• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 804 0

one there, jig-sawing in the Great Novelist’s priceless prose an inch or two at a time. Here was this young guy who’d written a best seller while barely out of his teens, who’d thus acquired all the arrogance of a star without any of the graciousness. The worst thing, as I saw it, was that unlike my newspaper friends he’d never been edited—and was never likely to be. There’s something about being paid several dollars per word for one’s writing that doesn’t encourage brevity and so, good writer though he was, he could have been infinitely better. Like most of us he would have benefited from a good editor, one not intimidated by his instant fame.”

The ongoing combat over Mailer’s late copy being inserted unmolested wasn’t the determining factor in his split from the Voice. As Mailer acknowledged in Advertisements for Myself, his dispute went deeper, to a philosophical schism between his desire that the paper be radical Hip (a word he capitalized as if it were a religion, which it was at the time for him) and the paper’s more conventionally bohemian and “politely rebellious” stance of opposition. Mailer’s discernment of the conservative temperament guiding the paper’s pirate course hit on something that’s often overlooked. It is one of journalism’s more interesting parallels that the Village Voice and William F. Buckley’s National Review were founded in the same year, 1955. Though the Voice was to become an embattled clubhouse for the scruffy urban left and National Review the flagship for the preppy urbane right, their birth canals were not as antithetical as it might seem. Both were founded in opposition to a liberal consensus that had gone blah and paternal with platitude and complacency. In the foreward (the misspelling is intentional) to The Village Voice Reader, Dan Wolf wrote, “Those of us who started the Voice had long since been left cold by the dull pieties of official liberalism with its dreary, if unspoken, drive to put every family in a housing development and give each child his own social worker.” That was a sentiment to which National Review’s founding editor, William F. Buckley Jr., could assent with a splash of holy water. The difference was that Buckley wanted to convert ideas and ideology into electoral, legislative, and executive power. Wolf didn’t. He and the Voice’s publisher and co-founder, Ed Fancher, a psychoanalyst whose defusing calmness was a credit to the Freudian playbook, weren’t fixed upon some future sun-risen horizon, conjuring a hero on horseback (a Goldwater, a Reagan). Wolf didn’t harbor national ambitions that might someday be inscribed in capital marble.

At the Voice the answer to the pukewarm pieties of official liberalism and the remedy for boredom were the unofficial individuality of locals sounding off in print as if the paper were their personal mike. Anticipating the blogosphere, the Voice thinned the distinction between professional keyboard peckers and stir-crazy amateurs in fifth-floor walk-ups, presenting a Beat-flavored alternative to the vaunted notion of the author as member of a sacred novitiate whose brow was sprinkled with the beneficent ashes of Lionel Trilling’s cigarette. Dainty aesthetes and goateed pedants could apply elsewhere. For me, discovering the paper at a historic newsstand in Baltimore called Sherman’s that stocked underground weeklies and rad-hip incendiaries such as Ramparts and Evergreen Review, the Voice threw off a black soot that no other rag could match (I must have been the only person to hook school in order to hit the Enoch Pratt Free Library and spend the afternoon marching through its bound volumes of Partisan Review, then scoot over to Sherman’s to stock up on the latest bombardments in the Berkeley Barb and the East Village Other, then drop in to the Marxist bookstore whose basement was piled with mildewy back issues of the Nation, Saturday Review, the New Republic, before catching the Greyhound home). You couldn’t even read the paper without getting your hands smudged with what looked like powder burns. In a time of strife it was the real