Literary World

New York publishing in the late-aughts

Carl Bloch “In A Roman Osteria,” 1866

1.

I remember sitting next to a fancy older lady with plumped lips and sunglasses and a pug under her seat on the plane to Laguardia (Was it Ms. Wintour herself, in disguise, flying coach?). This was 2008.

With customary New York stubbornness, we didn’t speak until about forty-five minutes into the hour-long flight. Then we ordered some thimbles of airplane wine. She said she used to work in magazines. I told her I was moving up to start my “real life” with a magazine internship in New York publishing.

“Oh, to be young in the city! So exciting! The bridges, the parties! Where will you be living?” she gushed.

“Brooklyn,” I said.

“That should be… affordable!” she said—adding “You’re going to have a great life there.”

As we disembarked, she grabbed my arm and looked me in the eye: “Let me give you a piece of advice. Give up the pridefulness, give up the roadblocks—do whatever you have to do to get into the ballpark that you want to be in.”

2.

To Carthage I came and all around me there sang a cauldron of unholy loves and I longed to be satisfied with worldly things. I went to literary parties, so many literary parties. I saw stage-plays, so many stage-plays. It was great, it was exciting, I was happy—the toasted blueberry deli muffin with butter has never tasted so good—I was in the flow of time and my ambition, but on the inside, there was spiritual famine.

Late at night, staring out at the rooftop skyline of the magazine offices at 666 Broadway—Lewis Lapham's magazine— I felt like I could catch a glimmer of the romantic previous world, the world of cluttered bookshelves and small offices and sincere, tweedy editor-intellectuals—Malcolm Cowley's world, Horace Greeley's world. It was in the process of disappearing as I arrived, but a little bit of it was still there.

What did I want exactly?

To become a real writer, a real literary person.

I wanted to get out of the inbred, low-expectations punk-zine world and transition into the high-stakes, high-expectations world of capital-M Magazines and real books. I made literary zines, zines that people liked—strangers wrote me endless handwritten letters, spilling their guts.

But it wasn't enough. I wanted more.

I wanted to publish fiction, journalism, essays, and reviews. My model was William Vollmann. Of course I had never made it through any of his novels, but the fact that he published so much and in so many different genres, was just so impressive.

After a reading I did once, a friend’s mom, a Southern woman of the kind I felt very comfortable around, came up to me and said I had to aim higher than the subculture-insider shit I was writing, do something more mainstream, more universal, more Southern. "Look at Pat Conroy," she advised, "Do something like that."

Going into New York publishing seemed like the obvious next move—”being there” “being among the gatekeepers in person”—this thing seemed to matter slightly more at the time. Not as much as it had mattered, say, 10 years before, but it still mattered some. The late 2000s were an interregnum when the real and the physical still mattered to some degree, before the world became fully remote and dispersed and fueled by online self-images.

All roads still led to Rome. The South had yet to come into its own via grad-student gentrification, with all the little colonies of literary people who later appeared in Durham and Asheville.

I felt I had to show I was a real person, not just some random aspirant stuck in the provinces, subscribing to Poets & Writers and Writer’s Market, one of the faceless masses sending unsolicited submissions that would rot in slush piles.

I had to convince skeptical editors that I was a reliable, respectable, talented young writer and could blend seamlessly into their insular Wesleyan-educated world.

There was no way to do that via email.

I had to meet with the power-brokers in person.

Had to use my in-person charisma and personality to show them how great I was.

3.

I don’t know what exactly I thought the literary world would be when I first got there.

I guess I had imagined it as some kind of magical place where everyone was reading The Times, everyone “got it” and was in the know. Maybe it would be like Dave Eggers Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and David Wojnarowicz and Kathy Acker and small cool literary journals and everyone was an ex-punk or ex-bohemian who had somehow transcended their zine-mindsets to create higher-quality, more literary work and were happily writing long things for bigger audiences.

I threw myself in totally. And since I had such high expectations for it to be something magical rather than people just struggling and striving like everywhere always, I was disappointed. (The reality of things you have romanticized is always disappointing.)

I learned to talk fast about the month’s big hyped up "piece," the season’s hot authors. I learned who John Berger and John McPhee were. Different men gave me dog-eared copies of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. I joined a reading group where n+1-adjacent critics and editors tried to impress each other by saying smart-sounding things about Hegel and Heidegger and Stendhal. The trends and fashions cascaded down one after another—it's the Bolano era, it's the Knausgaard era, it's the Rachel Cusk era.

I learned that factions and subcultures are the same all over the world, no matter which one it is. You learn to speak the language, you learn the norms, you keep yourself up-to-date on the bullshit late at night, you twist yourself in order to participate. They all spiral inward on themselves, the signifiers for participation are always arcane. (It, of course, was my own fault, for thinking that secrets lie hidden among others, among a different set, elsewhere. )

I looked towards gatekeepers who could help me and before asking myself what I had to offer, if we had anything in common, any shared basis for friendship or work together, I courted and networked blindly and hoped they would give me opportunities. I shot in the dark and got lucky occasionally because some of these people I actually did have a basis for a bond with. And in this way I met some wonderful people by chance, and made some lifelong friends.

I also saw a little bit how the sausage got made, and was disgusted. New York, more than any other place I’ve lived, is filled with lonely mercenaries, truffle-sniffers of success. "Characters" and "mascots" appear and everyone tramples each other to get to them. It felt that everyone was constantly watching everyone else to see who the person-of-the-moment was, and then insinuate themselves in with this person, hoping a little bit of their success might rub off. I learned to do it too.

I particularly remember being with a group of editors and writer-types meeting up with Thomas Frank and a money-guy publisher when he was relaunching The Baffler with new funding money, and I saw how the grad school writer-types circled around the Money-Man like little piranhas, offering to take him out on the town, offering to write for him, they aggressively schmoozed to get inside the money-power by any means necessary—I thought that was distasteful.

There is a case to be made that there was nothing distasteful about it at all. After all, wasn't that why we were all there together in New York, to be close to the power people and the gatekeepers?

I saw firsthand how hanging around to n + 1 parties and Paris Review parties and the Verso Parties could actually lead to real life things. “Being there” and “being a character” actually did sometimes result in book deals, a life as a writer—I remember seeing all these quirky characters always hanging around and next thing you know they’d have a Knopf book deal and that book would be this season’s It-Thing.

4.

I did not understand what "rich" meant until I got into New York publishing. Being rich in the South just meant having a McMansion and a lake house. Maybe dad owns a few laundromats or car dealerships or apartment buildings, he wears a white polo shirt and sunglasses.

New York rich is a different thing entirely.

There really is a wall of families. Old culture families, old industrialist families. I met descendants of the Roosevelts, girls whose fathers had private airplanes, unpaid interns who lived in huge Manhattan lofts. I went to one blogger's house in Westchester, a guy who maybe made $30K a year and the house was decorated with giant antiques and doors and statuary from ancient India—just amazing shit.

If the parents had PhDs, they expected their kids to get PhDs to continue the family legacy. If the parents were psychiatrists, the kids were in all kinds of crazy therapy.

Everyone knew each other from being kids together, going to the Dalton academies together, and then going to Wesleyan and Princeton together.

Does it matter that they all went to Dalton and Harvard and Iowa Writer’s Workshop together? Not really, I guess.

It wouldn't matter if it was just a little quiet corner of the world where they're like, "We all went to this kind of school together and now we make these things" but it is very conspicuous that everything they do becomes extremely contagious—it gets beamed out to the hinterlands as The Official Culture™.

If the parents are filmmakers and journalists and playwrights, lo and behold, their 22-year-old kids magically had op-ed columnist contracts at the biggest papers and magazines and were putting on off-broadway plays and little documentaries. This is thought to just be good and right and natural. “Nepotism” isn’t really even the right word for it—it’s people who are born in the right ballpark.

I envied them. I resented them. I wanted to be around them. I wanted my family to be like their families—to have cultured Thanksgiving dinner with fascinating and ironic discussions and books and attractive happy people and bottles of good wine flowing freely.

If I had wanted to be part of their world forever, I probably could have managed that, by marrying one of their daughters. I have seen a lot of poor-born men with lofty ambitions do this, to assure their future security. But two things prevented me from going that way, even if it had been on the table: a) I did not want to stay tied to New York forever and b) I was not raised poor enough for the cost-benefit analysis of accepting the inevitable downsides and shit-eating required when marrying into a rich girl's family.

5.

Lest this start to sound like a litany of excuses, let me be clear that it is not just about money and class—but the underlying structure of literary world does by birthright belong to a certain group of people. But I know plenty of people raised in all sorts of circumstances with all sorts of families who have been successful in literary world or in the world of art and publishing.

I do think it boils down to knowing what’s possible. At a young age, certain people know certain things are possible, career-wise, and certain people don’t. It’s not even in the realm of possibility.

I grew up comfortably suburban middle class. The jobs I knew that I could have were teacher, counselor, salesperson, graphic designer. I imagine growing up in a certain culture part of New York City, there are different things on offer: writer, playwright, diplomat, hedge fund manager. I never met a single person who was a journalist, a writer, a diplomat, a psychologist, an editor-in-chief or publisher until I was in my early-to-mid-20s.

I did not know these were things you could do. I did not know anyone who had a PhD. I did not know anyone who read The New Yorker or knew what The Paris Review or The London Review of Books was.

6.

My parents had raised me not trust Northerners. But the Northerners had all the culture money-power. It was a pickle.

I conceived of my life there as a Salafist might conceive of their lives in the decadent West—as a mission deep in enemy territory. I wanted to get whatever I needed to survive and then get out.

Hard as it might be to believe, this strategy didn’t always work out so well. I sometimes made a cardinal error I'd advise anyone trying to network within a field against.

Gatekeepers, it turns out, have feelings and are human beings. They believe in their project, whatever it is. Everyone everywhere is looking for connection, fulfillment, community, trying to live their lives. They've sacrificed things to devote their lives to esoteric things like books and being part of the intelligentsia. They are on the lookout for people willing to make the same sacrifices they've made, to get in the ballpark that they're in.

They want someone fully invested in the world they're invested in.

Sometimes when I met an editor or an important person, my words and body language and charm would say hey, we can be friends, collaborators. But thoughts are REAL THINGS (I believe they might even take form, be seen floating through the air) and we all have built-in antenna to pick up on secret thoughts and frequencies. Sometimes my hidden thoughts were hostility, judgmentalness, disdain. I didn't even know if I liked them or they liked me, I just wanted things from them.

As an editor friend of mine said: "There's nothing that makes me feel more hostile to a writer than when they give me the vibe that they want something from me and don't have any shared interests or respect for what I'm doing."

In punk-world, ambition and striving was always considered shameful—social climbing happened, but real "striving" was considered taboo. The best thing you could do in punk-world was not care and only do things for the community and the art and the friendship. Literary world is different, it is more mercenary and cutthroat, and it’s easy to adapt yourself to what feels like a different ballpark—but its all the same ballpark.

It may seem obvious and corny to say, but when forming bonds, when pursuing things, is important to bond with people over real things not projections and outward signifiers.

Aaron Lake Smith writes Empty Railroad Gulch. You can subscribe here.