Wolcott - Critical mass: four decades of essays, reviews, hand grenades, and hurrahs

Copyright 2013 by James Wolcott

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

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DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

The pieces appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications: Esquire, Harpers, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair, The Village Voice, Whats This Cats Story?:
The Best of Seymour Krim (Paragon House, 1991).

Jacket design by Emily Mahon

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Datacrt
Wolcott, James, 1952
[Prose works. Selections]
Critical mass : four decades of essays, reviews, hand grenades, and hurrahs / James Wolcott.
pages cm
I. Title.
PS3573.O4575A6 2013
814.6dc23 2013015290

eISBN: 978-0-385-53691-2

v3.1

In memory of Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf, Clay Felker, Pauline Kael, and Gore Vidal

Allow me to set the scene, the way fiction writers used to do before they went all meta-conceptual and self-annotating. Picture the screened-in back porch of a yellow bungalow on the southern tip of the Jersey shore. A small parish of mourning doves make their stately way across the scrubby lawn, pecking at fallen seeds from the bird feeder while squirrels conduct their own food-gathering choreography. It is late autumn, not long after Hurricane Sandy paid a tumultuous call, making landfall a few miles northeast, upheaving many of the resort towns. Here I sit cross-legged on a zigzag rug, but not in meditation. Arrayed around me like a drum kit are stacks of gray, dark-streaked clips of nearly every review, essay, and article Ive written over four decades. If I were ever inclined to ask the question, Where did my life go?, Id be able to say with a sweep of my hand: This is where it went. It wouldnt be the complete answer, of course. I did other things too, those special things that separate man from the mollusk, but so much of my irretrievable past was poured in and out of this cement mixer. The amount of reading, researching, writing, re-writing, worrying, procrastination, answering copy queries and fact-checking questions, poring over successions of galleys and still managing to miss that typo on page four; the beaded string of sleepless nights and panicky mornings that went into meeting those countless deadlines (which never seems to get easier, no matter how many times youve done it)in terms of accumulated word-count and distilled bulk alone, the result is prodigious. Its impressive how much you can get done when you dont go anywhere, or take any wild swerves. Ive never knocked off for a year or six months or even three months to discover the romance of Barcelona or the subtle fragrances of Istanbul, retreat to a rustic cabin to clear my head, taken the time to schedule a nervous collapse, become calcified with writers block. Even after an attack of vertigo in Miami Beach that left me walking with a cane for months, on the constant teeter of nausea due to a lingering inner-ear imbalance, I managed to put together a column, pushing out a sentence or two at a time between lurching pitches that cured me of any desire to run away to sea.

And yet, like every hag-ridden writer I know, I carry needling traces of guilt and self-reproach, feeling as if I could have done more, dove deeper, wrestled larger crocodiles. It seems to be an occupational trait, this sigh of the slacker. Samuel Johnson used to chastise himself for his sloth and irresolution, and all he ever achieved was authoring the first English language dictionary, the mini-biographies that make up The Lives of the Poets, the dense ruminations of the essays in The Rambler and The Idler, the philosophical allegory Rasselas, a small heap of poetry, and conversational sallies that have lasted three centuries, thanks to his biographer-pest James Boswell. If Johnson succumbed to sea-slug accidie, what hope is there for the rest of us short-order cooks? But such self-chastisement carried to extremes can also be a form of vanity, a penitential pride, and besides, nobody wants to hear it. Non-practitioners envy the life of a writer, even if that life isnt what it used to be, because for all of its anxieties and discouragements, writing is the greatest form of aviation that you can perform while firmly planted: the freedom, the vistas, the right word snapping a sentence to attention like the click of a gun, the passages that stretch into long solos, the nights when everything recedes and you feel as if youre the only one awake in the world: welcome to the pros. And, like Norman Mailer said when asked the best thing about being a writer, You cant beat the hours.

Descending into the archives combines an archeological dig with a biographical regression as the professional and the personal overlap like a double exposure, a blurred collage of what-you-did and who-you-were reintroducing you to a familiar stranger: your former self. I had gotten reacquainted with my former self, my junior edition, while working on the memoir Lucking Out (2011). Even so, some of the pieces I drew from the stacks around me seemed the work of a double agent. They bore my byline, they sounded like me, but I had no recollection of writing them, none. The ghost of amnesia had effaced them in white fog. And some of the articles werent bad, either! It was reassuring to discover that I had a doppelgnger (or was it a guardian angel?) I could depend on. Such blanks were exceptions. Most of the pieces I sifted through carried associations, memory ticklers. They brought back smiles of recognition along with a few wounded winces. What strikes me most about the earliest pieces of mine in The Village Voice, the downtown paper where I went through boot camp as a journalist, having arrived as a sophomore-year dropout in New York in 1972 with a letter of recommendation from Norman Mailer, is how much poise and confidence there was at the outset, to the point of obnoxious. I was such a precocious snot, quick-drawing my cap pistol as the new gunslinger in town, but being young and full of myself was a novelty for me, being otherwise so old-souled, solitary, and repressively armored. I had to enjoy it while I could, and I should have enjoyed it more than I did.

Leaving aside the mesa formations of my personality, what Im struck by going through my back pages is the incredible room I had to roam along the sidelines as a rookie writer, interviewing everyone from William F. Buckley, Jr., to comedy team Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (in Tuesday Welds apartment, no less) to Sissy Spacek (fresh from destroying the prom in Carrie) to future president Jimmy Carter to rampaging jazz drummer Buddy Rich, covering porn in Times Square, the bawling birth of punk on the Bowery, an intellectual Olympiad at Skidmore College, the infernal tunnel of ego and desperation at the stand-up club the Improv. It was a more spread-eagle decade, the seventies, the meritocracy hadnt fully sunk its Vulcan death-grip on journalism, the culture.