On company time: American modernism in the big magazines

THIS BOOK HAS MADE A CASE FOR THE CENTRALITY OF journalism—its office cultures, professional protocols, and print media—in the development and reception of literary modernism in the United States over the first half of the twentieth century. It has tracked the two fields’ codependence from the migration of the staff system out of the newspapers and into muckraking magazines like McClure’s, where Willa Cather reimagined artistic production as editorial effacement, to Life’s publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, where the style of the little magazine amplified into mass modernism, on the one hand, and the big magazines reimagined themselves as a modernist form, on the other.

Mass modernism as an actual social condition may initially seem far-fetched, yet this seems to be the situation that Chad Harbach has in mind in his recent campus novel The Art of Fielding (2011), when the character Guert Affenlight offers an impromptu cultural history of postwar anomie. Affenlight, a Melville scholar–cum–college president, comes up with his idea while watching the Westish College Harpooners baseball team, particularly the shortstop, Henry Skrimshander. Henry is on the verge of setting a record for most games without an error when he contracts what baseball players call “the yips”: he can no longer complete mindless, routine tasks like throwing the ball to first base. As Affenlight surveys the baseball diamond, pondering Henry’s problem, he offers something like a trickle-down theory of modernist influence. Wondering where exactly it all went wrong, for Henry and everyone else, he thinks:

The vehicle of Eliot’s cultural saturation remains unclear in the above passage, as the “psychic condition” of modernism is said to “reveal itself.” And while in some ways it befits Eliot and “Prufrock” for the novel to imagine mass modernism happening of its own accord—Ezra Pound famously told Harriet Monroe that Eliot “has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN”—I have been keying into the big magazines’ role in that process.2 The primary culprits in recent histories of postwar literature, however, have been universities like the one that employs Affenlight, where literature departments schooled undergraduates, including student-athletes like Henry, on the finer points of Eliot and Joyce. In the college classroom, the counterpublic sphere of the expatriate avant-garde normalized into what Mark McGurl convincingly calls institutionalized modernism, which takes “the product of urban coteries, circulating in the tiny sphere of little magazines,” and relocates them “helpfully on the syllabus as objects of study.”³ This transformation is one part of “the program era,” which takes the creative-writing program as exemplary of postwar fiction’s combination of individual ingenuity and systematic discipline. The establishment and extraordinary proliferation of these programs allowed a growing number of poet-professors and writers in residence to find employment and instruct students on how to internalize a formalist version of modernism and then replicate its attention to craft in their own writing.

In many ways The Art of Fielding can look like the “program novel” par excellence: Harbach began it as part of his MFA degree at the University of Virginia; it takes place on a college campus, with the competitive camaraderie of the baseball team standing in for the writing seminar; and it bears the mark of self-reflexivity endemic to institutionalized modernism by incorporating a baseball self-help manual also called The Art of Fielding into its plot. With this ammunition, The Art of Fielding’s none-too-subtle analogy between athletic performance and artistic practice—Harbach considers “athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety” who, like novelists, exert “the dedication to produce that grace”4—slides over into allegory: Henry’s Prufrockian paralysis is also Harbach’s, who spent ten years rewriting the manuscript before finally getting an agent then a publisher to invest in it. Thus, alongside Affenlight’s bit of armchair cultural history (presented by Harbach with the straightest of faces), Harbach’s and Henry’s shared plight looks like McGurl’s university-sponsored institutionalized modernism in a dark mirror, where a generation learns the pathologies of modernism without inheriting the fringe benefits of elevated taste or cultural prestige. The Art of Fielding’s plot-driven and character-based narrative form, along with its embrace of Americana, might be seen as pushing back against the assumption that literary innovation means formal difficulty. After all, if mass modernism really is so readily available, then realism might now be the difficult genre to make sense of.

Harbach’s other work, though, in the magazines, helps provide another context for The Art of Fielding’s interest in the slow creep of modernism, one that points to some of the contemporary implications for thinking about modernism and mass print culture together. After attending Harvard and moving to New York, he cofounded a contrarian magazine, n+1, modeled on forebears like The Baffler and The Partisan Review. Though not a big magazine by any stretch of the imagination, its existence is predicated on the history of and current state of periodical culture. Even though a manifesto against exercise was the most widely read essay in n+1’s first issue, published in the summer of 2004, the more representative content was a number of “state-of-the-field” articles on magazines: a thinkpiece on the postmodern neoconservatism of The Weekly Standard, a critique of The New Republic’s staid literary taste and regressive politics, and two articles on the author Dave Eggers and his San Francisco–based magazines McSweeney’s and The Believer. The editors at n+1 called out Eggers and the “Eggersards” for believing that they could save print from the digital world by combining overt sentimentality with a nostalgia for “an era when ink-fingered printers actually set metal type.”⁵ It’s hard not to see n+1 as invested in the same sincere revival of print culture as McSweeney’s and The Believer, even if its editors do so with more attention to intellectual history than page design; for example, the final words of the first issue are “say what you mean,” and Harbach’s coeditor Marc Grief claims that the journal’s end goal is “creating a long print archive in an era of the short sound bite.”⁶

This consciously new magazine dedicated to resuscitating an older era of periodicals, fiction, and print culture more generally is the institutional space that Harbach occupied while revising and rerevising The Art of Fielding. Thus, the novel’s obvious callbacks to nineteenth-century narrative genres—its regionalism, its family plot, its obsession with Melville—might be seen as an extension of n+1’s twin missions of saving intellectual inquiry from insulation in the academy and helping longform narrative prose fend off the Internet. Harbach seems to think that, right now, the novel is a more capable venue than a magazine for disseminating that worldview, because The Art of Fielding’s user-friendly form and recognizably all-American themes actively try to bring those topics to a larger reading base than the intentionally small community of n+1. It is the opposite attitude toward the potential audiences of journalism and literature held by early writers such as Cather, Du Bois, and Agee as well as that of more recent novelist-reporters such as David Foster Wallace. In fact, given Harbach’s public ardor for Wallace—his sole contribution to the first issue of n+1 is forthrightly titled “David Foster Wallace!”—his double life as a populist novel writer and little-magazine worker can look like an inversion of Wallace’s career, which toggled between that of an aggressively difficult novelist and an extraordinarily lucid journalist for periodicals such as Harper’s and the New York Times.

Granted, referring to an editor of n+1 as a little-magazine worker might be a misnomer. Harbach and his fellow editors “spent six months working full-time, or close to full-time for free,” and early on their complimentary office space in Brooklyn was taken away and given to paying customers.7 Unlike James Agee, Kenneth Fearing, and Dwight Macdonald, whose salaried work at big magazines made them unsure of what to call their personal writing, Harbach and his colleagues could not exactly call their editorial work a job because they did not get paid for it. Harbach, for example, eked out enough money to pay his bills by temping at law offices. It’s a much different experience of writing and work than that presented in the former Newsweek editor Michael M. Hastings’s posthumous novel, The Last Magazine (2014), whose protagonist makes it clear early on that “I make more working at The Magazine than writing a memoir about working for a newsmagazine.” Along with serving as a minimally fictionalized expose of the big-magazine newsroom circa 2002, Hastings’s novel is also something of a digital-age kunstlerroman, telling in miniature the drastic changes to both the work life of writers and the office life of a big magazine that is in the process of realizing its own mortality. Hastings narrates the travails of an aspiring journalist, also named Michael Hastings, as he rises from unpaid intern to temporary hire at a large news weekly that faces increasing pressure from news and culture websites, such as Wretched.com, which hires the fictional Hastings as a pseudonymously credited weekend editor. The reason for the fake name—and at least part of the reason why Hastings did not publish the highly autobiographical novel during his lifetime—is made explicit in a disclaimer on the book’s first page: “My magazine has a policy, a little item in the fifty-seven-page Human Resources manual called the ‘outside activities clause.’ It prevents employees from publishing journalism without the magazine’s permission. That could apply to writing books like this one. So I want to say right now: This is fiction, it’s all made up.”⁸ Hastings’s assurance that his fiction is a categorically different kind of writing than what he does for Newsweek has a clear legal bent here, but it offers a contemporary version of the modernist anxiety about the generic implications of magazine work.

The source of that anxiety, though, appears to be on the way out, even if a new one is replacing it. As the title of The Last Magazine boldly asserts, the institutions that created and enforced those policies for their poet-reporters do not hold sway like they did before. When Hastings writes, “maybe the genre is corporate betrayal,” it is unclear whether he refers to his own tell-all or the ensuing layoffs. Hastings’s own employer, Newsweek, announced in 2012 that it would stop print publication and make deep cuts to its editorial staff. In early 2013, TimeWarner spun off its print holdings, Time and Life among them, along with $1.3 billion of debt, into a standalone company called, with plenty of historical irony, Time Inc. These are only the largest examples of the sea change that mass-market periodicals experienced when the first generation of news-aggregation websites such as The Huffington Post began to take up more of the market share. These corporate-scale changes have affected the experience of editors and writers, of course: for example, Michael Massing begins his study of contemporary journalist practice by recounting the coerced retirement of Steven Greenhouse, a longtime labor reporter at the New York Times, which he and others interpreted as a bellwether of the “fear and insecurity that has gripped traditional news organizations in the digital era.” In surveying the “impact that technology has had on the actual practice of journalism,” Massing finds that “the distinctive properties of the internet—speed, immediacy, interactivity, boundless capacity, global reach—provide tremendous new opportunities for the gathering an presentation of news and information,” even if the content of that medium has not delivered on its capabilities.9

The fictional Michael M. Hastings’s precarious professional positions, first at a print-based news weekly and then at a culture website, offer an example of how the uneasy state of contemporary magazines, printed and digital, impacts the employment opportunities for writers. Instead of the staff system’s shared office spaces and generous paychecks, Hastings describes a piecemeal collection of one-off contributions by moonlighters and part-timers—some of which are paid, some not. While Hastings’s novel primarily has been discussed in terms of the barely concealed media personalities that fill out its character list, the more interesting aspect of it for me is how it depicts the casualization of labor as fundamental to both journalistic and literary culture. Though the dissolution of steady, salaried employment goes by many names—the Harvard Business Review has called it the freelance economy, workforce casualization, and the rise of the supertemp—it seems telling that a journalist has coined the most prevalent term: the gig economy. Tina Brown, a former editor of Vanity Fair and founder and editor of the news website The Daily Beast, uses the term to describe a situation newly common among her highly educated, upper-middle-class, white-collar acquaintances who make ends meet by way of “free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces.” At first, Brown says, people acted as if the “flexibility” and “freedom” were the antidote to the bureaucracy and repetitiveness of full-time work, the same wide-open space for the entrepreneurial spirit that William H. Whyte pined for in The Organization Man. “Twelve months later,” Brown says, “nobody bothers with that cover story anymore. Everyone knows what it actually feels like, this penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you’re lucky).”¹⁰

The local effect of the gig economy on would-be writers is the world that informs Hastings’s novel and Harbach’s magazine work, though it is perhaps best described in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), which is deeply concerned with how work has changed over the course of the twentieth century. Whitehead’s protagonist, the freelance journalist J. Sutter, starts his career as an unpaid intern at an ironically “downright corporate” alternative weekly, which bears a striking resemblance to The Village Voice, where Whitehead worked as a pop-culture critic in the early 1990s before becoming a novelist.11 However, Sutter is now one of a group of “junketeers,” journalists who travel the country at the bequest of advertising and public-relations firms and, only as a secondary motivation, write up the events for a seemingly endless number of magazines and weekly newspaper supplements. The novel begins as the junketeers land in Talcott, West Virginia, to cover the first annual John Henry Days festival, a celebration of the American folk hero inspired by the announcement of an official John Henry postage stamp, which the town also hopes will pump tourist dollars into the dead local economy. Sutter has convinced a new travel website to buy his story, and as the other junketeers discuss whom they might sell their work to, the narrator considers how their precarious employment produces a certain foxhole mentality:

They encounter each other on the newsstands, they chafe against one another in the contributors’ notes of glossy magazines, but primarily they meet like this, on the eve of war, hungry, sniffing comps and gratis, these things like smoke from a freebie battlefield on the other side of morning. At stake: the primal American right of free speech, the freedom, without fear of censor, to beguile, confuse and otherwise distract the people into plodding obeisance of pop. Their ideals: the holy inviolability of the receipt, two dollars a word, travel expenses. The junketeers are soldiers, and they hail each other.¹²

There is a link being made between the forgotten wage slavery that underwrites the legend of John Henry—he is “testament to the strength of the human spirit,” as one character puts it, rather than a casualty of atrocious working conditions—and the intensification of hyperbolic, sentimentalized reporting that comes with battling your ex-colleagues for assignments. Without romanticizing the heyday of mass print culture, we can read the junketeers’ cynicism and sensationalism as symptoms of what Daniel Pink calls “free agent nation,” with writers encountering one another in print, rather than in person, and fighting for reasonable pay-by-word rates.¹³

Cutting back and forth in time between John Henry’s hammer swinging and J. Sutter’s hack writing, Whitehead’s novel sets up a comparison between the unique indignities of industrial and postindustrial labor. One of Sutter’s fellow junketeers makes this explicit, highlighting “the industrial age–information age angle” of the John Henry Days festival, which advertises Henry’s courageous stand against mechanization—his folk-hero status rests on winning a race against a steam-powered drill, only to collapse and die shortly after—by way of the immaterial labor of the culture industry.14 What’s more striking than the novel’s moralistic critique of consumer culture and “the plodding obeisance of pop,” though, is how presciently it ties the narrative form of new media with writers’ working conditions. After nearly choking to death during the buffet dinner of the festival’s opening ceremonies, Sutter muses on the extraordinarily lax protocols of his profession:

Sutter is depersonalized from the “little bubble of content” that he produces for the travel website, but in a quite different way than staff-system employees experienced the anonymity of their writing. Instead of effacing his own input, like Cather, or having it effaced by corporate style, like Agee and Fearing, or encoding it as racialized work, like Du Bois, the new media journalist simply stops reading his own content. James Wood finds the tonal imbalance between the mock-heroic war metaphors and the puerile humor above, with its “fart in a bathtub,” to be a weakness of John Henry Days, a symptom of its neurotic attempt to be and say everything.16 However, when read with only the smallest amount of faith in Whitehead’s abilities as a novelist, the “bloodless edit” that Sutter anticipates for his John Henry Days piece can be seen as intentionally informing the style of the present-day sections of John Henry Days, which are full of the redundancies, tonal shifts, and repetitions of a first draft. Or, more accurately, Sutter’s sections of the novel mimic the narrative style of undercooked thinkpieces that are native to travel and culture websites like the one that contracted him to cover the John Henry festival. Yes, Wood is right that the Sutter sections of John Henry Days could benefit from the editorial acumen of a modern-day Cather or Du Bois, but he also misses how that formal tic fits into the historical point that Whitehead makes when parodying the style of web-based culture writing. Sutter’s writing style fits into the other historical and media-specific forms that the novel incorporates: 1870s work songs, Tin Pan Alley sheet music, oral histories from the 1930s, and what Daniel Grausam calls the postpostal genre of the commemorative stamp, which is meant to be archived rather than used.¹⁷ While Sutter sees the “new innovation of the internet” as unprecedented in its commodification of everything, its capacity to be infinitely and immediately updated, and its devaluation of quality writing for poorly paid content, John Henry Days situates the narrative forms of digital culture within a much longer history of work and artistic production.

Not that the opposite couldn’t also be said about the effect of “the digital” on writing. Web journalism is just as much characterized by the surface noise of microblogging, listicles, and thematic slideshows as the slow burn of what’s become known as “long form.” This is the métier of another character, Pamela, also a temp worker, when she starts at a “content driven interactive information provider.” Though her lofty title is “ontologist,” her day-to-day activity looks a lot like what Time editors were doing in the 1920s. “The ontologists,” her new boss tells her, “classify websites into root categories such as Entertainment, News, and Health, categories recognizable to many from the real world, and write descriptions of no more than thirty-five words.” The promise of endless space for writing produces the need for a new profession of aggregators and an intense focus on genre, both of which were also key features of the big magazines. And, following the line of argument that the plight of the magazining modernist is now everyone’s plight, it is only fitting that when Pamela tells J. Sutter what her job consists of—“Typing and filing, usually. They call you up and you head out”—he identifies with it: “Just like me,” he tells her.¹⁸

Given that Whitehead got his start in print journalism at The Village Voice as a fact checker and pop-culture critic, a job he says “taught him how to sit down for five hours and not get distracted,” his turn to web-based journalism after writing six novels can look like an enactment of J. Sutter’s fictional dip into the form, and it provides another way to bring the paired histories of modernism and big magazines into the present.19 The now-defunct sports-culture website Grantland assigned him to cover the 2012 Olympics in London, ostensibly under its “College Sports” banner, and then staked his entry into the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas in exchange for a serialized first-person account of the experience. The appeal of such an assignment, according to Whitehead, is that it is manageable work, occupying several days instead of the two years it takes him to write a novel. One can only assume that Grantland’s reputation for paying its contributors well—it was a property of ESPN, which in turn is owned by Disney—is another motivator, along with the fact that it averaged over six million unique visitors every month, a readership that even a well-known author of literary fiction could not hope to touch with his novels. Grantland also claimed that it wanted to provide a place for high-quality writing on the Internet, to “prove long-form content still [has] a place online,” and to bring in the “strongest writers” for the “strongest topics.”²⁰ Here, it is worth noting the echoes of S. S. McClure and Arnold Gingrich, who also responded to the felt oversupply of information with an intense focus on the style of their content, which they bought from authors who had proven themselves in the literary field. Which is only to say that the double life of modernism and big magazines does not end when the long tail of modernist formal experimentation gives way to other narrative preoccupations, nor does it end when big magazines reorganize their offices and mastheads while trying to acclimatize to digital culture. To make a positive claim for the creative sparks engendered by the double life of a writer—which, for what it’s worth, is what I hope to have accomplished with this book—is not to look back nostalgically at a golden age of magazines, nor is it to romanticize the poverty of underpaid and overworked writers for whom such employment rarely exists. Instead, learning a thing from big magazines, it is to acknowledge that aesthetic experimentation can be its own occupation and that given enough time and support it can circulate in unexpected ways.