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By Root 879 0

devotion to passion and literature had an idealistic ardency ripe for disillusionment. But in 1973 the backlash against Nin’s queenly deportment—the narcissism slathered like moisturizing lotion across thousands of pages—had yet to commence, and she swanned through the Village like the last dollop of dyed splendor in a Sidney Lumet world of screeching tires and clogged sinuses. Donald Barthelme once dropped by at the front desk, a confabulator whose stories in The New Yorker were whirring devices constructed from exquisite diagrams with sadness peeking from the corners, leaving residue. Jill Johnston, the dance writer turned Joycean stream-of-consciousness riding-the-rapids diarist, would wait for someone to open the back stairs (she was phobic about elevators), occasionally plucking a seashell from her denim vest to leave on the counter as a souvenir. I always liked Jill’s entrances because she seemed to bring a playful breeze with her, a sense of salutation that was like a greeting from a grasshopper, owing no allegiance to the daily grind. Voice writers talked a good game of being uninhibited, but for them it was more of a policy statement, a plank in the countercultural platform. She was more performative. It was Jill who would roll on the floor with a lesbian pal at the Town Hall debate on feminism starring Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer, an antic that provoked Mailer to snap, “Jill, act like a lady!”

Strangers would pop in with unsolicited manuscripts in manila envelopes to leave at the front desk for the editors. When the stack had reached a suitable height, I was given permission to open the envelopes and sort them into piles according to the appropriate department. Semi-idealistic as I was then, I accepted as gospel the democratic notion that there was all this rough undiscovered talent Out There crying out for discovery, rescue, tender care, bunny food, and a shot at publication—a phantom legion of mute, inglorious Miltons waiting for their big Broadway break. Within one of these manila envelopes ticked the explosive arrival of some railroad-flat genius or untenured academic drudge whose individuality would leap off the page like a police bulletin and knock them off their bar stools at the Lion’s Head, where men were men and their livers were shot. Boy, was I ever misaligned with reality. Based on my slush-pile diving, it was dishwater all the way down. Given the Voice’s status as a mouthy paper that didn’t aspire to starchy respectability, I was amazed at how so many of the manuscripts droned on with the dental-drill lecturing of letters to the editor at the New York Times or moused along with sensitive whiskers aquiver, emulating the crinkly-leafed, diffused-light impressionism of a New Yorker sketch—the kind of Talk of the Town piece The New Yorker hadn’t published since the fifties, not that I had read The New Yorker in the fifties. But as soon as I saw a manuscript with each comma perfectly tucked like a lock of hair behind a shy ear, the end of each paragraph landing with a muffled, dying fall, I pictured the author picturing himself as Updike or E. B. White, lit by an attic window.

The stabs at relevance were worse—ham-fisted and all over the canvas. The Watergate bombshell of the eighteen-minute gap in the Nixon tape produced an inundation of speculative humor pieces about what was missing on the tape, Russell Baker–Art Buchwald exercises that occasionally escalated into Paul Krassner necro-buggery fantasy without being funny. (Krassner was the creator of the champion sick-humor hoax in his satirical magazine, The Realist, where an exposé titled “The Parts Left Out of [William Manchester’s] Kennedy Book” claimed that the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had caught LBJ sticking his penis into the mortal hole in JFK’s throat on the flight back from Dallas. I never found that put-on funny either, but the controversy hung jester bells on Krassner that he’s been jangling ever since.) The fact that so many sharp brains—I recognized some of the names as belonging to occasional Voice contributors—were mining