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We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.
That’s it.
Over and over.
It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.
“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway,” said Randall Jarrell, a pretty good critic himself. “What is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.”
“Alyosha’s pathetic fate moves us to pity,” Clarence Brown said, “but most readers will wonder what exactly we are to do or refrain from doing as a result of reading about it.”
Right. We do wonder. We’ve seen such a cruel thing happen: a small life, with no pleasure in it, blossomed momentarily (a red jacket! a girlfriend!), and it seemed that Alyosha might have a chance to be loved, a chance even the humblest person deserves, but no, that possibility gets yanked away, for no good reason, and no one apologizes, because no one sees anything wrong with it.
In the scale of things, this is a small injustice, but imagine the number of such injustices that have occurred since the beginning of time. All of those people who were wronged in life and remained unavenged or unsatisfied or bitter or longing for love on their deathbeds (all of those people who found this life a frustration, a disappointment, a torment), what, for them, is the real end of the story of this life?
Well, aren’t we all, at some level, one of those people? Has it all gone perfectly for us down here? At this very moment, are you (am I) at total peace, completely satisfied? When the end comes, will you feel, “If only I could go back and do it over, I’d do it better, fighting boldly and fearlessly against all that would reduce me” or “All is well, I was the way I was, for better or worse, and now I’m leaving happily, to rejoin something bigger”?
Still, I often find myself constructing rationales for the beneficial effects of fiction, trying, in essence, to justify the work I’ve been doing all these years.
So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know—it really does it. That change is finite but real.
And that’s not nothing.
It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.
Essentially, before I read a story, I’m in a state of knowing, of being fairly sure. My life has led me to a certain place and I’m contentedly resting there. Then, here comes the story, and I am slightly undone, in a good way. Not so sure anymore, of my views, and reminded that my view-maker is always a little bit off: it’s limited, it’s too easily satisfied, with too little data.
And that’s an enviable state to be in, if only for a few minutes.
But the changes that were made, I don’t think they were the best ones for the people. Low-income cities like East Palo Alto could’ve invested in low-income housing instead of bringing in IKEA and Home Depot. Why we got a fucking PGA golf store in the middle of the hood? I mean, I get it: the rich cities around us need a place to come shop. But that all used to be housing. So you take the housing away, and now you put the problem on the people.
If you ride down El Camino you see nothing but hotels. Hotels, but no housing. They’re building those hotels for the tech industry, so all these people can come in and do big business here. But they ain’t let us—the people that’s living here—get no part of the big business. That’s wack.
N+1: What were the conditions you were facing at Columbia?
ROSENSTEIN: First of all, people were very low paid. People were making eight, nine, ten thousand dollars a year for a full-time job — people making fifteen thousand had a very good salary. And the other thing is that the conditions were very inequitable between departments. One of the things we found when we organized and went to negotiate our first contract was that there was a tremendous pay inequity between whites and minorities in the bargaining unit, and between men and women. It was one of the things we actually went on strike over, in our first contract.
I think the other thing is that it was a unit of over a thousand workers, mainly women, and a lot of us were influenced by the women’s movement, and one of the things we saw was that women workers were not organized. We worked on a campus where maintenance and security workers were unionized and had been unionized since the ’40s, and they were making good money and had much better benefits than we did as office workers. And so it became obvious that we needed to do something about our labor conditions and take our jobs seriously. We weren’t working for pocket money. We were workers who had full-time jobs, some of us supporting families, and we needed to do something serious about our jobs, and unionizing was getting serious about the job. We met tremendous opposition from the university. The university delayed our election by legally contesting our bargaining unit for years; they ran a vicious anti-union campaign. Even after we voted in the unit, they challenged ballots and delayed things for years. It was not a benevolent or an easy fight, and we had to go on strike for our first contract. So it was a very tough fight. But I still think I’m lucky that I came into the labor movement in that way, because we won a tremendous fight, and I realized it could be done even with a difficult employer.
N+1: Did it feel unusual at the time to be organizing as white-collar workers?
ROSENSTEIN: There weren’t a lot of precedents. But we felt that we were part of a movement because there were a lot of university office workers who were organizing at the time. We were very optimistic that we were breaking boundaries, and that we were going to be able to go on to organize tens of thousands of university workers, women workers, office workers, white-collar workers — that this was going to be something that other people would pick up. And it was very exciting.
There were other precedents. There were some other university workers and college workers who were organized in our own union, District 65. Publishing workers had organized originally into an independent association in the ’40s at HarperCollins — it was then called Harper & Row. And that unit survives to this day as part of Local 2110. Workers at the Museum of Modern Art organized in the late ’70s, and they too organized as an independent association. And you know it was all for the white-collar workers. So there was stuff that was happening.
The core group of checkers first met in a second-floor restaurant near the magazine’s offices. They figured no one else at the magazine would be going to a second-floor restaurant. They debated about whether to try to join the Newspaper Guild or District 65, an independent union associated with the United Auto Workers that had organized the Village Voice. The UAW connection held a certain proletarian appeal for those whom one of the checkers, Evan Cornog, now dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University, has called “some of us baby Marxists.” But the Guild won out, and when the checkers’ small revolutionary cell contacted them, the Guild people told them how to go about organizing, how to inform management about the drive, and so on. The checkers proceeded to speak, very quietly, at lunches and in apartments on the then-seedy Upper West Side, to other members of the staff who the rebels thought were safe solidarity bets. Ultimately, twenty-two members of the magazine’s one-hundred-plus editorial staff joined the Organizing Committee that the Guild had instructed the rebels to form.
I and many others didn’t believe that Shawn ever wanted to pass his mantle on to Bingham, or to anyone else. As a college English major, graduate student in literature, and English teacher in prep school, I had a mind too filled with Greek and Shakespearean tragic heroes, Dickensian manipulators, and Dostoevskian monomaniacs not to see Shawn in that kind of literary light almost right from the beginning. His personality contained a combination of qualities anathematic to the graceful relinquishing of power: genius, industry, a martyr’s demeanor, and a fanaticism about the New Yorker that he proclaimed so loudly and so tiresomely that it convinced others — and maybe even himself — that actions he might be taking to preserve his own preeminence were merely actions taken to preserve the preeminence of the publication. And that he was right about this for so many years — that his own best interests and those of the magazine seemed in many crucial respects indistinguishable, because the magazine was such a great cultural and commercial success under Shawn’s rule — made it hard for others to tell when he stopped being right, or to speak up when he stopped being right, or to take measures against the time when he would stop being right.
If there is any one general theme here, besides the usual apocalyptic warnings about destruction of the magazine, it is the disavowal of ordinariness, as if ordinariness were the eighth deadly sin. The company is profit-making “but not in any orthodox way.” The publishers “went counter to almost every normal business impulse.” The New Yorker is a “miracle.” And so forth. To someone so convinced that those under him shared the ideals he wanted to believe he represented — gentility, fairness, modesty, self-sacrifice, antimaterialism, humanity, and above all a devotion to truth as expressed through the written word — it must have come as quite a shock to see that a lot of his employees also considered putting out the New Yorker to be a job, one for which they were increasingly poorly paid.