'New Leader' Days
Epstein, Joseph
'New Leader5 Days Can you have a political magazine without politics? By Joseph Epstein Sometime earlier this year the New Leader magazine, after 82 years in business, ceased publication. Not all...
...and the magazine kept the pressure on in separate pamphlet studies of the Soviet doctors' plot, show trials, Khrushchev's "secret speech," and a great deal more...
...his being able to do so has perhaps been all the more remarkable in that he curried no favor from anyone, anywhere...
...Noel Coward, arriving at a party in a lounge suit when everyone else was in white tie and tails, is supposed to have said, "Please, I don't want anyone to apologize for overdressing...
...I once heard him say that anyone who didn't love Bernard Malamud's novel A New Life could not possibly be his friend—a remark emblematic of how much culture and ideas seemed to matter to intellectuals in those days...
...Not Eliot but his secretary wrote back on exquisite light blue stationery, saying that Mr...
...maybe he never read himself, at least in my version...
...Voting for a Republican, for anything, was more than I, otherwise not an unimaginative person, could conceive...
...But I hadn't overdressed...
...The rhythms of the news were not my rhythms...
...Now that the magazine is gone, I suppose the best I can say is that I shall miss not missing it...
...Kolatch once asked him if every piece of art criticism had to contain the word oeuvre...
...I found myself immensely impressed by the seriousness and usefulness of it...
...After the pleasure of first publication began to wear off, I wondered about what I would be paid for the article...
...Not all that many people could have known of the magazine during its existence...
...Levitas that they, too, must find time for a vacation...
...Kolatch was a smallish man, with a serious mustache, a pipe-smoker, tidy of mien and mind, who in those days jokingly called people, in his New York accent, "Doc-tah...
...The offices of labor union agents were on another floor...
...Oh," he said, "I introduced her to Phil, a horny friend of mine...
...New York, New York, if you could make it there, etc., etc...
...I remember his telling me that he had run into Pauline Kael one evening, who told him that she disagreed strongly with his review about some movie or other but she much admired the style in which it was written...
...He easily defeated Russell...
...Hilton had a laugh that I loved to be able to evoke...
...Detached amusement was his general tone...
...One of our specialties was coming up with absurd titles of our own, a contest Diane won going away one morning by giving the title "Days of Whine and Neuroses" to a review of a complaining memoir about growing up in India...
...Levitas's death, risen to be the magazine's executive editor...
...He gave off the aura of being unsurprisable...
...Levitas's kind invitation...
...Ellison's response was a whiplash blast at Howe for his effrontery in telling another man what opinions he ought to have and how he should express them and, ultimately, what kind of writer he needs to be...
...Not long after I first became aware of the magazine, I acquired, from the Little Rock library, a copy of one of its special issues, "Jews in the Soviet Union...
...I owe to the New Leader two things: first, a small skill for working with other people's writing, which, perhaps, helped me in shaping my own prose style...
...After three or four weeks, a few contributor's copies arrived, but no check...
...The New Leader shows it can indeed be done, so long as you don't expect many people to read it...
...He must of course have been much more than that...
...He once told me about Roditi, a homosexual who was under pressure to leave France during the Algerian war because he was living with an Algerian boy, that Roditi's cancer was the only subject upon which Roditi was less than fully candid with him...
...I brought in a few new writers, though none whose presence greatly altered the tone or general direction of the magazine...
...Lev-itas's time, had a column that required heavy reworking, sometimes near total rewriting...
...Levitas will soon be in London and he wonders if Eliot and Mrs...
...The translator of an about-to-be-published book of Israeli stories, Joel knew Isaac Bashevis Singer, just then ascending to his fame, and it was at his apartment that I first met Singer...
...He could be hard on women, and yet otherwise he had an odd sort of refinement, wore expensive clothes, had some of the mustache-and-small-spectacles elegance of S.J...
...He was able to garner, after all, the support of such men as Sidney Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr, Hugh Gaitskell and Walter Reuther, all of whom wrote for him...
...Many of the magazine's contributors in those days were European emigres who had not yet mastered English...
...Bohn never complained...
...I do know someone," Hilton said...
...most things came in over the transom, with others commissioned for altogether too obvious reasons: the dull piece on midterm elections from the dullish man who was then CBS's White House correspondent, the bundle of articles reporting on youth around the world by an Indian who wrote for the Christian Science Monitor and other regular contributors, the usual Sovietological extrapolations caused by the absence of some Politburo member from the photograph taken at the most recent Communist party congress (interesting that no Sovietologist came close to calling the demise of the Soviet Union...
...So I wrote to the editor, a man named S.M...
...Not to be was, somehow, to seem a touch callow, as if fearful about exploring one's inner yearnings, terrors, repressions...
...I frequently edited Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian whose name still had intellectual cachet and who continued writing for the New Leader probably long after he had much to say...
...The pay was low, even for those days—$6,000 a year—but the benefits nonexistent...
...I say "for all I know" because on those occasions when I saw a copy, scanning its contents and contributors' names, I found myself easily able to resist buying it...
...He had a New England accent, and a comic vision of the world...
...Howe replied, wanly, and Ellison, replying to the reply, body-slammed Howe onto the mat once again...
...When the rest of the world didn't want to hear about it, he and the contributors to the New Leader kept reminding that portion of the world prepared to listen that the Soviet Union was one large prison...
...Stanley's specialty was literary theory avant la lettre, which he used chiefly to show how other critics became ensnared in the presuppositions of their own methods...
...If that ad were to have been re-run later, it could not have said that Joseph Epstein reads it, because for more than 40 years I scarcely glimpsed it...
...Mike Kolatch's idea, then, was to run a magazine that was liberal (in the older, civilized meaning of the term), centrist, and educational in the sense of setting out the great political questions and issues of the day without a strong political parti pris...
...and, second, certain knowledge that I had no deep interest in the intricacies of foreign policy...
...in comparative literature at Harvard, the student of Harry Levin, John had a heavy armor of learning...
...On the ground floor was the Tamiment Institute, a foundation brought into being (I believe) by the ILGW and other clothing workers' unions...
...I have just reread it, and it strikes me as in the category I think of as sensitive-pretentious, and rather cheaply moralistic, with ornate vocabulary thrown in at no extra charge: "Gallimaufry," "blague," and "panjandrum" were among the words I used...
...Instead he often curried rage with the harshness of his own unmediated opinions...
...Diane in those days was, through marriage to the scion of an enormously successful construction company, a poor little rich girl, but a highly intelligent version of the species...
...and "shameless," always accompanied by a sly smile, he used even more...
...The novelty singer Chubby Checker was then in his brief heyday, and, Niebuhr's raw copy on my desk, I would sometime rise, and, going into a brief dance, sing a few lines of "Come on Reinie, let's do the twist...
...He was married to Shirley Jackson, famous in those days for her macabre story "The Lottery," about a village stoning...
...I must have been the only soldier who went off on bivouac with copies of Partisan Review and Dissent in his backpack in the icy November of 1958 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri...
...As I recall, John concluded his first movie review for the magazine, on David and Lisa, which was about two emotionally disturbed adolescents, by suggesting that perhaps the Lacedaemonians (not your mere Spartans) were probably correct in their practice of burying the deformed soon after birth...
...His reviews were the most read item in the magazine...
...Surely it couldn't be less than $100—and then I began to imagine it as much more, up around $500, maybe an even thousand...
...I asked...
...He once reviewed a film with segments by six directors from different countries, each segment in a different language, and remarked on the quality of the subtitles of all but the one in Japanese, a language he allowed—owing to a busy schedule, one gathers—he had never learned...
...without freedom, he declared, better dead than red—better to be a dead lion than a live jackal...
...Eliot was on holiday just now and thus wouldn't be able to accept Mr...
...or the editor of Field & Stream saying that he doesn't get out-of-doors all that much...
...The question that the recent history of the New Leader poses is, Can you run a political magazine without having firm political beliefs, demonstrating political passion, and taking clear positions...
...Eliot could "break bread" (quotation marks around the cliche supplied by Levitas) with him and his wife...
...Stanley wrote brief book notes for the New Yorker and taught at Bennington...
...The general appearance of the magazine was revamped in 1961 by a gifted designer named Herb Lubalin, who changed its typeface to Times Roman, pitched out dreary photographs in favor of line drawings, and added lots of elegant—if slightly funereal—thick black lines above the titles of articles and reviews...
...Levitas, telling him (a lie, of course) that the mailboxes in the building I was living in had been broken into, and I wondered if perhaps his check for my article "A Stillness at Little Rock" had been stolen...
...I'm essentially an apolitical person," Kolatch said in that interview...
...Stanley Edgar Hyman, who was at the top of the second echelon of critics during what has been called the Age of Criticism, wrote the lead book review in each issue...
...With a bit of sprucing up here and there, it retained this look till its dying day...
...After reading an essay of Irving Howe's about how Ralph Ellison and other black (then Negro) writers ought to be more out in the open with their protests about racial injustice in America, Kolatch got in touch with Ellison to invite him to respond in the pages of the New Leader...
...Some of the magazine's English contributors—a then young Labour MP named David Marquand comes to mind—would send in pieces written in longhand on yellow foolscap that didn't need a word or comma changed...
...His column presented what I thought of as "a typewriter job," in which one put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter and rewrote from scratch...
...I wasn't sure what to expect when I arrived at the New Leader's office at 7 East 15th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Union Square...
...Yep, a year...
...I discovered it in a tobacco store on Main Street in Little Rock that sold out-of-town newspapers and foreign magazines, including the London Spectator...
...Editors were said to enter his office demanding a raise, and depart with no raise but a review copy of an unreadable novel...
...Not an easy thing to do at any time...
...To which Levitas, now presuming on an old acquaintanceship, wrote to say that there was nothing finer than a lengthy holiday....Finally, there is a letter from Levitas to Eliot in which he announces that he and Mrs...
...my wife was pregnant with our second child...
...Not long before, I had read a collection of Sidney Hook's essays, Political Power and Personal Freedom, which turned me away from ever thinking that communism was anything but a menace to those upon whom it was visited...
...A young woman who came in part time, chiefly to proofread and do odd editorial jobs, was Diane Ravitch...
...I myself began to think about looking for a new job...
...While working there, I was never asked to write for the magazine...
...The one exciting piece I recall from my days there was initiated by Mike Kolatch...
...I did not, I regret to say, have a triumphant comeback...
...The New Leader does not pay its contributors...
...The logo—small n, capital L—was in white surrounded by a black box...
...And I felt I couldn't let the opportunity pass...
...in this I resembled the man who complains about every synagogue he's ever been in, and when asked his own affiliation, replies, "Unobserving Orthodox...
...The New Leader's art critic was Hilton Kramer, whose name I first encountered in Commentary, where he wrote a no-hostages-taken review-essay of James Thurber's The Years with Ross...
...I'm not sure exactly how long I remained at the New Leader, but I was mentally no longer fully there when, sometime after the conclusion of my first year, the editor called me in to say that he appreciated all my efforts, adding that without my help he couldn't have brought the magazine out...
...I began shopping myself around as an editor at other magazines, with a textbook publisher in Chicago, at NBC television news...
...In those years, if one had intellectual or artistic ambitions, Manhattan was thought the only true testing ground for them...
...Eliot's secretary replied by saying that Mr...
...Reading this "Report by the Editors," I recall thinking how pleased I was to be, in my small way as a onetime contributor, connected with the New Leader...
...Dwight Macdonald, a writer I then much admired, wrote a letter to the editor calling one of William Bohn's columns—a column I completely rewrote—a small classic...
...Tall, speaking careful English with a slight Mittel-Europeanish accent, John had determined to earn his living writing criticism...
...I was beguiled by the grandeur of some of the names I discovered in its pages...
...But for a man who has edited a political magazine for more than 40 years to say that he is "essentially apolitical" seems striking...
...Writers on such abstract subjects as arms control, Sovietology, and foreign policy were not much interested in lilting prose style...
...I had learned of the New Leader only a few months before I sent off my article...
...Eliot was still on holiday and would perhaps answer this letter upon his return...
...Adult clothes were still the order of the day, and I came to work that first day in a blue suit, white button-down collar shirt, rep (as they used to be called) tie...
...Eliot may have officially been an anti-Semite, but he was, from all reports, a kind man, and he and Levitas must indeed have broken bread...
...He thanked me for the praise and suggested that, to arrive at his customary fee, I attempt fund-raising...
...I thought of myself as vaguely socialist, if still anti-Communist, a man interested in social justice without any particular plan on how to acquire it, an automatic (if not very happy) Democratic voter...
...My own role on the New Leader was distinctly minor...
...Al taught at the School of General Studies at Columbia, which he called "working the lounge at Columbia...
...After editing his own magazine, Arts, Hilton had been freelancing, writing reviews for the Nation and the Progressive, and other places where the checks for contributors were written in longhand and tended to be in the low or middle two figures...
...Oh, my dear," he told me he replied, "I had no idea that you were in the least interested in style...
...Boris Nicolaevsky, the Sovietologist, wrote, as I recall, rather Pninistic English, which needed to be put on a gurney and sent into the operating room...
...I once wrote to Dwight Macdonald, praising him and suggesting he write something—I don't remember what—for the magazine, apologizing for the smallness of the fee we could offer...
...I can't stand ideologies...
...My two fellow editors, Mike Kolatch and Joel Blocker, were also besuited...
...My own politics in those days were what I would now call a lazy leftism...
...She was one of eight children of the family of a Houston liquor-store owner...
...was a word he used a great deal...
...The year was 1959, I was in the Army, an enlisted man typing up physicals in a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas...
...Scandalous...
...The tag line in a full-page ad that it once ran in the New York Times Book Review seeking new subscribers, as I remember it, was "Habitual coupon clippers please don't clip this one...
...There was no place to go at the New Leader, and he didn't think the magazine was likely to go any place either...
...He ran a magazine that for many years was the most persistently courageous voice of the anti-Stalinist left in America and maybe in the non-Communist world—and he did it with little in the way of financial backing...
...Roughly a year later, owing to domestic complications, I returned to Little Rock, where I worked in an urban renewal agency and then as the director of the Pulaski County antipoverty program...
...He wore three-piece brown suits and used a gold cigar cutter...
...As I remember it, the correspondence between the famous poet and the Menshevik editor began with a letter from Levitas inviting Eliot to review some entirely inappropriate book...
...Good at school, she went off to Wellesley, where she complicated her life by becoming interested in intellectual things...
...Funny, I seem never to have realized the obvious point that "the truth has no price tag...
...I was then 24, married, and had a child...
...He may or may not have suggested another inappropriate book for review...
...The first article I published was in the New Leader...
...He had had a stroke, and one of its effects was to cause him much of the time to forget that a typewriter has a space bar...
...This was my biggest thrill in copyediting...
...John F. Kennedy was president of the United States when I was at the New Leader, and my own view of him was that he was a business-as-usual politician, perhaps a bit better tailored and more carefully managed than most others, but not much more: weak on doing anything about civil rights in the South and not notably courageous in taking unpopular positions generally...
...Tamiment ran a summer camp in the Poconos and was also one of the New Leader's chief financial backers...
...I wanted to be a writer, but realized that I had all the equipment for the job except for subjects to write about, and so searched out editing jobs...
...It made for superior intellectual journalism...
...Most of the great names on the anti-Stalinist left at one time or another wrote for him...
...there was nothing seductive about its typeface or layout...
...But my brief adventures there, I have always known, were of considerable significance, to me if not at all to the rest of the world...
...Al hungered for more than academic success, and went on to write biographies of Lenny Bruce, Elvis Presley, and John Lennon (in response to the last, Elton John called him "human vermin," a fine blurb, I've always thought...
...Distinctly not, this, my idea of a swell time, but nonetheless amusing to hear about in John's recountings...
...Levitas wrote back to inform me that I was a young man and thus, as I recall his phrasing, "unaware that the truth has no price tag...
...He once told of a woman who confessed that she slept with every man she ever went out with and then felt degraded afterwards...
...After my discharge from the Army, I returned to Chicago...
...Joel Blocker, a fellow University of Chicago graduate, was darkly good looking, a Brooklynite, a man passionate about culture...
...The magazine, true enough, apart from occasionally interesting criticism in its back pages, was pretty dull...
...The ad went on to say that not everyone read the magazine and cited a statistically infinitesimal number of people who did—only the intellectually best people, to be sure...
...Hilton answered he wasn't sure, but could promise that every one of his would...
...John invited me out for a few evenings of what I took to be, for him, normal critical jousting...
...In those days, hers was a good mind that had not yet discovered the right subject to which to apply itself...
...When he did, we all went to lunch with him, and listened to his stories about the legendary figures around the New Yorker...
...I had stayed in touch with Myron Kolatch, the man I had dealt with at the New Leader on my Little Rock article, who had himself, after S.M...
...Inever met S.M...
...Eliot...
...Albert Goldman, the magazine's music critic, based his jumpy, hipster personal and literary style on a combination of jazz and psychoanalytic banter...
...Toward the end of her New Leader days, she found it, through the encouragement of Lawrence Cremin at Columbia Teacher's College, in education, its history and contemporary practice, upon which she has since written with great energy and distinction...
...He had no line, and, apart from a steadfast anti-communism, took few strong positions...
...once the articles left my desk they also left my mind...
...I was even dismayed to learn that, should the need arise, I could not collect unemployment, for the New Leader did not pay the employer's share...
...Let me quickly say that I believe Mike Kolatch...
...John F. Kennedy read it, Hubert Humphrey read it, T.S...
...I learned that the job, if I wanted it, was mine...
...emotionally at any rate, I was out of there...
...In identifying the magazine, I could always say that Bertrand Russell wrote for it...
...He attracted an impressive run of European writers, many of them, like himself, Russian emigres...
...In defense of the New Leader's dullness, it had almost no money to pay its contributors—some professional journalists received $25 or $50 for their contributions —and so it had to print what it was offered or could scare up, after an editorial rinsing, of course...
...On the Friday afternoon that word came into the New Leader office that he had been shot in Dallas, my first thought was, "Hell, we'll have to remake the whole damn magazine...
...Everyone of course hates ideologies, and an ideologue is usually what you call the person who, in a political argument, doesn't agree with you...
...A magazine editor noted for the directness of his views, after gazing down at my resume during a job interview, looked up and said, "I consider anything good in the New Leader is there by accident...
...Levitas must have known that Eliot's was a powerhouse name without knowing much more about him...
...Then, too, the magazine's reason for being, anti-communism, or the defense of freedom vis-a-vis communism, was losing its old motive force as the magazine's central interest: Stalin was dead, the Soviets had been backed down in the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev and the shabby characters who followed him in leading the Soviet Union seemed a good deal less menacing than their precursors...
...I used to imitate various movie stars reading the staid titles on New Leader articles...
...Mostly, I worked on manuscripts, trying to edit them into readability...
...In fact, a very decent man named Richard Gosswiller patiently taught me how to put together and put out a magazine...
...I adored joking with her...
...I had discovered the little magazines and intellectual journals a few years before, while a student at the University of Chicago...
...The result was no T.S...
...In its house ads, the magazine used to carry a blurb from Eliot that went (again, I'm quoting from memory): "Of all the journals that cross my desk, the one I should most sorely miss is the New Leader...
...I still believe this, and continue to find the relentless apotheosis of this politician whose father's money bought him the presidency hard to fathom...
...She now had two sons of her own...
...Levitas replied straightaway by telling Eliot how he envied him his ability to get away, and that he was only the other day saying to Mrs...
...He died in his middle sixties...
...Less than a week later, Mr...
...When there was a contribution from a well-known writer, there was a slight odor of the bottom of the desk drawer about it...
...The obvious reason was that not many of its articles were sought by the editors...
...Diane had a strong streak of common sense, and, what usually goes along with it, an equally strong distaste for nonsense...
...He knew all the strange crew of odd scribblers who attempted to eke out a living writing for the New Leader and other of the intellectual magazines of those days: Edouard Roditi, George Woodcock, Keith Botsford, Edward Sei-densticker, and other intellectuals now entirely forgotten...
...Not many politicians or policies could pass my lofty lefty standard...
...when the camp was sold, much of the money derived from the sale was used to keep the magazine afloat...
...He ended by saying that he encouraged me "to do more writing...
...As a reviewer, he availed himself of all the critical methods: anthropological, mythological, New Critical, Freudian, and the rest...
...He was grateful to me, and he was giving me an $800 raise, and only wished it could have been more...
...Within the New Leader's serious limitations—of money, brilliant contributors, a large readership—the magazine may, for all I know, have accomplished what it set out to do...
...Had he lived longer, he would doubtless have had to add to this triptych of popular culture figures by producing as a fourth panel a book on Michael Jackson...
...Lauren Bacall, for example, saying "Agonizing Opportunity in Southeast Asia...
...After Joel Blocker left the magazine for a job at Newsweek, Mike Kolatch asked Hilton if he knew of anyone who might be interested in a job as an editor at the New Leader...
...That, I have long since confirmed, is not a bad example of how journalists really think...
...The New Leader of those days, even though published on slick paper, was a weekly and impressively drab...
...Although I edited articles about polycentrism in the Communist world, one-party rule in Africa, the activities of Falangists in Spain, revolutionary parties in Peru, debates about the Common Market, and economic trends in the Benelux countries (are there still Benelux countries...
...Levitas, who died before I arrived at the New Leader, and I'm here making him out a clownish figure...
...Every two weeks he sent in a piece that required no editing, fit space requirements perfectly, and was rarely dull—an impressive performance that he kept up for many years...
...Knowing he would be sitting at the desk across the room from me made me look forward to coming to work...
...Between his New Yorker and New Leader jobs, he was said to read a book a day and drink a bottle of booze a night...
...British Labour MPs wrote articles for the magazine...
...only on a socialist magazine was this possible...
...Still, his saying that he "is essentially apolitical" is rather like the editor of Poetrysay-ing, "Poems—take 'em or leave 'em...
...In those days in New York it seemed as if everyone was in psychoanalysis...
...Hilton in those days looked rather like the best of the modernism he has long admired: He was well-turned out, sleek in an understated way, a touch severe (owing to large round spectacles), and wildly witty...
...Many of his sentences read as if they were multiple-choice propositions, permitting an editor to go any one of three different ways with it or eliminate it entirely (none of the above...
...Joel Blocker, he told me, was obviously looking for another job, and he realized that he couldn't any longer rely on him, and so many of Joel's tasks fell to me...
...The phrase "he could have mailed it in," in its current meaning of half-hearted effort, applied to lots that appeared in the magazine during the time that I worked there...
...Two years before, Little Rock had been at the center of the world's attention, when President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to insure the safety of the black children who, by court order, integrated Little Rock's Central High School...
...I wrote a piece on race relations in the city two years later from the standpoint of an outsider...
...Perelman, and required lots of attention at any table or in any room he occupied...
...Eliot read it, and I forget the other rather rarefied names who did...
...On one of its floors the building housed the old Rand School library, filled with books about socialism and the various strains of American radicalism, including the Eugene V. Debs papers...
...I worked as a sub-editor for the New Leader for nearly two years, 1962-63...
...A Ph.D...
...Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...I subsequently learned that Levitas smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and rarely bought any...
...A man then in his middle eighties named William Bohn, who had served as nominal editor during S.M...
...He talked openly about his various therapies, including his group sessions...
...He came in latish every morning, because he was in psychoanalysis...
...He left the New Leader after I did, to become the primary art critic of the New York Times...
...Hook argued that life without freedom such as was offered by communism wasn't worth living...
...An early issue I read carried a debate between Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook over whether, with the possibility of an atomic war hovering over the world, it was better to be Red than Dead...
...A news photograph usually appeared on its cover...
...Eliot reviews or essays but that blurb: "Of all the journals that cross my desk the one I should most sorely miss is the New Leader...
...But the magazine arranged another $1,000 a year for me as copy editor for Labor History, an academic journal published by the Tamiment Institute...
...One quiet day in the office, after I had come to work for the New Leader, I discovered in the files a folder marked T.S...
...A week or two later, over drinks after work, Blocker told me that he was indeed looking for another job, and had been for some time...
...He was in fact a schnorrer extraordinaire, which would have to be part of the job description of anyone running a small intellectual magazine without a generous angel behind it...
...Walter Lacqueur, who has long since become an elegantly efficient writer on contemporary history, in 1962 was not yet confident in his English composition...
...He'd perhaps miss it, I used to think, even if he ever actually read it, which was difficult to imagine...
...I guess I had this naive notion that we had a very intelligent audience that didn't need to be told how to think, how to vote, what to do," Kolatch told the Times...
...Bearded, overweight, a man of great bonhomie, Stanley came into the office only a few times during my days on the magazine...
...I was 22 years old and thrilled to have my article published in a New York magazine, even if no one I knew read or had ever heard of the New Leader...
...Not long after I arrived at the New Leader, John Simon signed on as the movie critic...
...When a vacancy occurred on the editorial staff, I wrote to ask if I might be a candidate for the job...
...The title was turned down as insufficiently serious...
...When I recently told this story to someone, she asked, "You mean $800 a year...
...But the true reason for the dullness of the New Leader I think was revealed in an interview that Mike Kolatch gave to Charles McGrath of the New York Times at the announcement of the magazine's ending publication...
...so did a number of writers whose names I knew from other intellectual magazines...
...Encounter, Commentary, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, these magazines opened up a new world to me, and an entirely new cast of writers—among them Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Robert Warshow, Midge Decter, Isaiah Berlin, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, and a great many others...
...Besides," he said, "Kolatch gave me a lousy thousand-dollar raise, which is pretty damn pathetic...
...But what I did realize from this letter was that Levitas, a former Menshevik who had briefly been vice mayor of Vladivostok, was a man with a fine touch...
...I edited a book he wrote on Thomas De Quincey that demonstrated De Quincey's having plagiarized from Germans...
...That last sentence put fini to my own days at the New Leader...
...Stanley died at 51, his wife at 49...
...How did you react to that...
...The best I could find in Chicago at the time was an assistant editorship on the Kiwanis Magazine, which I, already an inveterate highbrow, condescended to take...
...nor did I step forward to request to do so...
...The magazine, if I remember correctly, was on the third floor...
...I liked Joel, though sensed he was touchy, under pressure of some (to me) mysterious sort...
Vol. 12 • September 2006 • No. 1
