{"id":11283,"date":"2024-05-17T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2024-05-17T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/05\/17\/literary-journalism-nonfiction-writing-voice-ben-yagoda\/"},"modified":"2024-10-18T14:00:24","modified_gmt":"2024-10-18T14:00:24","slug":"literary-journalism-nonfiction-writing-voice-ben-yagoda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/05\/17\/literary-journalism-nonfiction-writing-voice-ben-yagoda\/","title":{"rendered":"Early influencers in a writing life"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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One day in the very late 1960s, my father brought home a copy of Esquire magazine. Out popped a card offering an annual subscription for, I believe, $1.99. He filled it out and mailed it in, and subsequently the magazine, which was just a little past its New Journalism heyday, arrived every month in the mailbox of our home in New Rochelle, New York.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When the year was over, my father decided not to renew. But the magazine kept coming, possibly because its bean-counters judged that keeping the rate base up, even to the point of giving the product away for free, was worth it in terms of advertising revenues. Teenage me read the magazine not word for word, but scattershot: Malcolm Muggeridge on books, Dwight Macdonald on movies, Robert Alan Aurthur\u2019s column \u201cHanging Out,\u201d Rex Reed\u2019s movie star profiles, occasional voices from the magazine\u2019s past like Helen Lawrenson or George Frazier, and certainly the annual Dubious Achievement Awards and the Gorge Lois covers, including Andy Warhol drowning in a giant can of Campbell\u2019s tomato soup and a smiling William Calley hugging a quartet of cute Vietnamese children.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\"Nonfiction
Ben Yagoda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Esquire stopped arriving after two years or three years. But that was long enough for me to absorb its ethos, similar to (though somewhat hipper than) what I was getting from a mix of newspapers and magazines that came into the house and were, without my realizing it, giving me a sense of what it was possible to do on a page. At the top of that list was The New York Times, which arrived every morning and where I would turn first (on his appointed days) to Russell Baker\u2019s column, which offered a take on politics and other matters that was both funny and serious (but never solemn, to use Baker\u2019s classic distinction). I\u2019d read Robert Lipsyte on the sports page, John Leonard on books, Vincent Canby on movies, Craig Claiborne on food, and features by Charlotte Curtis and Judy Klemesrud (loved that byline). Second was The New Yorker, my mother\u2019s Bible, where naturally I started with the cartoons and the newsbreaks like \u201cConstabulary Notes from All Over\u201d but grew to appreciate writers like Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Pauline Kael, John Updike and Whitney Balliett. Then throw in in the New York Post, <\/em>which my father occasionally brought home and where I read wise-guy \u201cchipmunk\u201d sports writers like Phil Pepe, Maury Allen and Larry Merchant; the even-wiser-guy Village Voice, which I picked up on my own forays into the city; Sports Illustrated and Sport magazines, which I intermittently subscribed to; and, needless to say, Mad magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This is a story I\u2019ve always told myself, that as writer I was formed by osmosis, not especially consciously. But recently, perhaps because I\u2019ve reached the stage of life where taking stock seems called for, I\u2019ve had an inclination to flesh out that story. And, thanks to Google\u2019s hoovering up of most of most of what has ever been published, plus the existence of proprietary archives from Esquire, the Times, the New Yorker and other publications, I\u2019ve been able to add specifics to the narrative: to track down particular articles, passages  or even sentences that had an impact.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Archived <\/strong>treasure<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Just the other day, someone mentioned something about Richard Brautigan on Facebook, and I flashed back to a line in a Brautigan parody I had read in The New Yorker at least five decades ago. I had thought it was written by Donald Barthelme, probably because his 1973 spoof<\/a> of Cosmopolitan ads had made such an impression on me.  But some time with Google and New Yorker digital archives revealed that the piece was by pre-\u201cPrairie Home Companion\u201d Garrison Keillor. It appeared in the issue of March 18, 1972, and here\u2019s how it started:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The bit I remembered was, \u201cSome of his stories are no longer than this.\u201d Now, at the time I hadn\u2019t read Brautigan, and I still haven\u2019t. But something about the Keillor line instructed me as to effects it\u2019s possible for a writer to achieve.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A couple of months ago, I saw Calvin Trillin speak on his book tour for \u201cThe Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press.\u201d<\/a> I pondered when it was that I became a Trillin fanboy for life, and after rooting around a while found what I think of the Rosetta Stone. It\u2019s the opening of a New Yorker article from July 3, 1971. (Trillin is not only a connoisseur but a perpetrator of great ledes.)<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Larry Goldberg, the pizza baron, is slim, but I still think of him as Fats Goldberg. So does he. Although he has \u2018been down,\u2019 as he puts it, for twelve years, after twenty-five years of exceptional fatness, he sees himself not as a man who weighs one hundred and sixty pounds but as a man who is constantly in danger of weighing three hundred twenty. \u201cInside, I\u2019m still a fat man,\u201d he sometimes says. When Fats and I were boys in Kansas City, he was already renowned for his corpulence\u2014though I can\u2019t say I was ever approached about posing for Refugee Relief ads in those days myself. During college, when Fats weighed three hundred pounds and was known to some as Three Cases Goldberg, I occasionally saw him at the University of Missouri, where he was one of a number of storied eaters. According to one tale, when a restaurant near the campus instituted a policy of giving customers all they wanted to eat on Sunday nights for a dollar thirty-five, a fraternity brother of Fats\u2019 called Hog Silverman, who weighed less than two and a half cases, went over one Sunday night and put it out of business.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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A little later there\u2019s this quintessentially Trillinesque sentence, about the first time he saw Goldberg after college:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It was a Sunday morning, and I was at Ratner\u2019s, on Second Avenue. I was having eggs scrambled with lox and onions, and I was glancing around constantly, as I tend to do in Ratner\u2019s, to see if some other table was being given a roll basket with more of my favorite kind of onion rolls than our roll basket had.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Given the well-known vicissitudes of memory, it\u2019s not surprising that sometimes I get these passages wrong. I was sure I had read a bit by Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated where he was making fun of sports-writing cliches and had a list to the effect of, \u201cJack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear; Lee Trevino, the Merry Mex; and Arnold Palmer, comma\u201d \u2014 the idea being that Palmer was so mighty, no epithet would suffice. For years I tried to find it with no success. Then I Googled \u201cJack Nicklaus comma\u201d and was directed to SI of September 13, 1976, where Jenkins had<\/a> this lede:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Jack Nicklaus, comma. Having a bad year by his own standards, comma. Bored when there isn\u2019t a major championship on the line, comma. Disinterested in money earnings, comma. Well, there\u2019s only one thing wrong with all of that. How do you explain the fact that every time they think up a golf tournament of special significance, Nicklaus goes out and hammers everyone so deeply into the bunkers that they think they must be living in a tent in the Sahara?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And speaking of Sports Illustrated, one of my favorite quotes of all time appeared in the issue of April 21, 1969. Curry Kirkpatrick was profiling<\/a> a young golfer named Bruce Fleisher and reported his answer when someone asked him why he went to Miami-Dade Junior College: \u201cBecause I\u2019m dumb and the weather is hot.\u201d (I actually streamlined that one in my memory as \u201cBecause it\u2019s hot and I\u2019m dumb.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Revisiting early influences<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Sometimes my efforts lead to naught. Probably in the late \u201860s, the New Yorker\u2019s television writer, Michael Arlen, had a set piece about a Saturday afternoon so dreary that the most interesting thing on TV was a professional hockey game. It was probably the starkest evocation of ennui I\u2019ve ever read, but the search capabilities of the magazine\u2019s archives are so quirky that I haven\u2019t been able to find it.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Here are some of the other influential lines, passages, or whole pieces I\u2019ve recently tracked down:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Writing about Count Basie\u2019s minimalistic piano playing<\/strong> in the New Yorker of April 7, 1975, Balliett made an analogy that opened my eyes to a thing that criticism could do:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What Hemingway had done for American prose Basie was doing for American music.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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On the other hand, Balliett taught me that I did not <\/em>want to be haughtily dismissive, the way he was in 1971 when he wrote:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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There is no need to worry about (Dave) Brubeck anymore. He is what he is \u2014 a jovial amateur pianist who happened along at the right time with the right music and make a million.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It kind of blew my mind<\/strong> that the Voice could print a profile of a typeface, to wit, Helvetica, in 1976. And Molly Haskell, writing about the 1964 Howard Hawks film \u201cMan\u2019s Favorite Sport\u201d in 1971, was my introduction to the auteur theory idea that even in an ostensibly witless Rock Hudson sex farce, there was more going on than met the eye:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Hudson is a virgin, who has written a \u2018How to\u2019 book on sex while harboring a deep, fastidious horror of it. His masculinity is a lie.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Meanwhile, costar Paula Prentiss:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u2026must take the initiative in Hudson\u2019s sexual initiation, for which the fishing exploit is metaphor. Fish are phallic symbols, of course, and there is even a scene in which a loose fish thrashes around inside Hudson\u2019s pants, causing him to jump and jerk uncontrollably.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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John McPhee\u2019s two-part article about a tennis match<\/strong> between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, \u201cLevels of the Game<\/a>,\u201d appeared in The New Yorker in June 1969. McPhee\u2019s description of Ashe\u2019s backhand showed me something about precision and observation (and provided an aspirational template for my own one-handed backhand, a lifetime work in progress).<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Ashe loves the movement of the backhand, because the follow-through does not cramp the arm into the body but does just the opposite-opens both arms wide and high, so that the stroke ends in the stance of the Winged Victory.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Later he quotes Ashe about the stroke:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u2026you fling your arms away from your body and you wind up in a position that looks as if you\u2019re calling for help, both arms in the air.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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And, the kicker (spoiler alert), when Ashe hits a backhand to win the match, is a callback<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When the stroke is finished, he is standing on his toes, his arms flung open, wide, and high.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In August, 1972, right after the Republican National Convention<\/strong>, my favorite columnist, Russell Baker, brilliantly appropriated<\/a> my favorite novel. What could be better? Here\u2019s how Baker\u2019s Times piece started:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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My name\u2019s Huckleberry Dick. You ain\u2019t heard of me less\u2019n you watched a TV show called the Republican National Love-In. That show was made by Mr. Walter Cronkite and Mr. John Chancellor and Mr. Howard Smith and lots of other smart TV people, and mostly they told the truth, \u2018cepn for leavin\u2019 out a lot of the more disgustin\u2019 scenes of crowds of love\u2010crazed Republicans a\u2010flingin\u2019 themselves on me and a\u2010lickin\u2019 my hands on account of my havin\u2019 done so much to make the country a fit place to love in again.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In June 1969, Rust Hills<\/strong> published a piece<\/a> in Esquire that was accurately titled \u201cHow to Do Four Dumb Tricks with a Package of Camels\u201d and that started this way:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Another reason for smoking Camels, besides because they satisfy, never change, are available most everywhere, are romantically-dangerously unfiltered, and taste best, is that there are four dumb tricks you can do with the package that amuse children and other simpleminded, amiable people.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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So much of that screams David Letterman \u2014 the air-quotey phrase \u201cthey satisfy,\u201d the idea of doing dumb tricks, even the word \u201cdumb\u201d \u2014 that I am convinced he read it in Indiana and it made even more of an impression on him than it did on me.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The funniest and cleverest <\/strong>thing I\u2019ve ever read remains \u201cAlbert Brooks\u2019 Famous Schools for Comedians,\u201d published<\/a> in Esquire in February 1971. It changed my life.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Hearing your own voice<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Later in 1971, I showed up in college, with the vague idea I wanted to be a writer. I took a couple of fiction-writing classes and didn\u2019t produce anything very good. I went out for the school newspaper and wrote a few articles, including an interview with Robert Strauss, the head of the Democratic Party, and an account of a speech by the governor of Puerto Rico. I realized that hard news wasn\u2019t for me either.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Then some people started a monthly magazine associated with the newspaper. My roommate was one of the people and one day I tagged along with him to a meeting. I left the meeting having been appointed Road Trips Editor of the magazine. In that role I assigned travel stories and wrote some of my own. The first one appeared on May 1, 1975. I know that because, sure enough, my complete college output is online, including the Robert Strauss interview.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This first Road Trips story<\/a> was about going to the New York Yankees\u2019 home opener.  I start out writing a bit about my history as a Yankee fan, then talked about arriving at the game:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Our seats today, are, again, in the mezzanine. My father, a champion of the middle way, always brought me to this sheltered cove, and it is like home.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cSheltered cove\u201d is a bit much. But that line about \u201cchampion of the middle way\u201d and etymologically linking it to the mezzanine. Yup, that\u2019s me. I didn\u2019t realize at the time \u2014 I didn\u2019t realize much at the time \u2014 but all that reading had borne fruit. I had a voice.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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* * *<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Ben Yagoda<\/strong><\/a> is the author or editor of fourteen books, including \u201cAbout Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made: and \u201cGobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English<\/a>,: which will be published in September 2024. His podcast is \u201cThe Lives They\u2019re Living<\/a>.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journalist, nonfiction author and teacher Ben Yagoda returns to some of the passages that inspired his career and helped shape his voice<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[68],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-11283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal-essays","authors-ben-yagoda"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEarly influencers in a writing life - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/05\/17\/literary-journalism-nonfiction-writing-voice-ben-yagoda\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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