Lucking Out - James Wolcott [6]
If you decide to come to New York I would certainly be glad to talk things over with you and try to evaluate the situation. But I must stress the fact that everyone is represented by what he does rather than what he says. You wrote a piece on N.M. I would like to see it if you have a copy.
Sincerely,
Daniel Wolf
Obviously, this wasn’t an urgent summons to pack up my dreams and hop the next hay wagon north, but I decided to read this yellow signal as go-ahead green, and after a summer spent dosing and weighing rats in a biomedical lab at Edgewood Arsenal (where one of the technicians and I discussed Proust to everyone else’s amused indifference), I arrived in New York in the fall, fording my way through the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where a well-entrenched troupe of winos, pimps, panhandlers, and assorted other characters amenable to fucking you up sideways on the airiest pretext introduced themselves to newcomers. Using the Empire State Building as my guidepost, I turned south and strolled dozens of blocks downtown (not knowing how to use the subway and afraid of ending up in the Bronx with my bloodied head on a stick) and showed up at the Voice reception desk, ready for induction. They weren’t ready for me, so I spent the first night, then a second, at the Y.
I met with Wolf in his office on the fifth floor of the Voice, then at 80 University Place and Eleventh Street. I had been briefed by Mailer in a letter that Wolf was largely deaf “and you have to make certain that he has heard what you just said,” advice reiterated by the receptionist that I shouldn’t mumble, “but don’t shout either.” Now that I am deaf in one ear, I understand better the cock of Wolf’s head as he seemed to lean both into and away from a visitor. Wolf, like The New Yorker’s William Shawn, was a master of indirection, implication, and the silent nudge, operating on a Zen druid frequency that offered maximum maneuverability with a minimum of words; they practiced an art of listening that bordered on the telepathic unless they tuned you out altogether, which they were too polite to do, though in Wolf’s case you could sense his meter ticking. He was patient with me, amused at the huge rolled-up copy of that day’s Washington Post poking out of my coat pocket, which whanged around whenever I shifted in the chair to favor a particular butt cheek. In Wolf’s office hung a framed photograph of Mailer leaning forward with his hands braced on his thighs, his mouth open as if in mid–lion roar or bawling orders at a junior officer.
Mailer was an initial investor in the Voice and one of its original columnists and provocateurs, famously getting into a roiling snit when the paper (whose lax copyediting left Mailer’s text acned with minor, grating errors) printed “the nuisances of growth” in lieu of “the nuances of growth,” arousing the finicky wrath of a writer whose style tended more toward steel wool. What provoked him was perhaps not so much the errors themselves—which could be corrected in the next week’s column—as the suspicion that they were deliberate sabotage from gremlins hoping to make him look the fool. Each handful of mistakes was like having thumbtacks thrown under his wheels. Those who had to accommodate his Zeus bolts in the late hour had a different perspective. One of the Voice’s original pilgrims, John Wilcock, whose column The Village Square was one of the paper’s most popular features, along with Jules Feiffer’s cartoon strip abounding with bohemian dancers in black leotards and neurotic mama’s boys as tense as rolled-up umbrellas, recalls in his Manhattan Memories trying to put the issue to bed only to have Mailer roll in, fully armored. “We’d all be beavering away at this grotty printing plant when our new columnist Norman Mailer would arrive bearing his lengthy column, insisting it appear word for word in the already made-up tabloid. This would involve cutting a story here and another