This should have been one of the happiest weeks of my life. It was and it wasn’t. Most of my friends were underemployed, unemployed, or in grad school, and few could relate. If you’d have asked me (no one did), I might have said that I was really scared. But I was so excited, too.
THAT FIRST WEEK, I DISCOVERED, IN THE BOTTOM LEFT DRAWER OF MY metal desk, paper contracts for recently published Esquire fiction. (Initially, it was of some passing interest to see how much more Esquire paid for fiction than GQ did—as in two to three times the amount.) Also in that contracts drawer was one other document, an internal memo about a short story that had been submitted to Esquire and rejected. The story was “The Depressed Person,” by David Foster Wallace.
The memo was a tortured thing, having clearly been left behind as an artifact of historical import, a sign of life: the letter the outgoing president leaves to the incoming, the Voyager Golden Record sent off into the universe. As explained in the memo, “The Depressed Person” had been read by nearly every single editor on staff—not only by those in the fiction department—and their responses had been divided into two agonized factions: those who were repelled by the story and loathed it, and those who were repelled by the story and admired it (in a cold, arm’s-length sort of way). As I recall, the phrase “tough going” was used to describe the overall reading experience. The memo had also certainly been left behind as a self-protective gesture: the editor who wrote it had been in the pro–“Depressed Person” camp and had been prescient enough to know on what side of history this opinion would eventually prove to be. (When I finally read “The Depressed Person” a year later, by the way, I will admit that I had a completely contradictory interpretation of the story. Wasn’t its parody of a therapy voice meant to be comic? Wasn’t the story just kind of a hoot?)
But my main takeaway from the memo then: How many people had it taken to make a goddamned decision around here? An editor in chief should give his editors a degree of freedom and autonomy, yes? Fiction by committee? Lord, already I couldn’t imagine that that scenario would have worked for me at all. I liked the way things were rigged up for me at Esquire. In these early days, I’d tell Granger I wanted to do something, he’d say “fine” and tell me how much I could spend, and that was that, pretty much. (It was possible that I was, and would never be, a great “collaborator”; in school, I’d always shuddered whenever the teacher told us to “break into groups.”) Only one of the editors implicated in the “Depressed Person” memo was still working at the magazine—Rust Hills. Everyone else had quit, or had been fired, though their fates were entirely unrelated to the outcome of “The Depressed Person.”
Rust had thick white hair and sort of a shambling, craggy quality. “Hello, it’s your wandering Uncle Rust!” our weekly calls would begin; he’d come into the office every few weeks or so, and then less than that, to root through fiction submissions. I was never clear when he last had an actual physical office. He was one of those mystical time-dividers with multiple homes and lived what seemed to me a graciously old-school peripatetic existence.
It was also not evident to me then what his expectations for his role still were or how much his association with Esquire actually still mattered to him; throughout the years, he had quit working at the magazine and returned three times. Had I been more perceptive, I would have understood that his involvement most certainly did matter to him, possibly quite a lot.
And what did Rust make of yours truly, if in fact he made anything of me at all? A tin-pot Torquemada? A mini Al Haig? An inoffensive nincompoop? An overly enthusiastic yet information-challenged youth? Looking back on it, he was always remarkably courteous toward me and treated me as an equal. It now makes me queasy to admit that I had quite a lot more power, if you wanted to call it that, at the magazine than Rust did. But my situation didn’t make me queasy at all then, at least not at first—power, to review, is a force rarely scrutinized. Power is also invisible when you have it. But you can’t see anything straight if you’re too close—you keep losing your perspective.
Throughout the years, several writers, including Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy, would tell me that Rust was a genius at novel excerpts (it’s true—I actually talked to McCarthy on the phone once): give the man a finished manuscript of a novel—the longer, spikier, more tentacled the better—and a day or two later, he would emerge with a stand-alone story from it, gorgeous, lapidaried, immaculate: complete. I also loved the drollery with which Rust would speak about short-story submissions: “It’s not a gripper”; “Oh, it’s amusing in spots, I suppose.”
I must say that Rust’s approach to the writers he wanted us to consider was weirdly in resonance with his Literary Universe project: he’d come into the office with a piece of legal-pad paper filled top to bottom with the names of writers. Names, names, and more names. Most of these writers had been in the Literary Universe ten years before; frequently appearing at the top of the list were two elegant writers graced with, I would come to appreciate, ideal prose styles: Christopher Buckley and James Salter. How correct you were, Rust, to put them right there at the top.
I’d heard from various writers that Rust maintained an elaborate index-card system of writer info, these cards described in Carol Polsgrove’s captivating history of the Harold Hayes Esquire years, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?: “On the cards was listed every fiction writer anywhere, it seemed, and their agents, and publishers, and past publications.” Some writers who’d claimed to have seen the cards would tell me that they were so lavishly detailed that they may as well have cataloged the writer’s blood type.
Rust had brought in Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the magazine, excerpts of Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits,” and he’d had the unenviable task of handling Mailer’s An American Dream (story line: the hero murders his wife and, in so doing, finds himself), which Mailer composed as a serialized novel in real time over the course of eight issues in 1964. Rust had worked with Dorothy Parker, who’d been the magazine’s book reviewer, but I was unable to pry any tales out of him about that experience, or any others, really. (Dorothy Parker. I mean, seriously.) I wanted to hear about Nabokov, O’Connor, Salinger, Cheever, Vidal, Italo Calvino, Philip Roth, and about Rust’s famous (and famously intoxicated) Esquire literary symposia. Terry Southern had, mind-explodingly, subbed for Rust in the office one summer. I needed details about that. I also needed to hear everything about Harold Hayes. And what about the magazine’s publication of “Le Côte Basque, 1965,” an excerpt from Truman Capote’s in-progress (and never finished) novel Answered Prayers, a painfully mediocre satire of the ladies-who-lunch set and the novel that killed Capote—artistically, socially, and probably even literally? Gordon Lish? What exactly was Rust’s relationship with Gordon Lish? He had placed Lish in the red-hot center of his 1987 literary power chart, after all. Was it sort of a Wozniak-Jobs situation with the two of them? But I got nothing.
There was never much in the way of institutional memory at Esquire, and later, when Rust was gone, there really was nothing. Former editors were rarely spoken of, as if the instant they left the magazine, they were flushed down the giant toilet bowl of publishing history. Although I was only twenty-five years old, I had enough sense to know that this would happen to me, too, eventually. Not for a long time, hopefully, but it would happen. The feeling was always that we were to look forward, not backward. This was also a warning: do good work, but don’t get too attached to the title or to the place.
When you get thrown back into who you are, you’d better have something there.
My own position: Would a little ancestor worship have been such a bad thing? Being the amateur student of history I was, it’s always been my belief that looking backward can do a lot to help you find your direction forward. When speaking once of this topic to David Foster Wallace, he remarked that if The New Yorker, not Esquire, had published “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” The New Yorker would have kept a statue to the story in its
offices, and you’d have to bow to it as you walked by.
Rust could also be rather cranky. During a lunch with him at a Japanese restaurant near the office, he complained, over colossal iced teas, that a misbehaving author had recently sent him what he amusingly described as a “nightmarishly circumstantial rant of self-justification.” He then drank in one swallow the shot glass of simple syrup for his iced tea and promptly asked a server for another.
I proceeded to ask Rust a question about the Nabokov story “The Visit to the Museum.” I mentioned the year it had been published—1963.
“Years?” Rust replied, perturbed, hunting around for the server again. “I don’t remember years.”
Maybe Rust thought I was looking for gossip, but I really wasn’t. I wanted information. I wanted a rip-roaring ride through the literary past, but he was not about to give it to me. It wasn’t Rust’s job to provide me that, of course. With him, I always felt like a miner outfitted with the world’s dimmest headlamp.
13
Not long after I started the job at Esquire, I went with a friend to a talk by Norman Mailer. The idea was for the friend, who worked at the Wylie Agency, which represented Mailer, to introduce me to the grand old man after the speech. Mailer was, possibly after Hemingway, the fiction writer most closely associated with Esquire. He’d been regularly publishing in the magazine since the fifties: he had a regular column (title: The Big Bite), there was An American Dream and excerpts from Harlot’s Ghost, and there were features, most famously “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” about JFK and the 1960 Democratic National Convention, and “Norman Mailer versus Nine Writers,” in which he was given seven (count ’em, seven) feature-well pages to assess recent books from nine rivals. (Let us sample this beauty about Bellow from the essay: “Yet I still wonder if he is not too timid to become a great writer.” And about Styron’s “bad maggoty novel” Set This House on Fire: “four or five half-great short stories were buried like pullulating organs in a corpse of fecal matter.”)
In more recent years, Mailer had done an interview with Pat Buchanan (thus bringing the number of Buchanan references in my narrative so far to an improbable two . . . although maybe not too improbable: Buchanan was Trump before Trump) and an astounding—not in a good way—interview with Madonna, the introduction to which Mailer wrote in third person and which contained the sentence “Madonna, on the face of it, had to have an ego even larger than his own.” You don’t even want to know how much he was paid for the piece (I saw the contract). Mailer had also appeared on the cover of the magazine a couple of times; his eerie resemblance on one of the covers to Golda Meir was not infrequently noted around the Esquire offices.
Repeatedly directed toward me at work, like the plangent bleats of a foghorn, were the questions “Who is our new Mailer? Who are our titans? Who are our titans?” They wanted Big (Male) Writers of the Mailer school. Implicit in this line of thinking was that a writer with enough talent and charisma should be able to force the culture to care about novelists and novels again. The fault was with the writers, not with the world, in other words. I supposed it was true that no one (except for David Foster Wallace) was trying as hard, and on such a heroic scale, as Mailer, as Roth. That was part of it. No one seemed to want it as much as they had. But how could a Mailer, or a Roth, or any communal national literature, ever exist again? Those big, grandiose books about America and Americanism couldn’t be written today: as the country went more and more off the rails, we all did the sensible thing and retreated inside our heads (and into university writing programs), and, broadly, our novels were now internal monologues—the dream world of the self.
I loathed Mailer. Yes, I would have reluctantly conceded that The Executioner’s Song was a near masterpiece; yes, I understood and appreciated that The Armies of the Night was a very good novel. Yes, yes, I got that Mailerian work ethic was in fact heroic. But I wouldn’t be the first one to point out that the prose was ludicrously overwritten and that the whole Mailer novel-writing stance—man asserts his manhood by writing manly novels—was preposterous. I would further argue that his novels had barely made any sort of dent at all on American fiction; his early nonfiction is another story, however (but novelists want the novel to be king, not the non-novel), and pieces like “Superman” actually probably did change literary journalism forever—now reported stories could be flamboyant and oracular and ridiculous and sound like novels.
In my view, the best Mailer Esquire piece was not something Mailer had written but was rather about him—Germaine Greer’s glorious takedown of their infamous 1971 Town Hall debate (and exploration of Mailer’s mother issues), “My Mailer Problem.” (In more recent years, Greer’s positions have become tragically retrograde and wackadoo, alas.) It was a piece that spoke more truth to power than anything Mailer ever wrote (and was fabulously illustrated with a photograph of a female performance artist as Mailer in a werewolf costume): “the tragedy of machismo,” Greer wrote, “is that a man is never quite man enough.”
What I couldn’t accept about Mailer: How could a writer whose work was so pugnaciously sexist be widely considered “great”? How could this even be allowed? But this probably wasn’t an argument I’d even need to have, once I ventured away from the Esquire editorial offices. There were no young Mailer fans, and I’d never heard anyone my age mention his work, ever . . . so that was progress of a sort, I guessed.
Mailer’s talk, a stop in the publicity campaign for his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, was at a school on the Upper East Side. The typical Mailer loyalist out in the audience looked as if he’d died about ten years before. The novel: the “autobiography” of Jesus. Mailer as God. The jokes just wrote themselves, folks. Onstage, Mailer, who had a weirdly affected Brahmin (was it?) accent, held forth about God, Jesus, Christians, and Christianity as if he alone had the special wisdom monopoly on these topics—and all others. It seemed to me even then dangerous for a writer to come to regard himself as grandee; the writer’s concern should always be getting to the truth—and how can you get to the truth of the story if you are the story, not the one standing outside of it? (In his irritatingly excellent book The Spooky Art, Mailer in fact acknowledges his early fame as the central tragedy of his career.) Never get too comfortable in the temple: this was another message in a bottle I’d send my future self.
During the book-signing portion of the evening, as my literary-agent friend and I advanced toward this terrifying white cannonball (who, to be fair, was not without a large degree of personal charm, and his captivating final wife, Norris, whom I would later briefly meet, seemed to be just about the loveliest person ever—Norman, you were a lucky man), it occurred to me that there was nowhere I less wanted to be. I had in my brain the demented bravado of Advertisements for Myself (“the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn”), a book Esquire had excerpted. As Greer had written of The Prisoner of Sex in “My Mailer Problem,” “Every page bespoke the terrors of the dying king.”
The question: Could I really levitate above it all with a special sort of Apollonian detachment? Should I?
When my turn in line with Mailer came, I’m sure I burbled something to him as nuance-free as “Hey, you should write for Esquire again.” As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I said.
Mailer’s blue eyes considered me with distaste. After a rich pause, he intoned, “I feel about Esquire the way I feel about an ex-wife: I don’t care.”
Sometimes in life things can be the best and the worst at the very same time. This particular encounter was an example of this phenomenon.
(The silky, urbane Mailer voice sounded a lot younger than it was, by the way, and that accent was a total put-on.)
The following day, I shared the sad tale of Mailer’s swiftly terminal response with Dave Eggers. I stood in Dave’s office, navigating
the many empty Snapple bottles on his floor. He would usually, but not always, arrive at the office sometime before noon. In memory, he is always in shorts.
Based upon my past close readings of Might—whose sensibility lay somewhere between the Onion, National Lampoon, and Letterman from the Chris Elliott era when I was making videotapes of it every night (I’m sure Dave would correct my appraisal, though)—I probably would have pegged Dave as a manic prankster with a hand buzzer built into his palm. A real madcap, in other words. I would have been wrong about that. Dave was jangly, restless, supernaturally confident, cantankerous when necessary, well meaning, and fixated on the idea of integrity—his own and everyone else’s. He would spend one somewhat embattled year at Esquire. I never really understood what his job was. I’m not sure he did, either.
I always enjoyed getting his take on things and typically felt that his overall worldview was in alignment with mine. In the case of the Mailer flop, however, he did not supply the response I’d wanted.
He shook his head slowly, very slowly. “You, sister,” Dave finally declared, “are a dork.”
In my view, Mailer had brushed me off because he had regarded me as a mere girl, nothing else to see here, please move along, but I supposed there was more to it than that. Mailer may indeed have had (and should have had) some vestigial loyalty toward Rust, who always had a soft spot for the old cannonball. But mortifyingly, when I approached Mailer, I hadn’t quite known how terribly checkered his history with Esquire actually was—a pattern that might be summarized as: Mailer leaves; Mailer comes back; Mailer leaves; Mailer comes back; Mailer leaves; Mailer threatens to sue (and does); Mailer comes back; lather, rinse, repeat.
In the Land of Men Page 13