“Has any era felt that it had less time than ours?” ask the editors of n+1. “A sense of speedup has obliterated, as in a lightning war, the time-saving promise of the technologies of the past.”
Take that warning to heart and slow down to read the new winter issue of n+1 titled “Throwback” (No. 21, $14.95). The highlight is a collection of pieces about labor and magazines, which will fascinate anyone interested in the future (and the past) of literary journalism.
• Daniel Menaker, who worked at the New Yorker for 20 years, offers a sharp record of efforts to unionize the magazine in the mid 1970s. This is not another witty reminiscence about the privilege of working for the world’s most prestigious publication. Menaker lays into fabled New Yorker editor William Shawn and quotes at length from his memos about the destruction that a union would bring down on the magazine. “My blood still boils,” Menaker writes, “when I recall Shawn’s blustering, often incomprehensible self-righteousness.” While conceding that Shawn was a brilliant editor, Menaker writes that “his personality contained a combination of qualities anathematic to the graceful relinquishing of power: genius, industry, a martyr’s demeanor, and a fanaticism about the New Yorker that he proclaimed so loudly and so tirelessly that it convinced others — and maybe even himself — that actions he might be taking to preserve his own preeminence were merely actions taken to preserve the preeminence of the publication.” In the end, Menaker says, “I was the only editor at the magazine who signed a union card.”
• Another tough union fight is described by Gemma Sieff, who worked at Harper’s during the staff’s conflict a few years ago with “Rick” MacArthur. The agitator in this piece is the magazine’s (former) literary editor, Ben Metcalf, “who had something of a sinecure. . . . He was an ex-bon vivant, a confidant, a raconteur, and a responsible gossip.” Sieff is candid about her ambivalence. “I was confused by the fight,” she writes, “which seemed to me less unionization drive than cage match between two beloved obsoletes, old publishing and the brilliant eccentric, who belonged on the same team.”
• Maxine Phillips, the former executive editor of Dissent, offers a bracing history of the journal’s — and the staff’s — precarious finances but also a sense of just how exciting it’s been to work for a cause they believe in. “After all,” she asks, “how many people in this country got to do what they loved when they went into their workplace?” That enjoyment, though, shouldn’t mean that writers and editors must starve. “Freelancers may be willing to work for our noncompetitive rates in order to get the exposure,” she says, “but they do have to be paid.”
• And finally, n+1 turns its attention to its own labor history. Keith Gessen, one of the founding editors, recalls those days — 10 years ago — when “everyone was a volunteer.” Particularly helpful outsiders were paid in whiskey. Total revenue was about $75,000 a year. “Was the magazine exploiting everyone?” he asks. “It sure felt like it. . . . We just wanted to build this thing and get it out into the world, and we were willing to sacrifice a lot of time and effort to make that happen.” His piece ends with a witty anecdote about a staff member trying to cash a rare paycheck. The bank balked, insisting that “n+1 may be an illegal front of some kind.”
• And don’t miss the trenchant letter at the very back of the issue from Susie Cagle and Manjula Martin. They call out liberal journals for exploiting labor just as effectively as the fat cats of corporate America: “When small publications deem themselves entitled to free labor, when editors take offense at writers’ discussion of low pay rates, when they presume being paid undercuts a writer’s artistic integrity and purity, they’re operating from a position of bad faith and extreme privilege.”
In other words, stop eating your young.