抖阴ap

Chapter One

A Personal Note

I am the first member of my family to earn a college degree (A.B.,
Swarthmore 1954).

My father, Macy, should have gone to college but couldn’t because he had to
go to work for his father, who had come to New York from Russia in the 1890s and
founded a small clothing manufacturing business in New York City’s garment
district. “Students and Young Men’s Clothing,” it said on the pencil advertising
“Navasky & Sons,” which later became the Sturdybuilt Company. Although he
subscribed to The Nation and The New Republic, my father was no
radical, and my grandfather never had a kind word to say about labor unions,
even in Yiddish. The other sons, my father’s brothers, were Alex and Abe. That’s
Alexander Hamilton Navasky and Abraham Lincoln Navasky. My mother, n茅e Esther
Goldberg, was my father’s secretary, until she married him and “retired.”

My father, who went to New York City’s High School of Commerce, where he was
an A student, hated business. He wanted to be a writer, but the closest he came
to getting published was letters to an occasional editor. His specialty was
writing letters to Dan Parker, a New York Daily Mirror sports columnist
who thought all fights were fixed. My father, a fan, thought none were:

9/15/50 Dear Parker: What this town needs are sportswriters who know that
athletes reach a peak and then pass it, and when past it are not as good as when
at it. Those strange things surrounding La Motta’s recent fights were the
key-pounders who hadn’t assimilated this elementary truth … Occasionally an
admirer, Yours, Macy.

Parker would reply on the back of Macy’s notepaper: “You certainly are a
smart guy, Macy, even if you do say so yourself.” When his father died, my
father sold his share of the family business, at least partly, I always assumed,
so that I would never have to go into it. At age forty-six, dragging my mother
along, he enrolled in a short-story-writing seminar at our local public library
where as far as I could figure out, he was the star student. Each week he would
be asked to read his story, and after comments and revisions, he would put seven
copies of his story in seven envelopes and send them off to seven magazines,
like The Dial, the Saturday Review, and Collier’s, along
with self-addressed return envelopes. Over the course of the semester he
received no acceptances but three or four encouraging letters, including one
from the editor of The Dial, who wanted to know if he was working on a
novel, and if so, asked to see it. Eventually he threw in the towel and spent
the remainder of his days outwitting the stock market, writing letters to Dan
Parker, and working his way through Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and the rest of the
masters. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that each week my father
had been sending out one original typed copy and six increasingly illegible
carbon copies of the same stories, and that 100 percent of the encouraging notes
were in response to the original manuscripts.

I had by accident what I later came to feel was an ideal education: From age
five to eleven I attended the Rudolph Steiner School, whose aim was to cultivate
the spirit by way of the arts; from eleven to seventeen I went to the Little Red
School House and its high school, Elisabeth Irwin, whose mission, through
community engagement, was to imbue students with a social conscience; and from
eighteen to twenty-one I attended Swarthmore College, which focused on the
intellect and the life of the mind in a Quaker context. For dessert, and as a
correction to all of the above (age twenty-two to twenty-four), I served in the
U.S. armed forces, after which I attended Yale Law School, which served as a
bridge to the so-called real world.

My father chose the Rudolph Steiner School because, based on his own
experience, he believed that public school “broke the spirit.” Little did he
know that Rudolph Steiner the man, founder of something called anthroposophy,
literally believed that two weeks after the body expired the spirit surveyed the
arc of its life and then was reincarnated in another vessel. (This I discovered
only many years later-we were not taught reincarnation in school.) I chose
Little Red because the best stickball player on my block went there. When I
enrolled, neither I nor my parents knew that it had started as an experimental
public school based on John Dewey’s theories of progressive education and broke
away when Elisabeth Irwin discovered that the Board of Education couldn’t
tolerate its independent ways. My parents knew mainly that it meant my taking a
daily subway ride down to Greenwich Village, then still a bohemian redoubt,
where the school was located.

Swarthmore chose me in the sense that it was the only college to which I had
applied that accepted me.

At none of these institutions did I take a course in journalism or writing.

At Rudolph Steiner I learned my vowel sounds by acting them out in eurythmy
classes (“O is for oak tree, tall and strong”). But I remember that after a
third-grade field trip to a farm in upstate New York (an organic farm, of
course-Rudolph Steiner was light-years ahead of the curve), our assignment the
following week was to write 300 words on the trip. I chose as my topic “A Day in
the Life of a Farmer” and dutifully turned in my paper. When it came back my
teacher had written, “This is lovely, Victor. But what about the milking of the
goat and the cows, and what about making the fire and dinner around the family
table, and what about that tractor you rode on?” I had also forgotten to mention
pitching hay. “Please fix.”

So I dutifully fixed and a few days later turned in my much expanded paper.
This time my teacher wrote, “This is wonderful, Victor. You have really captured
what it is like to be a farmer. But it is far longer than 300 words. Please
revise, keeping in all the facts, but don’t use more than 300 words.”

And so I did and so I didn’t.

At Little Red I remember putting out a lame, mimeographed parody of the high
school’s photo-offset paper, Info, which was called, with sublime
eighth-grade imagination, Ofni (Info spelled backward, get it?). But my
real literary, education came from an inspirational high-school English teacher,
Mr. Marvin. Mr. Marvin would spend much of his time reading aloud from his
favorite poems-and not only would his heart leap up when he beheld a rainbow in
the sky, but his whole body seemed to follow, and depending on the poem, like a
ballet dancer he would often end up en pointe.

He also taught us about literary standards. The day we returned from summer
vacation, he went around the class asking what we thought of the suggested
summer reading, Moby-Dick. When my friend Richard Atkinson courageously
(I thought) said he thought it was “boring,” Mr. Marvin said, “Moby-Dick
isn’t on trial, Mr. Atkinson, you are.”

At Elisabeth Irwin I learned about politics less through what we were taught
in the classroom than from the songs we sang and the hootenannies featuring such
subversives as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Sonny Terry. They and we sang the
anti-Fascist songs of the International Brigade in Spain, the labor songs of the
CIO PAC (“Which Side Are You On?”), the freedom songs of the civil rights
movement (“Lift Every, Voice and Sing”), the protest songs from the Warsaw
Ghetto, and yes, of the Chinese, Soviet, and American revolutions; and just for
the fun of it, love songs and ditties like “Newspapermen Meet Such Interesting
People.”

Over the years, I have learned from George Orwell, from Khruschev’s
revelations at the Twentieth Party Congress, from Gorbachev’s and other memoirs,
from the Venona decrypts and selected Soviet archives, some of the many things
wrong with this particular na茂ve internationalist vision of “the new world
a-comin’.” But as the democratic socialist Michael Harrington wrote in 1977 in
The Vast Majority, although the popular-front vision was sometimes
manipulated to rationalize cruelty rather than to promote kindness, “for all its
confusions and evasions and contradictions, it was a corruption of something
good that always remained in it: of an internationalism that is still the only
hope of mankind. My heart still quickens when I hear the songs of the
International Brigade.” Mine, too.

At Swarthmore, a nondenominational college founded by liberal Quakers (the
Hicksites, followers of the early-nineteenth-century pastor Elias Hicks, who
believed, among other things, in coeducation), I co-edited the weekly
Phoenix, the student paper, and contributed to an upstart student
periodical called the Lit. Although I didn’t understand it at the time,
my real magazine education came from the college’s honors program, modeled by
Frank Aydelotte after Oxford’s tutorials. If you entered the honors program, in
your junior and senior years you attended no lectures, took no exams, and
received no term grades. Instead, you took eight small-group seminars (two per
semester), at the end of which you were subjected to a battery of written and
oral exams from “outside” examiners; i.e., professors from other institutions,
who knew nothing about you other than what had been on your reading list. The
theory was that the weekly seminars would be unpolluted by students trying to
impress professors.

For me, though, the requirement of writing a weekly, unfootnoted,
six-to-eight-page paper worked well, the equivalent of writing a weekly
journalistic essay on deadline; the give-and-take in the seminars was the
equivalent of an editorial conference: and the sharing of one’s weekly paper
with fellow students (we each compiled each other’s papers along with our own in
ever-thickening spring binders) was a form of pseudo-publication. The honors
program still survives, albeit in a diluted form. In the late 1960s, new
generations of students attacked the honors seminars as elitist (only about 40
percent of the students were admitted to them), sexist (professors were expected
to provide refreshments for the home-based seminars, a responsibility that
frequently fell upon their mostly female spouses), and the formula of four
seminars in one’s major and two in each of two related minors seemed too narrow
and inflexible. Many of the students now prefer to take a year overseas.

At Swarthmore one of my favorite professors was Murray Stedman, who taught
political science. He told us if we remembered nothing else we should commit to
memory Robert MacIver’s definition of myth (“a value-impregnated belief”). I
also remember his line about why the student-run commons store, which dispensed
hundreds of cups of coffee a day, nevertheless lost money. “Because,” he said,
“Swarthmore students have an anti-business bias. Put three City College business
majors in charge of that store and in six months they will be making money hand
over fist.” I told him that the anti-business bias was a myth, but in my case at
least was factually correct. It wasn’t until decades later, after I entered the
Harvard Business School, that I tried to do something about it.

“It’s always better, when job hunting, to apply to a specific person rather
than to an anonymous title,” I tell my students, “and if possible to come with a
connection to that person.” I secured my own first job in the journalism
business that way, although it wasn’t until I had it that I learned that the old
clich茅-it’s not what you know but whom you know-was not quite right.

During a break in a Shakespeare seminar at Swarthmore, my classmate Pat
Bryson and I got to talking about our summer plans or, in my case, lack of them.
“What would you like to do?” Pat asked. “Work on a newspaper or magazine,” I
said. “Well, maybe Daddy can help you,” Pat said, in her cute upper-class Brit
accent, “but it would have to be in England. Would that be all right?” “Would
it!” I said.

Pat suggested that I call Daddy over the Christmas holidays and see whether
he might help.

George Bryson had for fifteen years been the founder and managing director of
the world-famous advertising agency Young & Rubicam’s London office. In that
capacity he dealt with-placed ads for and otherwise represented Y&R
in-British newspapers, magazines, and television, and perhaps had some contacts
he could put at my disposal. Now he was back in News York, though all his press
contacts were in England. I called Mr. Bryson over the holidays. He invited me
for a drink at his posh East Side apartment and we discussed two papers: the
News of the World, which was a weekly with a circulation in the millions,
and the Daily Mirror, a Labour daily, which seemed more my speed.

When I mentioned the conversation to Larry Lafore, my history professor, who
had spent the previous year on sabbatical in the U.K., he said, “Oh, if you have
a choice by all means do News of the World.” He explained that a typical
News of the World article might be an in-depth report on a parish priest
who raped eight of his parishioners, but it would appear under a heading like
“Clergyman Commits Indiscretion.” Larry taught diplomatic history, but he was a
gifted social historian, novelist, and world-class teacher. He taught one class
on the history of England by having each student write for his term paper a
chapter in a collective novel. He reeked of credibility and savoir faire. He
lectured without notes, hut his perfectly structured talks always ended a second
before the bell, after which he would disappear out the door. Only on the last
class of the semester did he end his class at the window, rather than the door.
With nonchalant aplomb he proceeded to open the window and make his exit onto
the fire escape.

A few months later I found myself on a student ship, Holland America’s
Groote Beer. After six rocky days at sea, I disembarked at Southampton,
and once in London headed right for the offices of News of the World,
where after a half-hour wait the editor saw me. He explained that he was seeing
me as a courtesy to Mr. Bryson, but that the chapel (the British equivalent of
the union local) would have his head if a nonchapel member “so much as lifted a
pencil.” But I came all the way from New York, I began to whine, when he
continued. “Now,” he said, “the provinces are something else again. Would you
mind going to Worcester? If we presented you to The Berrow’s Worcester
Journal as an American who was studying the British press-that’s really what
you’re doing, isn’t it?”-he asked, as he began writing what I assumed to be a
letter of introduction to a Mr. Jack Worrell, proprietor of the Berrow’s
Worcester Journal, the world’s oldest weekly. “Well, yes, if you say so,
although I was hoping to get some experience,” I volunteered tentatively.


Continues…

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Excerpted from A Matter of 抖阴ap by VICTOR S.
NAVASKY Copyright 漏 2005 by Victor S. Navasky. Excerpted by
permission.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux