“Jeff Loves Sexy Hires”

Also: Mark Twain in San Francisco, the stories of Kit Reed, the hunt for a 316-year-old Stradivarius, a biography of Pico della Mirandola, and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning! In New York, Charlotte Klein writes about The Atlantic’s recent “expensive hiring spree”:

The magazine, which is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, has been offering salaries in the $200,000–to–$300,000 range, according to multiple people familiar with the hiring process. A conservative estimate suggests the magazine has added nearly $4 million in salaries to its annual budget, not to mention the expensive investment in new games it announced earlier this month.

“It’s always nice to see people throwing money at journalism, but [ . . .] I’m not sure how it’s sustainable,” said an editor at a competing publication. “The salaries they’re offering are head and shoulders above what the market is for here, and they’ve hired some very good people, but I think it’s going to get crowded there very quickly.” And there are more A-Team additions to come: The Atlantic has just hired Toluse Olorunnipa, currently the Post’s White House bureau chief, and Nancy Youssef, who covers national security for The Wall Street Journal.

The creation of a new echelon of writers at The Atlantic is naturally a source of tension. A quirk of the magazine is that all writers have the same title — staff writer — which means there are huge pay disparities among colleagues of the same rank . . . plenty of longtime staffers continue to labor away for far less money than their newer peers; the salary floor for edit staff was $69,000, according to the contract the union reached last year.

There is also a sense that Goldberg, a gregarious man-about-Washington who is known for his sharp elbows, can’t resist the allure of one-upping his rivals. “Jeff loves sexy hires. He loves to make another publication look foolish, to look like they got got,” a former Atlantic staffer said.

Many of the new hires have come from The Washington Post, which Klein says has “imploded.” That’s not quite right. Yes, the Post lost a lot of subscribers when it did not endorse a candidate in last year’s presidential election, but it is still the third largest paper in the United States and many of the readers who resigned in protest may return to the newspaper depending on the success of its “third newsroom” initiative and premium newsletters. Time will tell.

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In other news, David Polansky writes about Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian, both which turn 40 this year:

Both were coincidentally published in the same year, 1985—well after the peak of the Western within the American cultural consciousness. Meanwhile, their reputations have since undergone inverse trajectories. Lonesome Dove was initially a great critical and commercial success, earning a Pulitzer and becoming both a bestseller in its own right and the basis for a highly-acclaimed television miniseries. Blood Meridian was neither at the time of its release, but has since received a remarkable critical reconsideration, now frequently shortlisted as one of the all-time Great American Novels.

Yet, despite their different receptions, the two share much else in common. Both were self-consciously composed in the shadow of the Western genre’s decline. Both were well-researched works featuring a combination of invented and historical figures. Both novels offer a deliberately unromantic portrait of the American West, involving graphic displays of frontier violence. And in different ways, both novels are concerned with how the frontier exposes people for what they truly are.

Philip Clark writes about John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, which I have just read and which turns 100 this year: “John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer was the other great American novel of 1925, but as Gatsby continues to be lionised, analysed and republished—and adapted for film and the musical stage—Dos Passos’s book remains a niche concern. Routinely referred to as Manhattan’s Ulysses moment, the scalpel it took to the American Dream was as sharp as Fitzgerald’s.” I don’t know about that scalpel to the American Dream, but read Clark’s take. It’s a great novel. Stylistically, what strikes me most is Dos Passos’s ear.

The novels of Henrik Pontoppidan:

Henrik Pontoppidan won the Nobel Prize in 1917, but his name may not be familiar to many Anglophone readers. That’s because the Danish author’s work remained unavailable in English for more than a hundred years, an omission that denied him a seat at the table of international letters. Though he garnered the support of famous writers like Thomas Mann, as well as that of critics like Ernst Bloch and György Lukács, the latter of whom included him in his seminal study, The Theory of the Novel, such distinctions still failed to grant him a wider audience. A writer whose characters often criticized society and even turned against it, Pontoppidan may have smiled at the cold shoulder he received from the Anglosphere.

A correction to this oversight finally arrived in 2010. Over a century after its initial publication, Naomi Lebowitz’s English translation of Pontoppidan’s magnum opus Lucky Per (Lykke-Per) appeared. The overlooked nineteenth-century masterpiece, which rivals the achievement of giants like Tolstoy and Mann, has now been republished by the New York Review Books’s classics series in a new translation by Paul Larkin—and with a new title, A Fortunate Man . . . Spanning a range of fifty years, it is at once a chronicle of turn-of-the-century Denmark as the agrarian society industrialized, as well as a keen psychological portrait of an individual during times of great cultural and technological upheaval. The bildungsroman archetype is familiar—ambitious young man from the provinces seeks to make a name for himself in the big city—but A Fortunate Man strays from the script in remarkable ways, most obviously in its disquieting denouement. On the verge of achieving great things, life suddenly comes to a halt for Per. He suffers a spiritual and intellectual breakdown and can’t seem to get out of his own way.

Revisiting Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints:

Even his admirers and sympathizers admit that the book isn’t a classic in the literary sense. In an article to mark the publication of a recent biography of Raspail, Le Figaro said the novel was guilty of a “certain kitschness, clumsiness, awkwardness and a nihilism that seems forced.” More than that, it has been accused of being overtly racist.

Yet what made The Camp of the Saints such a sensation when it was published – and increasingly today among the online right – was its narrative. Raspail explained the idea for it came to him in 1972 as he looked out at the Mediterranean from the Côte d’Azur. “The immigration problem didn’t exist yet,” he said. “The question suddenly arose: ‘What if they came?’”

Mark Twain in San Francisco:

Once, in a vainer moment, Twain had told his mother he could work for a San Francisco paper whenever he wanted. He was right. Within a week of arriving, he had joined the Morning Call as a local reporter. He already knew the editors from his stint as the Call’s Nevada correspondent. In San Francisco he lived with Steve Gillis, the Territorial Enterprise typesetter who came with him from Virginia City. In their first four months, they moved seven times. Gillis was a short, sinewy Southerner with a feared reputation as a barroom brawler, and he shared Twain’s prankish bent. For fun they played billiards, or lobbed empty beer bottles onto the tin roofs of their Chinese neighbors and got cursed out in Cantonese.

These diversions aside, life in San Francisco proved harder than Twain expected. The Call made him miserable. His days began at the courthouse at nine in the morning, collecting material for the local column. After enduring hours of testimony—an old man claimed a woman whacked him with a basket, but he only spoke German and was too deaf to hear anything the lawyers said—he visited the city’s six theaters, lingering just long enough to scribble a few notes on the half-dozen performances. Around eleven at night, he returned to the Call’s office to sift through his notebook’s dreary, doodled expanses for a kernel of presentable copy.

It’s hard to imagine a profession less suited to Twain’s personality than daily journalism. Four decades later he still shuddered at the memory of its “soulless drudgery.” Satisfying his nightly quota caused him endless suffering: it was “awful slavery for a lazy man,” he recalled. Worse, the Call wanted him to report facts.

(Speaking of Twain, while writing his essay on Twain for Harper’s (which I linked to a few weeks ago), John Jeremiah Sullivan discovered a “lost” newspaper article by Twain. Lapham’s Quarterly has published it here.)