When viewing the history of magazines, press, labels and other collectives of this ilk, it's common to hear about the Golden Age. Now, this isn't a specific Golden Age (ie: The Golden Age of Hiphop), but a specific timeframe for each imprint, where the editing, curation, artists and contributors all put their best feet forward. It's the era when wheels churn into innovative, iconoclastic territory. Personally, I rarely buy into this revisionist sort of history, but sometimes the Golden Age really is different and much better than the present.
Today I want to look at Esquire Magazine. Originally published by David A. Smart and Arnold Gingrich, the outlet became a true American original by featuring some of the best fiction around. I'm talking Hemingway, Fitzgerald, then Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, Tom Wolfe, etc. The magazine also essentially launched the career of Raymond Carver - one of my absolute favorites. It was stylish, original and had the guts to nurture actual artists.
The heroic (and apparently quite insane) editor of fiction during part of the Golden Age (69-76) was Gordon Lish. Here's a synopsis from the intro to an interview in The Believer:
Ignore the fact that he’s written about eating shit, or about stabbing someone in the eye and hearing the particular click as the knife tip punctures a contact lens. Forget the fact that he was so sure Dean Moriarty was a real person that he moved his entire family to San Francisco to hang out with “the man,” or that he published a story under the pretext that it was written by Salinger. Gordon Lish is the Andy Kaufman of the literary world. A maniac of publishing, wit, and dessert, Mr. Lish is a mythic figure—a supra-monster, distorting and bending American fiction in its own shiny be-stabbed eye.At the peak of his powers, Lish dubbed himself “Captain Fiction.” As a teacher (for Gary Lutz, Amy Hempel, Will Eno, etc.) he railed for perfect, compressed sentences; as an editor (for Raymond Carver, Esquire, the Quarterly, etc.) he slashed and compacted with line-item-veto fury; and as a novelist (the infuriatingly riveting Extravaganza: A Joke Book) he is capable of some of the most grandiose, gleeful overindulgences imaginable. He has long ceased publishing and writing, but his influence is out there, watching you, breathing.
There's still elements of the that, but the Golden Age is also long over. When you're biggest issue of the year is the famed "Sexiest Woman Alive," there's a clear emphasis on selling maximum volume rather than pushing quality content that could become much-loved down the line. Nonetheless, I still would consider Esquire as one of (if not the) best mass market mens publication. It might be an aura hangover.
