The first person known to have said, “The Village isn’t what it used to be” was the writer Floyd Dell. That was in 1916. Dell was from Illinois, and he had lived in Greenwich Village for less than three years. The Village is that kind of place: almost everybody who lives there has come from somewhere else, but when a new person arrives they tell him, “Man, you should have been here last year.” The Village is kept alive by immigrants who, immediately after they settle in, start worrying that the Village is disappearing. A community that insecure needs a newspaper.
The Village Voice was founded in 1955. It is one of the most successful enterprises in the history of American journalism. It began as a neighborhood paper serving an area about a tenth the size of the Left Bank, in Paris, and it became, within ten years, a nationally known brand and the inspiration for a dozen other local papers across the country. By 1967, it was the best-selling weekly newspaper in the United States, with a single-day circulation higher than the circulations of ninety-five per cent of American big-city dailies. It survived the deaths of four other New York City newspapers and most of its imitators, and it has had a longer life than the weekly Life. But, in books about the modern press, it is given a smaller role than it deserves.
Success may be part of the reason. The Voice was, from the start, a for-profit venture. For many years, it hung on by its teeth. Between 1955 and 1962, it lost nearly sixty thousand dollars; the combined salaries of its editor and its publisher, for that entire period, was eighteen thousand dollars. But, when it hit the black, it got very fat very quickly. In 1968, the paper ran 1.7 million lines of display ads and four hundred and sixty thousand lines of classifieds—twelve hundred individual advertisements every week. The typical issue was eighty pages; two-thirds of the book was advertising.
Advertising may seem to fall into the same category as richness, thinness, and approval, one of the things you can never have too much of. But a paper that is more than two-thirds advertising starts to look like what is known in the industry as a “shopper”—a free publication that people pick up for the ads, and that no one really reads, a paper that has editorial content mainly for the purpose of self-respect. The quality of the Voice’s editorial content has varied, but it was never just a shopper. Still, its prosperity may have obscured its originality. The Voice changed journalism, because it changed the idea of what it was to be a journalist.
The Voice was not the first local paper in Greenwich Village. The Villager, which had been founded in 1933, was distributed free to twenty-seven thousand readers. The Villager promoted itself as “Reflecting the Treasured Traditions of This Cherished Community”—which is a reminder that there has always been an upscale Village that has more in common with the Upper East Side than it does with Avenue A. But the voice of the Villager was a prewar voice, and the voice of the Voice was distinctly postwar. The cultural history of the Village is a Slinky on a staircase: it seems to flip over every three years or so. The Voice appeared around the time of the Beat writers, who were followed by the folkies, but the paper’s sensibility took shape earlier, in the period right after the Second World War.
Intellectually and creatively, the center of the postwar Village was the New School. When the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the G.I. Bill—was passed, the New School’s Adult Education Division added a B.A. program in order to take advantage of the act’s education benefits, and enrollment more than tripled. The New School was also an attraction because of the presence of what Anatole Broyard, in his flavorful memoir of Village life in the nineteen-forties, “Kafka Was the Rage,” called “the storm troopers of humanism.” These were the European émigrés, refugees from totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, who taught in the Adult Education Division. These men and women had been witnesses to history; they carried its scars, and they wore its authority. Their students regarded them, and many of them regarded themselves, as bearing out of the burning wreck of Europe the ark of Western art and thought. One of the storm troopers was Jean Malaquais.
Malaquais was practically the incarnation of the twentieth-century dangling man. His real name was Wladimir Malacki, and he was born in the Warsaw in 1908. His father, who was a classicist, and his mother, who was a musician, later died in the camps. He left Poland in 1926, travelled in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, worked as a laborer in France, and ended up in Paris, in 1935, where he changed his name (he took his new name from the Quai Malaquais) and began writing novels. André Gide admired Malaquais’s first novel, “Les Javanais,” a story based on his experiences as a miner in Provence, and he made Malaquais his private secretary. Malaquais fought for the Loyalists in Spain, where he was arrested as a Fascist provocateur by the Russians and nearly shot.
When the Second World War began, he was drafted into the French Army and captured by the Germans. He escaped (not difficult in the early months of the war; Sartre was a prisoner and escaped, too) and fled to Marseilles, where, with the help of the underground Emergency Rescue Committee, which also got Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, André Breton, and Marcel Duchamp out (all of them ended up in New York City), he managed to get to Venezuela, Mexico, and, finally, the United States. After the war, Malaquais returned briefly to Paris, where he published his most ambitious novel, “Planète sans Visa,” about an international group of exiles in Vichy France. And it was there, in 1948, most likely at a party given by a man named Harold Kaplan, who was the Paris correspondent for Partisan Review, that Malaquais met Norman Mailer.
Mailer was twenty-five. He had just finished “The Naked and the Dead,” and he was living in Paris with his wife, Bea, and taking a course at the Sorbonne called “Cours de la Civilisation Française”—a G.I. Bill special. Malaquais was forty. He was a Trotskyist, which signified, by then, mainly a superior and disillusioned leftism, a position from which anything, including anarchism, might follow. Malaquais naturally considered his grasp of conditions infinitely more hardheaded than Mailer’s; he thought of Mailer, as he later put it, as “kind of a Boy Scout politically and intellectually.” “Even then,” he said, “he had this talent for expatiating about philosophers he didn’t have the vaguest understanding of.” Accustomed to outmuscling more cautious friends and colleagues, Mailer seems to have enjoyed being outmuscled by Malaquais, and Malaquais became his guru, his boxing master, his Drew Bundini Brown—a relationship that was lifelong. At the end of 1948, Malaquais returned to New York and began teaching modern literature at the New School. And, soon after, at a party at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, he introduced Mailer to one of his students, Dan Wolf.
Wolf was in his mid-thirties, and his career was without an obvious trajectory. He was born, in 1915, on the Upper West Side; his father was in the antique business. After finishing high school, he travelled in Europe, then served as a private in the Pacific theatre. He left the service in 1946, moved to the Village, and started attending the New School on the G.I. Bill. Wolf and Mailer liked each other and became good friends. Mailer’s marriage was breaking up, and, one night in 1951, Wolf suggested that he might want to meet Adele Morales.
Wolf knew Morales because she had dated one of his New School friends, Edwin Fancher. Fancher was from Middletown, New York. He attended the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks, but did not graduate; served in Italy with the ski troops of the 10th Mountain Division during the war; and was working toward a degree in psychology at the New School. He had picked up Morales in the cafeteria. She was a painter; she had studied with the legendary Hans Hofmann, another refugee from the Nazis and one of the major influences on the Abstract Expressionism of the nineteen-forties, at his school on Eighth Street. She moved to Manhattan from Bensonhurst (her parents emigrated from Cuba) and she went out with Fancher for several years; she also had a brief relationship with Jack Kerouac, who was writing “On the Road.” (She is supposed to have been one of the first people to see the famous scroll.) She was sexually adventurous, and Mailer found her irresistible; in 1951, they combined two apartments upstairs from Wolf’s, on First Avenue near Second Street, and began living together. The rent was sixteen dollars. Mailer came to the Village—after the huge success of “The Naked and the Dead,” sixty-two weeks on the Times best-seller list, he had moved to Vermont, of all places—because he was looking for the bohemians. Naturally, he was about a year too late.
“If it hadn’t been for books,” Broyard says in his memoir, “we’d have been completely at the mercy of sex.” The Village stood for an advanced taste in literature and the arts; it also stood for sexual opportunity. (Exactly what the Village stood for in Floyd Dell’s time, too.) The place where those two staples of human life intersected was the place where they have always intersected: the bar scene. In a tour of Hollywood, you visit the homes of the stars; in a tour of the Cold War Village, you visit the bars. (In a tour of the Village today, you visit places featured in “Sex and the City.”) There was the White Horse, on Hudson Street, where Dylan Thomas had the last of many drinks. There was the Cedar Tavern, on University, where the Abstract Expressionists drank and slugged each other. And there was the San Remo, on MacDougal. “The Remo was a sort of Village United Nations,” Michael Harrington, who came to the Village from St. Louis, in 1949, wrote. “The Remo was our Deux Magots, our Café Flore, our La Coupole.” The San Remo bar seems to have appealed to every type: John Cage and Miles Davis, James Agee and William Steig, Julian Beck and the editors of Partisan Review, whose office was on Astor Place.
Read classic New Yorker stories, curated by our archivists and editors.
Harrington’s analogy was not casual: Village night life right after the war took inspiration from stories of Paris. The Left Bank was the liveliest venue in Europe after the Liberation—the home of les caves existentialistes, as Boris Vian described them in his amusing faux travel guide, “Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” written in 1949. Sartre and Beauvoir were its symbolic figures: close thinking and open marriages. Many of the people who were flooding into the neighborhood and taking classes at the New School were veterans, and they saw the Village, as Wolf later put it, “as an extension or a successor to Paris.” The Village promised the same combination of alcohol, sex, jazz, and highbrow conversation.
The Village also suffered the same victimization at the hands of what Vian called les pisse-copie—the hack journalists. The Village’s pisse-copie was Mary McCarthy. In 1950, McCarthy needed money, and, through the good offices of her friend Arthur Schlesinger, she contracted to write a ten-part series for the New York Post on “Greenwich Village at Night.” McCarthy had lived in the Village in the nineteen-thirties, and she found, upon revisiting, that the place wasn’t what it used to be. She felt comfortable in the San Remo, which she called “the Café de Flore of the Village,” but most of her reports were about (to use her terms) the fairies, the pansies, the rough trade, and the dikes. The Village of her pieces was a louche and depressing sexual playground. Nothing could scandalize McCarthy, of course: to promote the series, the Post reprinted her short story about casual train sex, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” But she expressed well the sensation of having been slumming, and her series performed the same function that “Sex and the City” did later on: it brought in the tourists. For the first time, as one Villager remembered, there was sexual graffiti in the men’s room at the San Remo.
Mailer had other worries. His second novel, “Barbary Shore,” came out in 1951; it was dedicated to Malaquais. The reception was unkind, the start of a rough ride for Mailer. In 1954, he and Adele Morales were married; Mailer repaid Wolf for the successful matchmaking by introducing him to Rhoda Lazare, a social worker who was a close friend of Mailer’s sister, Barbara, and Wolf and Lazare were married in 1955. That was the year that Mailer, Wolf, and Fancher founded the Village Voice.
Mailer liked to claim that he came up with the name for the paper, but, as Kevin McAuliffe suggests in his highly informative, highly enjoyable, and highly opinionated book about the Voice, “The Great American Newspaper” (1978), it seems likely that he simply picked it from a list of proposals made by potential readers. Fancher, who had started working as a psychologist, was the publisher. Wolf was the editor. And Mailer, invited in part because he was a source of capital, was officially a silent partner. None of these men had any experience in the newspaper business. “If we had known more, we certainly would have suffered less,” Wolf said later. But they did create a durable template.
The first issue of the Voice had an attractive white-on-black, black-on-white logo designed by a student of Hans Hofmann, Nell Blaine, who was an important figure in the postwar art world: she was associated with the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which promoted the early poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. But the logo was the closest the magazine got to serious graphic design. The layout was cut-and-paste: the eccentricity of the jumps in the Voice—page 1 to page 12, say, finishing with half an inch on page 3—became notorious. “I’d like to read you,” I. F. Stone told the columnist Nat Hentoff, “but I can’t find you.” The stories were doggedly local: “VILLAGE TRUCKER SUES COLUMBIA: SEEKS $50,000” was the headline in the first issue. There were news stories about panels and classes at the New School; there was full coverage of the arts; there were columns on shopping and fashion. Beginning with the third issue, there was a letters section, whose tone of amused outrage did a lot to define the character of the paper and its readership. Harrington had a review of Budd Schulberg’s novel “Waterfront” in the first issue, and he became a regular contributor, as did his wife, Stephanie Gervis, whose irreverent reporting—for example, a piece about picking up women in the Village, in 1962—set a standard in the nineteen-sixties.
“The literary Zeitgeist, I guess you’d call it, or Weltanschauung, around the Remo and the New School was the intellectual heritage of the Voice,” Fancher once said. That Weltanschauung was humanist and individualist; it was anti-relativist and anti-utopian. It was even, in some respects, conservative: it was reflexively suspicious of calls for change—part of the intellectual heritage of anti-totalitarianism. What the Voice was not was therefore as important as what it was. It was not a left-wing paper; it distanced itself from the Old Left and, later on, from the New. The editors were disaffected with liberalism, but the goal was to avoid ideology altogether. “The Nation, The New Republic, and Partisan were all boring,” as Fancher later put it. “Ideology bored us—not simply the Communist line but the antiCommunist line too.” Eventually, the paper became associated with the Village Independent Democrats, the reform group that produced Ed Koch, and then with the mayoralty of John Lindsay. Koch and Lindsay were not men looking to overthrow the system.
Nor was the Voice an underground or countercultural paper. The idea was to make money (at least, not to lose it), and though the business side of the operation was fairly hopeless—Mailer’s dad, Barney, was the first accountant; at one point, every member of the sales department was a poet—the founders worked hard to distribute the paper to newsstands all over the city. They knew that they could not survive with the Village as their sole advertising base. The Voice reviewed high-end art, film, and theatre; its movie reviewer starting in 1958 was the arch-avant-gardist Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian émigré who had spent four years in a camp for stateless persons after the war. Eventually, Andrew Sarris, a protégé of Mekas and a student of French film theory, took over. Beginning in 1956, the Voice ran a weekly comic strip by Jules Feiffer. But the paper was often skeptical of boldness. It gave a mixed review to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” and, amazingly for a paper that was the great antagonist of Robert Moses, it ran a largely critical review of Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It regarded her as an enemy of urban planning, and a romantic about the lives and hopes of slumdwellers.
The Voice did run personals. The personal ad is a minor art form (personals are also a convenient way to generate content and income at the same time), and some of the Voice’s were distinguished for their ingenuity: “Stubborn, penniless, aristocratic, unstable nitwit expects to hear from idiotic, irresponsible, temperamental broad who can’t keep her mind on anything. If it’s you, you might as well write back. I’ll get hold of you sooner or later.” But the Voice refused to run sex ads. (Later, there were debates among the editors about the propriety of accepting ads for massage parlors; McAuliffe says that Wolf and Fancher were relieved when Al Goldstein’s Screw emerged, in 1968, to accommodate the sex-ad traffic.) And, before the nineteen-seventies, the Voice showed no interest in or concern with gay life and gay issues. When the Stonewall riots took place, one Voice reporter described them as “the forces of faggotry”; another found himself on the side of the police, fighting off the protesters. The Voice had no openly gay writers at the time; it had published only a few black writers. In 1969, gay activists picketed the paper after it rejected an ad for a gay dating service. The Voice was not on the cutting edge of anything except journalism. That, of course, is why it survived.
The Voice’s editorial formula was the product of two people. One was Wolf. “Dan was a brilliant editor because he didn’t edit,” Feiffer’s first wife, Judy, once said. Wolf recognized that New York City is filled with smart, ambitious people who will do anything to get their stuff in print. His strategy was to wait and see what came in. Stuff came in. So the paper was able to recruit new talent just by offering a place to publish, and it did not have to pay much. Sometimes, it didn’t pay at all. This meant that Wolf had to be prepared to publish what writers wanted to write. So, on the one hand, the Voice was under-edited; but, on the other hand, it got material that no other publication did, because no other publication would have attracted it or known what to do with it. And, by all reports, Wolf had the kind of personality that inspired writers to give him their best. As McAuliffe puts it, he edited people, not copy.
Read classic New Yorker stories, curated by our archivists and editors.
The policy got Wolf into trouble. He and Fancher were slow to reward their writers, because they assumed that, if the writers were worth more, another publication would steal them, and the Voice could find new ones. The paper was designed for continual turnover. This did not sit well with writers, especially once the Voice was plainly making money. When Wolf and Fancher sold most of their stake in the paper to Carter Burden, in 1970, for three million dollars, there was outrage. (Burden was a New York City councilman, a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the husband of William S. Paley’s stepdaughter Amanda.) The church-mouse routine did not go down well, especially with Feiffer, who had been the face of the franchise for many years—his strips were occasionally run on the cover—and who had to ask for a raise after the strip’s fifteenth anniversary. “At least Wolf and Fancher could have given us a bottle of champagne,” he later complained. When he finally resigned from the Voice, in 1997, it was because of a pay dispute.
Wolf considered his editorial policy as philosophy. “The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Village Voice Reader,” in 1962. “It was a philosophical position. We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism.” Journalism is a profession entirely by self-description. You do not need a degree, license, or credential of any kind to be a journalist. So the need to define and maintain a professional identity is at least as strong in the case of journalists as it is for lawyers and college professors. It was its insouciance toward this identity that made the Voice such an influential force. There were many regular columnists in the Voice’s early history; they all took inspiration from Wolf’s permissiveness—their columns were often personal, sometimes rambling, occasionally contentious. Voice writers attacked other Voice writers, and this was fine, because there was no one voice of the Voice. “Every man his own James Reston” could have been the paper’s motto. And, when everyone is James Reston, it devalues the authority of the real James Reston a little. Since devaluing authority is one of the things journalism does, this amounted to using the methods of journalism against the pretensions of mainstream journalism.
The other creator of the Voice formula was Jerry Tallmer. Tallmer edited and wrote theatre reviews—he was the inventor of the Obies, the Off-Broadway theatre awards that the Voice founded and sponsored. Tallmer’s mission was to put the “I” in newspaper criticism. Impersonality and objectivity are part of the ethic of journalistic identity, just as disinterestedness and freedom of inquiry are part of the ethic of professorial identity. The Voice showed that you could disrespect these idols and still sell newspapers. And the world would not come to an end, either.
The Voice also had two stars. One was Mailer. The same month that the newspaper began publishing, Mailer’s third novel, “The Deer Park,” came out. Mailer dedicated it to Wolf. Though the Voice ran a review by Mailer’s friend the Baltimore psychologist Robert Lindner, who called it “a giant step forward from his previous novels,” the rest of the literary world was vicious. Mailer bought a half-page ad in the Voice featuring excerpts from some of the worst reviews (“Moronic Mindlessness . . . Golden Garbage Heap”—New York Herald Tribune). He was crushed and angry, but he saw opportunity in the wreckage, and, a few months later, in 1956, he contributed ten thousand dollars more to keep the paper going and began writing a column.
He called it “QUICKLY: A Column for Slow Readers.” The name was adapted from a phrase of Gide’s, which Mailer presumably got via Malaquais and which he adopted permanently as his own: “Do not understand me too quickly.” As the title suggests, the column was belligerent from the start. “The only way I see myself becoming one of the cherished traditions of the Village,” Mailer wrote, echoing the motto of the Villager, “is to be actively disliked each week.” This turned out to be easily done. The column provoked letters—“This guy Mailer, he’s a hostile, narcissistic pest. Lose him”—and even a parody, “Burp: A Column for People Who Can Read, by Normal Failure.”
Mailer managed just seventeen columns. Tallmer was his editor, even though he hated the columns: he considered them “turgid and unreadable.” Mailer was always late submitting his copy, and when mistranscriptions crept in he was furious with Tallmer. Eventually, a typo (“nuisances” for “nuances”) led to a scene in the office. Wolf accused him of behaving like “the worst cartoon caricature of a capitalist with a high hat beating the slaves,” and Mailer quit. It was the end of that friendship. (Mailer wrote again for the Voice, but he withdrew from involvement with the paper.) The columns are not Mailer’s best work; they might possibly be his worst, though with Mailer that can be a fine line. But the pieces were important. It was in them that Mailer began formulating his philosophy of hip, which he called “an American existentialism.” He soon renamed the column “The Hip and the Square” (the conceit was not original: John Wilcock’s long-running Voice column was called “The Village Square”), and much of his essay “The White Negro,” which was published in a special New York issue of Irving Howe’s magazine Dissent, in 1957, was drawn directly from the columns.
Mailer hardly invented the concept of hip, or its racial and sexual associations. It had been around since the rise of bebop, in the nineteen-forties: Broyard criticized its inauthenticity in one of his first essays, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” in Partisan Review in 1948. And no one would call Mailer’s idea of hipness a step toward racial understanding. “The same old primitivism crap in a new package,” as Ralph Ellison called it, in a letter to Albert Murray. But Mailer always regarded “The White Negro” as the foundational work in his canon.
The column also helped Mailer discover that journalism suited him—though it was journalism on new terms. His column was unprofessional on purpose: like Wolf, he wanted to poke his finger in the eye of objectivity and expertise. The personal and argumentative nature of the columns led to the personal and argumentative nature of the book that got him out of his career rut, “Advertisements for Myself,” published in 1959, in which “The White Negro” and every Voice column, with commentary, are reprinted. “Barbary Shore” and “The Deer Park” are formally ambitious books, but they are impersonal, in the aesthetic of the times. What Mailer learned at the Voice was the literary value of leading with your personality. He never forgot it.
The other star was Feiffer. In 1956, Feiffer showed up and arranged a deal: he would contribute a weekly comic strip free if the Voice would grant him complete editorial independence. Wolf was not in a position to refuse such an offer, and, anyway, editorial independence was what the Voice was all about. The first Feiffer strip appeared on October 24, 1956. It ran in the Voice (eventually, Feiffer did get paid for it) for forty-one years.
That had not been Feiffer’s plan. He was born in 1929 in the East Bronx; his parents were Polish immigrants. He got his start in the golden age of comics, when the industry was wildly unregulated, working for one of the geniuses of the form, Will Eisner. Feiffer spent five years with Eisner, starting in 1946, collaborating with him on a classic crime-fighter newspaper comic called “The Spirit.” Feiffer thought of Eisner as his mentor—“a rabbi of the comic art form,” he called him—and Eisner thought that Feiffer was a brilliant writer. But he didn’t think much of Feiffer’s drawing. Humility was never Feiffer’s most recognizable attribute, but he took the point. “The simplest stuff, I couldn’t do” he admitted later. “Oddly, and ironically, the form I most wanted to work in, comic books, was the one I had no gift for working in.” He took nine months away from “The Spirit,” in 1947, to attend the Pratt Institute full time, hoping to start a career in advertising, but he had no luck, and returned to the strip. When it closed, in 1952, he had already been drafted into the Army.
By 1956, the golden age of comics was over: government hearings, and a popular attack on comic books by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, “Seduction of the Innocent,” had driven most of the creative people out of the field. Some went to Mad, which, since it was a magazine and not, technically, a comic book, did not have to submit to the industry’s new code of standards. But it was Feiffer’s ambition to publish his own books. He wanted to be like William Steig, Saul Steinberg, and James Thurber, and he figured that he could use the Voice to get the attention of book publishers. “My approach to the Voice was totally cynical,” he says in the introduction to a collection of his first decade of Voice strips, “Explainers” (Fantagraphics; $28.99).
Feiffer was inimitable, but, like all geniuses, he tapped into a current already live. “Sick, Sick, Sick,” the original name of the strip, belongs to one of the giant upward advances in brow in the history of comedy. The pioneer and, by 1956, the prince of this moment was Mort Sahl. Sahl, who was born in Canada but who grew up in Southern California, got his start in 1953 in San Francisco at the hungry i. (The “i” stood for “intellectual.”) His routine was to carry a newspaper onstage and refer to it, adding commentary so deadpan that audiences at first didn’t get it. Eventually, they did. In 1955, “Mort Sahl at Sunset” became the first standup-comedy LP. It had limited distribution; his next album, “The Future Lies Ahead,” in 1958, was a hit. Meanwhile, he had played the Village Vanguard to record houses in 1954. In 1958, he had a Broadway show.
The mark of the new comedy was edge. Feiffer had edge: his tone, like Sahl’s—and like Tom Lehrer’s, whose first major album, “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” was released in 1959—was sardonic. But his method was closer to another highbrow act, Nichols and May. Mike Nichols (a refugee from Berlin) and Elaine May were a hit from their first appearance, at the Village Vanguard, in 1957. Feiffer saw them on the television program “Omnibus” soon after, and he was knocked out. “I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” he said later, “because it was as if I was watching stuff completely out of my own mind in a style that was quite advanced from mine—they were much more finished than I thought I was.” It was the start of a relationship. Nichols directed a show called “The World of Jules Feiffer,” with music by Stephen Sondheim, based on the Voice strip, but the show didn’t make it to New York. Later on, though, Feiffer wrote the screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge,” which Nichols directed.
Nichols and May specialized in the language of received wisdom: they improvised on the way people talk when they think that they are sounding smart or hip or just impressively reasonable. This was Feiffer’s specialty, too. His strips are almost always the same: people who are trying to talk their way through or around something, and end up ensnarled in their own discourse, because the discourse is not, in fact, their own. Feiffer’s strips are about borrowed ways of talking, about the lack of fit between people and words, about the way that clichés take over. Two Madison Avenue copywriters (January, 1960):
Now you take rebellion. When I was a kid we used to have rebellion!
Darn right! We’ve sold out our integrity for a mess of status. That’s our trouble.
When was the last time you saw a college kid with a picket sign? We’ve lost the urge to defy!
It’s a conformist culture. That’s our trouble.
Small, frightened people. That’s what we all are.
Trapped by Kerouac on the left and The New Yorker on the right. That’s our trouble.
What if every copywriter in the city woke up one morning and refused to go in to his agency?
What a great concept!
For weeks not one single line of copy would be written!
The economy would break down! The government would have to nationalize the advertising field!
A rebellion of the conformists!
The lowest common denominator strikes back!
Let’s begin a manifesto immediately! I can put aside my novel and work nights!
“Truth to the printed page” shall be our watchword!
[A sober pause is implied.]
Well, let’s not over stimulate. We wouldn’t want to alienate our market.
Here comes the coffee wagon. Let’s talk more tomorrow.
It’s sometimes said of this kind of humor that it succeeds by getting people to laugh at themselves, but this can’t be right. People don’t like to laugh at themselves. This kind of humor succeeds because it gets people to laugh at people who are exactly like themselves.
Madmen showed up regularly in Feiffer’s early strips, which were written at a time when the advertising copywriter, rather than the management consultant, was the personification of the sellout. In fact, they loved Feiffer on Madison Avenue. They loved the Voice on Madison Avenue. Feiffer’s characters were sometimes business types and politicians, but they were also sometimes caricatures of the sort of people one would imagine to be Voice readers—beatniks, lounge lizards, modern dancers. The hip was mocked as much as the square. This was also an attribute of the new comedy: it made fun of the establishment, but it was not antiestablishment. It was merely disillusioned, which is the place where all comedy begins and ends. “The beat generation,” Sahl used to say, “is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on.”
But which Feiffer characters were the real Voice readers? This touches on one of the coy mysteries of journalism, which is that the reader implied by a magazine’s interests and attitudes is rarely the magazine’s actual reader. If the actual Voice reader played the bongos or wore a leotard, the paper would not have lived for a year, because very few advertisers will pay to reach coffeehouse musicians and modern dancers. As McAuliffe explains, by the time the Voice began making money, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, the typical reader was thirty years old and had a median family income of $18,771 (about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars today). Almost ninety per cent of Voice readers had gone to college; forty per cent had done postgraduate work. Most had charge accounts at major department stores, such as Bloomingdale’s. Most owned stock. Twenty per cent were New Yorker readers. The Voice was the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian. It was the ponytail on the man in the gray flannel suit.
Feiffer’s career took off in 1958, after his second year at the Voice, when a four-page anti-nuke comic strip (strangely missing from “Explainers”) was picked up by newspapers around the world, and his weekly strip began to be syndicated. And why did the Voice suddenly take off? The necessary but not sufficient reason is that on December 7, 1962, the New York Typographical Union Local 6 went on strike. The strike lasted a hundred and fourteen days, and it changed the state of journalism. Among other effects, it produced The New York Review of Books, which was established, in part, in response to the absence of the Times Book Review. (To the founders, the fact that they didn’t miss the Times Book Review seemed a reason for starting a review that people might read.) Another consequence of the strike was the enhancement of the Voice’s demographics. The Voice had no relations with unions (as its staff would one day complain), and the editors recognized that they were the only game in town. So they expanded the paper’s news coverage by writing up stories from reports on the radio, not having the resources to send out reporters, and circulation jumped from seventeen thousand to forty thousand. A second strike, in 1965, consolidated that gain, and the Voice became a Manhattan weekly. Even after the strike, it continued to beat Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker in newsstand sales in the city. (The Voice was always primarily a newsstand publication; The New Yorker, for most of its history, was sold mainly by subscription.)
The Voice was a model for two very different journalistic products. One was the alternative paper. The first of the alternative, or underground, papers was the Los Angeles Free Press, commonly called the Freep, which was founded in 1964 by Arthur Kunkin. Kunkin had been inspired by a single issue he had read of the Village Voice. “I liked the investigative articles, their length, the mixture of culture and community,” he said. What he did not like were the Voice’s politics—a kind of centrist liberalism. Kunkin despised liberals; his paper’s orientation was radical. Walter Bowart, one of the founders of the Voice’s crosstown rival, the East Village Other, which was started up during the New York newspaper strike of 1965, was more blunt. The Voice, he said, “was a straight old safe Democratic paper, what you get when a businessman and a psychiatrist go into journalism.”
That attitude was the brief glory and ultimate undoing of the alternative press. Alternative papers sorted themselves into two categories, the fists (political) and the heads (countercultural), and they were one of the most spontaneous and aggressive growths in publishing history. There were forerunners, such as The Realist, started, on the Lower East Side, in 1958, by a former Mad contributor, Paul Krassner (who had a brief career as a standup comic, with a style, as he put it, “between Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl”). Mainly, though, the alternatives were a sixties phenomenon. In 1965, there were about half a dozen underground papers, according to the Underground Press Syndicate. By 1969, there were five hundred, with a readership ranging from two million to four and a half million. The Los Angeles Free Press claimed a circulation of ninety-five thousand, second only to the Voice among weekly newspapers; the Berkeley Barb had eighty-five thousand readers, the East Village Other sixty-five thousand. But, after 1970, the alternative press died out. This was partly because people stopped demonstrating and smoking dope, and started reading the New York Times—and the Village Voice, which had maintained, on the whole, a skeptical detachment from the hippies and the radical left. But it was also because, after the alternative papers had proved that there was a market for the coverage of “youth culture,” the mainstream publications moved into the field.
The other journalistic form to which the Voice showed the way had a completely different demographic. This was the commercial magazine writing that flourished in the nineteen-sixties, the so-called New Journalism. Since some New Journalists—notably Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his anthology “The New Journalism,” published in 1973—claimed to be doing interesting things with some supposed distinction between the techniques of fact and fiction, the New Journalism acquired academic cachet. But the style did not develop from a theory. The New Journalism was basically the result of the discovery that you could report any subject by adapting an already existing journalistic genre in which personality, attitude, and the use of literary techniques, even a little artful manipulation for effect, were perfectly acceptable: the celebrity profile. The models for most of the magazine writers associated with the New Journalism were not the works of Charles Dickens and Stephen Crane. They were pieces like Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” (The New Yorker, 1950); Tom Morgan’s “What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?” (Esquire, 1959) and “Brigitte Bardot: Problem Child” (Look, 1960); and Gay Talese’s profile of Floyd Patterson, “The Loser” (Esquire, 1964), and his immortal “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Esquire, 1965). The stylistic markers of the New Journalism were in all those pieces. The trick was expanding the range of subjects, downward into strange subcultures and outward into political campaigns and, eventually, the war in Vietnam. New subject matter was as much the point of the development as new technique.
Mailer was one of the first to see the possibilities. In 1960, he was sitting in a club, the Five Spot, having a fight with Adele Morales, when he was approached by Clay Felker, who was then an ambitious young editor at Esquire. Felker proposed a piece on the 1960 Democratic Convention; Mailer accepted; and the result was the famous “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire in November, 1960, the month that Kennedy was elected President. “I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time,” Mailer said. His piece changed that. (The publisher and founding editor of Esquire, Arnold Gingrich, hated it—“This isn’t writing,” he is supposed to have said. “It’s just smearing anything on the page that comes into his head.” And he changed the headline to “Superman Comes to the Supermart.” Mailer was livid, and briefly refused to write for Esquire.)
A year and a half later, Gingrich pushed Felker out, after Felker got into a shouting match with Mort Sahl in a club called Basin Street East. (Neither man was ever admired for his equanimity.) Felker was taken on as a consultant to the New York Herald Tribune, where he became the editor of the paper’s Sunday magazine section, New York. Tom Wolfe, Dick Schaap, and Jimmy Breslin were his regular writers. The newspaper strike put them all temporarily out of work, which is how Wolfe ended up writing for Esquire, where, in 1963, he published his piece about customized cars, known for short as “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” the biggest splash of the New Journalism. (Gingrich had been replaced by Harold Hayes. No editor is more closely associated with the New Journalism than Hayes, but he considered the concept pretentious. He thought that journalists in the nineteen-sixties had simply become unhinged.) The newspaper strikes eventually killed the Herald Tribune, and, in 1968, Felker founded the magazine New York. Six years later, New York took over the Village Voice from Carter Burden. It was the natural move, like AOL buying Time Warner. The Voice was the original for everything that Felker had tried to do.
Felker’s magazine formula was not countercultural. “Print must be for the educated and affluent élite,” he liked to say. (As one of his editors put it, “We’re editing the magazine for the people Clay had lunch with.”) This wisdom may be good for the business side, but the reader does not like to think of the content as mere worms for an advertiser’s hook. More important, it traduces the self-conception of the journalist. In 1974, Felker, despite having promised that there would be “no clean sweep” of the Voice staff, fired Wolf and Fancher as editor and publisher. “You’re a very neurotic man, Mr. Felker,” Wolf told him when they parted, “and someday the same thing is going to happen to you.” That is usually a safe prediction in the magazine business. Felker’s expensive effort to make the Voice into a national newspaper failed, and, in 1977, he lost control of the property to Rupert Murdoch.
The Murdoch purchase did not end the Voice’s distinctiveness. It was a durable brand. Of course, the paper will share the fate of every other print medium in the digital age, whatever fate that is. Still, more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere—whose motto might be “Every man his own Norman Mailer”—and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium. It opened up an insecure and defensively self-important profession. Until its own success made it irresistible to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a business plan than its founders had done from desperation and instinct, it had the courage to live by its wits. ♦
Correction, January 22, 2009: Wladimir Malacki was born in Warsaw in 1908, not in the Warsaw Ghetto, as previously stated.
