An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

(If it seems time-out-of-joint that I was called to do the column three months before the review appeared, do not be overly confused. The cover date on Starlog was April, but I wrote the piece early in December 1979, proposed a film review column for Starlog in mid January 1980—and was turned down on the idea—and was recontacted on 20 February to write a column for Future Life rather than for Starlog, which already had its complement of columnists, not the least of whom were David Gerrold and Bjo Trimble.)

  The columns ran in Future Life, with a few lapses for missed deadlines and breathers, from August 1980 till the demise of the magazine in December 1981.

  At that point, An Edge in My Voice was dead.

  Early in January of 1982 I received a phone call from Jay Levin, a man who represented himself as the publisher of the L.A. Weekly, a free newspaper subsidized by advertising that was distributed throughout the Los Angeles area. Though I had never read the paper, I was familiar with it, and was interested enough in his suggestion that I write a Glass Teat sort of column for him, that I agreed to a meeting. Then I did some checking around, and learned that Levin had been a respected reporter for the New York Post. He had been a liberal covering, among other areas, the “New Left.” So I checked a little further and learned he had been hired by the Larry Flynt organization to come out to California to edit a national version of the L.A. Free Press, which Flynt had bought when Art Kunkin went bankrupt and the paper folded. Like so many other good and reputable people who’ve passed through the revolving door of Larry Flynt’s publishing paranoia, Levin was left afoot in L.A. when his deal with Flynt fell through; and the national Freep never happened (though I hear Kunkin is now on Flynt’s payroll trying to revivify the old warhorse publication).

  At 1:30 PM on January 4th, on a Monday in Los Angeles in which the heaviest rains in ten years began, I met Jay Levin at Jerry’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. I had a cup of coffee.

  We talked about my doing a continuing version of An Edge in My Voice every week, and I gave him copies of the columns that Future Life had published. He skimmed them and said he liked the tone, but he wanted columns that ran not much more than a thousand to twelve hundred words. I explained that the kind of rambles I took in the world of the essay were more often than not an arguing from the smaller to the greater. (See Installment 61 for a perfect example.) I told him that for me, the best essays were the ones that illuminated large societal problems by progressing from an everyday discomfort. And that sometimes took two thousand words to set up properly.

  Levin was vague about how strictly he wanted to enforce such space limitations, and so when it came time to discuss what kind of remuneration I was to receive for these weekly emanations, and Levin blanched at my suggesting two hundred bucks a shot, I traded off: I’d take a hundred dollars per, with a reevaluation of salary after three months, when the worth to the Weekly of my writing had been established, in exchange for a policy of flexibility where length was concerned. He agreed.

  The one ground rule I insisted upon, however, was set at that meeting. And it boiled down to this: I write ’em, and the Weekly publishes ’em. No rewriting. No editorial infringement. No “suggestions” about avoiding subjects that might be troublesome. Short of libel, I could go where I chose, and report what I’d seen. He agreed.

  Therein lay the seed of our destruction.

  We agreed that a good lead-in for the column’s appearance in the Weekly would be a reprint of my final column for Future Life, the brouhaha attendant on my piece about knife-kill movies. I suggested it be published intact, but Levin had some space problems, so we decided to break the longer version in half, and to use it in successive issues with some brief rewriting to make it flow for continuity.

  On January 14th, 1982 the first column appeared. Then the second part of the knife-kill essay the following week. By that time most of the uproar about the Writers Guild Film Society decision not to book slasher flicks had gone down, and on the 25th of January I wrote the first new column. It went in to Jay Levin and I see by my daily log that the next day, Tuesday the 26th, that I was already having trouble with “The Man.” My note reads: Jay Levin of L.A. Weekly gives me a hard time re the column—I tell him to cut it as he pleases. I’m so disgusted, don’t intend to do column much more.

  Jay was a man who liked to play at being editor, I feel. It was not enough for him to be the publisher of a successful newspaper, he also wanted to be Maxwell Perkins or Punch Sulzberger. Ben Bradlee, maybe. He was not, in my view, systemically capable of maintaining our bargain—I write ’em and he runs ’em, no interference.

  But I was abruptly gifted with the presence of an intermediary for whom I had instant respect and affection, the actual line-editor of the paper, Phil Tracy.

  He was, and is, a newspaperman out of the old school where precision and imagination and getting the spelling right counted for a lot. He understood, in a way that made me love him, that too much gonzo journalism had produced a generation of sloppy reporters, that in their star-bedazzled attempts to emulate Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson, hordes of minuscule talents had avoided learning the craft in deference to producing writing that was fast and smartass and essentially uninformed.

  Phil Tracy was born in Manhattan in 1942; he had sixteen years of Catholic education which, miraculously, he was able to transcend. He was a former social and civil rights worker, a labor organizer for the Welfare Workers Union (and served as shop steward), worked in the 1968 presidential campaign for Bobby Kennedy, and was a staff writer from 1971–76 at The Village Voice, specializing in political and labor union coverage, in which areas he did solid investigative reportage. He was what is commonly known as an honest, hardnosed newsman. He was respected.

  In the summer of 1976, tired of New York and remembering with fondness the two years during the sixties in which he had lived in San Francisco, Tracy accepted the offer of Clay Felker (then owner of The Village Voice, which is now a Rupert Murdoch possession) to go to work for New West (now California magazine) in the Bay Area. Felker’s problem with the magazine—which he had spun off the successful New York magazine empire on April 26th of that year—was that he could not, in his view, find reporters on the West Coast who knew how to dig up stories.

  (Those of us who had memorably horrendous experiences with the inept and arrogant staff initially manning New West, those of us here in Los Angeles who swore we’d rather undergo root canal surgery than be further demeaned and jerked around by the dolts Felker had dispatched to our town, knew that there were muck rakers and investigative journalists galore. We simply did not choose to waste our time and efforts in service to a publication that manifested an obvious dislike for California. It was another confrontation with that East Coast Literary Establishment provincialism that contends anything that happens beyond the Hudson River simply ain’t worth taking seriously.)

  So Tracy volunteered to fry Felker’s bacon, and he came back to San Francisco in the summer of 1976, in the capacity of contributing editor, picking his own shots and writing about whatever caught his interest. He was 34 years old.

  In July of 1977 Phil Tracy became one of the best-known reporters in America: in the July 18th issue of New West, eighteen months before the Jonestown Peoples Temple tragedy in which Congressman Leo Ryan and four others were murdered on that airstrip in Guyana, before the Reverend Jim Jones induced 933 of his followers to drink cyanide-laced Flav-R-Aid—including more than 200 of their own children—in a death-pact that stunned the nation, Phil Tracy broke the story. In a city where the mayor had been so convinced of Jim Jones’s worthiness (and political clout) that he had appointed the man to chairmanship of San Francisco’s housing authority; in a time when Jones was being lauded and courted by Vice President Walter Mondale, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Governor Jerry Brown and Mayor Moscone, the voices of Phil Tracy and his collaborator, Marshall Kilduff of the Chronicle, were the first (and for a dangerous time the only) voices raised against Jim Jones and the evil that was the Peo
ples Temple.

  The story was a bombshell. And within two weeks the San Francisco Examiner was running articles that backed up Tracy’s findings and suppositions. Within those same two weeks, Jim Jones began the massive pullout of his operation, from San Francisco to Guyana. Fifteen months later Jonestown was major news.

  And like the pilot of the Enola Gay, whose existence after the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima was a nightmare of assimilated guilt, Phil Tracy went temporarily bugfuck. He was a hero, a media authority widely quoted and frequently interviewed, a pundit who appeared on television explaining what had gone down at Jonestown, a reporter whose name was mentioned in the same breath with the Pulitzer Prize. Yet in some deep place in his soul, where a reporter’s pathological devotion to seeking out the truth wars with his guilt about being responsible for the betrayal of those he has written about, Phil Tracy savaged himself. In a terrible reach from beyond the mass graveyard of Jonestown, Jim Jones extended his evil to claim the man who had been instrumental in bringing him down. Tracy’s life began to fall apart. He told about it in an article titled “Confessions of a Hero” in the November 1983 issue of California magazine.

  By June of 1980 he could not write, his marriage was raveling, he had gained 80 pounds, he had become withdrawn and reclusive, and he was doping heavily. At the end of that month he quit New West. Sometime later that year, in his own words, “I began to consider suicide. I think the thing that really stopped me was the realization that if I actually did it, I would be joining Jones and all his followers, somehow confirming their view of the world. No matter how miserable I felt, I wasn’t prepared to give the bastard that satisfaction, even if he was already dead. Still, it was close.”

  In 1981 he became the managing editor of the L.A. Weekly, and it was there, having read the original piece on the Peoples Temple years before (but never making the link-up in my mind that this was that Tracy), that I met Phil Tracy, It was not until late in 1984 (having fallen behind in my reading of issues of California magazine) that I caught up with “Confessions of a Hero” and realized the torment that Tracy was undergoing during the time we worked together. He never spoke of it.

  We got along famously. He became a friend on the only basis I have ever been able to validate people: trust and respect. I listened to his suggestions and seldom disagreed with his assessments of how the column could be improved. When something troubled him, it was usually because I hadn’t thought it out properly, or because I hadn’t gotten my verifications, or—several times—that I’d been superficial and needed to dig deeper.

  Had I been able to deal only with Tracy, I’d probably still be writing An Edge in My Voice for the Weekly. Maybe. Possibly.

  But my problems with Jay Levin (or, as some might say, his problems with me) went on. Two weeks later, on February 5th, I wrote my third new installment, the one numbered 16 in this volume, the column about why everything is fucked up. In that column’s original version, in a paragraph discussing the ethics of planned obsolescence, I wrote: “We expect the toaster to go on the fritz in thirteen months, just after the warranty expires. We expect the digital watch we bought at The Akron to begin running backwards, widdershins like the White Rabbit’s timepiece, after a year of faithful service. We expect the screws to come loose in the lawn chair after one summer in the sun.”

  In the 12–18 February Weekly, that paragraph reads as follows: “We expect the toaster to go on the fritz in 13 months, just after the warranty expire [sic]. We expect the digital watch we bought at some chain store to begin running backwards…” Etcetera and unchanged (though badly typeset) for the balance of the paragraph.

  Now it may not seem like much of an alteration to the copy…after all, the meaning is as clear using the phrase “some chain store” as it is using the name of The Akron, a Los Angeles chain that deals in rattan and antimony, job lots from Siam and Korea. And had Phil Tracy called to suggest that singling out The Akron (from which I’d actually bought a digital timepiece that gave out on me within days of the expiration of the “guarantee”) in an essay where I singled out no other retailer might be a bit unfair, I’d no doubt have switched to “some chain store” without hesitation. But Phil wasn’t the one who called. Jay Levin called. And what he said was, “We’re having a tough time getting big advertisers, and The Akron takes an ad every issue, and why should they be singled out when you don’t go after any other stores?”

  To my chagrin, it was the only time I can remember when I allowed myself to rationalize the disgorging, the bowdlerizing, the acceptance of weaseling in these essays. Well, I thought, for whatever reasons I thought it at the time, maybe he’s right. By what mandate do I assume I can damage the newspaper that supports my remarks, just because I happened to type “The Akron” rather than some other specific store, or even the “some chain store” generic? Do I serve the commonweal by demanding high-flown artistic integrity when it’s been made clear to me that I will cause the Weekly serious difficulty? Is not the continued publication of this newspaper, a small voice of liberal opinion in a town dominated by the Voice of the Establishment, the Los Angeles Times, a cause worth bending one’s arrogance in aid of? Haven’t you bought a hundred items from The Akron in the last twenty years that worked perfectly well? Why pillory this otherwise respected chain because of one purchase that went awry? Who the fuck do you think you are, Mr. Righteous Columnist?

  Thus do we subscribe to floating ethics.

  I changed the line. Or, I let Jay Levin change it.

  But not once during the months that followed, did I sit down to write these essays without remembering Levin’s demand, to which I’d acceded. And as my readers came to trust me, as time passed, and their letters and phone calls thanked me for my sense of responsibility in what I praised or damned, I felt a gnawing shame that I’d been so easily co-opted. And it never happened again, though on three other occasions similar requests were made by Jay Levin to excise specific references. Nonetheless, I had done it once. And I hated the memory.

  And the adversarial relationship with Levin persisted. Not only because he often questioned “the importance” of what I chose to write about—culminating in the refusal to publish what appears here as Installment 59 (see Interim Memo page 353)—but also, in large measure, because the columns were getting longer as I loosened up and felt comfortable with the way the readers were responding. The first two columns were 1500 and 1800 words each. The first new one was 2800 and thereafter through the first three months they grew longer: 3200, 3000, 5000, 5200, 5000, 2800, 4000, 4000, 4300.

  But the response to the column was overwhelmingly positive and the circulation of the Weekly continued climbing; and both from Phil Tracy’s championing of the work in-house, and from the general community approbation (which at its peak netted me the P.E.N. award for journalism, an accolade that Levin took pride in, and which he praised editorially), Levin gritted his teeth and continued running the installments. (Every once in a while he’d attempt to remind me of my “station,” however, by apprising me, strictly entre nous, that many of the kids who worked on the paper hated An Edge in My Voice, that it was, to them, too “committed,” that it had too many resonances of the Sixties, the Seventies. He gave me to believe it wasn’t punk enough for them. That bothered me, I confess. Never tried to be trendy, but hoped I was au courant. The staff was, in large part, new wave casual surly streetsmart. I worried it, but it didn’t get in the way of the writing.)

  (Long after I’d departed the Weekly, it chanced that I found myself, one evening, in the company of a bunch of people who’d worked at the Weekly during my tenure. I asked them about what Levin had told me. They were quick to tell me that had been bullshit, that they’d enjoyed the columns. So much for worrying needlessly. But it didn’t help me in loving “The Man.”)

  As for having written “trivial” columns, I stopped fretting that one when I read a piece on Andy Rooney in which the television essayist said, “It vaguely bothers me to be dismissed as insignificant,
though it may be true. I think of myself as writing in metaphor. When I talk about cereal boxes or the excess of salesmanship in toothpaste tubes, I’m talking about the fact that in America we’re generally selling things better than we’re making them. And I suppose it bothers me to be dismissed as an inconsequential, amusing little fellow who affects a curmudgeonly air.”

  The writer of the piece on Rooney concluded with the observation that Rooney is anything but dismissable to those who believe a good laugh—whether it be insightful, metaphorical, or just good fun—is well worth waiting for.

  As one who has been accused of affecting a curmudgeonly air, I felt a whole helluva lot better after reading them words. Thanks, Rooney.

  During the year 1982, with only eight issues in which the column did not appear, An Edge In My Voice poked its twitching little pink nose out of the pages of the Los Angeles Weekly forty-seven times. And then it was done.

  Phil Tracy resigned from the L.A. Weekly in 1984. He now teaches journalism at USC in Los Angeles. He won’t discuss why he left Jay Levin’s employ. He is rigorously mute about the particulars, offering only this: “Managing the paper was too time-consuming. I had left off writing for myself when I became staff at the Weekly, and I found a need to get back to doing what had given me pleasure in the days before Jonestown…writing. There were projects that intrigued me, and I just didn’t have the time to work on them.”

  He’s lost weight, he’s productively involved with passing along what he knows about being a responsible journalist, he’s doing some writing, and he gets together with close friends for dinners of barbequed ribs at Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler, Texas Pit BBQ and at Diamond’s. He won’t confirm or deny my contention that a person has to be quite a bit nuts to go to work for Jay voluntarily; he just says, “Pass the hot sauce,” and grimaces at me. Tracy’s like that: he remembers good deeds; and Jay performed a good deed when he offered Phil the job on the Weekly when Phil was going through hell.