Lucking Out Read online

  [Mailer turns his chair away from us and to the audience.]

  Mailer: Are you all really, truly idiots or is it me?

  [A chorus replies, “You!” Then, applause.]

  Cavett: Oh, that was the easy answer.

  (Forgotten today is that one of the Cavett show’s most frisson-y highlights belonged to Flanner, who, after describing how the dancer Isadora Duncan died when her scarf got tangled in the wheels of a car, noted, “She was nearly decapitated”—producing an audible intake of breath from the audience.)

  Riveted by the most lacerating exchanges of rancor since the Gore Vidal–William F. Buckley skate-off at the convulsive 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (where, as one of the ABC News commentators, Buckley, making a fist, snarled, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered,” and Vidal didn’t even flinch), I decided to write about the show for Frostburg’s student paper, the State-to-Date. I analyzed the verbal punches and bristling subtext much as Mailer would cover a prizefight or a gunslingers’ duel, as if he were wired into the opponents’ nervous systems, their jabs the extensions of his own perceptions. Decoding comments that in the original context sounded cryptic and were (as when Mailer disapprovingly alluded to Vidal’s revealing in his nonfiction novel Two Sisters—excerpted in the Partisan Review—that he had sex with the Beat novelist and lumberjack bodhisattva Jack Kerouac), I reconstructed the evening as if it were a clash of two storm fronts within whose black clouds the motives were buried. The piece was called “O.K. Corral Revisited,” and why the State-to-Date thought a meditation on an episode of The Dick Cavett Show by a sophomore was worth publishing across an entire page wasn’t entirely apparent then, but there it was, my first appearance in college print, and I thought, Why not send a copy to Mailer? He had gotten such a drubbing for his boorishness that I thought he might appreciate someone who was tuned in to his broadcast frequency covering the verbal fisticuffs. I looked up an address for Mailer in the college library’s edition of Who’s Who and sent off a copy of State-to-Date, not sure if the issue would even reach him and expecting nothing in return.

  Here is what I received.

  “I think you have a career,” Mailer’s letter began, and external noise washed away, as if my brain needed to be rid of sound to take in what it was reading. It was so clear-cut, what he was saying, that I couldn’t from that moment imagine my future heading any other way. Mailer went on to compliment me for peeling back the tense skin of Cavett’s show and perceiving the blood currents and nerve wiring underlying the animosity between him and Vidal; and for noting the significance of his allusion to Vidal’s outing of Jack Kerouac in an excerpt from Two Sisters that had been published in Partisan Review, and his shooting down of Vidal’s echoing of Degas’s rebuke of Whistler—“I’m going to give you a line that Degas said to Whistler—two celebrated painters—and Whistler was a great performer like Norman, and Degas said, ‘You know, Whistler, you act as if you had no talent’ ”—by snapping, “Come on, I read that quote the same place you did, in Edmund Wilson’s answer to Nabokov in this Sunday’s Times Book Review.” So don’t try pulling any of those fancy erudite moves on me, buster! Mailer went on to talk about his experience in reporting and writing The Armies of the Night, the importance of getting the dramatic feel of the action right rather than burying your nose in the notepad and missing the marrow of the moment. He was talking shop to me, someone who had no shop to talk! Guaranteeing no certain result, he offered to write a letter of recommendation for me to Dan Wolf, the editor of the Village Voice, whenever I graduated from college, and I decided then and there to drop out of college at the end of my sophomore year and leave for Manhattan. Well, I didn’t decide “then and there,” holding the letter in my hand, but I decided to decide, and knew that in a deeper sense the decision had been made for me. I felt that if I didn’t take the gamble soon, in two years I might be afraid to take a shot and that Mailer might have forgotten by then his earlier promise, and who knows what could happen between now and then? So I wrote back to Mailer, immediately taking him up on his offer, and he was as good as his word, writing to Wolf:

  Dear Dan:

  I have taken the liberty of telling a young college kid, 19, to go and look you up for a job. His name is James Wolcott and he sent me a piece of reporting he did about the Cavett show I did with Vidal which I must say impressed me. Not only because it was kind to your aging ex-partner, but for the sharp recall of the quotes and the feeling Wolcott had for what the participants were up to and how they were feeling inside as the show went on. This is a long way of saying that I think this fellow has talent which I don’t feel too often about young writers, and in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if he was the best I sent your way since Lucian Truscott. (Let me hope I sent Lucian your way—all I know is that I corresponded with him for a couple of years and this name popped up in the Voice, so I may take credit for a connection I don’t deserve.)

  At any rate, Dan, I wrote to James Wolcott, told him how much I liked the piece and asked him if he would be interested in getting an interview with you for working on the Voice. He answered all the way in the affirmative and I think he would be willing to live on hot dogs for a while, which can’t be said of all of our sterling reporters these days, can it? I guess, therefore, you will hear from him before too long and I would appreciate it if you would let him have a little of your time and give a try out on a story or two.

  Cheers,

  Norman

  Hear from me Wolf did, and in return he sent a note a bit less up-tempo.

  “Dear Mr. Wolcott,” he began and, after some preliminaries, cautioned:

  There are very few staff writers on the Voice and those we put on are drawn from the ranks of our contributors. However, we have a number of fairly regular contributors.

  If you decide to come to New York I would certainly be glad to talk things over with you and try to evaluate the situation. But I must stress the fact that everyone is represented by what he does rather than what he says. You wrote a piece on N.M. I would like to see it if you have a copy.

  Sincerely,

  Daniel Wolf

  Obviously, this wasn’t an urgent summons to pack up my dreams and hop the next hay wagon north, but I decided to read this yellow signal as go-ahead green, and after a summer spent dosing and weighing rats in a biomedical lab at Edgewood Arsenal (where one of the technicians and I discussed Proust to everyone else’s amused indifference), I arrived in New York in the fall, fording my way through the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where a well-entrenched troupe of winos, pimps, panhandlers, and assorted other characters amenable to fucking you up sideways on the airiest pretext introduced themselves to newcomers. Using the Empire State Building as my guidepost, I turned south and strolled dozens of blocks downtown (not knowing how to use the subway and afraid of ending up in the Bronx with my bloodied head on a stick) and showed up at the Voice reception desk, ready for induction. They weren’t ready for me, so I spent the first night, then a second, at the Y.

  I met with Wolf in his office on the fifth floor of the Voice, then at 80 University Place and Eleventh Street. I had been briefed by Mailer in a letter that Wolf was largely deaf “and you have to make certain that he has heard what you just said,” advice reiterated by the receptionist that I shouldn’t mumble, “but don’t shout either.” Now that I am deaf in one ear, I understand better the cock of Wolf’s head as he seemed to lean both into and away from a visitor. Wolf, like The New Yorker’s William Shawn, was a master of indirection, implication, and the silent nudge, operating on a Zen druid frequency that offered maximum maneuverability with a minimum of words; they practiced an art of listening that bordered on the telepathic unless they tuned you out altogether, which they were too polite to do, though in Wolf’s case you could sense his meter ticking. He was patient with me, amused at the huge rolled-up copy of that day’s Washington Post poking out of my coat pocket, which whanged a
round whenever I shifted in the chair to favor a particular butt cheek. In Wolf’s office hung a framed photograph of Mailer leaning forward with his hands braced on his thighs, his mouth open as if in mid–lion roar or bawling orders at a junior officer.

  Mailer was an initial investor in the Voice and one of its original columnists and provocateurs, famously getting into a roiling snit when the paper (whose lax copyediting left Mailer’s text acned with minor, grating errors) printed “the nuisances of growth” in lieu of “the nuances of growth,” arousing the finicky wrath of a writer whose style tended more toward steel wool. What provoked him was perhaps not so much the errors themselves—which could be corrected in the next week’s column—as the suspicion that they were deliberate sabotage from gremlins hoping to make him look the fool. Each handful of mistakes was like having thumbtacks thrown under his wheels. Those who had to accommodate his Zeus bolts in the late hour had a different perspective. One of the Voice’s original pilgrims, John Wilcock, whose column The Village Square was one of the paper’s most popular features, along with Jules Feiffer’s cartoon strip abounding with bohemian dancers in black leotards and neurotic mama’s boys as tense as rolled-up umbrellas, recalls in his Manhattan Memories trying to put the issue to bed only to have Mailer roll in, fully armored. “We’d all be beavering away at this grotty printing plant when our new columnist Norman Mailer would arrive bearing his lengthy column, insisting it appear word for word in the already made-up tabloid. This would involve cutting a story here and another one there, jig-sawing in the Great Novelist’s priceless prose an inch or two at a time. Here was this young guy who’d written a best seller while barely out of his teens, who’d thus acquired all the arrogance of a star without any of the graciousness. The worst thing, as I saw it, was that unlike my newspaper friends he’d never been edited—and was never likely to be. There’s something about being paid several dollars per word for one’s writing that doesn’t encourage brevity and so, good writer though he was, he could have been infinitely better. Like most of us he would have benefited from a good editor, one not intimidated by his instant fame.”

  The ongoing combat over Mailer’s late copy being inserted unmolested wasn’t the determining factor in his split from the Voice. As Mailer acknowledged in Advertisements for Myself, his dispute went deeper, to a philosophical schism between his desire that the paper be radical Hip (a word he capitalized as if it were a religion, which it was at the time for him) and the paper’s more conventionally bohemian and “politely rebellious” stance of opposition. Mailer’s discernment of the conservative temperament guiding the paper’s pirate course hit on something that’s often overlooked. It is one of journalism’s more interesting parallels that the Village Voice and William F. Buckley’s National Review were founded in the same year, 1955. Though the Voice was to become an embattled clubhouse for the scruffy urban left and National Review the flagship for the preppy urbane right, their birth canals were not as antithetical as it might seem. Both were founded in opposition to a liberal consensus that had gone blah and paternal with platitude and complacency. In the foreward (the misspelling is intentional) to The Village Voice Reader, Dan Wolf wrote, “Those of us who started the Voice had long since been left cold by the dull pieties of official liberalism with its dreary, if unspoken, drive to put every family in a housing development and give each child his own social worker.” That was a sentiment to which National Review’s founding editor, William F. Buckley Jr., could assent with a splash of holy water. The difference was that Buckley wanted to convert ideas and ideology into electoral, legislative, and executive power. Wolf didn’t. He and the Voice’s publisher and co-founder, Ed Fancher, a psychoanalyst whose defusing calmness was a credit to the Freudian playbook, weren’t fixed upon some future sun-risen horizon, conjuring a hero on horseback (a Goldwater, a Reagan). Wolf didn’t harbor national ambitions that might someday be inscribed in capital marble.

  At the Voice the answer to the pukewarm pieties of official liberalism and the remedy for boredom were the unofficial individuality of locals sounding off in print as if the paper were their personal mike. Anticipating the blogosphere, the Voice thinned the distinction between professional keyboard peckers and stir-crazy amateurs in fifth-floor walk-ups, presenting a Beat-flavored alternative to the vaunted notion of the author as member of a sacred novitiate whose brow was sprinkled with the beneficent ashes of Lionel Trilling’s cigarette. Dainty aesthetes and goateed pedants could apply elsewhere. For me, discovering the paper at a historic newsstand in Baltimore called Sherman’s that stocked underground weeklies and rad-hip incendiaries such as Ramparts and Evergreen Review, the Voice threw off a black soot that no other rag could match (I must have been the only person to hook school in order to hit the Enoch Pratt Free Library and spend the afternoon marching through its bound volumes of Partisan Review, then scoot over to Sherman’s to stock up on the latest bombardments in the Berkeley Barb and the East Village Other, then drop in to the Marxist bookstore whose basement was piled with mildewy back issues of the Nation, Saturday Review, the New Republic, before catching the Greyhound home). You couldn’t even read the paper without getting your hands smudged with what looked like powder burns. In a time of strife it was the real fisticuffed goods. While so many underground papers went paisley wild with psychedelic art and five-alarm headlines fresh from the police-state blotter, the Voice—from the photography of Fred McDarrah to the barricade reporting by byliners whose press credentials were slung around their necks like militant dog tags (as witness the photo of the valiant Voice reporter Don McNeill on the paperback cover of Moving Through Here, blood trickling down his Dylanesque face)—practiced front-page cinema verité. It doled out a rough cut of history steeped in the radical hubbub and bohemianism of the Village but with a lot more riding on the outcome, a sense that each week might be pivotal as the war in Vietnam raged and American cities rioted and burned. Reading the Voice, you could practically hear the clomping hooves of police horses as a protest threatened to get disorderly, tear gas canisters about to hit the cobblestones. Since New York didn’t actually have that many cobblestoned streets, my aural imagination must have been using its embellishing brush.

  By contrast, the phantasmal histrionics of Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone never commandeered my cadet allegiance because I always found them something of a masquerade, a grown man with a cigarette holder playing outlaw dandy for his fan club. The jeweled brocade of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism bedazzled, popcorn kernels of laughter exploding alongside the typographical fireworks, but his tours de force were such feats of mind reading and magicianship that they and he didn’t seem quite human. I wasn’t into baroque caricature then, when the brick-hard reality of the sixties seemed berserk enough, and Wolfe’s dandyism wasn’t something I could relate to—in his author’s photos he looked like a painted flat posed in front of another painted flat. But each issue of the Voice was a barrage of articulate gabble, crackling with radio static and overlapping quarrels (like the gangster families in The Godfather, the Voice convulsed into feuds every few years to purge the bad blood and begin a fresh cycle of animosities), hitting you from an ambush trap of different angles while sticking to the actuality of what was happening, offering the cinema-screen field of view. Voice writers could be as egotistical as anybody else who packed words into snowballs for a precarious living, but it wasn’t a high-buffed, cachet-seeking, English-majory-brunette, every-comma-hung-like-candy-canes-on-a-Christmas-tree exercise in fine craft and delectation. Voice writers tended to be more direct, shooting their sentences from shoulder level. You were always aware of the hard surfaces and clashing forces off of which everything caromed—the noun-verb combination punches that had traveled from Hemingway to Jimmy Cannon to Pete Hamill—and you could almost hear the mousy scribble of quotes scratched into their reporters’ notebooks that would yield the killer payoff, the fatal clincher. So to be accepted into the Voice was to be initiated into a fight club where you either fit in or were flu
shed out. Or so I fancied, never doubting I’d make the cut if given a chance. Such confidence I had, a healthy by-product of not knowing any better.

  To return to the office where Mailer’s photograph silently roared: The questions Wolf asked were basic and general, mild probes befitting an informal interview with a noncandidate for a nonexistent job. I wonder if he thought I was a rough diamond or a raw carrot. From my end, I thought—truthfully, I’m not sure what I thought, or if I was even thinking from inside the swirl of expectations I had spun out of the daydreams of glory that owed less to literature than to Hollywood films such as Youngblood Hawke, where the barefoot, bare-chested author straight from the provinces landed Suzanne Pleshette as his editor (“Shall I call you Youngy or Bloody?” is the line Gore Vidal cherishes), and TV’s The Waltons, where John-Boy and typewriter longed to sprout the heavenly wings of Look Homeward, Angel. But if I had envisioned that Wolf would be so impressed that I had quit college and left home to apply to the Voice that I would be accepted at once and sent out with an assignment to prove myself worthy of Mailer’s sword tap (and I had), the helium soon left that balloon. This wasn’t Hollywood, and a handshake wasn’t going to welcome me into the fraternity of fire jumpers. The meeting ended with an invitation to submit something and they’d be happy to take a look at it, the editorial equivalent of “Drop by if you’re ever in the neighborhood (but call first).” It was up to me to prove myself, not up to them to nurture the tender bough and outstretched leaves of some greasy kid popping in from nowhere. I didn’t need a blackboard diagram to understand that they hadn’t been waiting all their lives for me to emerge from the woods like a natural wonder, jangling my pocketful of epiphanies. Wolf didn’t try to discourage me, direct me back to college for more seasoning, so there was at least that.