Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [191]
He never did win the Nobel Prize.
CHAPTER 23
By 1972, I had written hundreds of thousands of words for magazines and newspapers without the idea of writing a book ever having crossed my mind. Despite having edited God knows how many hundreds of books—many of which, truth to tell, might better have gone unpublished—the book still seemed to me something of a sacred object, not to be undertaken in a light spirit. When I thought of writing a book, I thought of Graham Greene rather than many of “my” authors, who seemed to have stumbled into writing books more or less by accident and learned how to do it, to the extent they had learned at all, by trial and error. It might seem odd that after so much exposure to authors, I still held naive illusions about authorhood, but such is the fact.
After the New York Herald Tribune closed its doors in 1966, Clay Felker, then the editor of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, reconstituted New York as an independent enterprise and eventually made it a home for the practitioners of what was then called “the new journalism,” including Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, and “Adam Smith.” “The new journalism” was hard to define, but in practice it meant writing nonfiction as narrative, with a clear-cut story line, strong characters, and as much pizzazz as possible. In the “old” journalism, typified by the news pages of The New York Times, the writer was ideally invisible—he or she reported the facts as objectively as possible. In the “new” journalism, the writer bullied his way into the story, sometimes overwhelming the people he was writing about, and inevitably blurred what had once been the fairly rigid distinction between nonfiction and fiction—a distinction that had in any event been eroding under the influence of books such as Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (which presented fact as fiction) and the nonfiction of Norman Mailer (in which fact and fiction were indistinguishable). In keeping with the zeitgeist, the new journalism was almost by definition overheated, full of sound effects, and occasionally shrill. The people who were good at it, such as Wolfe and Breslin, were journalistic exhibitionists, media stars whose specialty was making even the humdrum and the insignificant seem important and, above all, exciting. Even the restaurant reviews had to be written like narrative stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which probably explains why the celebrity chef appeared as a culture figure then, since a writer could hang a story on him, as opposed to simply reporting whether the food was edible and the service good or bad.
The staff writers at New York constituted a small, clubby set; very much on the defensive, they were not exactly welcoming to outsiders or newcomers, and it was not then a place for which I thought of writing. When my agent Lynn Nesbit urged it on me, I was torn between reluctance—I feared being out of my depth—and enthusiasm, for I was getting tired of writing for women’s magazines, with their restricting format and narrow range of interests.
Almost from the first, the pieces I did for New York were splashy successes, in the sense that they were controversial, lent themselves to being cover pieces, and stirred up a lot of talk. I attribute this far more to Felker’s shrewdness—no magazine editor ever had a better sense of what would sell copies and start a buzz than Felker in his heyday—than to any skill or insight of mine. Indeed, the first piece I wrote for Felker came about only because none of the women’s magazines (nor the Times) wanted it. Some months previously, my wife and I had been dining out at a restaurant where two rather drunken men seated near us began to make remarks about her fairly low-cut dress. I kept my temper for as long as I could, but when they continued, despite a complaint to the owner, I lost my temper completely, grabbed a heavy cut-glass ashtray, and flung it with a good deal of force