I also intuitively understood that these writers’ jobs seemed both ideal and also thankless—living from deadline to deadline, pulling all-nighters, perpetually cramming like grad students. And the stakes were just so awfully high: one error in reporting and that would be it for them.
But the thing you had to say about them was that they were their own men (and yes, they were men, all of them). They were creating something that was theirs alone in the world. This already seemed to be the most important thing.
From these guys, and others, I would also learn that writers are sensitive instruments.
I was responsible for writing the table of contents page, an unenviable task because everyone hates writing the TOC. I ended up doing it for years. This meant I had to read the galleys for every piece in the magazine, often wondering as I did if I was the only person there who actually read the issue cover to cover. GQ was, like every general-interest magazine, a high-low amalgam, which in this case meant, approximately, literary journalism/political reporting/essays/criticism/occasional literary fiction + men’s fashion + service and celebrity pieces + boobs (– nipples).
As has been pointed out at length, there was some tremendous writing in the magazine, but there was also plenty of not-great stuff. The most egregiously written pieces in the magazine were always the celebrity profiles; the worst of these profiles inevitably had actresses and models as their subjects—or, God forbid, aspiring actresses and models. My time at GQ coincided with the advent of the so-called lad magazine; when Maxim was birthed in the United Kingdom in 1995, you could see GQ’s treatment of women get lewder and stupider right before your eyes. The then raunchy Sharon Stone cover (cover line: “Sharon Stone Undressed”; seems tame now, I know) was a turning point of some sort.
MAN: high culture.
WOMAN: low culture.
(MAN: high power; WOMAN: low power.)
“Mass media,” writes bell hooks, “do the work of continually indoctrinating boys and men, teaching them the rules of patriarchal thinking and practice.” I would note all the policing of masculinity in the magazine—a “man” does this, but a “man” does not do that; a “man” is this, but he is not that. Why was “being a man” so important? It was about power, that was why.
Regardless, I saw writing the TOC as my opportunity to slither my way into the magazine. My predecessor was a true virtuosa of the TOC, and on a shelf above my desk I kept a black binder filled with photocopies of her old pages. In Telling Stories, Joan Didion says that writing editorial captions for Vogue in the fifties, which she likened to training for the Rockettes, taught her that “less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.” I would study these old TOC pages from GQ issues past and try to absorb the style and voice. Their concision, when really analyzed, was quite artful. Here was a new concept, following the lead of Didion (following, indeed, Tacitus): don’t use three words when one word will serve.
But do I continue, lo these many years later, to follow that particular lesson? Not exactly. My heart has always been with those wild old Ciceronians—the spiraling subordinate-clause-upon-subordinate-clause approach—rather than with any no-fun, tightfisted Tacitus. Which is to say that my TOC entries could run the length of a paragraph and were always appallingly pun-heavy.
After a couple of months at GQ, the literary editor asked me if I wanted to choose a book and attempt a short capsule review of it. Yes, I certainly did want to. My selection was The Quantity Theory of Insanity, by Will Self. Soon thereafter, I was concocting little reviews every month. This was a very big deal for me.
There isn’t a lot of room in a capsule book review to do much else other than summarize the book, which, if the book is any good, can’t be done anyway. (Was it Edward Albee who said that if a play could be described in three lines, that play should be exactly three lines long?) The sad thing: I never really improved at the format. I certainly wish I’d known then what I know now: the reviewer’s job is to evaluate the book on its own terms and to determine how well the book succeeds—or doesn’t, as the case may be—within those terms. I suppose that I had believed that my job was to imperially confer, based on little else than my sensibility and idiosyncratic preferences, based more on emotion than on rationality, a Caesar’s thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Conveying subtleties and fine distinctions is not easily done (or encouraged) in such a structure, and it didn’t take too long to figure out that the stronger and louder your voice in these reviews, the more positive reinforcement you’d receive. Let me just say that that was one happy day, when an editor at the magazine appreciatively remarked, noting my breezy savagings of various recent novels, that I was getting to be quite the trash artist. He actually said that: “trash artist.” I didn’t understand that I was hiding behind a pose, a mask; that I was disguising myself and feigning a lot more confidence and knowledge than I had, pretending as if I had emerged into being fully formed like the mythical Spartoi, who, from dragon teeth sown into the ground, spring up whole—and victorious. All I was doing was judging and declaring victory.
Being a reviewer (Gore Vidal enjoyed reminding everyone of the distinction between a reviewer and a critic) is easy work, especially for a young person—you are always standing safely at a remove; nothing is risked, nothing is bloodied. Writing reviews can become your first little frisson of power, and if you’re not rigorous with yourself (you won’t be), your aesthetic judgments about a book can become moral judgments: this bad person—“bad” because he has such a minute understanding of the human experience—wrote this bad book. I also didn’t understand that while I had been given a modest platform, I had no innate authority.
And whatever I believed I was doing with these book reviews, it had nothing to do with cultivating appreciation.
Back in those pre-email days, when you’d see the author’s own crazy handwriting on the heartrending self-addressed stamped envelopes, you were always so acutely aware that a real human being was attached to each submission. For better or worse, I’ve given a lot of thought throughout the years to what Sid Luft said about Judy Garland’s response to having her TV show in the sixties canceled: it was like canceling a person. Well, nice work, I’d think with every rejection letter I’d send, I’ve just ruined this guy’s day. Sometimes, depending on the kind of mood I was in, or how much time I had that day, I might draw a goofy picture on the rejection letters or else write a boosterish “FANTASTIC!” It was just that these slush-pile authors seemed so vulnerable and trembling in a way that the actual published authors did not. (Why was it that typeset books rendered the persons who created them unreal?) Little did I know, every writer—high, low—is always vulnerable and trembling, all the time. I’d learn that soon enough.
But I will say that, at first, I did approach the short-story submission stack with more purity of purpose than I did the book-review stack. I had this idea that the slush pile was the place where my taste and my judgment really could come out and shine. At GQ, I dreamed of bringing a brilliant short story by some undiscovered writer—some unblinking genius who knew her own worth even if no one else did, someone whose sense of self, even after the thousandth rejection, had still not been eroded—to the literary editor, and he would love it, and he would pass the story along to Art, and Art would love it, and it would be published, and the world would change forever. I’d always believed I had something of an eye for spotting literary talent.
Since I’d been at GQ, I’d become a keen reader of Esquire’s fiction, past and present. Arguably, Esquire had been the chief platform for American short fiction from the forties through the seventies. The magazine had published major works by Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Barry Hannah; Tim O’Brien’s classic “The Things They Carried”; my beloved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic and unreadable Pat Hobby stories; Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”; and, most famously, Ernest Hemingway’s
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” And GQ had published . . . what memorable fiction exactly? But in my view, the current literary section of Esquire had become moribund, geriatric, small, boring—and, mostly, expected. And work by women was, to say the very least, grossly underrepresented in the magazine.
I’d always loved what Kafka wrote in a letter: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for?” If there were one job in the world I wanted, the ur-job, it would be literary editor of Esquire. Of course, this was insane. But I could really shake things up there, I thought. I’d publish fiction that wounded, that stabbed.
THE MID-NINETIES WAS THE GOLDEN AGE—OR, MORE CORRECTLY, THE last gasp—of the print magazine. There was no competition from the Internet, and print was still king. I don’t even want to begin to calculate the amount of time I spent at newsstands those days. Like many other people I knew, I was a connoisseur of The Baffler and The Face and the magazines that wanted to be The Face—the ones that always had Jarvis Cocker or Liam/Noel Gallagher (and is there a distinction between the two?) on the covers. I likewise developed an interest in a satirical magazine from San Francisco called Might and nerdily saved every issue. I brought the stack in for Granger to examine.
“You should get this guy David Eggers to write for us,” I suggested. (Dave was then, professionally, a David.)
It was also the era of the low-fi, low-res fiction reading. I’d been going to my fair share of readings, though I didn’t quite go out of love (but does anyone?) so much as out of professional obligation. Most of these writers were men, and most of the man-writers’ readings would go a little like this: the writer would walk up to the podium, carrying a great bundle of papers, which he would drop onto the lectern like a granite tombstone; with a solemn look, he would gaze upon the audience and declare into the microphone, “This is pretty long, actually.” There would be a throat clearing. There would be a leafing through of the papers. Upon the room a great silence would descend, and it was at this very moment that you, as captive audience member, knew that all you could do was settle into your chair (if you had one) and kiss your evening goodbye.
In 1995, GQ organized a reading at a bar downtown for a young writer, Donna Tartt, who had published a short story in the magazine. She was a real hotshot—her first novel, The Secret History, had come out to great fanfare three years before—and it was clear that GQ considered it a coup to have her story “A Garter Snake.” I didn’t yet remotely understand the pecking order of the whole short-story submission game (a game watched by perhaps dozens of people, even if we were still in the golden age of print), which was to say that if GQ was publishing it, the story must have been rejected by at least four or possibly five other magazines. (This is not a disparagement; it is a clear-eyed statement of fact. And if GQ ran a short story, it had certainly been rejected by Esquire.)
Mostly, I just thought it was cool that (1) GQ was publishing an ambitious short story by an ambitious woman, and (2) Art Cooper hadn’t required some sort of corset-themed photo shoot for her.
The reading was at the scruffy East Village bar KGB. I was the assistant/drudge whose job it was to deal with the invitations, RSVPs, venue setup, and whatnot. I was just happy to be involved, and the whole event was so obviously excellent for GQ, and for writers, and for books, and for the so-called literary world.
But there was also something mephitic about the thing.
The bar was packed, and I wondered if the bourgeois sensibilities—shared, sadly, to a degree by yours truly—of, for example, Art Cooper were somewhat offended by the place’s grubby downtown aura. There were red walls and kitschy framed Soviet-era posters. Art stood back by the bar, enjoying a martini, but not doing too much in the way of circulating. Not entirely his milieu, I suspected. The guests, upon further inspection, were all rather nicely scrubbed up—a colleague later said derisively, “I think all of them owned art galleries”; there was lots of tight, shiny clothing; there were barrettes, worn high on the forehead, in the style of the day; I actually saw one cigarette holder (certainly used parodically, although it was no mere prop: there was an actual lit cigarette in it). Before the reading began, a number of Tartt’s friends and acquaintances installed themselves at a big table in the front.
I overheard Art Cooper’s wife say to a female assistant, “Do you work in the fashion department?”
The young woman did.
“I knew it,” Art’s wife, Amy, said. She had been the editor in chief of Mademoiselle, so she was an expert in these things. “I can always tell when a girl works in the fashion department. You all have that extra little something. A real spark. An extra pizzazz.”
But as excited as I was to be there, it was impossible not to pick up on a kind of weird energy in the room, like some kind of miasma hanging over the city of Thebes.
I had a couple of mildly sour mini-chats with young men who were, or who claimed to be, fiction writers, and I also found myself talking to some peculiar young fellows on the book publishing side of things. I couldn’t figure out why the literary encounters I had had in my brief career so far, particularly with dudes, seemed to have this borderline surly and defensive tone. Was it me? It definitely could have been me, but did anyone else also feel that these happenings were essentially Kierkegaard’s idea of ressentiment personified? And the larger question: Was this really all there was of the republic of letters? Did anyone actually have any interesting conversations about books—or about anything? It just seemed to me that the collective thought circulating around this room and all rooms like it boiled down to: Who here is writer numero uno, and why am I not he? (Most authors eventually grow out of this adolescent need to be the top dog, by the way, but I have also known some who, well, never quite did.)
While fiction writers may have had the imaginative high ground with respect to journalists, I will suggest that journalists were pretty much always more straightforward to deal with than fiction writers. I was working on a hypothesis about this: fiction writers were all maybe just a little bit crazy because their lives were so insecure and so defined by reputation—and reputation was abstract, subject to ebb and flow, flux and change, and was something one had very limited control over.
But if there was one thing a fiction writer could control, it was his persona. I now considered the scene before me at KGB. It struck me that a lot of these guys often seemed to be playacting the part of the archetypal Writer—and that archetypal Writer often seemed based, in some way perhaps no one was really even conscious of, on Hemingway. (In much the same way that the archetypal Composer is always Beethoven.) But the conscientious actor must fully understand his part, and thus it seemed important to remember that the persona of the demotically possessed male artist, the rugged loner, was actually a creation, a copy of a copy with its origin in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, and it had to do with, yes, Beethoven, with Nietzsche, with the rise of the middle class, and with the deification of secular idols. In other words: always remember that every idea has a whole human history behind it, so make sure you think twice about what narrative it is you’re enacting before you go around believing you’re any kind of renegade.
There’s a line from the Richard Corliss Time review of Amadeus (when I was thirteen, I collected reviews of Amadeus from newspapers and magazines and put them in a scrapbook; I was an odd child): “Mozart . . . comes raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment.” I’ve often thought of that line with respect to many writers I’ve known and their timidly chippy rebellion: Ah, there he goes again, grossing out the Establishment.
A small dinner, hosted by GQ, took place after the reading. Tartt was welcomed to bring a couple of her friends to it. I was not invited, as indeed I should not have been and did not want to be, and I fled out into the night.
The next morning, the literary editor handed me the bill from the dinner, an expense to put through
for speedy reimbursement. I looked at the receipt. Had I ever seen a meal whose tab reached comfortably into the four digits? I had not. Had perhaps more than a “couple” of Tartt’s friends been included in the dinner? This was not for me to say. When I got home that night, I called my parents and told them about the dinner bill.
“It will be interesting,” said my father, “to see what happens when the company goes public.” This was always his take when I told him about any of the alarming (to me) profligacy I had witnessed at work. He added, “I just don’t see how any of it is sustainable.”
And it wasn’t sustainable. How could it have been? “I believe in waste,” said the famous former Condé Nast creative director Alexander Liberman. “Waste is very important in creativity.” Not that I was in any sort of position of power (obviously), but never once did I hear the word “budget.” These magazines spent enormous amounts of money on writers, photographers, and illustrators, on shoots and events; the expense accounts were big (although the editors’ salaries were not so big, but no one needed to know that—sort of ruined the fantasy), everyone took black town cars everywhere (this included, yes, frequently, assistants), there were not one but two Christmas parties for even the lowliest members of the editorial staff at GQ, and assistants got overtime if they stayed past 7:00 P.M. and, if they played it right, were even reimbursed for their lunches. (All I had to do, it turned out, was submit a receipt and a petty-cash voucher for a “working lunch.” And “working lunch,” for me, usually meant sitting at my desk, flipping through someone else’s copy of Esquire as I very slowly speared into my container of salad with an uncouth plastic fork. [Like everyone else in the office, I would pore over each new issue of Esquire with varying degrees of interest and bewilderment. One extraordinary cover line from Esquire during those years: “Heather Locklear Plumbs the Hermeneutics of Desire.”])
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