So long ago it feels like another life, I was a recent college grad, recently married, and recently moved to New York—a difficult combination I was far from mastering. The New York Times had recently suspended publication because of a strike. This seemed to provide an opportunity for a small group of men to begin a newspaper entirely of book reviews—long, substantial, highly intellectual—and of leftwing political commentary that the Times, even when it was around, did not publish.
I attended some of those early meetings, since my then-husband was one of the founding group, but I don’t remember venturing an opinion. In those days, the opinions of young women weren’t usually regarded. Elizabeth Hardwick sometimes had a voice in these sessions, but she was older and known mainly as the wife of Robert Lowell rather than as the fine writer she was and continued to be.
So I really didn’t know what I was in for when my husband told me the group needed someone to stuff envelops with their first subscription offering. Of course there would be no pay, which meant that it would have to be done by a young woman. It never occurred to me to say no.
All that hot summer, I took the bus to a one-room office without air-conditioning in a building on West 57th Street. New York summers then were rigorous; the heat rising from the pavement was intense and there was no escaping it. I rode up in an elevator past empty floors—most people who could afford to had fled the city—unlocked the room, and spent the day sitting at a card table in front of a pile of envelopes and forms and a list of names and addresses. I suppose there were stamps, as well, although I don’t remember them.
It was tedious work, stuffing those forms into the envelopes and addressing them. My sweaty forearms stuck to the papers. When I had a sufficient pile ready to go, I walked them to the post office box and rode the bus home.
This miserable work left me with a nearly life-long aversion to The New York Review of Books, which I justified by the fact that it has never included a review of any of my thirteen novels, short stories, memoirs or of my two current books, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke and Treason: A Sallie Bingham Reader.
But if maturity means anything, it means the dissolving of old grudges, and so the other day I picked up the September 24th edition of the New York Review of Books and came away from reading it with respect, even admiration.
The names of the editors reflect the times we are all in with a handful of non-Anglo names; three of the four senior editors are women. And although the contributors’ names, in this issue at least, do not reflect much diversity, nine of the twenty-four are women, unimaginable at the beginning. In so many fields, there have been even more striking advances but for an intellectual journal planted in New York, this is remarkable.
But even more important is the quality of the writing, especially in Janet Malcolm’s “A Second Chance”, a revealing account of her battles with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson over Malcolm’s profile of him in The New Yorker.
Malcolm found during her second appearance in court in this libel suit that she was ill-served by her absorption of the self-presentation mode typical of the New Yorker: “reticent, self-deprecating, and maybe, here and there, funny”—an attitude often seen as arrogant—as well as by the somber dark clothes she habitually wore. Adding a bright scarf, changed every day, addressing herself to the jury rather than to the lawyers was what Sam Chwat advised. In contrast, Malcolm writes, New Yorker staff believed “The idea was to be tasteful. Another no! The idea was to give the jurors the idea that I wanted to please them, the way you want to please your hosts at a dinner party by dressing up.”
She gives credit for the success of her approach in court to “a man named Sam Chwat” who “called himself a voice coach” but was much more. His advice, which Malcolm readily accepted, covered all aspects of her self-presentation at the trial. After the favorable verdict, several jurors mentioned how much they had enjoyed Malcolm’s array of scarfs. What good advice Sam Chwat’s would have been for me in those early sessions about The New York Review of Books. I certainly could have worn a variety of scarfs but I would have disdained that as frivolous—as it would have been perceived.
If the Old Left, largely composed of intellectuals in New York, is to have any relevance in our struggles these days—and it has much to offer—it will be in the form forward-moving writing like Janet Malcolm’s, personal and perceptive and humble, and to change in its institutions like that represented by The New York Review of Books.
So—no more grudges!
Wisdom!