At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  So I was excited, not depressed, to have the possibility of a job. My friend explained it casually: they needed someone who would edit the fashion copy. I nodded wisely, as one who had done this often. It called for meticulous attention to detail, he went on, and a tedious concern for the fine points of presentation. Since no task could have suited my abilities less than one calling for meticulous attention to detail and a tediously exacting concern for the fine points of presentation, I leapt on it at once.

  And found myself soon in the office of an elegant Englishman whom I’ll call Peter Taylor. “This could be delicious,” he said. (“Delicious” was, I soon discovered, his all-purpose adjective of praise.) He, too, didn’t seem to view my obvious incapacity to do the job as any kind of barrier to getting it. By a twist that I would learn was nearly universal, the glamour in those precincts of being a graduate student in art history—a thing actually so lacking in glamour as to be almost the definition of tarnish—seemed to elevate my candidacy. You would want an unprepared copyeditor who came from graduate school—just as, I discovered, having landed a job editing fashion copy at a fashion magazine added a note of real-world glamour to my life among my fellow clerks at graduate school. The great satirist Stephen Potter, inventor of Lifemanship, wrote once that the core of metropolitan living was what he called the “Two Club Gambit”: one had to belong, in London, to two clubs, the Artillery and the Arts, and be the odd man out at both—arty among the military men, combed and contained among the artists. Potter was right in his social observation: authority in one place derives from an occupation in another. On a more Lilliputian scale, I was instinctively doing the same. Fashion magazine people imagine art historians to be interesting; art historians imagine fashion magazine editors to be glamorous. The complete absence of either glamour or interest in either place is compensated for by the shared illusion among both about what it is that the other place possesses.

  Having been shown the top of the ladder at the magazine, I was quickly passed right down it, to the senior copyeditor, and had the actual job explained to me. I would learn soon enough that this was the pattern of all more-than-sort-of New York jobs—a few congenial seconds with the ultimate boss, and then a quick plunge to the effective supervisor, for whom the ultimate boss was not the congenial character you had just met but a Sphinx of arbitrary decisions and random, crazy choices, of which you were obviously the latest. Job hierarchies in American life tend to look remarkably clear from the top—the boss is the boss and gets an office like one—but the middle and the bottom tend to get all compressed together. (Already existing in that time, this segregation would only increase over the next thirty years, until the boss now usually has the splendor and isolation of a Byzantine emperor, while the underlings share the sweaty, unwindowed squalor—not to mention the morale, and often the longevity—of Byzantine wrestlers.)

  The job, it turned out, was very complicated without being particularly interesting. It required some math and an X-Acto knife. In those days, before computer typesetting made “leading” the spaces between characters easy, all the words, or copy, on a fashion “spread”—photographs of clothes with type describing them—had to be “flush right”: lined up exactly even against a right-hand margin. Nowadays you can do this with the press of a key on a keyboard, but in those days you could only do it by giving someone a “character count”—the exact number of characters, including letters, spaces, and punctuation, that filled each line. The someone was called a “fashion copyeditor.”

  I was to be him. The fashion copyeditor had to take the descriptive text written by the fashion copywriter—a higher creature, though confusingly, by the rule of perpetual unease essential to any capitalist hierarchy, subject to the lower-ranking fashion copyeditor’s constant improvements and changes—and alter it in order to make sure that it broke down into the precise number of characters that the art director had prescribed for each line, without any hyphens at the column’s edge, or “widows” on the line below. (Widows were leftover lines that only came partway across the designated space. They were called widows because they seemed useless and unfulfilled, I suppose, an insensitivity encoded in copyediting.) You did this with an actual X-Acto knife, applied to the lettering.

  The form that the fashion copy took was as neatly stereotyped as a haiku or sestina. Each little block of type had to begin with a two-word “cap”—a little starter, preferably with a pun of some kind, that set the tone for what came immediately below: “The White Stuff,” “Loose Change,” and “Collar These,” over simple spreads of shirts, were some I recall from my first summer. Then there had to be a description, exact enough to identify the clothes being described (“Double-breasted nail-head wool suit,” not just “suit with nubbly surface”), the name of the designer, and then, in parentheses, an approximate price—(“about tk”), an actual price being disliked by the advertisers—“tk” meaning “to come,” an abbreviation having apparently been invented by an earlier copyeditor who could not spell. The choice of clothes, and the prices, too, were arrived at by a complicated negotiation between the tastes of the fashion editor, the art director, and the advertisers, though how intense, or craven, that negotiation could be I was not to learn till much later.

  I seemed at last to be in the middle of the real world. Even my schoolwork seemed to be improving from my exposure to Madison Avenue style. At the same time that I had begun my adventures in fashion copyediting, I had found in Cesare Ripa’s seventeenth-century Italian Iconologia (“Dictionary of Images”) an image of Ambiguity, personified as a young man with a lantern. I was going to deliver my next seminar report on him, on the way that the half-light illumination in Baroque painting was always—I had a hard time writing “sometimes” in those days—to be understood as a sign of ambiguity, of moral confusion and youthful striving. An iconographic “catch” of this kind was still regarded as an art-historical prize.

  I was excited—I identified with the ambiguous youth, in his mismatched suit—though the professor of the course was oddly, disturbingly larksome. Once, a hopeful student had pointed out that the mismatched socks in a Carpaccio seemed like those in a print of a traveling commedia dell’arte troupe—so shouldn’t we take the painting, whatever it was, as a representation of a performance of a Nativity rather than a representation of a Nativity? “No,” the professor said, with a long Lewis Carroll sigh. “No. It wasn’t just actors. Everyone wore mismatched stockings then. It made life so…so easy when you reached into your sock drawer in the morning.”

  I wish I could say that I walked through the job at GQ with a dry, mordant awareness of its absurdity, or at least its triviality, and the larger absurdity or triviality of fashion magazines generally. Not a bit of it. For one thing, it didn’t feel trivial. With its rules and orders and precise numbers, its conventions and insistent conjunctions, the this-with-this and not-with-this—not to mention the irresistible note of commercial imperiousness that drove it all, the entangled injunctions by which only an approximate price could ever be mentioned for fear that the garment might be found somewhere at discount or at a markup, enraging the trusting reader or disappointing the faithful advertiser—no, it felt as though all the forces of the world, commercial and aesthetic, had converged on this photograph of clothing on handsome tall people and that you had been placed there as their judicious umpire. These seemingly neutral pages, which one flipped idly in a barbershop or at a newsstand, turned out to be as intensely felt, as organized and rich with inner referents—as filled with what would later be called hyperlinks to other worlds and needs—as densely and obscurely referential, as any page of Cesare Ripa. And they weren’t necessarily less rewarding when you got to the end of the page’s meanings, even if the page’s purposes were purely commercial and designed to sell men’s clothes, not offer an encyclopedia of icons.

  And, then, there is no greater pleasure in a working life than being inducted into a new kind of shoptalk, with the ooze of expertise cheaply earned in a few afternoon
s of listening. Nowadays my family mocks me for the Broadway-ese I have lapped up hanging around actors and directors: we “track” a narrative thread to make sure it “lands”; we wonder if we should “put a button” on something—i.e., create a sharp crescendo to provoke applause. In that period, I felt the same way about the tawdry shoptalk of fashion magazine copyediting. I was high on it, intoxicated with gutters and widows—with “spreads” that bled (i.e., went right over the spine of the magazine) and spreads that didn’t; and drop caps that might or might not be italicized. I knew that only an outsider called a magazine anything except “the book.” Despite what now seems to me an almost insane narrowness, at the time it seemed far more thrilling than anything I was learning in art history.

  For the truth is that academia, though long on technical-sounding jargon, has no actual shoptalk, aside from the desultory gossip of sabbaticals and tenure-track positions and the like, which I had grown up overhearing. But shoptalk isn’t gossip. Shoptalk is secret technical language. It is the argot of shared practice. It is inviting, inasmuch as it inducts the new speaker into a charmed circle of initiates; off-putting, inasmuch as it prevents the new speaker from wondering just how charmed the circle really is.

  At graduate school, new names for old things were constantly being generated—“deconstructed” for “explained,” or “praxis” for “what he did.” Intellectuals believe that making up new names for things is the same as having new thoughts; professionals are taught the professional names for things in the belief that this will make having new thoughts unnecessary. Louis XIV discovered that having competitions for meaningless medals and geegaws among aristocrats kept them from starting rebellions. It took capitalism to discover that teaching people a specialized professionalized vocabulary helps keep them from asking what the profession is for. The point of the talk is to keep you from thinking too much about the shop. It worked, for me.

  Having become the fashion copyeditor, I had, after memorizing that technical vocabulary, to learn a rhetoric. The rhetoric of fashion—even men’s fashion—in those days, as probably in these days, too, depended on a simple, puzzlingly repeated tale of previous confusion from which we had now blessedly—just this month!—recovered. This myth of eternal return went this way: Until recently, the whimsical, the arbitrary, and the showy had reigned. This season, though, simple logic, classic lines, and common sense had mercifully dethroned them. Put away your show-off shirts! Come home to the elegant drape and flow of natural fabrics. “Return to Classics,” “The New Informality,” “Simple Pleasures,” and “The Six Classics a Man Must Have”—invariably those were the headlines that would arrive on the fashion stories I was expected to edit. The previous styles, now condemned as repellently self-conscious and artificial, had of course been heralded, a season or so before, in the same terms: we were getting rid of everything starchy and fixed, and play and fun and ease had become the watchwords of the new dispensation.

  The rhetoric of fashion, I was learning, is always a rhetoric of the triumph of the natural over the artificial, even when what is being pushed or presented is so obviously mannered that it might as well have been an imposition from a dictator on Mars. Even the self-evidently strange is always announced as the serenely self-evident. Among what we called “our sister magazines” the rule was even more extravagantly enforced. In those years, Japanese designers were just coming into prominence with their mismatched buttonings and irregular hems—but they were not presented as pleasingly strange. Instead, they were shown as logically in tune with their time: They were thoughtful, not capricious, specially made for thinking women. They made you aware of how unduly dated your Chanel suit really was. Now, in Comme des Garçons, you could be free from the encumbrances of cute, and a woman could dress as wise as she really was. The new clothes corresponded to another kind of nature, that of women’s inner lives. In this way, the art world and the world of fashion, the two rabbit holes I had fallen into, were rhetorically out of tune while being in deeper harmony. Everything in the art world had to be announced as new even if, as with Expressionist figure painting, just then coming back into style, it really wasn’t; everything in the fashion world had to be announced as classic, even if it was entirely new.

  No one told me this, of course. That’s not how the languages of life are learned. It was just implicit in the system of rewards. About six weeks into the job, I was given a spread of cotton shirts to “edit.” I brooded, fixed the widows, and then, boldly crossing out whatever the proposed headline was—“Shirtings for Summer,” or something like that—I wrote over it: “The Simple Logic of Summer Shirts.” I soon saw, by the approving smiles around me—or, rather, by the absence of changes made by those still higher up—that I had landed on the right formula, like the lucky Renaissance man reaching into his drawer and finding the ideal pair of mismatched socks.

  I worked at home, on the floor of our basement room, while Martha was away cutting or archiving film. But two or three times a week I would come into the office, on the eighteenth floor of the headquarters on Madison Avenue in the Forties. I loved being there. In those days, the magazine was largely read, and entirely edited and composed, by gay men—and yet kept up a pretense, in its pages, of its being written by and for straight men. Not weird, prematurely married straight men, like me, but ones who were shown, month after month, off on Australian beach holidays with perfect abdominal muscles and an accompanying, rather indifferent-looking, six-foot-tall blond girl in aviators. The men had six-packs and big, toothy smiles, and tousled sun-bleached hair. Their “girlfriends,” in swimsuits or nightgowns—never lingerie—stood beside them, bored, in almost every spread. The girl models were like the Christian Bibles ostentatiously placed on the entrance table of secretly Jewish Marrano households in Spain: there to declare an allegiance no one really credited. The staff photographer, a kind of genius, would place both boys and girls in processional friezes of beauty that announced, in their absence of heat or evident interaction among the models, the actual condition of desire, while leaving it to the fashion writer, and the fashion copyeditor, to pretend otherwise.

  It would be too simple to call the actual appetites of the editors and the readers “closeted.” I did not have the sense, talking to my universally genial and fashionable colleagues, that they were discontent with the deception. They were aware of it, certainly—but they knew that the attempts to make ours seem less gay a magazine only made it seem more so. The excess of the encoding was so obvious, the falsity in its pages so marked and theatrical, that the real tastes of its makers and readers shone all the more brightly through the transparent masquerade. The attempt to make the magazine seem less gay than it was only made it even gayer than it might have looked.

  Indeed, the simple presence of semi-dressed boys and girls together made its covert orientation plain. Straight men, God forgive us, prisoners of our simple compulsions, like our semi-naked ladies straight, all by themselves, somewhere we can gawk at them without competition or distraction. For the secret of the “male gaze,” already gaining currency then as a term in art history, is that it isn’t a gaze, slowly glancing over its objects. It is a gawk, always coming back to the same two or three oversubscribed features. Straight men can’t get enough of breasts spilling over and bottoms in thongs. And though there are obviously gay equivalents in raw-appetite images, when gay appetites leave the house—exit sex magazines for style magazines—they do tend to be, so to speak, better dressed. (When GQ became radically straight, in subsequent years, its sexual politics consisted of getting a well-known model to take off her top. I will not pretend to have been displeased by this, but I knew that it was, as pictorial orchestration, oddly flatter than the old dispensation.)

  My colleagues were all gay men, of a kind essential to New York life, but whom I was meeting for the first time only now. For the most part my sense was that they were of two generations. There were older gay men—the senior copyeditor, who oversaw my stuff, was one, and so was the British-born a
rt director—who, having come up through the ranks, so to speak, in the closeted fifties and sixties, kept the traits of that kind of gayness (the dandyish turn, the lisping speech, the campy humor and “effeminate” turn of wrist), and then a younger generation, for whom “pride” involved something like uncontroversial acceptance of their own nature, unmarked by tribal traits. Though the older staffers were willing to be much more obviously, caricaturally, “queens,” they were, oddly, much less willing to be “out.” They still held on to the older caution and reserve—the vocabulary of “confirmed bachelors” and “partners” and even “roommates” that homosexuals had been caged in for so long. Though they were far more unmistakably gay, addressing their homosexuality openly was bad manners. In their minds, I sensed, being aggressively “out” was vulgar. It was, indeed, part of the essential vulgarity of heterosexuality that straight people were “out” all the time. Normalized sex was less interesting than marginalized sex for the same reason that drip-dry shirts were less stylish than linen ones. Being “in the closet” was not so bad. What was kept in the closet, after all, were all the elements of style.