Writer Blocked
Wexler’s article, which he then sent us, comes down hard on the Chicago Tribune, but I’m not as certain as he is that AJR let the Tribune drive it off the story. AJR was wavering already; his long, partisan discourse was better suited to a paper like the Reader than AJR. “When the redone piece came in it was certainly better,” says editor Rem Rieder, who calls the first draft “more of a tract than an analysis.” Nevertheless, “it still needed a great deal more shaping. And second, it was much more about social policy than about journalism.”
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It’s a strong case. And Wexler’s clearly on the money about one thing: After Rieder got off the phone with the Tribune’s managing editor Ann Marie Lipinski, he rejected Wexler’s second draft without seeing it.
But it also got back to Lipinski that these reporters weren’t necessarily comfortable with his methods.
Updike Upbraided
Updike admitted that he’s felt “a pang of awe” at observing “society’s serious people, the white male power brokers, the airborne harbingers of the free world’s deals,” propping in their laps the “serious escapism” of a genre that intrigued him as a callow youth. (Did no one prefer his The Coup?) To demonstrate how far he’s drifted from this genre, Updike expounded on le Carre’s career. “Le Carre has already exhibited magical powers in persuading hundreds of thousands of American readers that the forces of British espionage were a staunch and canny bulwark against the Red Menace, contrary to local reports that the United States did the heavy lifting for the free world and that the British secret service was distinguished chiefly by the multitude of Cambridge-educated pro-Communist moles the old-boy network had myopically sheltered. . . . Americans in the movies made from le Carre’s novels are a negligible and loutish lot.”
In short, Updike’s in the cheerless position of looking like someone toeing a company line. “I think probably the major stopper for a Byzantine conspiracy theory,” New Yorker book-review editor Henry Finder told me, “is that anybody who knows John Updike would be rather hard pressed to think he ever does anybody’s bidding.”
