it. The second year, you’re still bobbing in the success, carried with the current. Third year, the gold plating has chipped away, and people are asking you if you’re working on anything new. Fourth year, they’re no longer asking, and you might as well drape yourself over a coat hanger in the closet and get accustomed to the dark. Truscott sounded almost resentful, despite having hit the jackpot that so many writers daydreamed about in those days when a fiction best seller didn’t require the bestowing tap of Oprah’s sparkly wand. A lesson it would take me a while to learn was that nothing makes writers happy for very long, there are always ravens pecking on the roof.
The Dan Wolf cone of silence over his run-silent-run-deep decision making gave way to a more democratic airing of what was in the works at the regular editorial meetings on the fifth floor. The more rambunctious ones sometimes yielded the raw disclosures of an encounter session. At one meeting a senior editor casually shared that although his penis might be on the snubby side, what he lacked in size he more than made up for with dedicated effort. (“It takes a liberal to brag about how small his dick is,” one of the staffers wisecracked, he being more old-school in such matters.) The point-blank pillow talk of popular feminist fiction in the seventies—best sellers such as Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends, with its forest of desultory blow jobs, Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, and, most famously, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which introduced the “zipless fuck” into the lexicon and established the runway for Carrie Bradshaw to parade her stilettos in Sex and the City—empowered frisky mouths. My then editor, my latest piece lying before her ready to undergo the blue pencil marks of what Terry Southern immortally called “tightening and brightening,” once apologized for not yet having the opportunity to give my copy a proper going-over. She was just feeling too worn-out that morning, she said. She didn’t look worn-out to me; if anything, her Annie Hall cheekbones shone even brighter, a beacon to guide us. Perhaps because she was feeling worn-out in a good way. “I didn’t get much rest the last couple days,” she explained. “I spent the weekend with—well, let’s just say I was in the hands of a master.” The picture theater of my imagination immediately opened with multiple screens, all of them showing X-rated material. Whatever insufficient comment I was about to cough up was interrupted by one of the paper’s feminists leaning over the cubicle and saying, “So tell me, what happened with the guy you left with?” “Later,” my editor promised in a stage whisper of smoky texture while I sat there feeling sexually hangdog from the knowledge that my editor, on whom I had a crush (we all did, those cheekbones being apples of the gods and her hair so glowy), had spent the weekend being royally serviced by some renowned instrumentalist with magic fingers while I was hunched over the stupid typewriter, laboring to get my opening graf to “breathe.” It was so unfair, especially since I was being deprived of the choice details that give erotic envy that extra dash of spice.
Wired under the dashboa
rd of the chatty byplay was a serious work ethic, a professional rigor. Writers today are assigned and edited almost exclusively over the phone and computer screen, physically cut off in their own monadic domains. That’s why we’re all so lonely. But at the Voice, as at The New Yorker and the Boston Phoenix and so many other newspapers and magazines then, editing was a face-to-face procedure, a surgical operation where each paragraph was gone over in pencil, each phrase subject to query, word reps circled and remedied, your best passages complimented, your muddier passages met with a concerned moue as the two of you tried to untangle the seaweed, retrieve a sunken thought from the morass. (In those primitive, pre-word-processing times, Richard Goldstein would sometimes take scissors and paste together the paragraphs of a writer’s piece, reconfiguring them in a different progression as if cutting a film, only to misplace a graf on his messy desk, necessitating a scavenger hunt.) The weekly sit-downs fostered an apprenticeship attitude that no true writer ever outgrows, if he or she is smart, because there’s always more to learn, habits to break, imprecisions to sharpen, excisions that bring out the muscle of a sentence sausaged in flab.
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