Editor's Note, Fall 99

Two books by eminent contemporary editors have recently crossed my desk, unfortunately not as review copies, although I had asked their respective publisher's publicity departments to furnish me with same. I don't know if possible mention in an editor's note was deemed not to constitute a "review," but in the new, bottom-line order of the industry many fewer freebies are being given out. Which is unfortunate for reviewers. Like poets making much more on the reading circuit (or, especially, on the prize-winning circuit) than they could ever hope to earn on sales of their books, veteran reviewers could once expect to make a modest living selling their review copies! In pristine condition, of course, for about a quarter of the cover price. Certain "used" bookstores would, then, on occasion, it was said, turn around and sell these copies as new; or, claiming they were "unsold," return them to their publishers for credit.

Having paid full price at my local independent bookstore, I read these volumes with an avidity that only a paying customer (closely identifying with the protagonists) could hope to muster.

I turned first to the autobiographical essays in The Amateur by my transbay colleague Wendy Lesser, who founded The Threepenny Review some 20 years ago--a round of applause for her tenacity, for her sustained discernment! Wendy delights in writing about topics she is not terribly qualified to write about; she claims this is part of her charm as an amateur. She maintains this posture even in areas in which she might be considered an expert, namely, herself and the struggles of her journal. Reticence being so rare these days, I'm reluctant to feel shortchanged by her postcards from the edge: parents split when she's six; father leaves behind stash of sci-fi that hooks her; mother struggles to keep it together in Palo Alto, eventually writing two novels and a bio of Jane Bowles; Benazir Bhutto in Wendy's dorm at Radcliffe; nasty affair, then breakdown, at Cambridge (England); doctoral dissertation signed off at Berkeley by advisor who says it's not good enough if you want to teach at Hopkins, but if you just want out....; career as public policy "consultant" takes shape in Bay Area; at 27, asks editor of San Francisco Review of Books to guest-edit an issue; must raise money to fund her issue, good training for next step: to start her own. "I made a list of about ten possible names for the new magazine on an index card, and from among them I chose The Threepenny Review for its obvious Brechtian overtones, and also because I thought it sounded nice. (A few years ago I again came across that index card: among the other names on it were Washington Square...and Wigan Pier, in honor of George Orwell.) I decided that the magazine would appear in tabloid format because that was the only form I knew how to paste up...."

It was also the format of The New York Review of Books, and the format cheapest to produce. Of her passion, Wendy is similarly ingenuous: "I love the actual process of editing: taking a piece of writing that is almost there and making it come clear, like a photographic image submerged in developer." This analogy is attractive, but misinformed: Wendy may enjoy midwifery, making a silk purse from a sow's ear, but a manuscript exists in a way a negative does not: it can be published as is. And a manuscript remains in play, through however many drafts, versions, translations, adaptations, up to and including the reader's "creation of the text." Wendy does write persuasively about her relationship with Thom Gunn, and about the joys of being understaffed: stuffing envelopes can be performed like a mind-clearing mantra and, in any case, sure beats sitting through a meeting of the English department.

When I was doing PR at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in 1980, I was delighted to see Threepenny come along, and I quickly invited Wendy to come see if she could find some of the museum's images to use in her journal; she could not.

Early on, ZYZZYVA challenged Threepenny in softball, just as when I worked at Newsweek I challenged my old friend Jose Ferrer to put together a team from Time--he had Donald Barthelme's future wife on the mound. Only one play from that long-ago sunny afternoon in Berkeley's Tilden Park sticks in my memory. I was playing second, man on first, no outs, lazy grounder to short. The shortstop fields the ball cleanly and tosses it to me in ample time for the putout, but not in time for me to risk a throw to first. The (rather slow) runner, however, Robert Pinsky, out by a million miles, decides to make the textbook play (to break up the double play) and crash into me. Perhaps I'd been a fool to decide unilaterally that the play was over; in any case, I was so shocked--I was just standing there in the general vicinity of the bag, and it was, after all, a pickup game--that I merely called him a jerk. I wish now that I'd retaliated, just as I wish, one day in the late seventies, when a bearded, balding tourist (John Erlichman, the Nixon henchman) asked me for directions to Chinatown, standing on the corner of Grant & Bush, with his back to the very gates of his destination, I'd sent him on a wild goosechase, all the way to hell and gone.

In late '87, an L.A. Times stringer came by to do a story on the rivalry of two Bay Area litmags. I told him Wendy and I were hardly rivals, she being much more academic and traditional--she actually publishes "reviews." And her model's the NYRB, while in my dreams I'm editing Shawn's New Yorker. (This was before my demotic epiphany when I realized that my greatest pleasure--and only possible utility--was to publish new and emerging writers, those who needed me more than I needed them.) In the event, Wendy got her picture on the front page of the arts section, and I had to settle for an inside shot, but at least an old girlfriend was inspired to call and say hello.

In '91, I submitted a "table talk" piece to Wendy; I observed that whereas the leadership of certain fields--dance, theater, fashion, interior design--had been decimated by AIDS, the literary community, at least its household names, had so far been spared. Wendy rejected it.

I've never met Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster celeb/editor and author of Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, a must-read account of The Life--beautifully observed set pieces on publishing history, in-house politics, and the charms of working with Famous Authors. However, I had, apparently, met his stunning second wife a few years before he did, on the beach at Amagansett, on the blanket of Galen Williams, founder of Poets & Writers. I was with Maggie Paley, whom I'd met at an underground filmmaker's--Maggie was wearing a Betsey Johnson football-jersey dress; her date was George Plimpton. The filmmaker was projecting the image of a woman taking off her clothes onto that same woman wearing a white shift, which served as a screen. Those were innocent days.

In which Maggie seemed to specialize in working for magazines that were destined to fold; she was kind enough to commission a couple of articles from me when I was struggling as a freelancer. In turn, I included her in my posse, along with a struggling photographer, Jill Krementz, who later married Kurt Vonnegut, and Sarah Wilson--at one of her parties when she was living with Tomi Ungerer, I met John Updike; Jill took a picture of us comparing our noses in profile. Anyway, Maggie has a new book out from Grove, The Book of the Penis. Its cover features a hinged fig leaf, which, when lifted, reveals the nice marble set of Michelangelo's David.