City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [42]
Chapter 9
A science writer from Time-Life named Frank called me up in 1971 and asked me if I wanted a “gig.” He said that the two publishers, Charney and Veronis, who’d made a success out of Psychology Today had bought the dowdy old Saturday Review and didn’t seem to know anyone in the arts—and besides, they wanted to “democratize” the arts. Their idea was to have stories on quilting and Adirondack ceramics and furniture made out of driftwood. They were as hostile to East Coast snobbism as a Beltway politician speaking for effect. They were even considering moving the whole operation to the West Coast. We quipped that they were irritated because no one noticed them when they entered their box at the Metropolitan Opera, that they thought they’d be big fish in the small pond of San Francisco. Little did they realize that in San Francisco they’d be just as ignored.
Some of the old-timers had been kept on at the Saturday Review and were darting about angrily like late-autumn bees since they’d been promised that nothing would change and they’d still be in charge of their old hives, and now obviously everything had changed. Critics with triple-barreled names and old tweeds were ignored as ambitious youngsters who knew nothing shoved past them. I was one of the barbarians. I wrote a “Letter from the Publisher” in which I made two crucial mistakes. I confused Walker Percy’s name and called him Percy Walker. And I dimly remembered Marilyn once telling me that T. E. Hulme had said that Romanticism is nothing but “spilt religion,” but I’d misinterpreted his words. As a result, dozens of letters to the editor ridiculed poor Charney for being an illiterate fool—and it was all my fault. I was the fool. I was illiterate. Today an essayist would google his sources, but back then fact-checking could take up a whole day, and I was working long hours without assistants.
For some reason the new owners attributed all the malice of the letter writers to East Coast elitism and didn’t chuck me. They were counseled by Peter Drucker, a celebrated business guru, who told them they should turn the weekly magazine (whose typical reader was a middle-aged Midwestern librarian) into four flashy monthly supplements: the Saturday Review of the Arts, the Saturday Review of Society, the Saturday Review of the Sciences, and the Saturday Review of Education. They wanted me to be an editor in charge of the arts, but since I wasn’t experienced enough to run a magazine, they thought I should have a boss. I could interview my own boss and give him my approval or not. The person they chose was a chipper, bright-eyed, well-groomed West Coaster of about forty named John Poppy, who had been an editor of Look and was a surprisingly buttoned-up disciple of George Leonard, an Esalen West Coast touchy-feely leader of the “human actualization” movement. Mr. Poppy didn’t look or act as if he’d ever been in a hot tub or been “rebirthed,” but he did have a permanent smile on his face and a robin’s way of cocking his head to one side, of beaming very deliberate alpha waves over his much more natural and native jitteriness.
None of us liked him, although he was extremely likable—polite, receptive, kind. I didn’t like him because I had an allergy to all authority figures and didn’t want a boss. I said I disliked him because he didn’t know as much as I did, but in fact he was clever, and even if he’d been a genius, I would have wanted to undermine him. At Time-Life Books our supervising editors had been so much older than us and so remote and established that I suppose it never occurred to us as trainees to defy or question them. We complained about them,