One wonders, though, whether the marketing bigwigs are waffling about VF or simply waffling about marketing. The editor of the magazine is an encouragingly unlikely figure whom the media are already fingering as a frontman booked for early departure. He is Richard Locke, trim, fortyish, an ex-deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review. He is not a sculptor, hang-glider and corporate lawyer. He is merely a solidly literary personage, as are many of his senior staff.
The VF PR-men don’t really know what to say about Mr Locke. But they say it anyway. ‘In his 12 years [at NYTBR] he contributed better than 60 literary essays and reviews… Richard is president of the National Book Critics Circle__To say that there’s excitement going on at 350 Madison Avenue is an understatement.’ A rough equivalent of the Locke appointment would be the elevation of, say, Hermione Lee to the editorship of the Sunday Times. It would be interesting — but why should it set the pulses racing in the managerial offices of New Printing House Square?
In America, magazines have taken the place of national newspapers; they have also established themselves (by virtue, perhaps, of the country’s relative classlessness) as arbiters of cultural etiquette. The success of any general-interest magazine depends on an accidental nimbus of authority, a lucky aura. It is, in every sense, the business of the targeting gurus and marketing mentors to deny or pooh-pooh this fact. The first issue of Vanity Fair will contain the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold in its entirety. Richard Locke wants the magazine to be ‘a playground for writers’ — literary, critical, political, satirical. He wants it to be full of good things; he hopes it acquires that lucky aura. Enmeshed in their spools, charts, print-outs and psychographics, the media-men are hoping this too. In other words, they are simply waiting and seeing, just like the rest of us.
Observer 1983
Kurt Vonnegut: After the Slaughterhouse
Inveterately regressive, ever the playful infantilist, Kurt Vonnegut recently shuffled his career into a report card, signed it, and tacked it to his study wall. The report was chronological, grading his work from A to D. This is what it looked like:
Player Piano A
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat’s Cradle A+
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A+
Breakfast of Champions C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
The burden of the report seems clear enough: Kurt started confidently, went from strength to strength for a good long spell, then passed into a trough of lassitude and uncertainty, but now shows signs of rallying.
The graph charted by the American literary establishment — viewed by Vonnegut as, at best, a flock of cuecard-readers, at worst a squad of jailers, torturers and funeral directors — would be even starker, and much less auspicious. Their report would probably go something like this: B-, B, B-, A, A-, B-, B, D, C.
‘Anyway, the card isn’t quite up to date,’ I said, half-way through lunch in a teeming trattoria on Second Avenue. Vonnegut is a mildly lionised regular here, but it was mid-December, and we took our chances among the parched and panting Christmas shoppers of New York. Our table seemed to be half-way between the lobby and the toilet. I wondered, protectively, whether we’d have done any better during Vonnegut’s heyday; perhaps the head waiter hadn’t liked Slapstick either. ‘What about your new novel?’ I asked. ‘How would you grade Deadeye Dicky Vonnegut looked doubtful. ‘I guess it’s sort of a B-minus,’ he said.
Even by American standards, Vonnegut’s career represents an extreme case of critical revisionism and double-think. He is immensely popular, an unbudgeable bestseller, a cult hero and campus guru; all his books are in print; he is the most widely taught of contemporary American authors. On the other hand, his work has remarkably little currency among the card-carrying literati; his pacifistic, faux-naïf philosophy’ is regarded as hippyish and nugatory; he is the sort of writer, nowadays, whom Serious People are ashamed of ever having liked. Cute, coy, tricksy, mawkish — gee-whiz writing, comic-book stuff.
‘It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country’, he has written, ‘that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time.’