EDITORS WORK WITHOUT APPLAUSE, except perhaps from a few of their writers and sometimes just for offering up assignments. You can’t trust that, and good editors learn quickly. Still, discouragement comes from being too hopeful, which I sometimes was. Michael Herr’s writing and reporting for Esquire in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969 was the best I had ever read. His 1977 book Dispatches was reviewed as an instant classic of war literature. So as soon as I got to Rolling Stone in 1981 I went after him, asking for whatever he might like to write. I took it as a positive sign that the one piece he had previously published in RS had become the last chapter in Dispatches. Herr wrote back to say that although the magazine’s founder and my boss, Jann Wenner, was alright with him, the problem of Rolling Stone not paying enough was insurmountable.
Frankly, his next paragraph began, it was impossible for him to imagine his work ever again in the Stone, and even more frankly, provocatively, that was too bad because readers of the magazine could use a little relief from the ongoing vulgarity. True enough, I thought. He ended the paragraph suggesting you might want to put a match to the corner of this letter around now.
Rather than lighting a match, I looked for an opening somewhere before the end of the letter. That was always how it went with Hunter and many other writers. But then:
I spent too many hours with one of your predecessors while his tears scalded his bourbon not to appreciate the difficulties of your position.
That stopped me. It was far from my first taste of the journalistic frustrations of working for other people. It had been made obvious to me many other times that I didn’t have the last word. But this was humiliating in its kindness and understanding. The difficulties of your position. I would never enjoy the power of my decisions until my position changed. Rereading the letter, I knew that I would have to start my own magazine, and I saved it as a kind of totem. Remembering that letter helped me when I was raising money to launch Smart. And I hear it still, like a wind blowing through my career, every time I pick up Dispatches.
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