Falling Up

In yesterday’s New York Times, our friend Charles McGrath is up to his old tricks. In “Week in Review,” he considers whether The Paris Review can survive the death of its founder and guardian, George Plimpton—and at the same time considers the life expectancy of these tiny little “lit-mags” with circulations in the 10K range. McGrath points out that most titles of this sort will live about as long as a good dog—say ten years.

The Paris Review has managed thirty years or so for one reason: George Plimpton. He was an outsized personality with good literary chops and connections, and he had the charisma of a world-class editor and party-thrower, although he was mainly a great writer.

But the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Plimpton’s little vanity project persisted because Plimpton was willing to write big personal checks to insure that it did. And thank goodness for that. There are lots of good reasons to write and read that have nothing to do with making, keeping, or spending money. So there may be a direct relationship between the celebrity of the editor and the lifespan of the journal, and that’s no real surprise.

Further, McGrath poses the interesting proposition that Dave Eggers may be our generation’s George Plimpton—the respected literary superstar who uses his powers for literary good, so long as he is willing to write checks and lend his boyish face and soft hands to the miserable job of begging for financial help when necessary. (But this is easier than it seems, probably. We just finished a wonderfully written book that contains a nice description of the perpetual-motion-machine of celebrity: “You know you have passed through the magic looking glass when people pay you to do what you wanted to do anyway.” That, and the free drinks for life are also kind of a red flag.)

We’re reminded of Will Blythe’s thoughtful review a few weeks ago of Plimpton’s latest book, a posthumous collection of his unique brand of “gonzo” participatory journalism. In that review, Blythe proposed that Plimpton was a certain kind of archetypal loser—the American anti-hero, who made a career of failure and self-deprecation. Clearly, Eggers has done the same thing.

But Blythe wonders why the anti-hero can never quite achieve the apotheosis of the hero in American letters, and we think we know why: Anti-heroes are an inherently contrarian minority. (That’s why they insist, for example, on publishing literary magazines for a couple hundred readers. How Euro-faggy is that? And why, after all, did Plimpton insist on naming his New York-based journal after that other gay city?) What’s more, neither Plimpton nor Eggers ever really failed at anything—if they did, it was a glorious case of failing up. Both are essentially privileged upper-middle-class literary fellows who have been in a position to prank the literary establishment, and the literary establishment loves to be pranked by its chosen sons.