Lucking Out - James Wolcott [5]
Here is what I received.
“I think you have a career,” Mailer’s letter began, and external noise washed away, as if my brain needed to be rid of sound to take in what it was reading. It was so clear-cut, what he was saying, that I couldn’t from that moment imagine my future heading any other way. Mailer went on to compliment me for peeling back the tense skin of Cavett’s show and perceiving the blood currents and nerve wiring underlying the animosity between him and Vidal; and for noting the significance of his allusion to Vidal’s outing of Jack Kerouac in an excerpt from Two Sisters that had been published in Partisan Review, and his shooting down of Vidal’s echoing of Degas’s rebuke of Whistler—“I’m going to give you a line that Degas said to Whistler—two celebrated painters—and Whistler was a great performer like Norman, and Degas said, ‘You know, Whistler, you act as if you had no talent’ ”—by snapping, “Come on, I read that quote the same place you did, in Edmund Wilson’s answer to Nabokov in this Sunday’s Times Book Review.” So don’t try pulling any of those fancy erudite moves on me, buster! Mailer went on to talk about his experience in reporting and writing The Armies of the Night, the importance of getting the dramatic feel of the action right rather than burying your nose in the notepad and missing the marrow of the moment. He was talking shop to me, someone who had no shop to talk! Guaranteeing no certain result, he offered to write a letter of recommendation for me to Dan Wolf, the editor of the Village Voice, whenever I graduated from college, and I decided then and there to drop out of college at the end of my sophomore year and leave for Manhattan. Well, I didn’t decide “then and there,” holding the letter in my hand, but I decided to decide, and knew that in a deeper sense the decision had been made for me. I felt that if I didn’t take the gamble soon, in two years I might be afraid to take a shot and that Mailer might have forgotten by then his earlier promise, and who knows what could happen between now and then? So I wrote back to Mailer, immediately taking him up on his offer, and he was as good as his word, writing to Wolf:
Dear Dan:
I have taken the liberty of telling a young college kid, 19, to go and look you up for a job. His name is James Wolcott and he sent me a piece of reporting he did about the Cavett show I did with Vidal which I must say impressed me. Not only because it was kind to your aging ex-partner, but for the sharp recall of the quotes and the feeling Wolcott had for what the participants were up to and how they were feeling inside as the show went on. This is a long way of saying that I think this fellow has talent which I don’t feel too often about young writers, and in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if he was the best I sent your way since Lucian Truscott. (Let me hope I sent Lucian your way—all I know is that I corresponded with him for a couple of years and this name popped up in the Voice, so I may take credit for a connection I don’t deserve.)
At any rate, Dan, I wrote to James Wolcott, told him how much I liked the piece and asked him if he would be interested in getting an interview with you for working on the Voice. He answered all the way in the affirmative and I think he would be willing to live on hot dogs for a while, which can’t be said of all of our sterling reporters these days, can it? I guess, therefore, you will hear from him before too long and I would appreciate it if you would let him have a little of your time and give a try out on a story or two.
Cheers,
Norman
Hear from me Wolf did, and in return he sent a note a bit less up-tempo.
“Dear Mr. Wolcott,” he began and, after some preliminaries, cautioned:
There are very few staff writers on