Why I'm not weeping for the decline of literary men
A quote from Tina Brown's 'Vanity Fair Diaries' puts it in perspective
A line in
’s The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-92 suggests why I have little sympathy for the tears being shed for “the disappearance of literary men.” Her comment involves the late Richard Snyder, chairman of Simon & Schuster; Joni Evans, publisher of S&S and later Random House; and a dinner party Brown went to in 1985 while editor in chief of VF. Brown writes:“Dick Snyder’s wife, Joni Evans, told me Dick believes women with children are unemployable. Nice.”
“The literary man” may well be dying. But when he blew hard, “the literary woman” was too often stillborn or aborted by publishers who saw women with children as “unemployable” or worse.
If you enjoy zingers like Brown’s about Snyder, they abound in her book, which collects the edited diaries she kept at Vanity Fair. I picked it up after reading reviews of the new memoir by Graydon Carter, her successor at VF, that made his book sound too bloated and self-congratulatory for my taste but reminded me that I hadn’t read hers.
I can’t be objective about Brown’s book given that, although we’ve never met, she and I worked at different times in the old Condé Nast building at 350 Madison Avenue. But I can say that when she writes about people I have met—particularly the Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse and his courtier Alexander Liberman—she nails them.
Notes:
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/04/decline-literary-bloke
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tina-brown/the-vanity-fair-diaries/
Want to read more of my contrarian views of books, publishing, and the media? Check out the stories “Why You Can’t Trust ‘Year’s Best’ Book Lists” and “I Made the Mistake of Reading America’s Fastest-selling Novel.” Posts like these don’t make me more employable, and if you can afford to become a paid subscriber, I’d be so grateful, and you’ll help to keep posts like these coming.
I understand your position about the old guard male publishing guru. I just have to wonder: are there no younger men who aren’t assholes like their fathers and uncles?
I just put VFD on my library list! Thank you for the suggestion. For some reason Helen Gurley Brown's autobiography came to mind. It has been a while since I read it, and I can't remember a lot of the details, but I do remember enjoying it a lot and that it exceeded my expectations.