Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Caste and Class--The Publishing Industry's Uncomfortable Secret

The current (January/February 2005) issue of the Columbia Journalism Review contains a fine piece by reporter Ivan G. Goldman reviewing his own career (unfortunately, not available online). Titled “Caste and Class at The Washington Post,” it begins with an anecdote about the 28-year-old Goldman having lunch with Ben Bradlee, the famous Watergate-era editor of the Post (played by Jason Robards in flashy suspenders in All the President’s Men) and Katharine Graham, the paper’s even-more-famous publisher and longtime grand dame of the Washington social scene.

In the middle of the lunch, the pit from a hot apricot (which Goldman says he “had no idea” how to eat) falls into his lap. Acute embarrassment ensues:

After too many moments it finally occurred to me that I should pick the pit up with my fingers and place it in the saucer, which I did. But full recovery took many years. Each time I replayed the event in my mind it made me acutely aware that my father belonged to the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen union and I’d graduated from Southern Illinois University--one of those directional schools that had been shaped out of a state-run teachers college.

The rest of Goldman’s piece is about the social and psychological difficulties confronting someone from a working-class background struggling to make good in the highest echelons of the newspaper business.

Boy, do I identify. I experienced much of the same sense of embarrassment, awkwardness, and dislocation as Goldman when I was trying to succeed in the book publishing business. Not that my dad was a meat cutter from the midwest. He was a postal worker from Brooklyn, and his union was the National Association of Letter Carriers. My alma mater was Hunter College, housed in a drab gray office building on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan--also originally a teachers college, and far from the best college in the overwhelmingly working-class City University of New York system.

Over time, I did all right in publishing, even rising eventually into the ranks of middle management (though I’m a lot happier today running my own shop as a freelancer). But, like Goldman, I never escaped the feeling that I didn’t belong among my colleagues at companies like Random House.

Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, these colleagues weren’t snobbish or disdainful of me. But they were overwhelmingly upper-middle-class, expensively educated at private schools and Ivy league universities (or Ivy equivalents like Amherst, Vassar, or Stanford), and linked into networks of family and friends that included attorneys, doctors, executives, writers, artists, and professors. (The most impressive professional in my family was distant Cousin Michael, a successful air conditioning contractor in Hawaii.)

As kids, my publishing counterparts had summered in the Hamptons, toured Europe, and enjoyed prestigious high-school internships at fashion magazines or law firms. (In my family, we felt lucky when we could afford a week in the Catskills. I finally made it to Europe the year I turned 44.)

In a sense, I always felt as though I was one or two generations behind my publishing colleagues--as though I was recapitulating the social and economic ascent that their grandparents had experienced soon after immigrating to the US in the early years of the twentieth century. That has turned out to be more or less right. Today my kids have gone to the kinds of colleges most people in publishing attend, and they’ve all been to Europe, done fancy internships, and learned how to eat in nice restaurants without embarrassing themselves. (I suspect I still embarrass them sometimes.)

None of this matters much to anyone outside my family--except, perhaps, for what it says about the book publishing industry.

Isn’t it likely that the way we do business is affected by our industry’s strongly upper-middle-class social tilt? Isn’t it likely that our choices about which books we publish--which ideas we anoint as the next big things--and which authors we promote as important cultural figures--are all colored by class preferences in ways that may not serve and may even alienate the vast majority of our fellow citizens?

An obvious rejoinder is that, in contemporary America, most readers and especially most book buyers are themselves drawn from a relatively narrow slice of upper-middle-class society. As my friend and sometime publishing mentor Peter Osnos has remarked, the demographics of book readership are less like those of TV or movies than like those of the Broadway theatre--elitist, exclusive, fairly highbrow.

All true enough. But isn’t there at least a possibility that this has become a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating reality, reinforced by the fact that, for generations, publishing companies have been staffed almost exclusively by bright young things from “good” families in Manhattan, Boston, and the expensive suburbs, with the particular interests, tastes, and values such people inevitably share?

Mind you, I have nothing against people who live in expensive suburbs. (I’ve worked hard for decades to be able to join them.) And in some ways publishing has done a good job of being inclusive; it appears to me that gays and women are pretty well represented in the industry (though not often enough at the very top levels of organizations). But I worry about the economic and cultural gap that we’ve allowed to open up between book editors and publishers and the general public whose needs and interests our business ought to address.

Ivan Goldman’s article about the newspaper business ends with a largely inward focus:

Much later, after I left the Post, I gradually came to understand more about my experience. There’s something called the imposter syndrome. When people advance quickly, they can create a gap between how others see them and how they see themselves. They believe they’re protecting the secret of terrible inadequacies and are in constant fear they will be unmasked.

I’ve shared that experience, too. (Although I suspect that the harboring of secret fears of inadequacy is common enough among people of every background.) But at the moment I’m less interested in the psychological dilemmas of individual publishing professionals than in what Goldman’s experience reveals about the limitations and narrowness of our industry. Am I the only one to view this as a problem?

I plan to write more about this topic--about the “barriers to entry” that may limit access to publishing careers by class, about whether this phenomenon is really a problem, and, if so, what can be done about it. Your input and comments are invited and will help to shape upcoming posts.
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