Lucking Out - James Wolcott [13]
I do recall seeing an account of jury-duty service submitted by Alfred Kazin that stood out from the rest of the laundry—wow, an actual writer, I thought, one whose authority was evident from the first footstep he took on the page. (It had originally been commissioned for Playboy in one of its wild, impetuous moments.) Years later I would be invited to appear on Dick Cavett’s PBS show with Kazin and a pair of fellow reviewers, taking part in a literary panel discussion in which Kazin did his blinky best to pretend the rest of us were lawn ornaments while he held forth like a highbrow hound dog bemoaning the intellectual erosion at the New York Times Book Review, a topic always dear to people’s hearts. He found it perturbing that the Book Review had given front-page treatment to Gay Talese’s snorkel submersion into the hot tub of the American libido, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, an editorial decision he felt deserving of reprimand and reproach. That the rest of us weren’t perturbed allowed him to have the heath all to himself. Somewhere along the line the monologue in his head and the monologue out of his mouth wedded into an uninterrupted melody that you longed to interrupt, to give that murmurous, sonorous eloquence a rest. It wasn’t his conceit that rankled (hard-earned conceit being acceptable as long as it’s not ringed with barbed wire and rude to waiters); no, it was the pained moral conscience that accompanied it, the sigh of weary resignation worthy of a Moses with no followers, as if he were the last literary soul in the five boroughs who cared.
Sifting through the slush pile served the useful purpose of pointing me in the direction of what not to do as I tried to break into print from inside the building. Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble—flip the on switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five-hundred-word slot: no matter how short a piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. A number of Voice regulars with their own weekly beats had lapsed into a chummy informality with beer suds at the top and not much below, an anecdotal approach that struck me as a drought waiting to happen, and not just because I had so few anecdotes to call my own. Writing that was too talky lacked the third rail below the surface that suggested untapped power reserves, an extra store of ammo. Mailer’s writing could be verbose, but he never relaxed his knuckles; it never devolved into chat. Loosely fortified with these scraped-together guidelines, bent like a concert pianist over a borrowed typewriter and barely able to think further than one or two sentences ahead, I applied myself to whatever chanced by in order to break into the Voice with my own byline, enhanced with the versatility of a novice willing to essay a variety of subjects because I was equally unversed in all of them. American history, European history, New York politics (Carmine De Sapio, who he?), the performing arts, the drug scene, the dominant schools of psychotherapy, the factional feuds between the rugby squads of sixties radical movements, these were but a smattering of the blank regions on my intellectual road map to points unknown. My lack of education and expertise didn’t hold me back; if anything, it made me feel free, unbuckled. I didn’t know what I was capable of doing as a writer, because I didn’t know what I was incapable of doing, because I hadn’t done anything yet. Everything