The Undefeated

A new history of the Village Voice being over, yet not finished

My name does not appear in the new oral history of the Village Voice, The Freaks Came Out to Write. That’s OK; I was only briefly there, in a late period where everyone was saying, oh, the Voice is over. And I’m in good company because, Tricia Romano’s book reminds me, people had been saying the Voice is over since the early 70s, when Clay Felker took it over. (“So many people have tried to ruin the Village Voice, and many of them have succeeded, and Felker was really the first,” says Jonathan Z. Larsen, one of a series of disgruntled editors Romano interviewed.)

The main strength and weakness of oral history as a format is that it reduces the author’s role to that of an editor, and more like a film editor than a literary editor, snipping and splicing. Thus the sources get more room to reveal themselves — which can be great if the sources are interesting, and in this case they certainly are — but you’re not going to get much of a point of view; the form implies that the subject is beyond editorial comprehension.

I can see why someone might think that about the Voice. The Freaks Came Out has 88 chapters and there is barely any connective tissue among them except a long thread of excellent or at least notorious journalism, and a common background of endless angst. You get the feeling, though it’s never elucidated, that the two are related.

As a longtime Voice fan I knew the broad strokes about the forebears —Mailer, Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, Jack Newfield et alia — though many of the details were new, like Wolf hiding in a closet when Newfield brought Bobby Kennedy to the offices because, former freelancer Mary Breasted says, he was afraid meeting him would damage his objectivity. (It should be noted some of the comments are old ones from now-deceased sources.) Their era and their stories are legendary, Old Gods stuff; they just made it up as they went along, like letting the jazz writer Nat Hentoff write about civil liberties. I had no idea Wolf was living in a “cold water flat on First Avenue and Second Steet” when they dreamed this up. The world was their oyster and they just didn’t give a fuck about the shell.

I literally had never even heard about their early city editor Mary Perot Nichols, who ran Runnin’ Scared, the column I later filled; she was apparently a force of nature, smacking down Robert Moses and mob guys with aplomb and sangfroid. (“Don’t worry,” she tells her daughter when the house starts getting threatening phone calls, “the Italians have a code, and my name is Mary, and they won’t kill you.”) Maybe someday there can be a whole book about her.

The later personalities, and personality conflicts, I recall hearing about in local gossip back in the day — but, as you might imagine, when the combatants’ colleagues start dishing in The Freaks Come Out we’re really off to the races. It’s fun, at least for a while, to hear eyewitness reports of fights between journalists and subjects (Michael Gira of the Swans reacting to a Robert Christgau pan by sending him a baggie of his cum; Christgau telling his assistant, “file this under ‘G’”), between journalists and editors, and even between journalists and journalists (except, for me, Stanley Crouch’s habit of physically attacking other Voice writers who liked rap, which still strikes me as serious mental illness).  

But after reading about a dozen such screaming matches and fistfights I got weary and depressed. I’m as much a fan, and performer, of anti-social behavior as anyone, but when it stretches to sixty-odd years you have to think about an intervention.

Of more enduring interest is the ongoing philosophical conflict at the paper between the personal and the political — or, I should say, the personal-political and the political-political: The old idea of class solidarity versus the new idea of liberation movements. Disputes emerge over whether women’s lib and gay lib are, as Newfield snaps at one point, “pushing civil rights off the table,” or whether the paper’s devotion to free speech covers slurs.

One fairly amazing incident in this regard, from early gay lib days: Arts editor Goldstein gets mad that the paper plans to run “an article about how gay people are ruining the village.” Goldstein — who isn’t out yet, and neither is his boyfriend; in fact both have girlfriends — leaks the planned publication to “the gay paper,” presumably the late New York Native, causing a ruckus. Goldstein’s enraged editor threatens to fire him and asks why he did it. Goldstein: “I said, ‘Well, I’m gay.’ I came out to her. She said, ‘OK.’” In another section the late theater critic Michael Feingold recalls that Goldstein was miserably homophobic until, one day, Feingold noticed his “black cloud” had lifted and correctly deduced he’d come out.

Over time the personal-political struggle leads to arguments over whether the paper is too arts-oriented, too politics-oriented, too gay, too straight etc. It makes more sense than punching a colleague for contrary opinions; something realer than pride and ego is at stake. Or is it? To the extent that it involves arguments (some decades old!) over the paper’s real estate, as if the Voice’s mission were to present a unified front for a specific agenda, it still feels futile, especially now.

It reminds me of the downside of the old media paradigm before the internet smashed it — a downside we don’t think about much because of the good things that went away with it (decently-funded journalism and journalists, for one). We tend to forget that the power of any paper like the Voice relied on heavy gatekeeping. Whatever you, citizen, might scrawl and photocopy and hand out on the street, or call in to late-night talk radio shows, or yell on street corners, the real action was in large profitable properties and the limited number of voices they elevated.

If you were aboard such an enterprise, grabbing for the tiller to steer the ship in your favored direction might seem more important than your little duty on the deck — a matter of power politics, albeit exercised by hippies or punks, rather than a matter of journalism.

Not so much the beatnik OGs — one interviewee has the interesting insight that the Voice elders were baffled that younger staffers wanted to bring in a union because of their intensely “individualistic” temperament. But in a way they’d lit the fuse for everything to come. Mailer, Wolf said, “saw the paper as an explosion… he was fascinated by the idea that we’re all becoming psychopathic, and approved of it in a way.” Mailer didn’t stick around, but that anarchistic seed did. Hentoff brags early on that “there was no party line in the paper,” but it seems to me that was simply an invitation to chaos and power struggle — especially when the paper expanded beyond the cozy crew of white male Villagers who founded it.

In the end it wasn’t political fractiousness but money, and the social movement powered by money (that gate-smashing internet), that did the paper in. (When Hentoff was fired, it had nothing to do with his heterodox views — they just didn’t want to pay him.) Or perhaps I should say, did the paper in all over again, in the latest round of The Voice is Over.

“The Village Voice still exists,” Romano notes, referring to its current online presence, “…if you don’t look at it too closely, it still resembles its old self, the one that held the city in its grip.” But no paper or pixel-paper can hold anything in its grip as the old Voice did (in whatever sense it did; most New Yorkers, you must realize, never gave a shit). Speaking strictly for myself, I think R.C. Baker, Michael Atkinson, and the other current Voicers are doing fine with what history has left them — has left us, I should say. There are no crazy old timers to kick in beer money to float a paper now, even online where it’s supposed to be cheap.

Though if there is, please let me know!

(P.S. The book is rather slighting of Tony Ortega, the EIC who had the nerve to hire me; one of the interviewees refers to Scientology as his “white whale.” All these years later Tony is running The Underground Bunker, still throwing his harpoons at the cult and scoring many direct hits. Like Edmond O’Brien says to Robert Ryan at the end of The Wild Bunch, it’s ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.)