By John Seabrook
Tina Brown's arrival at The New Yorker was part of a larger change in American society, the end of a particular kind of cultural life and the beginning of another kind. The old aristocracy of high culture was dying, and a new, more democratic but also more commercial elite was being born — a meritocracy of taste. The old cultural arbiters, whose job was to decide what was "good" in the sense of "valuable," were being replaced by a new type of arbiter, whose skill was to define "good" in terms of "hot." This vast change in our civilization made itself felt in virtually every museum, library, university, publishing house, magazine, newspaper, and TV station in the country. The New Yorker was where I witnessed the transformation, and although the changes there may have been more dramatic than at some other places, The New Yorker was only a part of the larger tectonic shift in the uses of culture-as-status in America, from the old town-house world of High-Low to the new megastore of Nobrow.
For more than a century, the elite in the United States had distinguished themselves from consumers of commercial culture, or mass culture. The pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. The words highbrow and lowbrow are American inventions, devised for a specifically American purpose: to render culture into class. H. L. Mencken discussed the brow system in "The American Language," and the critic and scholar Van Wyck Brooks was among the first to apply the terms to cultural attitudes and practices. "Human nature itself in America exists on two irreconcilable planes," he wrote in "America's Coming-of-Age," "the plane of stark intellectuality and the plane of stark business," planes which Brooks referred to as highbrow and lowbrow respectively.
In those words, there's more than a whiff of their rank etymological origin in the pseudoscience of phrenology. But the words' roots also underscore the earnestness with which Americans believed in these distinctions: they were not merely cultural, they were almost biological. In the United States, making hierarchical distinctions about culture was the only acceptable way for people to talk openly about class. In less egalitarian countries, like Brown's homeland, a class-based social hierarchy existed before a cultural hierarchy evolved, and therefore people could afford to mix commercial and elite culture. Think of Dickens and Thackeray, who were both artistic and commercial successes, or, more recently, Monty Python, or Tom Stoppard, or Laurence Olivier. But in the United States, people needed highbrow-lowbrow distinctions to do the work that social hierarchy did in other countries. Any fat cat could buy a mansion, but not everyone could cultivate a passionate interest in Arnold Schönberg or John Cage.
Brown represented the coming of Nobrow to the magazine. By this I mean a value system where the old distinction between the elite culture of the aristocrats and the commercial culture of the masses no longer makes sense. In Nobrow, Van Wyck Brooks's "two irreconcilable planes" are reconciled. Nobrow is not culture without hierarchy, of course, but in Nobrow commercial culture is a source of status, rather than the thing the elite define themselves against.
Some of the older writers predictably dismissed Brown as a lowbrow. But somehow Tina always managed to escape whatever shelf her antagonists — the guardians of the old cultural hierarchy — tried to capture her on. While Brown's tastes may have been low by [legendary New Yorker Editor William] Shawn's standards, and were certainly low by [later New Yorker Editor Robert] Gottlieb's, she brought energy, zest, wit, and argument to the magazine; she banished both camp and cant from its pages (and printed cunt in them for the first time); and she was egalitarian in a way that an American editor could not afford to be. In all the ways that a market-oriented system is more democratic than a standards-oriented system, so was Brown, although she had her own elitism, the hierarchy of hotness. And, being British, Brown could be in the middle of the culture without appearing to be a middlebrow. The fatal earnestness of the American middlebrows — that quality Virginia Woolf had memorably called "a mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calf's-foot jelly" — was not a part of Tina's complexion.
Under Brown, The New Yorker changed drastically. Articles became much shorter, their deadlines were firm, and their publication was pegged to other happenings within the Buzz. Doing stories that were topical, trying to get the public's attention, trying to be controversial, trying to sell magazines — all of which Shawn had gone out of his way to avoid — became the norm. The virtue that Shawn had made of resisting the lowest forms of commercial culture was replaced by the virtue of making intelligent compromises with it — of figuring out how to do commercial subjects "in a New Yorker way." At the old New Yorker, quirky was good because it defied categorization. At the new New Yorker, quirky was bad for the same reason. Quirky was something that didn't fit a marketing category. In marketing terms, a quirky subject was a "tweener." It was fatally quirky.
Like the ancient Romans leaving their capital to the Visigoths and decamping to Constantinople, so The New Yorker left the middle of the culture to be defended by The Atlantic and Harper's and lit out for the Buzz. Brown made The New Yorker part of the media elite of the '90s. All sorts of pop-culture subjects — rock stars, MTV, Howard Stern, Star Wars — that were off limits at the old New Yorker were now fair game. Pieces on the old cultural arbiters — the museum directors, opera house managers, and art collectors — were replaced with pieces on the new cultural arbiters: Barry Diller and Michael Eisner and Calvin Klein. At the same time, Brown broke decisively from the old New Yorker tradition of genteel commentary on out-of-the-way places and things, and she dragged the magazine, sometimes kicking and screaming, but other times rushing headlong forward, out of its town house and into the yellow tornado light of fashion, money, power, sex, and celebrity that is the color of Buzz.
More than 30 of the old New Yorker writers would eventually leave Tina's magazine. In the editorial hallways, bylines once synonymous with good taste, wit, or quiet elegance could be seen unceremoniously scrawled on the side of cardboard packing boxes. Some writers went with fireworks, but most went quietly and sadly when they felt that awful chill of being cut out of Tina's circle of attention. It killed you to see the desperate look in their eyes as they clung to their offices and tried to schedule meetings with Tina, knowing in their hearts it was over.
Of all the old New Yorker writers, George Trow was the one whose decision to leave meant the most to me. Trow, after all, had been one of the first to describe the commercial culture that Tina had brought to the magazine, in his essay "Within the Context of No Context," published in The New Yorker by William Shawn in 1980. In college, the cool people read George Trow, and when I got to New York he was the writer I most wanted to meet. Once I heard he was at a party in a loft I was renting in NoHo, but I didn't meet him. I never have.
After a spectacular exchange of faxes with Brown, which were passed around the office, Trow accused Tina of "kissing the ass of celebrity" and left the magazine. Trow's falling on his sword resonated with me: Clearly, there were real principles at stake here. There were new New Yorker people and there were old New Yorker people, some of whom were Gottlieb people and some Shawn people, and there was no escaping these politics, which were a complex mix of convictions, loyalty, relationships, and self-interest — the culture of culture.
Which side of this culture war was I on? Although I had written for Gottlieb at the old New Yorker, I had left to accept a contract from Vanity Fair, which Tina was then running. I had known Tina since she called me a few years earlier, saying she wanted me to write for her. She had seen one of my first magazine pieces, a profile of Polly Mellen, then a top arbiter of fashion at Vogue, in Manhattan, inc., magazine. Tina responded to my pop side — to the pleasure and the fun I tried to put into my pieces — but I was wary of her for that reason. In my mythology, Tina was the temptress of the lowbrow side of my writing, the too-eager-to-please side, the merely entertaining, which the serious writer in me distinguished himself against, along traditional High-Low lines.
But when Tina offered me a contract in the high five figures to write a year's worth of pieces for Vanity Fair, it was a lot more money than I had ever made before, and even though I knew Bob Gottlieb disapproved, I figured it would be useful for me to try writing for Tina Brown. So I signed up.
It didn't work out. Whenever Tina and I disagreed about an idea for a story, I was quick to revert to type — the stuffed-shirt old New Yorker type — forcing Tina to play the suit to my artist. Also, I hated the magazine. There was some good stuff in it, but it also published trash, and while the Tina people put this down to the "mix," I put it down to a basic lack of standards. The level of celebrity pandering was such that I wondered whether I could ever really trust an editor who would publish such craven journalism.
With my first year's contract coming to an end, I went to the Vanity Fair Christmas party, which was held in some awful corporate place that year. I had been slaving away on a piece that just wasn't working, for reasons that were more my fault than Tina's, but I was tortured and angry about my lack of communication with her, and when I saw her at the party that night she offered me her left hand, as if I was supposed to kiss it or something. I tried to grab her wrist. It was very awkward, which for some reason it often was with Tina.
After that encounter, feeling that everything was utterly fucked up, I had a couple of quick drinks and got a little buzz going, then ran into another staff writer and began telling him loudly, all reckless now, about what a shitty place Vanity Fair was. In the editing of my last piece all the interesting stuff had been taken out, I said, and the whole thing had been dumbed down for some theoretical reader whom I didn't even like. The older writer listened, sipping his drink, nodding boozily. He was a once-talented writer who had squandered his ability in hackwork for Tina. He was quite drunk, and the pleasant, serviceably witty face he presented to the world — the face that still got his subjects to trust him when they shouldn't — had cracked, like ice, showing the bitterness underneath. After I had finished my rant, he said, "Yes, I used to feel that way, too. I got over it. You will, too."
That encounter with the ghost of Christmas future decided it: I quit. Maybe I'd end up being a lawyer, but I didn't want to do this anymore. That night, while I was walking home through the freezing cold in an effort to clear my head, I decided I'd go back to freelancing for The New Yorker again. I wouldn't be earning anything like the money I had at Vanity Fair — and how much money I made from writing had turned out to be surprisingly important — but I would be writing about serious things for an institution that respected quality, not trafficking in pop as I was now.
- John Seabrook has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper's and The Nation. His first book, "Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace," was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997.
This essay was excerpted from Mr. Seabrook's latest book, "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). It is reprinted by permission. Copyright 2000, John Seabrook.
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