The Cave of the Winds

In the middle 1960s, I was a contributing writer to The Saturday Evening Post, and about five or six times a year, usually on those occasions when I brought a manuscript into the office, I would talk to Otto Friedrich, the magazine’s editor, about the sorrows of Grub Street. The Post in those days was a weekly, paying the highest rates in the business and drawing upon the entire repertoire of American writing. Even so, and contrary to the publicity for the wonders of the new journalism, Friedrich figured that there were 12, maybe 15, writers in the United States from whom he could expect consistently decent work. He left out of his calculation the celebrated novelists of the moment (“tiny giants,” he used to call them) and the fashionable sages who, for a fee appropriate to their enlightened state of being, sometimes would descend from Connecticut or the Sierra Nevada to make a few announcements about the fate of the nation or the future of mankind. He referred instead to the writers not yet transformed into properties and who therefore still found it necessary to observe, think, study, and ask questions of people other than themselves.

Although I held Friedrich in high regard, I thought him inclined to a gloomy view of things, and so I attributed his remarks to his habitual melancholy. Surely, I thought, the fellow exaggerates. Surely a country as populous as the United States could bring forth more than one writer for every 13 million citizens. Renaissance England had a population of less than five million, and yet the city of London sustained not only Shakespeare but Bacon, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Nashe, Spenser, Sidney, and the translators of the King James Bible. Clearly Friedrich must be mistaken. Perhaps he had been inquiring of the wrong literary agents.

LL

About the Author

Lewis H. Lapham

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In the middle 1960s, I was a contributing writer to The Saturday Evening Post, and about five or six times a year, usually on those occasions when I brought a manuscript into the office, I would talk to Otto Friedrich, the magazine’s editor, about the sorrows of Grub Street. The Post in those days was a weekly, paying the highest rates in the business and drawing upon the entire repertoire of American writing. Even so, and contrary to the publicity for the wonders of the new journalism, Friedrich figured that there were 12, maybe 15, writers in the United States from whom he could expect consistently decent work. He left out of his calculation the celebrated novelists of the moment (“tiny giants,” he used to call them) and the fashionable sages who, for a fee appropriate to their enlightened state of being, sometimes would descend from Connecticut or the Sierra Nevada to make a few announcements about the fate of the nation or the future of mankind. He referred instead to the writers not yet transformed into properties and who therefore still found it necessary to observe, think, study, and ask questions of people other than themselves.

Although I held Friedrich in high regard, I thought him inclined to a gloomy view of things, and so I attributed his remarks to his habitual melancholy. Surely, I thought, the fellow exaggerates. Surely a country as populous as the United States could bring forth more than one writer for every 13 million citizens. Renaissance England had a population of less than five million, and yet the city of London sustained not only Shakespeare but Bacon, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Nashe, Spenser, Sidney, and the translators of the King James Bible. Clearly Friedrich must be mistaken. Perhaps he had been inquiring of the wrong literary agents.