Is Ted Turner using CNN international to espouse his personal political views? Conspiracy theories abound in the Media area of Table Talk

Weep and read it
By James Poniewozik
Books are alive, well and as sentimentalized as ever
(11/10/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

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---------------A former editor charges that the New Yorker's fiction
---------------has gone off the deep end of the testosterone scale.

BY SUSAN LEHMAN

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Readers who don't spend the winter months huddled under the counterpane reading the American Scholar, the lively and eclectic journal of the Phi Beta Kappa society, may have missed former New Yorker editor Frances Kiernan's analysis of the premier rag's fiction-publishing deficiencies.

In a piece challenging new editor David Remnick to revitalize the magazine's fiction policy, Kiernan argues that a disproportionate amount of the scarce space now devoted to fiction features prose that is manly, rough and preoccupied with sex.

Kiernan wrote that she had begun to suspect that the magazine's fiction was dominated by "guy stories," and to test her suspicions she had examined eight issues of the magazine. "What I found when I took a look at those eight issues of the New Yorker were eight stories about men, seven of them written by men," Kiernan wrote. "I found the sort of explicit sex Mr. Shawn would never have tolerated. I found a fascination with the connection between food and sex. I found almost every male narrator or protagonist to be either highly flawed or terribly unattractive." (Could Kiernan somehow have stumbled upon an all-Martin Amis issue?)

A weary-sounding Bill Buford, the New Yorker's fiction editor, responds, "We are publishing fiction that maybe is different than what we were publishing when she was here. We're also publishing lots of the same writers we were publishing when she was here. I wouldn't describe Don DeLillo or Annie Proulx or Steven Millhauser as 'rough' writers."

Buford, who admits colleagues had to prod him to even respond to Kiernan's charges, says Kiernan got her facts wrong. "We published 19 stories by women writers, 27 by men [in 1998]. That's not a 50/50 ratio, but it's not bad," says Buford, noting that the magazine ran 93 male-authored stories and 31 stories penned by women in the supposedly less testosterone-drenched year 1970, shortly after Kiernan started at the New Yorker. Invoking an unlikely big gun, Buford adds, "Cynthia Ozick expressed surprise at the implication that I was an editor of boy fiction."

In her wistful essay, Kiernan writes that when she first arrived at the New Yorker to interview for a receptionist job in 1966, the magazine frequently published three pieces of fiction a week. (Strangely, says Kiernan, back then the magazine always treated memoirs as fiction.) She remembers the seriousness afforded unsolicited manuscripts: Garrison Keillor came to the New Yorker that way, as, after a dozen or so rejections, did Ann Beattie. In the first two months of Kiernan's 30-year tenure with the magazine's fiction department, the magazine published stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Spencer, Larry Woiwode, Edith Templeton, John Updike, S.J. Perelman, Woody Allen and Frank Conroy, among others.

According to Kiernan, everything changed when Tina Brown entered the picture and cut back on fiction. Kiernan told Media Circus that lots of writers stopped submitting pieces to the magazine at that point because "nobody likes to be rejected all the time." And the fiction Brown's magazine did publish was almost all written by name writers; in the old days, when the New Yorker was bursting with fiction, Kiernan says there was room to introduce up-and-coming unknowns. "Fiction can give you something nonfiction doesn't," says Kiernan, who is now finishing work on a biography of Mary McCarthy. "Fiction is glorious at its best."

According to Buford, the New Yorker has no plans to publish more fiction, but "if we found ourselves with more fiction we wanted to publish, we would."

In an ideal world, writes Kiernan, Remnick would throw out Brown's crossword puzzle and contributor's page, trim the listings in "Goings On" and give the Fiction Department space to run two stories a week.

And everyone would live happily ever after.

Gravy trains grind to a halt

If Tina Brown edited a philanthropy magazine, it would probably look a lot like the American Benefactor. Sporting cover stories on "The Hollywood Way of Giving" and "Fashion's New Line: Enriching the Arts," this glossy is jam-packed with profiles on glam money givers. Edited by Nelson Aldridge, the American Benefactor began as a magazine about the mysteries of personal giving, and featured pieces by impressive writers (Jack Hitt, Francine Prose, Nicholas von Hoffman) on unexpected subjects such as Jane Austen's views on money and the human heart. AB's real beneficiaries were the highly paid writers who jetted across the globe chasing tales of charitable extravagance. All this came to a sad end last week when Randall Jones, the CEO of Capital Publishing -- which publishes Worth, Civilization and American Benefactor -- alerted magazine subscribers that, because of unsatisfactory circulation growth, American Benefactor would fold into Worth. How a 100-plus page magazine will fold into another magazine is anyone's guess.

Also down: Ralph Lauren son David Lauren's Swing: The Magazine for Life in your 20s. Lauren broke the bad news to staffers at a 4 o'clock meeting Monday afternoon; by Tuesday afternoon, practically everyone was out the door. Lauren issued a statement saying that after nine years and 40 issues, he decided to close the magazine. "To advance to the next level would require greater financial investment and a willingness to commercialize the editorial vision of the magazine." (Not that!) The big losers: the young writers who through Swing gained an entry into the national magazine market.

Robert Bork, Susan Estrich set to swing from heels

American Lawyer Media, under the new ownership of Bruce Wasserstein, launches a new online venture on Dec. 1. The sexiest part, Open Court, promises a "feast of opinion and commentary, unfiltered rushes to judgment, injudicial musings by and for members of the legal community and people generally interested in legal affairs," says Law News Network executive editor Dirk Olin.

"Lots of stories, properly considered, are legal stories," says Olin, who insists that far from being glassy-eyed zombies, lots of lawyers are, in fact, deep thinkers on a broad range of subjects. "It will be a place that allows you to swing from the heels and somehow stay within the envelope of civility -- Slate for lawyers, " promises Olin. (Interesting business model.) Jeffrey Rosen, Susan Estrich, Alex Kozinski, Edward Lazarus and possibly Robert Bork are set to square off in the days following Open Court's launch.

Am Law's Web venture also features Law News Network, which will provide breaking national legal news culled from Am Law's regional legal papers as well as original material.

Your tax dollars at work

The National Endowment for the Arts has just begun a new program to help literary magazines thrive in an increasingly competitive and commercial marketplace. The NEA committed $350,000 -- a sum Ken Starr's team probably spends on long-term copy-machine rental amortization each month -- for a two-year program that will help literary magazines beef up operations through workshops, consulting and a mentoring network.

Dedicated journal editors who toil in obscurity, scaring up weird and wonderful fiction even Frances Kiernan wouldn't have published, say the program is a good start, but probably won't revolutionize publishing in America. "Literary journals keep innovative writing alive. And they help provide a forum for emerging writers or writers who wouldn't ordinarily be noticed by the larger public or by publishers," says Ploughshares editor Don Lee. (Jayne Anne Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Sue Miller and Ethan Canin all got their start in Ploughshares; Sharon Olds, Richard Ford, Philip Roth and Rita Dove also first published in literary magazines.) Says Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser, "Any time the federal government is forced to give money to the arts or to literature, it's a good thing."

Attention David Lauren: Switch gears a bit and you may qualify.
SALON | Nov. 19, 1998

Susan Lehman's Media Circus appears every Thursday in Salon.