Away from the Big Tents
JANEWAY, MICHAEL
In Search of a Craft Away from the Big Tents By Michael Janeway THE TIMES were on a hinge. Lyndon B. Johnson hadjust won 61 per cent of the Presidential vote against Barry Goldwater,...
...Mike Kolatch asked me why I wanted to leave Newsweek and work at a publication whose name would probably puzzle my friends...
...Newsrooms: Kvetch they must...
...At the Boston Globe, where I became editor in chief in the 1980s, objection was made that I had "never covered City Hall...
...With the same droopylidded, insightful charm he brought to the merits of Woyzeck, Charlie explained to me— a jogger, but not as fanatical a jogger as Gi 1 der—that paunch was not an issue: "Women like love handles...
...There was a lot of noise in Vietnam, and our posture in the Dominican Republic smacked more of Teddy Roosevelt than Franklin D. But surely LBJ, his consummate political mastery unleashed (and the GOP in all-out self-destructive mode), was simply exercising due diligence, drilling his advantage over the Right-wingers into the wall...
...The piece got me hired at the Atlantic, where I became managing editor before I left for the Globe...
...Thanks in particular to the émigré connection, the NL had an inside track to Eastern Europeans in dissent...
...With boulevardier panache, well-tailored trench coat over his shoulders, Simon greeted Gaulkin, shrouded in a cloud of cigar smoke, and dropped his copy on Charlie's desk...
...A plaque reading Lionel Trilling Published Here would also have been appropriate...
...Hilton Kramer, erudite and witty, was the senior associate editor...
...It was more than a subway ride from preppy Newsweek...
...I became—so I was told in later years—a tough but empathetic "writer's editor," helping authors say, or try to say, what they meant...
...In fact, as 1965 played out, Irving Kristol, still one of the NL's godfathers, suggested to his friend from Time, Inc., Robert Manning, incoming editor of the Atlantic Monthly, that he try me out with an in-depth report on John Lindsay's first run for mayor of New York, and the tired establishment Lindsay upended...
...Thirty-something, married and a father, he commuted from the New Jersey suburbs...
...A ubiquitous poster around New York that year was Con Edison's "Dig We Must, for a Growing New York...
...Charlie smoked serious cigars, their haze accenting a sleepy demeanor...
...John, peppy, acidic: "Yes...
...Antique figures from the first decades of the anti-Stalinist Left—émigrés, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites, Socialists— dropped by the off ice to schmooze...
...He had acquired a slight paunch...
...George Gilder, then a liberal Republican and Rockefeller family protégé, occasionally jogged into the office to polish his pieces exhorting the forces of reason to take the Republican Party back from the Goldwater Crazies...
...I felt no more than a degree of cultural separation from my best professor at Harvard, Richard Poirier, and his radical friends at Partisan Review and the just born New York Review of Books, like the young and fashionable Susan Sontag...
...I needed another kind of job, away from the big tents...
...Availing themselves of the chance to be more critical of government policymaking than they could be in their own papers, correspondents like Karl E. Meyer of the Washington Post and Tad Szulc of the New York Times, plus many others elsewhere, sent the NL smart reports on U.S.-Soviet relations, NATO strategy and the Caribbean mess...
...ButHyman's review panned him...
...He looked a little like the young Paul Newman and had a passion for heavy opera (Alban Berg's Wozzeck, from Georg Büchner's Woyzeck...
...You could get your hair cut at the barbershop next door with a hot-towel facial on the side...
...Blast we must...
...Norman Mailer's novel that season, An American Dream, was into exploratory sexual radicalism...
...A short while later (January 1965) he welcomed me into the NL's humble warren on 15th Street, at the fringe of the men's garment district...
...My life too was on a hinge...
...I had worked for LBJ in the Senate during my undergraduate summers—my parents and the Johnsons were good friends, dating from New Deal connections...
...On deadline days, Charlie and I would alternate, late at night, taking the pasted-up layouts for the next issue up to the Hogarthian Port Authority terminal on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue for shipment to our invisible printer in East Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania...
...Two years out of Harvard, I was utterly unclear about what I wanted to do or how to do it...
...Closer to the present, traffic was heavy with eminences among "the family," as Norman Podhoretz called his lead writers and backers at Commentant—handsomely funded by the American Jewish Committee, while The New Leader subsisted on small allowances from liberal anti-Communist labor entities...
...As in Greek tragedies, though, things did not work out the way any of them intended...
...Expertise, not ideology, was the point...
...The can-do spirit of the New Deal, on which our parents reared us, was the order of the day...
...They had seen it all...
...I was eager to learn the nuts and bolts, minus the pretensions, of putting out a magazine...
...In the mittel-Europa collegiality of the NL, I acquired the skill, or even art, of the necessarily selfless business of handling fine and sensitive writing—as well as nightmares like the disastrous stylist, the tiresome ideologue, and the impossible narcissist...
...Another blast...
...I owe The New Leader and its James Joycemeets-Zero Mostel community a big debt...
...This was wisdom unlearned at home or at Harvard...
...The mix of news analysts and polemic in the NL was measured...
...One day John Simon, crisp, assured and mysteriously accented, stopped by with his latest film review...
...I learned a lifetime's worth of professional craft in my time at The New Leader...
...To support his family—NL writers were paid nothing, the editors only slightly more—he had a night-desk editing job at one of the Jersey newspapers...
...Frequent contributors to both magazines included Theodore Draper, Gertrude Himmelfarb and George Lichtheim...
...Lyndon B. Johnson hadjust won 61 per cent of the Presidential vote against Barry Goldwater, topping FDR's highest margin...
...a cigar might protrude from the towel masking the mâcher in the next chair...
...Working for The New Leader put me on a path toward running larger news organizations...
...He made an amiable older brother figure for a 24-year-old living in the West Village, at loose ends...
...Liberals had not yet been mugged: Neo conservatism was still gestating uptown...
...The other associate editor was Charles Gaulkin, a free spirit out of an early Saul Bellow novel...
...Stormy weather: Seeking independent terrain, I had done some cub reporting at Newsday, gone through the U.S...
...The magazine's arts critics, in a stellar tradition, were a talented cluster: Stanley Edgar Hyman on books, James R. Mellow on art, Albert Bermel on theater, John Simon on film...
...I heard that President Johnson in his "Ah'm just a Texan" mode, irritated by Szulc's irreverent coverage of U.S...
...So I phoned The New Leader...
...Charlie, drowsy: "Ah, John...
...The demeanor was no affectation...
...Army six-month program a step ahead of the draft, then immersed myself in group journalism anomie at Newsweek...
...The walls were a blurry greenish gray, the desks a few communal feet from one another, the elevator deeply suspect...
...I told him...
...Part of the job's charm, in retrospect, was that I did not realize how much I was learning...
...Hilton, a long way from the conservative hauteur he later trademarked, was a Mailer enthusiast...
...In the previous issue, he had cast a curse on the cinematic event of the season, Ship of Fools—adapted from Katherine Anne Porter's grand finale of a novel—and "the queue of fools" lined up for tickets to see it...
...intervention in the Dominican Republic, would pronounce the journalist's name "Ted Shell-ack...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
