Nobody grows up wanting to be an editor. A writer, yes, even in this unliterate age, but the servant of a writer, never.

I wanted to be an editor from the time I was ten, growing up in the now infamous, Clinton-inhabited suburb of Chappaqua. My father had died, and the man next door, who, as best he could, tried to lessen my terrible loss, was an editor. Ed Kuhn was from an old family in Cincinnati. As a Dartmouth undergraduate, he had walked in the woods with Robert Frost. He had left after his sophomore year to join the Marines—and was trained for the invasion of Japan. In the late forties, he quickly established himself as editor-in-chief of McGraw-Hill’s trade division. His wife, Polly, had gone to Vassar. They were young, handsome, still a couple of years from starting their own family and therefore free to take me on as a protégé. The night before our father’s funeral, they played poker with my brother George and me, letting us win all the matchsticks.

They’d invite me over to an occasional afternoon gathering for an author—I remember trying to help think up a title for a tell-all by ex-Communist Herbert Philbrick. I Led Three Lives was the eventual winner.

Polly and Ed took me to see Dartmouth play Army and then to see the last of the great triple-threats, Princeton’s Dick Kazmaier, who could run, pass, and kick.

When you get to be a junior in college, Ed told me, you can come work for me as a “summer reader.” I had no idea what that would entail, but I wanted to be Ed’s summer reader. All the summers that I caddied and the summer after my freshman year at Amherst, when I worked as a messenger at J. P. Morgan, I assumed I would be Ed’s summer reader after junior year.

When the time finally came, I don’t know—he’d had kids of his own; my family had moved into the city; I had become obnoxious—I asked and he apologized, but he couldn’t take me on.

I wrote a note to the only other publisher I cared about, Grove Press, and, since I was the first to ask for a summer job that year, I got it. I typed up envelopes to send catalogs to college English professors. I helped out in billing. I worked the switchboard at lunch until somebody teased Barney Rosset about not being able to afford a girl—although he had already published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his financial situation was still precarious.

Through that hot summer, the great editor Dick Seaver, who’d had his own Paris review, Merlin, in the early fifties, was visible to me, across the hall, his white shirtsleeves rolled up, his massive forearms seemingly underutilized. He was unapproachable. Fred Jordan, editor of Evergreen Review, gave me two manuscripts to report on; one, if I remember correctly, described the act of masturbation at great length.

Being in the presence of real editors—Alex Trocchi, author of the quintessential junkie screed Cain’s Book, was the only writer I noticed wandering through the office—apparently did not inspire me. My ambition, when I went back to college, was graduate school. I got a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Yale...but, let’s just say, for the moment anyway, fate intervened.

I decided to take a year off. First, I spent the summer working days as a typist for an Israeli rainwear importer and nights at the Doubleday Bookstore on 52nd and Fifth—when Greta Garbo came in, we were instructed not to talk to her unless she asked for help. With $500 in traveler’s checks—it was the age of Europe on $5 a Day—I embarked on a Holland-America liner (and played Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest). I hitchhiked around looking at castles, cathedrals, and museums—my basic training in art history, geopolitics, and modern languages.

I came back from this wanderjahr to start what turned out to be 20 years of more or less success as a wannabe. I taught, made documentary films, wrote for magazines, did a stint as a TV producer and as a carpenter....

Skip ahead, then, to 1982. I was working in the public relations department of Bechtel, a giant construction/engineering firm, allegedly as a speechwriter, but, as far as I could tell, the bigwigs, like Messrs. Bechtel p`ere et fils and George Shultz, never gave speeches. Or at least they didn’t want my help preparing them. So I spent a lot of time trying to look busy.

The proofreader in the department—an older man, Richard Emerson—seemed reasonably literate, and we would have lunch every once in a while in the dreary corporate cafeteria. One day he allowed that he had once put out a literary magazine...in the early fifties, in Columbus, OH.

In Golden Goose, he had published William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferling (he had not yet appended the Italianate “hetti”), Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley.

Olson and Creeley frequently refer to Emerson in their correspondence, at first with enthusiasm, because he has shown an interest in their work: “Emerson has the same concerns/has himself a good grip/good firm line & language,” writes Creeley, encouraging Olson to send Emerson a manuscript. But Emerson doesn’t write enough letters back; he attempts a flat-footed critique of their work; he is too slow in bringing out their work. So they turn against him. “And if that sonofabitch Emerson had PRAISES out,” writes Olson, “I wouldn’t mind so much, for then, anyone interested could put the ORIGIN stuff into proper frame. But with that emerson not having sd a fucking word to me since a telephone conversation before I left Washington—not a word—LOOK: I’m telling you, if that prick throws the book down now, I’ll stay after him the rest of my goddamn life, and no matter how highly I may think of his goddam verse, I’ll beat him and beat him and beat him whenever and wherever I get a chance.” Later, less paranoid, Olson acknowledges: “yet—and this will kill you—what shakes out, for me, is, still three: that is, still emerson seems to be, ahead of, theze others NOW (how abt that? and hold everything, don’t throw, i’m ducking, lad).”

Emerson moved out to San Francisco around 1956, like a lot of other people, to make the scene. But he was married and had to get a job, and he quickly fell out of touch with the literary world.
In any case, he inspired me. I thought that maybe we could do something like Golden Goose in house, because there was the Bechtel chorale, and the microcomputer club, and the travel club, and I figured, well, we all had salaries, we had fancy Wang word processors, we had Xeroxes, we could do this. And it would be fun, there would be a bunch of us, and it would be redeeming. It would make up for the horrible work we were having to do.

But Emerson didn’t really want to; he had done it long ago, and he wasn’t into it anymore. And, although there was another poet in our department and a guy who wrote art reviews working in Pipeline, but there wasn’t really a critical mass inside the corporation. (Anne Lamott had once proofread nuclear safety analysis reports at Bechtel, as I did, but she had long since moved on.)

Then somebody mentioned a guy at Bank of America who was in P.R. and wrote poetry, and somebody else mentioned a lawyer who wrote mysteries, and I thought we had a chance if we expanded our purview to “downtown.” So I kept talking to people. Eventually, I decided to do some market research: I looked around and saw that there wasn’t anything being published at Stanford or Berkeley, places where you would expect to find a good literary magazine like the ones in the East. Or the South. Or the Midwest.

Then I was laid off. I worked as a cook in a Danish restaurant. I wrote blurbs for an ophthalmologists’ marketing campaign. Then I was hired back at Bechtel as a technical editor. I also started writing for Architectural Digest—the editor of Art in America, whom I had recently done a couple of pieces for, had recommended me. So I got used to seeing my byline again and I also got paid a lot of money for mini-profile/interviews that were relatively easy to do. And since AD was the hot “shelter” book, I had a sense that people actually saw what I was writing.

As a technical editor, I would work with writers (actually, they were engineers) and not only proofread their stuff, but actually put together brochures and pamphlets. I would work with designers and typesetters, the whole process. So I moved beyond just being a writer to being an editor and, in fact, a publisher. Plus, I was continuing to talk to everyone I could (outside the office) about the magazine.

Eventually, we had a meeting with about 30 people who had agreed to put in $200 apiece, and they said, yes, let’s do it!

As luck would have it, I was laid off at Bechtel again. My boss said, well, we’ve never laid people off before; we’ve always believed in keeping our workforce on hand for the next big project, but there are no new nuclear power projects coming online, so why don’t you keep coming into the office and use the phone and try to find another job. I felt I could never find another job; no one would ever hire me for a job I would want to have; my best shot would be to start my magazine. So the first three months of ZYZZYVA were funded, inadvertently, by Bechtel.