All Men, All the Time: A Former Literary Editor Remembers the World Before #MeToo
Model Trish Goff, photographed by Arthur Elgort for Vogue, 1995. Miller joined the staff of Esquire in 1997, the first woman to hold the title of Literary Editor.
I was the world's unlikeliest person to have a career in men's magazines. In college, I was in thrall to the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous, and I was fascinated by issues of gender, identity, language, and power. But I loved American writers and writing, too, and magazines like Esquire and GQ, while the self-proclaimed epicenters of masculinity, also stood at the vanguard of literary journalism.
My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant at GQ. I liked working there, and during my time at the magazine, I absorbed one very important lesson: Great editors operate by trusting their instincts. But the GQ of the nineties was also inarguably a boys' club, and the magazine's sensibility was then firmly encased in mid-century values. The tone at the office was informal, jocular, and often lewd—and, yes, one editor did seem to enjoy relaying to me grotesquely graphic stories of his sexual history. Another editor asked me, when I was wearing a skirt, to submit to the old stand-and-twirl routine. At a professional event, I was groped and forcibly kissed by a colleague's friend. But I never felt victimized by these experiences, or even that they injured me all that much. What they did do was make me angry and defiant and determined to prevail over them.
In 1997, when I was 25, I was hired for the plum job of the literary and fiction editor of Esquire. The magazine had a magnificent literary history and for a time had been arguably the premier venue for American short fiction. It was also an indisputable cult of maleness, home to many of the writers who defined "manhood" in their eras—notably Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Mailer. For better or worse, the job of literary editor was also one of the few cultural-gatekeeper roles left, and one of the few rather glamorous positions in a somewhat drab industry.
I knew I could do the job at Esquire. I lobbied hard for it. I wanted it. Previously, only men had served in the role, including the legendary Rust Hills and Gordon Lish. Both were enormously important figures in the landscape of mid– to late–twentieth century American literature: Hills was an early champion of the writers Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford, and Gordon Lish was, famously, Raymond Carver's closest editor. Indeed, Lish was so associated with a swashbuckling persona cultivated at the magazine that he had an actual nickname: "Captain Fiction." But that was a long time ago, the seventies, an era when a fiction editor could rule like a czar—or a superhero.
The new editor-in-chief of Esquire, David Granger, who had been one of my bosses at GQ and was always very supportive and decent, took a huge risk hiring me, and I was aware that, as a woman, particularly one so young, I would be viewed with skepticism. But it seemed important not to let anyone else's opinion affect me. I had a job to do. And anyway, I'd always tried to operate according to Gore Vidal's splendid dictum "It is of no consequence to you what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of them."
On my first week at work, I discovered that somehow one of the best lunch tables at Michael's, a restaurant-temple dedicated to power, publishing and media division, had been magically bestowed on me. But also on that first week, an editor at the magazine said to me, "No one is ever going to take you seriously until you win a National Magazine Award for fiction." Days later, just as I learned that I could get nearly any American fiction writer on the phone if I wanted to, a literary agent told me, "You don't have any authority to do this job, you know."
I knew I would have to develop a thick skin, and I did, quickly. Naively, though, I believed that at least now I would be treated with equality, in a way that I often felt I hadn't been as an assistant. What I did not anticipate was that I would often still be regarded as a mere ingenue, as a girl, and that whatever power my job conferred would not protect me from aggressively sexist behavior in the so-called literary world. In fact, this very knowledge—that a woman, and a young one at that, had this job—seemed not to sit too well with some men.
Nevertheless, it was a consistent source of joy to get to work with so many superb writers—men and women. One of my missions was to open up the magazine to work by women, and I published very early stories by the novelists Nicole Krauss and Heidi Julavits. I also acquired and edited work by giants such as Don DeLillo, George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, and Arthur Miller, and published a story by Adam Johnson, then a student, who would later go on to win the Pulitzer Prize. During my eight years at Esquire, I became very close to some of the best writers alive. I listened to them, and they listened to me. And I did win the National Magazine Award for fiction.
But there was a paradox to the job, too—all of the writers were so good, and every single one of them would have been (and was) fine without me. Of course every writer needs support early in his career, but I quickly learned that an editor's relationship with writers has a lot in common with a professor's complicated status vis-à-vis her students—the smart ones don't need you, and the dumb ones can't be helped anyway. This is something that the more ludicrously self-important of our male gatekeepers, those whose careers have recently been so visibly toppled, would have been wise to grasp. Maybe things would have gone differently for them if they'd understood that power is never absolute.
Miller, also the author of the novel The Coast of Akron and a forthcoming memoir.
It didn't take long for me to learn that the literary world, despite an exterior sheen of civility, could be a discouragingly conventional place teeming with unchecked male egos. And many of those egos seemed to feel the need to put me in my place. The foolproof way to knock a woman down a few pegs is, of course, to remind her that she is a woman.
I was put in my place at a party in a literary agent's apartment on Fifth Avenue, when an elderly Frenchman approached me and another woman as we sipped our champagne, and croaked, "All women should be dead when they're the Marilyn Monroe age."
The man glared at us with pale, rheumy eyes, trying to determine on which side of the mystical line of demarcation of 36 we fell.
I was put in my place when a male book editor, a terminally ambitious one approximately my own age, called me and asked, "What are you thinking about, Adrienne?"
What kind of question was that? I asked him to clarify.
"Are you thinking about boys?" he asked blithely.
I was put in my place when, at a seemingly subdued work-related dinner, someone at the table asked me what I was looking for in the short stories I published. I replied to the whole group, speaking, I believed, in a modest, innocuous way. But a screenwriter seated across from me—a man with an enviable career, and horses—clearly disagreed. After I finished talking, he balled up his cloth napkin in a silent rage and threw it at me.
After the dinner, my then boyfriend (now husband) asked, "Why did that guy hate you so much?"
"I'm not sure it had anything to do with me," I said.
I was a woman with some amount of power, and to add to that, I was a young woman.
In the novel What Maisie Knew, Henry James writes, "Everything had something behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors."
I've been thinking about that line a lot, particularly in the wake of the momentous #MeToo movement: Everything had something behind it. Because when you start opening up doors, you have to be prepared to find some Jungian shadows—dark, reptilian, wayward—lurking behind them.
It could come to pass that bizarre experiences with men, all of whom tended to hide behind various masks of refinement, would be one of the central emblems of my professional life. I knew that I had been permitted to work in an extraordinary world, but I would sometimes find myself wondering whether there was even a standard for minimally acceptable behavior in it. The men who worked at Esquire were reliably well behaved; it was outside literary-world figures and would-be contributors who frequently were not. There was a writer who brought me a coffee-table book of high-end pornographic art at lunch, another writer who tried to convince me to have sex with him in a large empty auditorium before his event there, and another writer who, interestingly, sent me a bottle of Skin So Soft. I had to calibrate how much weight to give these and various other episodes, but if the intent didn't seem malevolent, I'd generally let it slide. But there was never a correct response. Now, with hindsight, I'm dismayed that I lost so much time thinking about any of this. That's the worst of it—the lost time, when all I'd wanted to do was work.
I'd been at the magazine for several years when I went out for drinks one evening with a writer I'd known for a while. He was in literary fiction's top tier. I respected his work. We were friendly, but we were not friends. How could we have been friends? He was my father's age.
Over drinks at a restaurant bar, he declared, "You should dress sexier."
I had a number of thoughts about this. The editor in me was thinking about what an abysmal sentence this great American author—that dying breed—had just produced. (Would I have suggested a revision to "You should dress more sexily"?) Simultaneously, I was also thinking, You don't have any style at all. (I was wearing wide-legged Chloé pants that night—my uniform then—and they were fantastic.) But mostly I was appalled. And furthermore, did he not understand, if he really wanted to play that game, that I was the one with professional power over him?
Later that night, on a sidewalk in midtown, when the writer and I were waiting to cross the street, he reached his hand down my pants. That hand kept going, advancing underneath my underwear.
I had arrived at this appointment believing that each of us would play an equal role, and I left it knowing the truth: To this man, I was just a female body.
So much for Gore Vidal's assertion about how what other people think of you is of no consequence.
The following day, still in a kind of dazed shock, I relayed what happened to a fiction-writer friend. He was several years older than I, but quite a lot younger than the man who had assaulted me.
"Oldest story in the book," he said. "The boss chasing the secretary around the desk."
My friend had not supplied the answer I'd anticipated.
"But I'm his editor," I reminded him.
"Yeah, well," my friend said grimly, "that's not how he sees it, obviously."
Everything had something behind it.
Naturally, there were no real consequences for the great American author, other than my own private resolve never to work with him again—because while literary editors may come and go, or at least the female ones, the great American author is forever. But that was to be expected, of course—all women intuitively know that men will be protected, while we will be left utterly exposed. The recent chorus of stories of workplace sexual harassment and abuse has verified this truth a millionfold.
Eventually, the cumulative effect of my darker professional episodes with men came to make my job seem tainted. When I was younger, I'd believed that if I did good work, everything would be resolved and redeemed. What I resented most about these experiences was that they insulted the integrity of that thinking. That work would be its own reward.
So is anything finally going to change? That is the question we're all asking in this extraordinary post-Weinstein reckoning. Revolutions are difficult to interpret when they're happening right in front of you, but I say, with caution, that it will, and for good—because we're finally interrogating how men regard women, how masculine power is exercised, and the way it subjugates women. Women are declaring, "Enough," and it's thrilling.
There's another important change, and this one seems irrevocable: The power of our gatekeepers—inevitably male, inevitably white—will no longer go unexamined. This should have rousing consequences for art, for democracy, and for empowerment.
I have a son now. He is in kindergarten at a boys' school, and, given the workings of the merry wheel of fate, I suppose it makes perfect sense that my life, once All Men, All the Time, has shifted to All Boys, All the Time. Stampeding six-year-old boys—all of whom, incidentally, are brilliant, sensitive, and extremely interesting—have the run of our apartment. It's a bit heartrending, actually, to love these little boys so much. I find myself looking into their faces, trying to time-lapse them forward, imagining what they will look like as young men. The times we live in are so hard on the spirit in so many ways, but if there is one bright side, it is this: These boys will come of age in a time of major change to the way gender and power operate.
But that won't be enough, of course, just as excommunicating all the bad guys won't be enough. You try to inculcate virtuous habits in your children, you try to help your son become a person of conscience and honor, but that's also not enough. We're never awakened just one time. And if there's anything this strange, chaotic, momentous era can teach us, it is that we need to be awakened again, and again, and again.
| Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote. |
No comments:
Post a Comment