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I have a garden, or what we call in New York a garden — a cement plot edged with potted plants — and I often think I should go outside to sit at the green plastic table and write and work, in good health, having made myself a glass of iced tea or something. But sometimes I just can’t do it. I make the list, but then I sit on my brown couch and stare for hours, turning something inarticulate over and over in my head, waiting for something that never happens, dehydrating myself, eating nothing good, caught between dread and guilt about not doing the things on the list and the pleasure of not doing the things on the list, while the air gets too heavy to move through, the stillness a little terrifying, if I let it be, like lucid dreaming about paralysis. Recently nearly a whole week passed while I was on the couch, while the sun shone outside and the flowers bloomed absurdly.
That the end is always there in the beginning is, obviously, no comfort. Our strangeness and difference from one another is what makes it feel so expansive and effervescent to learn each others’ bodies and worlds; this is what makes the world shine, and then empties it out, for a while, when the other becomes strange again. It’s true, but it’s also bullshit; some people are able to learn one another again, apologize, forgive, make new. She could have. He could have. You could have. I could say: Next time, ask to meet the husband. But you are not asking what to do next time. You are asking what can be saved, if anything, of the world you made together.
[...] The phrase “try harder” first came to my attention when I was writing an essay for this very magazine. Next to a paragraph that was foundering on the rocks of my typically confused mind, Mark Greif, rather than engaging in any substantial way with the content of that paragraph or giving me any guidance at all about how I might improve it, instead wrote in the margin next to the paragraph in blue ink, try harder.
At first I was puzzled. Try harder at what? Try harder at making sense, I supposed, but how? Maybe Mr. Greif should try harder at editing, I thought. But then, because he had asked, I decided to attempt what he’d suggested. I turned my attention more vigorously to the problem paragraph, and found the place in the mind where you can — motivated by heightened belief and desire — make yourself make more sense, and I sat still and worked until the paragraph got better, and it did. And the fact that he hadn’t told me what to do, but assumed that if I tried harder, I would figure out what to do, was the condition of possibility for being able to do this.
this is both funny and also worth remembering on a more serious note
[...] That summer weekend, I was floating at one end of her pool, looking at her big yellow house and watching her, beautiful in her black-and-white swimsuit, taking care of her two little girls at the other end of the pool with patience and her characteristic disarming silliness. She makes motherhood look as fun as a Saturday night at my local, which is to say, very fun. The joy I felt about her life with these daughters, the good husband she’d managed to keep, the poems — it was so material as to make my heart feel stretched; I felt a different but equal joy about my own life. This witnessing of another’s life with genuine pleasure, even or especially when its different success might threaten your own personal philosophy of life — I’ve been thinking this is true friendship, or a part of it.
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.
I played and sang those songs that evening with two or three kinds of embarrassment. First of all, it seemed merely socially a silly thing to be doing. Then there was the fact that we had been moved, we had not rolled the union on or stuck to it, we had not kept our hand upon the dollar and our eye upon the scale, none of us would, that night, dream of Joe Hill, standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes. I was embarrassed about the ineffectuality and yes, ordinariness of the Guild people we’d come in contact with. I was embarrassed for Shawn and the rest of the magazine’s management, because they appeared to have not the faintest inkling that much of what they’d said and done to fight off the union was typical of any management fighting off any union — unremarkable, unmiraculous. Again, ordinary. The union would destroy what we had all worked so hard to achieve. The New Yorker is different. We are above the crudity and coerciveness of bargaining and strikes. We are so very generous. There are no “sides” to be on. You will really suffer if you get the union. And so on. And, finally, I was embarrassed that I had looked so condescendingly on the political and economic values and ideas of many members of my own family, however romantic and oversimplified those ideas and values might have been. For here were liberals like Shawn and Jonathan Schell turning to the right when the capitalist chips were down — just as I had been told, from my childhood on, liberals usually do, often with no embarrassment at all. Just as I was doing myself, at least passively, by backing down, by not keeping the courage of what I thought were my convictions.