IF YOU’RE A WRITER, you’ve got plenty of time to think about what you’re doing, and eventually you have to confront the question of why you’re doing it—writing in the first place. And then come the practical questions. And they keep coming around, like the rent.
“I’m not rich enough to be a writer” was a freelancer homily I heard sometimes, and it would always make me think of Taki (Panagiotis Theodoracopulos), the son of a Greek shipping tycoon with houses in New York, London and Gstaad and a sleek black-and-teak sailboat called Bushido. At one of his Christmas parties he pointed to a photo of the yacht on the mantel and said that was where my wife would be when he stole her away from me. Bushido, of course, is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry. We first worked together in 1984 when Taki was serving time in North London’s Pentonville Prison for possession of cocaine.
He got away with much as a traditional playboy, and his columns were laced with astonishing ethnic slurs. Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld was “a very homely, simian-looking Jew who couldn’t punch his way out of a nursery.” Russian manners were a “grotesque deformity.” The Puerto Rican Day Parade was a “hoedown for slobs.” But now bankrolling Taki’s Magazine (a libertarian webzine of “politics and culture”), Taki wears the cape of the lovable old rogue. I had to insist on paying him, and he never cashed the checks. But like I said, he was in prison for cocaine possession then.
On the other side of that coin, Rian Malan was down to his last few dollars in L.A., with no car. When I tried to advance him money on a contract for several pieces, he said he couldn’t take it because he wasn’t sure he could do the work. That he was broke was inexplicable. His searing autobiographical take on South Africa, My Traitor’s Heart, was a New York Times best seller and had already been translated into eleven languages. That didn’t mean unlimited cash, but it meant he could get an assignment anytime he wanted one. But the assignment had to be right and he wouldn’t take money he hadn’t already earned. He seemed haunted by fairness, going back to his childhood in Johannesburg in an Afrikaner clan led by his great-uncle Daniel François Malan, who as prime minister was the ideological force behind apartheid.
Rian was singular. But I had to insist on paying him, too.
THE BEST WRITERS were usually the best negotiators, especially when it came to leveraging where they stood among other writers. Why wouldn’t they be—they had the throw weight. Good editors paid close attention to this.
I wrote in the introduction to the 1993 Lust, Violence, Sin, Magic: Sixty Years of Esquire Fiction that when Arnold Gingrich was thirty years old and launching Esquire in 1933, he approached Ernest Hemingway in a New York City bookstore that dealt in first editions. Gingrich had arrived to pick up a copy of Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems—one of 350 copies printed in Paris in 1923. Hemingway was just leaving when Gingrich came in, and the young editor went right at him, reminding Hemingway that he was a collector of his work (they had been corresponding in this regard for some months) and pleading with him to contribute to the new magazine.
Hemingway agreed to Gingrich’s suggestion that he write “some kind of sporting letter” covering his outdoor activities in the course of his travels. When it came to payment, Gingrich said that he hoped to “make up in promptness of payment what it would lack in size” but that he was going to be forced to start rather low, even if it was “as much as I could to start and going up as fast as we make it, if we make it.”
“I don’t care how much you pay,” Hemingway told him, then reconsidered immediately. “Hell, yes, I do care, but the big stuff I can always get by selling stories and you and I are just talking about journalism. Let’s say if you pay fifty bucks or whatever you pay, you pay me double.”
Gingrich said he was planning to pay $100.
“Fine,” said Hemingway. “That means I get two hundred, and if you find as you go along that you can do better than that, then I get that much more, too, only doubled, and right away, without making me sit up and beg for it.”
They shook hands. That was the only deal Hemingway ever had with Esquire, and as he conscientiously met deadlines over the next couple of years from wherever he happened to be, the magazine’s rate more than doubled. By the late spring of 1936, Hemingway was making $500 per contribution and enjoying his relationship with Gingrich. When he saw he couldn’t meet an upcoming deadline for his standard “Letter From…” Hemingway sent Gingrich a story he had been working on instead.
It was called “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and Gingrich paid Hemingway $1,000, double his standard “double rate.” It was the most the magazine had paid for any single contribution up to that time, and as Gingrich pointed out in his memoir Nothing but People, it was less than a fourth of what big magazines like the Saturday Evening Post were paying Hemingway for stories.
Editors today who hear this story are struck by the haphazardness by which that great story came to Esquire, not to mention the deal-making eccentricities of its author and the charming opportunism of editor Gingrich. More interesting to me when I edited Esquire was Hemingway’s willingness to do the work offered by Gingrich for next to nothing because they were “just talking about journalism.”
Journalism as Hemingway was referring to it was as greatly undervalued compared to fiction back then as it became overvalued later. In the thirties, the short story ruled, and as the decades moved on, journalists began to adopt the techniques of fiction. Narrative and scene became more important, as did believable dialogue and even speculation about what was going on inside a subject’s head. (Thanks, Tom!)
And journalists started making more money. (Thanks again, Tom!!). For almost twenty years it was not crazy to think you could make an interesting living as a magazine freelancer, but that changed when the decline of traditional print economics and the rise of the cheapskate Internet resulted in what politicians now call an income equity gap. If you’re writing short fiction, you’ve probably got a teaching job.
I ALWAYS PAID MUCH LESS for fiction, and when I went to novelists with an idea for a nonfiction piece, they were surprised by how much more the journalism paid—usually at least double.
“What the fuck have I been doing?” is how Bill Kittredge put it when I called him in Missoula to talk him into what became a widely admired essay called “Redneck Secrets” that ran in the premier issue of Rocky Mountain Magazine. He had written mostly short fiction, which is what he taught at the University of Montana, but after that the personal essay was his strongest form and he also became a fine editor, putting together The Last Best Place, an anthology with astonishing range about Montana, with the filmmaker and writer Annick Smith.
Writers have to be opportunistic. Even if they don’t recycle their pieces, exactly, they return to themes they have made their own and rework the language for different magazines. You can’t blame them. It’s survival instinct. So, too, is writing an online column for little or no money just for the exposure so you can charge more for speaking engagements. But over the years it was especially good news for writers whenever a new print magazine was launching (Egg, Spy, Outside, Spin, Condé Nast Traveler, Manhattan, Inc., all the way up through more recent business failures like Portfolio and Play). And it was even better if the rates were bouncing up, like when Vanity Fair relaunched in 1982, and then when Tina Brown began her luminous run there in 1984, and again when she took over the New Yorker in 1992. Condé Nast always paid the most and mounted the last of the big, extravagant magazine launches. Mark Golin, a colleague of mine at Time Inc., explained the writer economics of the $120 million Portfolio start-up in 2007 as “like when dogs find a tipped-over dumpster behind the Whole Foods.”
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