I read this interesting review by Vivian Gornick of a book about the Village Voice. Vivian Gornick is almost 90 years old! This reminds me of our discussion, What’s the best novel ever written by an 85-year-old?, where I wrote:
Old authors can write excellent essays—they’re practiced in putting words together, and writing an essay is like noodling around on the piano for an experienced musician: they know how to structure their ideas and make them go down smoothly. But a novel, that’s another story. Updike’s novels were disintegrating for decades even while he kept up the quality of his stories and essays—and he didn’t even reach 80.
I haven’t read enough of Gornick’s earlier writing to say anything about her literary trajectory, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed this review she wrote about “The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice,’ the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture,” by Tricia Romano.
Beyond all the fun stories—an impressive number of fun stories for a review that’s only two pages long—, Gornick conveys a sense of how open the Voice was:
The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting. Write it up persuasively and we’ll publish it. Soon, the Voice became the place where a steadily increasing readership could see its own concerns written about in the kind of language actually being used at work, on the street, on the subway. . . .
The freedom (if that’s the word) given to staff writers and freelancers alike was extraordinary. Once a piece had been accepted, you were allowed to write whatever you wanted, at the length you wanted. There was no real editing. Writers taught themselves on the job. Some did it well, others badly. The result was a noisy mixture of pieces that nailed and pieces that flailed, sometimes informed and brilliant, sometimes garrulous and absurd, all of it either on the money or over the top but never less than alive to the touch. . . .
There was personal journalism and there was advocacy journalism; at the Village Voice the two were often indistinguishable. . . . Piece after piece after piece, every one of them as long as I wanted, as polemical as I wanted, as pugnacious as I wanted.
This reminds me of . . . blogging!
OK, there are some differences, perhaps the main one being that bloggers are doing it for free, and I think the Voice journalists were getting paid. Even if they weren’t being paid a lot, back in the 1960s and 70s you didn’t need a lot of money to live on . . . I don’t know the full story of the economics here, but I guess that this writing could go a ways toward paying the bills.
But the range of authors, the low barriers to entry, the ability to publish things that fell outside the usual journalistic formulas, indeed the opportunity to invent entirely new templates, and the ability to reach a wide audience, that sounds a lot like the early years of blogging.
Other than the economic structure (the Voice being supported by advertising; blogging being supported by people with other full-time jobs who are willing to write for free), the biggest difference I see between the Village Voice and blogs is political. The Voice was (and seems to still be) left-wing. Blogs are left, right, and center. To the extent that there was a “left blogosphere” and a “right blogosphere,” each was kind of the equivalent (or mirror image) of the Voice, but the analogy doesn’t quite work because there wasn’t really a right-wing equivalent of the Village Voice. Sure, there were conservative magazines like The American Spectator or whatever, but they did not reach a broad audience the way the Voice did. It took awhile for the conservative swing among voters and political elites to reach mass audiences. Now I guess it’s the opposite: there are many visible right-wing media sources, from Fox News on down, while the alternative press, which was mostly left-wing, has pretty much disappeared.
Even if it is not a blog, arguably the Reader’s Digest is like a blogroll on paper, and it is pretty conservative / right-wing (but of course not in the radical way that is prevalent today).
Tamás:
I think of the old Reader’s Digest as being an offshoot of the traditional conservative press, different from alternative media such as the Village Voice or blogs which had different business models.
It is of course dangerous to write,
“Old authors can write excellent essays—they’re practiced in putting words together, and writing an essay is like noodling around on the piano for an experienced musician: they know how to structure their ideas and make them go down smoothly. But a novel, that’s another story. Updike’s novels were disintegrating for decades even while he kept up the quality of his stories and essays—and he didn’t even reach 80.”
because of the analogy to statisticians as they age. For example, Fisher, who also “didn’t even reach 80” comes to mind; he died at age 72.
Naturally, in order to avoid flaming out later in life, the best, romantic option might be to die young.
Paul:
I’m not sure when R. A. Fisher did his last major work. Maybe in 1935, when he was 45 years old? Let me go to his wikipedia page . . . it seems he published a an influential paper in genetics in 1937, and something about relative species abundance in 1943, along with various smaller projects. That’s fine. He did a huge amount of important work in his career, and a falling off in productivity is natural.
“I think the Voice journalists were getting paid. Even if they weren’t being paid a lot,…”
I often wonder what salaries were (or are) for all sorts of jobs. I’ve never actually looked into it — is there any database of past salaries?
Raghu:
Yeah, I don’t know. My impression is that salaries were low, then, but not zero, and that if you didn’t want to live fancy or have a house in the suburbs, that you didn’t need a lot of money to get by.
Data on word rates for writing are easy to find. They have been roughly constant in nominal terms for the past 150 years (Jennifer Morrow points out that the 1868 novel “Little Women” features a $100 prize for a short story which would be a common payment for a piece of short writing in many genres today). But griping about poor pay and lack of respect is how authors avoid putting their next writing out into the world.
Sean:
But the rates depend on the outlet. I assume the Village Voice in the 1960s paid less than the New York Times and a lot less than Time, Life, the New Yorker, etc.
I’m told that you can make a dollar a word in some American “op-ed” and “opinion” venues today, whereas the rates for the types of writing I have tried in tend to be around 5 to 10 cents a word. I suspect that the $100 prize was great pay for writing a short story in 1868. But knowing that good pay for writing in 1868 was about the same number of cents per word as bad pay in 2018 shows the scale of the problem: its Baumol’s Cost Disease in reverse.
Sean:
I do the vast majority of my writing for free, or essentially for free. But sometimes I publish in an outlet that pays, and they might pay $300 for an 800-word op-ed. It might be that sometimes I’ve been paid $600 for a piece of that length, which is close to $1 per word. Financially, though, what’s relevant to me is not the word rate but the total amount paid. A dollar a word would be pretty good if I wrote 100 op-eds a year, not so much given that I write so few of them.
“. . . but they did not reach a broad audience the way the Voice did. ”
Growing up on Long Island in the 60s and 70s, I knew about and was an occasional reader of the Voice. But do you really think it garnered much attention outside of limited geographic and intellectual circles? One could gather circulation and citation data to address the question, but my guess would be that there were plenty of conservative publications that reached mass audiences then, even if kids from New York (and other parts of the northeast) weren’t reading them.
Gregory:
There definitely were conservative media outlets back then, including TV stations, newspapers, magazines, books, and low-budget alternative sources such as those newsletters back in the 70s that were telling people to stock up on gold in anticipation of future chaos. I was just saying that the Voice was part of a particular media category—the so-called alternative press—that was predominantly left-wing.
I don’t know what the best novel is by someone of that age, but it occurs to me the same issues don’t exist for non-fiction books. There’s a general consensus that “From Dawn to Decadence” is Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, published when he was 93.
Wonks:
Agreed that the question is different for nonfiction; see the second paragraph of the above post!