While the City Slept

...More often than not of late, it is a memoir, by the likes of Hope Hale Davis (Great Day Coming) or Carolyn Heilbrun (When Men Were the Only Models We Had) or Joseph Lelyveld (Omaha Blues...

...Then it was back to tapping on the keys until another piece was finished, ready for close reading by Dean Valentine or Ben Yagoda, the assistant editors for much of the time I was doing the columns, before it got to Mike himself...

...indeed, I had been singled out as someone who would manage to find academic employment even so...

...There was something about the magazine, from the soberness of its physical premises to the alarmingly late hours that its small staff kept, that suggested important work was being done...

...This was fairly often, leading me at various times to take the LSATs in contemplation of law school, or to send away for applications to doctorate programs in clinical psychology...

...Perhaps most important of all, though, was the fact that the NL, inits own ornery yet nurturing way, addressed my beginning writer's need to feel I belonged to an ongoing tradition of cultural discourse...

...With the passing of each hour I tended to assume a more relaxed position, sometimes moving from the couch a few stairs up to my bed, where I could feel more entwined with the material...

...It was at one of those dinners that Mike succeeded in luring me back to the magazine to write its "On Screen" column after an absence of a few years when 1 departed for what I took to be greener—certainly more frequented—pastures...

...There was also my discovery of a melancholy, heroin-addicted writer named Anna Kavan, not to mention the occasional divertissement, such as Bruce Jay Friedman's The Lonely Guy's Book of Life or Joseph Heller's Good as Gold...

...As the afternoon ebbed into evening, I lost myself to the sublime pleasure of readerly absorption, underlining phrases I liked, scribbling notes in the margins and inside the covers, conducting an unheard conversation with the voices in my head...

...The New Leader was either serenely above the notice of the madding crowd who gulped up the latest issues of the New Yorker and Harper's, or quaintly below...

...Although I may often have harbored a message-in-a-bottle feeling about my columns, wondering whether anyone read them other than my parents and the New York Times editors who had once worked at or written for the magazine, 1 was buoyed by Mike's belief in me and my abilities...

...I worked at a Smith-Corona typewriter set on a small white desk that stood inches from the floral couch...

...Still, I found the business of getting down to the work at hand a never-ending battle, helped along by music, coffee and the thought of Mike's grim voice the next day on the phone, demanding to know where my piece was...

...You didn't feel you were being subtly shaped to conform to some pre-existing model, the better to express this or that house edict or received wisdom...

...I willy-nilly picked up some of the prevailing editorial obsessions, including an aversion to certain words for no particular reason I could think of and a perfectionist avoidance of repetitions, even tiny insignificant ones, that bordered on the insane...

...minor novels by Angus Wilson and Morris Philipson as well as important ones by Nadine Gordimer (Burger's Daughter), A.S...

...I was 23 when I started writing for The New Leader, and over the next almost three decades I have never managed to cut the umbilical cord completely...

...Those were precomputer days, and they had their own peculiar advantages: 1 loved painting on the white correcting fluid with the tiny brush that came inside the bottle, then sitting back and waiting for the liquid to dry, sometimes blowing on it to speed up the process but mostly preferring to stretch out the reprieve this exercise granted for as long as possible...

...With the news of The New Leader's demise comes a sense of other endings, a kind of narrowing of the circle, a shift in the cultural tone toward something both more frivolous and frantic...

...I know only that I will miss The New Leader and that life will go on—because life always goes on, while elsewhere Icarus falls into the sea, someone important to someone gasps their last, and a magazine that one thought would go on forever calls it a day...

...I balked at going to the office to actually hand in my pieces or check out the latest merchandise, but more often than not felt better after I had made the trip...

...The NL was open to young writers in a way I had not experienced at some of the other publications I had written for...

...The magazine spoke to my own contrarian sensibility, to my feeling of being swamped by fashionable opinions and glitzy ideas emanating from both sides of the political spectrum, rather than honest deliberation or thoughtful prose...

...The texture of critical discourse seems to have thinned out, caught between the insular polemics of the academy and the uncrafted postings of the blogosphere...

...When I was especially out of sorts or simply to catch up, there were invitations to dinner at an excellent little restaurant nearby...

...The New Leader was not a publication I had seen around the house growing up, nor did I know anyone who read it...

...I attribute what degree of professionalism I have about the daily-grind necessity of producing words on a page (or, as has come to pass, a computer screen) to that early regimen of pounding out a regular column whether I wanted to or not, whether the muse came naturally or was coerced into appearing...

...Once he has decided to bring you into his fold, it is difficult— no, impossible—simply to flap your wings and fly away, hoping not to be missed among the others of his brood...

...I started, stopped, wiped out whole sentences—whole paragraphs—with bottles of Liquid Paper and Wite-Out...

...For another, I had always been attracted to the overlooked and undervalued, whether in writing or in people, and The New Leader qualified on both counts...

...Or he would report putting aside a bunch of disparate books that might somehow or other work together to make for a good column...

...Or so I tried to reassure myself whenever I faltered in my conviction about what I had chosen to spend my time doing...

...While the crosstown buses roared along the street and the other twentysomethings who lived in my building were busy visibly aspiring to becoming tycoons or Indian chiefs out there inthevastandmerciless world, I was engaged in an activity invisible to others but of no less (and perhaps even greater) value...

...I wasn't quite sure, but I knew it sailed under its own steam...

...As it happened, I had heard mention of it in passing because one of Mike's two sons was a close friend of one of my brothers...

...But Mike Kolatch, as those who have written for him know, does not easily yield to a Bartleby-like "I would prefer not to" response from those he has fixed his determined eye upon...

...it was serious without being pompous and intellectually engaged without carrying the weight of the ideological agenda that characterized, for example, the cultural pages of Commentary and the Nation...

...For one thing, I had never been convinced that the anointed, obviously influential tastemakers or journalists were the best ones...

...Pritchett...

...Mike would call to tell me of a book that had just come into the offices at 212 Fifth and looked promising or had been buzzed about...

...It was constructed of a dubious material somewhere between plastic and cardboard and had been bought at Conran's together with matching white bookcases you had to assemble yourself (or, in my case, inveigle a handy boyfriend into assembling...

...Forster...

...This is not to say I haven't tried, but out of some combination of guilt and affection, I have seen fit to respond when Mike calls, beckons, shouts, demands—whatever it is he does to get me to show up in the NL's pages...

...Far preferable, in my opinion, to look back in plangent silence than to try and put a garland of words on a leave-taking that, however long in coming, has all the same induced a mood of mourning...

...If one adds to this my never having been good at endings—I tend to bow out without saying goodbye—it should be clear why my natural instinct was to absent myself from this final issue of a magazine that in many ways was my first literary home, a place that fostered my budding writerly self as no other ever would again...

...I can still feel the heft of that Knopf volume on my lap, all 784 pages of it, can still recall its irritatingly small type and my surprise at Bowen's range and the muscularity of her prose...

...I would usually read on the couch—a castoff from my parents' summer house that I had recov ered in a hideous floral pattern—in the tiny living-room-cumoffice of my dark and much burglarized apartment on East 79th Street...

...So here I am, writing at the ninth hour and with a degree of reluctance, as has been true of so many of the pieces I have done for this magazine...

...My best hours in those years were after midnight, when the city slept and the phone rarely rang...

...Maybe, and maybe not...

...And yet barely any time passed before I found myself—notwithstanding the fast-moving, visually-oriented, noisy age I lived in—back where I felt best: communing silently and unathletically with books, page after page of unrelieved print that demanded my close attention...

...I had published a clutch of book reviews in Commentary after graduating from college, but soon became disenchanted by the editors' insistence on putting politics into every frail vessel of a book or a film that came along...

...While others chased after money or glamour or the more conventional rewards of the legal and medical professions, I was pursuing something harder to describe, something Diana Trilling would characterize in her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, as "the life of significant contention...

...It began with my securing an assignment to review the first volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries ("A Writer Talking to Herself," December 5,1977), and eventually went on to include a catholic range of the latest fiction and nonfiction: John Updike, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion...

...I abandoned my abiding interest in modernism and my much researched thesis linking Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin because I feared the negative fantasy in my head, and its accompanying specter of being marooned among footnotes, drying up like a prune in some cubicle of Butler Library...

...To be sure, the sense of nostalgia I refer to is partly for my own enterprising youth, for a period during my mid-20s when I passed whole afternoons reading, say, The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, in preparation for my next overdue "Writers & Writing" column ("Virile Refinement," March 23,1981...

...Since giving up the movie slot, I have remained an occasional book reviewer...

...It was on account of precisely these anxieties, after all, that I had fled graduate studies in literature at Columbia...

...Along the way, I learned to write cleaner prose and more polished segues...

...I was immediately drawn to its unclamorous presentation, the way its unadulterated text-oriented black-and-white graphic style refused to vie for attention with the audience-conscious glossies, yet also separated itself out from self-consciously "little" magazines...

...Writers are always looking for an echo, for a sense that they are being heard by significant others...

...One of my secret fears since girlhood was of turning into the stereotyped image of a female bookworm...

...He was persistent where I wavered, refusing to let me off the hook when I pleaded exhaustion or malaise, fueling my erratic writerly resolve with his inimitable combination of coaxing and bullying...

...There were other factors too...

...I think he meant to suggest it is intrinsic to human nature to imagine things were better before and are worse now...

...I may not have been conversant with the ins and outs of its past, but I knew it had hosted a remarkable number of talented critics over the years...

...the letters of Gustave Flaubert and of F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...a biography of E.M...

...I did not leave the program and the inbred universe of Hamilton Hall as others did, because I feared the reality of a dispirited job market...

...Wite-Out Nights While the City Slept By Daphne Merkin WHEN I LOOK BACK at the years I wrote for TheNew Leader as first a book critic and then a movie critic—from 1977 through 1986, with a hiatus of two and a half years—I feel a rush of nostalgia (tempered only by the memory of payment so small as to verge on unremunerated labor) that is almost painful to contemplate...

...And, to be perfectly honest, there was something about the magazine's very lack of popularity, its deficient glitz factor, that appealed to me without my being able to articulate exactly why...

...Thanks to a new connection with a slim, resolutely unjazzy, largely unsung publication I had barely been aware of before I started contributing to it, I set up a graduate program of my own...

...Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden) and Leslie Epstein (King of the Jews...

...essays by VS...

...I held it like a cautionary, self-flagellating threat over my own irrevocably bookish proclivities: I envisioned myself ending up a sad spinster, a frequenter of library stacks, bespectacled, indifferently dressed, exuding no sign of an exciting inner life much less a sexual one, caught up in vaporish communion with bards of the glorious past like John Keats and William Wordsworth...

...Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (he sent me a letter in response to my review, conceding that I wrote well "for a girl...

...Unlike so many other NL contributors, I had come to the magazine blind— with absolutely no idea of its history or its glittering intellectual lineage...

...I guess you could say I feel I owe the place some kind of fealty— despite its pay not improving beyond the "tangible token of our appreciation" range—in return for having prodded me forward on a path of stick-to-it-iveness I might not have taken otherwise...

...the diaries of Quentin Crisp and Smile, Please, the unfinished autobiography of Jean Rhys...

...It was, on the other hand, that inveterately nostalgic creature, Marcel Proust, who observed that all paradises are lost paradises...

...I only took proper note of it for the first time when I saw it in Milbank Library at Barnard, amid a bevy of more familiar weeklies and monthlies...

...The nostalgia I alluded to at the beginning of this piece is not merely personal, however...

...By contrast, The New Leader struck me as intriguingly unpredictable...