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By Root 873 0

worn-out that morning, she said. She didn’t look worn-out to me; if anything, her Annie Hall cheekbones shone even brighter, a beacon to guide us. Perhaps because she was feeling worn-out in a good way. “I didn’t get much rest the last couple days,” she explained. “I spent the weekend with—well, let’s just say I was in the hands of a master.” The picture theater of my imagination immediately opened with multiple screens, all of them showing X-rated material. Whatever insufficient comment I was about to cough up was interrupted by one of the paper’s feminists leaning over the cubicle and saying, “So tell me, what happened with the guy you left with?” “Later,” my editor promised in a stage whisper of smoky texture while I sat there feeling sexually hangdog from the knowledge that my editor, on whom I had a crush (we all did, those cheekbones being apples of the gods and her hair so glowy), had spent the weekend being royally serviced by some renowned instrumentalist with magic fingers while I was hunched over the stupid typewriter, laboring to get my opening graf to “breathe.” It was so unfair, especially since I was being deprived of the choice details that give erotic envy that extra dash of spice.

Wired under the dashboard of the chatty byplay was a serious work ethic, a professional rigor. Writers today are assigned and edited almost exclusively over the phone and computer screen, physically cut off in their own monadic domains. That’s why we’re all so lonely. But at the Voice, as at The New Yorker and the Boston Phoenix and so many other newspapers and magazines then, editing was a face-to-face procedure, a surgical operation where each paragraph was gone over in pencil, each phrase subject to query, word reps circled and remedied, your best passages complimented, your muddier passages met with a concerned moue as the two of you tried to untangle the seaweed, retrieve a sunken thought from the morass. (In those primitive, pre-word-processing times, Richard Goldstein would sometimes take scissors and paste together the paragraphs of a writer’s piece, reconfiguring them in a different progression as if cutting a film, only to misplace a graf on his messy desk, necessitating a scavenger hunt.) The weekly sit-downs fostered an apprenticeship attitude that no true writer ever outgrows, if he or she is smart, because there’s always more to learn, habits to break, imprecisions to sharpen, excisions that bring out the muscle of a sentence sausaged in flab.

There was another home-brewed brand of criticism practiced at the Voice—informal, unsolicited feedback that was delivered like a body check in hockey and intended to put you on notice. It was not uncommon for a fellow writer, in a warrior spirit of collegiality, to let you know that the piece that ran in last week’s issue or the new one teed up in galleys carried the risk of making you look like a fool. Not simply mistaken, not merely misguided, but a fool—a dupe who made everybody else look bad. One year at the Voice Christmas party, a columnist in ambush mode, having filled his tank to excess capacity with holiday cheer, intercepted me, even though I was standing still, to put me wise that a campaign piece I had done about a presidential candidate that was set to run proved that I didn’t know a thing about politics and if it were published I would look like a fool and the editors would look like fools, a diatribe/dire prediction he delivered so close up his face nearly went out of focus. He was telling me this for my own good, he said, but nobody at the Voice ever told you anything for your own good unless they were up to no good. Another Voice staffer, whom nobody dared call a fool for fear he’d do a calypso number on their heads with his fists, speculated that the weaponized use of the word was rooted in Old Left discourse, evidenced by how often Voice writers would quote August Bebel’s pronouncement “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools,” one of those thundering dicta certainly intended to stop an adversary dead in his rhino tracks. (As Diana Trilling would write