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The first step was putting an end to a now-stillborn issue that was due at the printer in a week. I had almost all of the editorial content and most of the money to finish the issue and bring it to light, but I didn't want to work on a funereal mission and I certainly didn't want to use other people's money to do so. It was impossible to instill this very personal epiphany in the contributors who were waiting to see their work in print, and to convince them that it didn't matter at all that I wasn't "using" their work - they had still created the work, didn't they? Wasn't that the most important thing? Even before quitting the journal, I had picked up other literary magazines and quarterlies in the bookstores sometimes, and seen stories in them that had been submitted to us, and which we had passed up. I supposed the things we had liked had just as good a chance.
I heard through the grapevine that a writer who had previously been happy to be published in the journal no longer was so, upon hearing it was ending. He felt, I was told, that "we were no longer significant to his resumé." For the contributors to night rally’s stillborn issue – having been given the choice between a career track in literature and a place in my personal epiphany – the choice was nearly unanimous. It took mere weeks for my e-mail box to be emptier than it had been in almost three years. I arranged for the remainder of our "live" subscriptions to be taken up by another new journal I admired. "I still wish you'd done it, although I can't see why you wanted to do it in the first place," a disappointed contributor to the "lost" issue told me. "Sometimes, not everybody can be happy." I hoped no one was mistaking me for the happy one.
A particularly thoughtful past contributor scouted around and found out where my favorite sushi restaurant in Philadelphia was, and, from Arizona, had a gift certificate arranged for me. It was an extravagant gesture of kindness, but not the only such gesture. Enough people wished me well that I felt, in a very short time, well. But I was anxious for the dust to settle and to discover what I had learned.
Did the printed word -- specifically the printed word as printed by a hand other than the writers' own, indicating that the work had been (the magic word) chosen -- have to be the manifestation that could buoy one, by accumulation of such honors, into being a "real" artist? As a writer, I no longer believed in a nice, neat, accountable hierarchy in the publishing industry that will lead anyone to grace. As an editor, I never had any business believing in it.
I read a then-current novel, a work of “literary fiction” that was getting rave reviews. I didn't think it was very good, but what concerned me equally was the design of the book itself. In the story, the author used a repeated image of a charm bracelet belonging to a missing child. The bracelet held, it was stated clearly and numerous times, a single charm: a Pennsylvania Keystone.
But the cover of this book, and every edition I have seen of it since, had a picture of a charm bracelet with a little house on it.
It had seemed to me a given that sensitivity to the subject matter of the work itself was supposed to come into play in designing a book. It is not a given.
I wondered what the writer whose words had been thus “authenticated” by the publishing industry thought about seeing the copies of her book, with a completely erroneous representation of one of her core images on its cover. Did she notice it at all, through the luminosity of the proclamations of the book’s “worth” which graced every new edition?
Would future reprints of Breakfast at Tiffany's feature a rendering of a girl standing outside of a Best Buy outlet? How was that any less ridiculous?
Could things get more ridiculous?
"I am friends with the guy they are calling the next William Faulkner!" a friend told me.
I had never read Faulkner or my friend's friend. In reviews, this up and coming author - my friend's friend - had a style that had, yes, been compared to Faulker's. However, the novel by my friend's friend ranked 144,382 on Amazon's list of sales, while Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" ranked 3,780. That seemed to indicate that in at least one way -- William Faulkner was still the current William Faulkner.
One day, while knitting, I watched a television biography of Gwyneth Paltrow. "She is a 'studio actress' in the grand tradition, like Grace Kelly," someone close to the actress assured me. "She has a blonde ponytail like Grace Kelly" was all I could see for myself. What Grace Kelly took a lifetime to become on her own, we now invite you to congratulate in someone else, is the dangerous message conveyed. Don't bother thinking this one out on your own. It isn't the chemistry between an individual or artistic entity and the world around it that creates a "reputation" anymore; it's simply a matter of someone renewing the existing lease.
Grey is the new black. Brown is the new black. Drag is the new mime. We have forgotten, it seems, how to cultivate an opinion of our own, and moreover, we feel guilty when we can't find any thing to fill the vacant top spots in our range. A space in our aesthetics labeled The Best Thing cannot sit empty, so we find something to fill it.
There's no crime in wanting to live in exciting times, surrounded by crackling talent. But being overly referential does not make it so. Journalists write about the "most exciting new writer since Hemingway" because they want to be the journalists who write about the most exciting writers, and because their other option - telling the truth - will not do much for their careers, not to mention their outlook on life. You can only write so many fantastic negative reviews of anything. And nothing in this day and age could be more boring – and reviled -- than a critic who tells the truth all the time. Therefore, a quiet consistent lowering of the bar has occurred, and we cannot depend on the manifest cachet of awards or reputations to give us any indication of the real value of what is at the top of the curve.
A talented poet I know - certainly a personal favorite - was taken on as an assistant poetry editor at a well-known review in his state. There, he made what I don't doubt were accurate and insightful suggestions on some poems in the piles.
The Poetry Editor at this Review liked the suggestions that her new assistant -- my poet friend -- had made. But she preferred that he not make such suggestions at all. She told him "that was the kind of thing that was done in a workshop." They at the Review, she explained, had the "luxury" of being more "selective".
The process of editing is what she was talking about. And the luxury that she felt she had earned – based on the good reputation of the journal for which she edited, although she was not likely the source of that journal’s good reputation – meant that a handwritten rejection with suggestions and comments on it, or encouragement to submit again, was too much to expect.
It’s disheartening enough to realize that there are editors who wish to avoid contact with writers, but it’s far worse to realize there are editors who actually encourage assistants to avail themselves of the “luxurious” experience of not communicating what they want to communicate, to writers to whom they have felt compelled to reach out.
It was clearer to me, day by day, that there was no longer any compass in the publishing industry, and that I had not been able to be a compass myself, because every magnetic filing –- every writer, every editor, every gauge of success -– was charged, it seemed, against me. For a writer with extra hours on her hands, this could have seemed disappointing, but it felt very liberating. There had never been a better time in my life to have an epiphany, and I did not have to spend another dollar to have mine.
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