Calvin Trillin, the poet-in-residence of this blog, reflects on his time at Time magazine and then offers a quatrain on the junior Senator from Texas. The Canadian born Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz has emerged as L'enfant terrible of the United States Senate.
The best item from the Time reminiscence was the reference to the Time senior editor known as the "Horny Avocado." This guy chased women staffers around his desk and had an endomorphic body-shape (no shoulders and broad in the bottom).
Then, our poet turns to Rafael Cruz and his lack of fellowship in the clubby Senate. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration for clever writing, so be it.
P.S. Helpful hint from the blogger: click on the bracketed numbers below to hop from one item to another; click on "Back To Directory" to return to the starting point.
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[1] Calvin Trillin Does Time
[2] The Deadline Poet Strikes Again
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[x New Yorker]
Time Edit
By Calvin Trillin
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Time Warner, whose profits now come from cable and film, has announced that Time magazine is about to be “spun off”—a phrase that to me has always conjured up a business enterprise caught in the final cycle of a giant washing machine, with desks and office machines flying through the air and middle-management types being blown away, head over heels, like so many tumbleweeds. Newsweek has ceased to exist as a print magazine. For a long time now, of course, newsmagazines have borne little resemblance to the sort of publication that was invented at Time in 1923 and loosely replicated at Newsweek ten years later—a magazine designed to present the week’s news succinctly to “busy men” who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers. Starting as strictly a rewrite operation, Time eventually had reporters and stringers around the world. They sent “files” to an operation called Time Edit, in New York, where writers, drawing on those files and the material that researchers had dug out of the library and whatever could be lifted from the Times, composed tight narratives that were conveniently compartmentalized into sections like Sport and Medicine and Religion and Show Business. That system, which for decades was the formula for producing a newsmagazine, went by a name that had the communal ring of a town picnic or a Tupperware party—group journalism.
In the early sixties, in the heyday of group journalism, I spent a year as one of the writers in Time Edit. I’d previously spent a year as a reporter (or “correspondent,” as the masthead had it) in the Atlanta bureau, covering the civil rights struggle in the South, and six months in the New York bureau—a misfit operation in the group-journalism scheme of things, staffed by two or three reporters who sometimes compared themselves to Transit Authority policemen assigned to the tunnels. For half of that year in Time Edit, I was what we called a floater—a utility infielder who was brought in to a section when, say, the person who wrote Sport was home with the flu, or when one of the World writers was on vacation. Since writers were listed on the masthead as associate or assistant editors, I’ve assumed ever since that I could justifiably refer to myself, on occasions when credentials are called out to add weight to a point of view, as the former Art editor of Time (four or five weeks, at various times) or even the former Medicine editor of Time (two consecutive weeks, although I must admit that the section was killed both weeks).
There were some enjoyable aspects of being a floater. When I settled into the desk chair of, say, the Education writer, someone who presumably pored through the education quarterlies and lunched with school reformers and kept abreast of the latest disagreements about how best to teach reading, I could feel myself imbued with the authoritative tone favored in those days at Time; I called that “instant omniscience.” I had become adept at using one of the tools employed to assert Time’s authority—what I thought of as the corrective “in fact,” as in “Democrats maintain that the measure would increase unemployment. In fact…” There were no bylines in Time then, so the readers had no way of knowing whether the Art section’s critique of the new Coventry Cathedral had been written by someone steeped in the history of church architecture or by a floater who’d moved in after a short stint in Medicine that had left him with no words in the magazine for two weeks and a more detailed knowledge of loop colostomy procedures than he’d ever hoped to have.
I liked the frequent change from section to section. In the South, my movements had been so constant and unpredictable that I’d kept a packed bag at the office. As a floater, I at least might get a change of subjects from week to week, even if I never left a building on Sixth Avenue. In 1980, long after I’d left Time, I wrote a comic novel that was set partly at an unnamed newsmagazine—the novel was called Floater (1980)—and I admitted in the flap copy that I was the restless floater referred to in passing as having tried to get out of an overlong stay in Religion by writing “alleged” in front of any historically questionable religious event. The senior editor whose responsibilities included Religion simply crossed out all of the “alleged”s. If there was anything Time was experienced in dealing with in those days, it was smart-alecks.
Back then, a newspaper reporter covering anything that involved Time rarely seemed able to resist the temptation to write his story as a parody of what he thought of as Timestyle—although the parodies actually tended to resemble the style used by Wolcott Gibbs, a quarter of a century before, to parody Time’s backward sentences in a New Yorker profile of its co-founder Henry Luce. (“Doomed to strict anonymity are Time-Fortune staff writers.”) By the time I was working in Time Edit, just about all that remained of the style Gibbs had lampooned was the use of phrases like “says he” or “said she” to introduce a quotation, plus a number of constructions that must have grown out of the pressure Time writers were under to write as compactly as possible—saving a few words by referring to the writer of a new novel, for instance, as “gap-toothed author Smith.” (In the eighties, Spy magazine, both of whose founding editors had been writers at Time, paid a sort of homage to those leftover tics by using phrases like “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump.”) It was largely because of the constant pressure to compress that Time prose struck me as more difficult to write than to parody.
A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.
Writing the story at seventy lines didn’t mean the compressing was over. At the end of the week (or “at week’s end,” as we would have put it, in order to save three words), the makeup people would invariably inform us that the story had to be shortened to fit into the section. Since words or passages cut for space were marked with a green pencil—changes that had to be made because of something like factual error were in red—the process was called greening. The instructions were expressed as how many lines had to be greened—“Green seven” or “Green twelve.” I loved greening. I don’t have any interest in word games—I don’t think I’ve ever done a crossword or played Scrabble—but I found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story—a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact—was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten per cent of it. The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself “Green fourteen” or “Green eight.” And one of these days I’m going to begin doing that.
When I worked at Time, all editors and writers were male and all researchers were female, as a matter of policy. No one took much notice of this. One researcher, Johanna Davis, was so clever that the senior editor in charge of the section she worked in, Show Business, allowed her to write some stories. But that arrangement was off the books. Josie Davis was listed on the masthead as a researcher, and I assume that on stories she hadn’t written she continued to do the job of a researcher—sending out queries to reporters in the field, gathering material for the writer from the library, and fact-checking copy as the section closed. Fact-checking was the main task of a researcher. On each story that had been approved by the senior editor, she met with the writer to thrash out questions of where his prose strayed from ascertainable facts. There was considerable thrashing. The writer’s incentive had been to get the senior editor’s initials on the copy, which meant that he might have a broad view of a fact that, if taken absolutely literally, could easily have ruined a transition. A writer at Time lived and died by his transitions. The researcher’s incentive was to put a red check above each word that seemed solid enough to keep her from being on the receiving end of an “error report.” I once read a biography of Briton Hadden, the co-founder of Time, who was credited with inventing the fact-checking system, as well as much of the Time prose style. (He was generally thought to be of a much more playful temperament than his partner, although it would not have been difficult to be more playful than Henry R. Luce.) According to the biography, Hadden designed the fact-checking system with the thought that putting a male writer and a female researcher together in a quasi-adversarial situation would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process. I don’t know if that was what Hadden had in mind, but I know that tears were not unusual on closing nights.
It wouldn’t have taken any special planning to make Time Edit a work environment that was highly charged sexually. Instead of being out reporting, as would have been the case at a newspaper, the employees were always inside an office building, with not much to do at the beginning of the week and too much to drink at the end of the week. (Closing the section required a catered meal or at least a few bottles in the senior editor’s office late in the evening.) There was constant interaction in story conferences and fact-checking conferences and closing-night gatherings; whoever said that writing is a lonely craft had never worked as a writer in Time Edit. Often, the couplings that emerged from these interactions were discreetly handled, so that the first hint that the two people involved were any more than casual office acquaintances came with a wedding announcement or an ugly scene in the hall. What would now be considered sexual harassment was a subject of anecdotes rather than outrage; one editor, a man with an unfortunate shape and a reputation for chasing researchers around his desk, was known, behind his back, as the Horny Avocado.
In an issue of Time in that era, the place where group journalism could be seen shining in all of its glory was in the Letter from the Publisher—a weekly offering that was not, it almost goes without saying, written by the publisher. During my employment at Time, the “publetter,” which was meant to be a report on Time’s inner workings, was also the only place other than the masthead where, as Wolcott Gibbs might have put it, “mentioned were the names of Time writers and reporters.” Reporters and writers were not only mentioned, they were mentioned in heroic language. As the publetter told it, group journalism was a staggeringly efficient machine: in India, Delhi bureau chief Jones caught the last plane to the scene of the disaster, leaving photographer Johnson to make his way by bus and motor scooter and yak cart, while Smith, in Washington, tapped his sources in the defense and intelligence communities in time to allow veteran World writer Thompson to incorporate the foreign policy implications into a fast-breaking cover story that included files from bureaus in London, Paris, Chicago, and Calgary. There were occasions when the machinery did work that efficiently. But most employees of Time in those years would have described group journalism in a simpler way: some people work in the first half of the week and some people work in the second half of the week.
I have sometimes wondered whether having to pay all of those people for half a week’s work helped bring about the demise of group journalism. But there were more serious problems. Essentially, power over a story grew in direct proportion to distance from the event it described—the least power being in the hands of the reporter who had actually been present. With the best of intentions, a writer was likely to put a different spin on the story by presenting it as a sixty-line narrative. There were writers who seemed to use files mainly to pluck out punchy quotes or the details Time loved to include in order to bring the reader closer, like what the school board president had for breakfast on the day of desegregation. One writer was said to believe that using an entire sentence or paragraph from a file was tantamount to plagiarism. The senior editor of a section—who might not have even read the file thoroughly, since he had a growing stack of files from his other sections to worry about—could, after asking for a couple of new versions that still didn’t please him, completely rewrite the story. (Time senior editors tended to act less as editors than as promoted writers.) The managing editor might toss in a paragraph of his own here and there. The finished product could be almost unrecognizable to the reporter who’d begun the chain; the first time he’d see it would be when he read it in the magazine. In one real-life exchange that I later transmogrified for “Floater,” I was asked by a researcher what I thought of the Time cover story on the Freedom Rides, which I had reported on for an intense and at times somewhat scary two weeks. “It was interesting,” I said. “Did you get my file?”
Eventually, Time did institute what Newsweek called “read-backs”—going over the finished version of a story with the principal reporter, as a way of avoiding particularly egregious misunderstandings. One at time, some of the other pillars of group journalism fell. The introduction of bylines, first at Newsweek and then at Time, made the authoritative tone more difficult to maintain. (No longer was word handed down from on high; it had been composed by two or three mere mortals.) The lines between sections evaporated. Stories began appearing under the byline of someone who had done both the reporting and the writing. Columnists emerged. Even before the complete Twitterization of the public attention span—even before practically nobody, busy or not, waded through a lot of newspapers—Time, which had been invented as a succinct way of keeping busy men informed, found itself using as an advertising motto “Make time for Time.” There is still the occasional story that seems designed to bring back a version of the group journalism described in one of those old publetters: a day or two after the selection of Pope Francis, Time was on the stands with a smooth cover story, written in New York with reporting from Rome, Washington, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and London. But long before Time Warner tycoons (a word invented by Time) thought of dumping the magazine that their corporation had grown out of, the rigid superstructure of the Time Edit I’d known had been dismantled.
I was, of course, gone by then. After floating for six months, I’d been assigned to Nation. That meant that I was stuck in one section for the foreseeable future. It happened to be a section where Time’s political views—views that these days would probably be categorized as moderate Republican—were sometimes dropped in somewhere along the group-journalism chain. As it turned out, the senior editor of Nation was someone willing to listen to arguments of why, say, a sneering comment about the Kennedys was not supported by the reporting sent from Washington. I didn’t know how long his patience would last, of course, or how long it would be before I’d grow tired of making the arguments. But I didn’t storm out of the building because of a political argument. I suppose that, without verbalizing it, I had come to the conclusion that reporting and writing are inseparable. Even before an opportunity to join The New Yorker came along, I was making plans to return to the South. The civil rights struggle had been covered mostly in terms of organizations and court cases and disruptions, and I thought that, by concentrating on individuals who had been involved in one way or another, I might be able to write a book. All by myself. Ω
[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine. Since July 2, 1990, as a columnist at The Nation, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column: humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces for The Nation than any other single person. A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time.]
Copyright © 2013 Condé Nast Digital
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[x The Nation]
One Issue That Seems To Be Getting Bipartisan Support In The Senate
By The Deadline Poet (Calvin Trillin)
Tag Cloud of the following article
(Click to embiggen)
When Cruz begins a crude bombard,
He speaks with reckless disregard.
So even those who share his views
Tend not to want to shmooze with Cruz. Ω
[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine. Since July 2, 1990, as a columnist at The Nation, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column: humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces for The Nation than any other single person. A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time.]
Copyright © 2013 The Nation
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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Copyright © 2013 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
