T A B L E_.T A L K

Pulling the plug on the Greaseman. Discuss how much shock a jock can get away with in the Media area of Table Talk.

BILL LETTRES | PAGE 1, 2
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Brag about your money or bitch about it; either way, we don't want to hear it. (OK, we do -- greedily -- but we'll despise you for it.) True, the story of the starving artist is familiar and sympathetic, but that's because we hear it not from his own underfed mouth but in comfortable retrospect (Orwell's reminiscences, Paul Auster's "Hand to Mouth") or through admiring biographers. Beggaring one's creditors is practically an entrance requirement for the canon (and the stuff of literary movie heartthrobs): James Joyce scholars love the story behind a 1904 photo portrait of the young artist -- asked what he was thinking when his friend snapped the picture, the legendary freeloader replied, "I wondered would he lend me five shillings."

In our own time acclaimed novelist James Wilcox became the face of literary penury, but not by his own hand: A 1994 New Yorker profile depicted him scraping by, despite critical raves, on niggardly advances and rationing himself bargain chicken from the supermarket rotisserie. The article revived interest in his work, but there was inevitable sniggering afterward, and, underscoring the social stigma of opening the ledgers in public, even the New Orleans Times-Picayune granted the Louisianan a "most dubious distinction" award.

But the successful writer? Oy gevalt! Don't get the financially successful writer started on his money problems. ("Financially successful writer" is a fraught and contradictory term, but I'll define it here as a writer who earns all or a substantial part of an average-to-above-average income from writing.) Earning embarrassingly less than many of their subjects, yet in many ways removed from the experience of typical 9-to-5 clock-punchers, writers occupy a roiling rapids of multidirectional resentment. Somebody once mentioned to me the average income, comfortably into six figures, of the readers of Fortune magazine, where I write, and since then I can't file a piece for that magazine without feeling like I should be carrying a silver tray and answering to a bell.

And when you're talking financially successful writers kvetching about money, you're talking James Atlas. An accomplished biographer, editor and critic, Atlas is probably no more obsessed than any other writer with, as he puts it, "the fiercest desire of all these days -- the desire to get ahead." But he sure is more willing to bellyache about it. A string of Atlas' New Yorker essays in the last few years compose an Iliad of writerly envy. He seems to have had a decent life. He mentions a little red farmhouse in Vermont, an apartment overlooking Central Park, children in -- sure -- private schools. But all around him, brokers, doctors, even other writers are making mad phat money, '90s money, fuck-you money. ("One of my oldest friends in the literary world has recently hit it big. How big? ... A million, two million?") He mourns the days when artists could be shabbily genteel and buy real estate for a song ("How come Jules Feiffer gets to summer on Martha's Vineyard?"). He phones fellow literatus Jason Epstein to determine that one now needs $350,000 a year to live "a comfortable life in Manhattan -- private schools, a decent apartment, a modest summer place." He notes in not one but two articles that he is forced to subsidize his trips abroad by -- gasp! -- writing for Travel & Leisure.

But today, Atlas is stepping up and doing something about it. Seeking money to put where his mouth is, Atlas has become an entrepreneur, publishing a new series of short biographies in conjunction with Viking Penguin, backed with Wall Street financing. In a New York magazine profile Michael Wolff insinuated that Atlas' little metal car would henceforth be passing "Go" with speed-of-light periodicity, and you can be damn sure that set tongues a-waggin' in the aforementioned bitter-journalists' community.

So even as Atlas wrote wistfully last year that "the city is awash in money" but "I'm trying to be happy where I am," he was in fact drawing up blueprints for his start-up. In retrospect, the closing of that essay -- "show me the money" -- is no mere plaint. It is a manifesto, Atlas' new, improved version of "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead," his "hypocrite lecteur!" Atlas is giving us the business venture as the culmination of art, a literary endeavor with return on investment, taking Flaubert's dictum that the artist "should live like a bourgeois" and slamming it to the next level. Bourgeois, hell! Live like Jeff Bezos! "Make it new"? Strike it rich!

Atlas and Passaro have reached two different solutions to the ancient art-vs.-money perplex: Transcend it or come clean about it. When Passaro's essay came out, I was, like him, working an academic day job, my wife was, like his, a librarian and we earned less and paid more than he to live in an apartment in a nice but less-coveted New York neighborhood. I was, shall we say, less than sympathetic to his personal woes. But despite my objections as a fellow striver, I at least envied him a little -- not just for his rent-stabilization deal but for defying that Cratchit-like fiscal meekness most of us share, that cringing, hide-the-pay-stub modesty. Passaro tells me now he doesn't regret the essay, though he might raise class issues more explicitly if he did it again, and that he'd probably make the same financial choices: "You want to live your life in such a way that it gives you joy and comfort when you're old."

Wrapping up the interview, we talk for a minute about work, which is to say, we talk about money. I ask him about his full-time freelancing days ('88 to '93, fiction, reviews, author profiles for Esquire and Vanity Fair). I give him my half-assed opinions of Web economics and micropayments and banner ads. He asks me if I'm really making a living at this online-writing business, and I tell him yes, and -- of course, of course -- I do not say how much.
SALON | March 2, 1999

James Poniewozik's Under the Covers appears every Tuesday in Media Circus.