Webs of Influence and Intimacy
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WEBS OF INTIMACY AND INFLUENCE: UNRAVELING WRITING CULTURE AT HARPER’S MAGAZINE DURING THE WILLIE MORRIS YEARS (1967-1971) ____________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Missouri-Columbia ____________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________ by REBECCA TOWNSEND Dr. Berkley Hudson, Thesis Supervisor DECEMBER 2009 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled: WEBS OF INTIMACY AND INFLUENCE: UNRAVELING WRITING CULTURE AT HARPER’S MAGAZINE DURING THE WILLIE MORRIS YEARS (1967-1971) Presented by Rebecca Townsend A candidate for the degree of Master of Journalism And hereby certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. ____________________________________________ Professor Berkley Hudson, PhD ____________________________________________ Professor David Brunsma, PhD ____________________________________________ Professor Michael Grinfeld, J.D. ____________________________________________ Professor Lee Wilkins, PhD This thesis is dedicated to all the writers who ever suffered for their work. And to Clyde and Jasmine, who suffered for mine. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not be possible without the influence –direct and indirect –of so many teachers and writers. Above all, I‘m indebted to Dr. Berkley Hudson, who welcomed me on a tour of journalism theory during my first semester as a graduate student at the University of Missouri. I appreciate Dr. Hudson‘s literary vision and patient guidance. In his work as my thesis committee chair, he enabled me to move beyond journalistic hero worship and develop a new way to explore the way writers work. A special round of thanks and appreciation is extended to the participants in Harper‟s writing culture who sat for the interviews that formed the core of this study: John Corry, Midge Decter, Jean Herskovitz, Elaine Kaufman, Bob Kotlowitz, Larry L. King, and Lewis Lapham. Heartfelt thanks I offer to the other members of my thesis advisory committee for their individual contributions: To Professor Michael Grinfeld, who also served as my academic advisor, for his unwavering support and encouragement. To Dr. David Brunsma, for taking time out from his duties in the sociology department to offer solid guidance on cultural theory and for telling me to make writing culture my own. And to Dr. Lee Wilkins, for her commitment to cultivating scholastic excellence. My brain could never have conceived this work without the teaching of Dr. Daniel Rosenberg and his cohorts in the sociology/anthropology department at Earlham College where ethnography is celebrated, ritual analyzed and truth‘s meaning forever scrutinized in light of theories regarding the social construction of reality. ii And eternal thanks to my teachers, Marty Belcher and Tom Hastings, at Harmony School in Bloomington, Indiana, whose creative fire and love of words nurtured me and laid the career path I followed. Thank you for teaching language with punch lines and a beat. Also to Suzanne Kirk and Marty Hedler, who first introduced me to Harper‟s Magazine in 1992 – under the editorship of Lewis Lapham. And to Harper‟s Magazine itself – and the myriad writing cultures it has nurtured since its inception. Michael Berryhill, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, deserves special acknowledgement. During a visit to the Mizzou campus for a boot camp at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting in summer of 2006, Mr. Berryhill first introduced me to the name Willie Morris. Finally, sincere gratitude is offered to my friend Pete Reinwald for his commitment to the well-done word. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………ii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: A Writing Culture Like No Other…………..………………….…1 2. LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………..14 Cultural Expressions and Manufactured Meaning Deciphering Meaning through Theories of Culture Ideology and Identity Framing The Process of Communication What Journalists Write About Writing 3. METHODOLOGY: Exploring Culture Through The Written and Spoken Word…...35 4. DEFINING WRITING CULTURE: Fluidity in Motion………………………………………………….45 The Word Defining ―Good‖ Writing Stimulating Writing Culture: Some Notes on the Use of Humor Environment (aka Elaine‘s and the Scene) The Role of Alcohol Mailer America, Home, Politics and the South Webs of Writing Culture Expand and Contract 5. CONCLUSION: Writing Culture Captures the Historical Consciousness of Journalism……………………………………………………….114 APPENDIX 1. The Cast of Characters and Their Contributions Representing the Nucleus of Harper‟s Writing Culture from July 1967 – April 1971………129 2. Interview Transcripts with Photos………………………………..135 3. Institutional Review Board Study Information…………………...179 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………….181 ENDNOTES……………………………………………………………………...188 v Chapter 1 Introduction: A Writing Culture Like No Other ―Each one of us is just a crossroads where things happen. I don‘t believe because I feel this way, I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks that way too. But I believe that, for each scholar and writer, the particular way he or she thinks and writes opens a new outlook on mankind.‖ - Claude Lévi-Strauss1 Any story has multiple layers depending on who is doing the telling; each version, even if it conflicts with other accounts, can illuminate the greater topic. As such, the layers of story spun by writers working at Harper‟s Magazine from 1967-1971 weave a tapestry of American journalistic history reflecting an iteration of writing culture. The analytical techniques employed in this work aim to pierce the surface coating on the cult of personality, not to pit good styles against bad or right journalistic approaches against wrong; instead readers of this thesis are asked to consider the meaning of Harper‟s writing culture and how individual participants – through what is termed webs of intimacy and influence - contributed to its development. In 1967, a 32-year-old Yazoo City, Mississippi, native and Rhodes Scholar named Willie Morris became the youngest editor-in-chief of the nation‘s oldest general-interest magazine, Harper‟s. He drank too much and some say a petulant approach to business cost him his leadership of the magazine, which he left in 1971. But even after his death in 1999, legions of colleagues and admirers remember his editorial talents with fond reverence. 1 When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam eulogized his former editor, he said Morris: was more than just a gifted writer and editor come to us from a distant place….we understood in some intuitive way that he was an ambassador from a new Mississippi, one that did not yet exist, but one day surely would – and that in the meantime he was a representative of a pained, troubled society…2 In New York Days, a 1993 memoir of his Harper‟s experiences, Morris said that upon assuming the chief editor‘s chair he wrote a letter of hope and ambition to his colleagues. It is unclear who exactly received this communiqué, but Morris recalled his editorial mandate as follows: The country badly needs a truly national magazine, unidentified with any intellectual clique or any religion, or city, or slice of city, willing to fight to the death the pallid formulas and deadening values of mass media. It needs a magazine young and courageous enough to carry the language to its limits, to reflect the great tensions and complexities and even the madnesses of the day, to encourage the most daring and imaginative and inventive of our writers, scholars and journalists – to help give the country some feel of itself and what it is becoming.3 2 Privately, he envisioned ―a magazine that had to be read, that would take on the ‗Establishment,‘ assume the big dare, move out to the edge, make people mad, edify and arouse and entertain, tell the truth.‖4 He placed his faith in ―sturdy empirical reporting buttressed by good writing,‖ work he would showcase at great length, imposing no discernable word limit if he felt the piece was ―strong, brave and evocative.‖ 5 Even if the pieces were subjective or outrageous, Morris said he felt that ―sometimes a magazine, like a person, must be reckless in behalf of the qualities it passionately cares for.‖6 He saw truth in what Halberstam told him, that ―the real tyranny of journalism has always been the lack of time and of space to break away from the pack;‖ that Harper‟s, which allowed time and space to develop exceptional stories, offered ―emancipation from all those dopey rules which inhibit real reporting.‖7 Morris‘s reign as chief editor lasted about four years, until the spring of 1971, when he resigned in protest of the magazine‘s new corporate owner‘s failure to appreciate the power of his literary vision. The legacy he left in print captured the work of some of the nation‘s most acclaimed writers, many of whom were in the early days of their careers, covering one of the most provocative periods in American history. Examples of work published under Morris‘s lead include an advance section of William Styron‘s Confessions of Nat Turner; Norman Mailer‘s coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democratic national conventions in Miami and Chicago, respectively; Gay Talese‘ on the New York Times; Bill Moyers‘ ―Listening to America;‖ and ―the first detailed (hour-by-hour) account‖ of the massacre at My Lai by Seymour Hersh. 3 This thesis seeks to explore the idea of a writing culture, not to scrape the scabs off wounds inflicted in old power struggles, engage in blind hero worship or character assassination. Morris provides the nucleus around which the web of Harper‟s writing culture is woven, but he is not presented as a journalistic paragon in eclipse of the surrounding community of writers. In particular, this study does not make a martyr out of Morris or a devil of his successor in chief editorship Lewis H. Lapham – or vice versa. That being said, understanding the bookends of this study‘s timeline - Morris‘s triumphant entrance and trauma-fraught exit from the office of Harper‟s editor-in-chief – provides necessary context from which to launch this inquiry.