The Book That Prepared This Veteran Editor for a Literary Life
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A 1966 novel captures a publishing world full of chronic malcontents, strategic lunches and ideas that mattered.
By Gerald Howard
Gerald Howard is a retired book editor. His biographical study of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley will be published next year. This essay is adapted from his introduction to a reissue of Office Politics, published by McNally Editions in September.
Originally published in The New York Times on Sep 11, 2024
I’ve read Wilfrid Sheed’s novel OFFICE POLITICS (McNally Editions, 300 pp., paperback, $18) three times in my life, at three very different stages and with three very different takeaways.
My first reading was sometime around 1974. I was two years out of college, an English major and damned unhappy to have been ejected into a world that had little use for my fully stocked and well-trained — or so I told myself — literary mind. Employed in a grimly uninteresting job at a large advertising agency, I compensated by latching onto figures who seemed to be avatars (looking at you, George Plimpton) of the suavely civilized New York literary world.
The figure I fell for the hardest was Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011), who at the time was writing a column for The New York Times Book Review and, from my worm’s-eye perspective, was dialed into the Quality Lit scene. He wrote about the Mailers and Hellers and Roths and Updikes and Vonneguts with an easy familiarity that suggested he’d just gotten off the phone with them, and the Connollys and the Waughs and the Greenes as if they’d all chummed around together at Oxford.
This led me to his novels, which are invariably called witty, though wry, dry and urbane are closer to the mark. It was “Office Politics” (1966) that really stuck with me. Encompassing a year in the none-too-robust life of a low-circulation magazine called The Outsider, the novel reads like a “Game of Thrones” among warring cubicles, or an extremely low-stakes version of “Succession.” Sheed’s prefatory disclaimer that “The Outsider resembles no magazine living or dead” is about as disingenuous as disclaimers get. The New Leader, Commonweal, The Nation, Encounter, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, The New Republic, Commentary and Partisan Review all spring to mind as likely models — high-minded publications that used to be printed on ink-bleeding newsprint or fingertip-lacerating butcher paper.
This “broken-down opinion machine,” as The Outsider’s most junior editor perceives it, is presided over with silky interpersonal manipulation by its editor in chief, Gilbert Twining, a handsome British expat and smooth operator. Their cramped and shabby Manhattan office is a veritable petri dish for all manner of rivalries, resentments and thwarted ambitions. As Twining cheerfully explains to his office manager: “The best magazines are all produced by chronic malcontents. Take away the note of hysteria and discomfort and what have you got?”
The junior editor is George Wren, who at first adopts a stance of amused detachment. But as Twining, over a series of lunches and boozy after-work tête-à-têtes, draws him deeper into his own paranoias and peccadilloes, Wren discovers that “the game, as game, was getting a stronger grip on him.”
On one level, the younger me would have given anything to be in Wren’s position. Hell, I would have been happy to work in the mailroom. But my real take was basically like Wren’s: amused detachment — from an adult life I had no desire to enter. I’d learned from the books I liked to read that people were, in general, a pretty sad lot, and I would certainly never let myself get into these unfortunate career dead ends and backwaters. I was grateful to Sheed for the laughs, and also for the warning.
A few years later, after I’d weaseled my way into a George-Wrenish job at a large paperback publishing house, I reread the novel. It was still funny, but what struck me was that it was all completely true to life! Despite my best-laid plans, adult life, with its mixed-up ambitions and compromises and disappointments, had captured me, and the workplace was a kind of theater where all these things played out. The firm I worked for was far larger than The Outsider, but the dynamics, personality types and jockeying were nevertheless pretty similar.
What Sheed had gotten so gloriously right were the many functions of lunch and its close relative, drinks after work. Lunch! The things you learn at it! When you are new to an office, people ask you to lunch to take your measure, find out if you are friend or foe, of some use or not. In return they impose their own narratives on the various animals in the zoo, who is in or out, up or down. Later, you start inviting people out to lunch yourself to set your own little schemes in motion.
Drinks, on the other hand, are a darker and more ambiguous ritual. Sure, you might get a bit oiled with a colleague and engage in some innocent character assassination before heading home. But those dark Midtown bars are also perfect for alcohol-lubricated indiscretions: gripes to be aired, secrets to be told, conspiracies to be hatched, seductions to be undertaken, bad choices of every kind to exfoliate. Beware all plans made after a second martini!
In “Office Politics,” Sheed uses these expense-account rituals the way British novelists of earlier generations employed country weekends, as the locus of revelations and reversals. They mark the steady beat of the plot, which reaches its climax at a restaurant meeting between Twining, Wren and a usurpation-minded colleague. “Nothing very terrible was going to happen at dinner,” Wren thinks, “a dinner, furthermore, of three editors of a minor magazine of opinion.” By now the reader knows that he could be very wrong.
The core insight I gained from my second reading of “Office Politics” was that if I thought I could stand at a remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself. As Rilke wrote, in a very different context: All this seems to require us. I was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.
Now, having read “Office Politics” for the third time, after 40 years of editorial work in a variety of offices, I feel a surge of gratitude to Sheed for having hipped me so well to what I was going to experience. I don’t see the inmates of The Outsider as being sad in the least. I see them as smart, skilled, serious people. Sheed never plays his character’s problems just for laughs. He finds them not simply funny, but poignant as well.
Time has transformed “Office Politics” into a historical novel. In the ’60s it was still possible for the readers and editors of magazines like The Outsider to think that what they published and read genuinely mattered because, often enough, it actually did. They served a vital function in the larger intellectual ecosystem. Their circulations may have been tiny, but they punched way above their weight. They were often the test kitchens or proving grounds for ideas and talents that would go on to have great sway. To cite one spectacular example: Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” in Partisan Review made her an instant intellectual star and in some respects changed our culture.
It is impossible to imagine that a figure like Sheed, who died in 2011, will ever emerge again. He was the product of a certain kind of midcentury literary culture that made the freelancer’s life possible (see: affordable rents), if not exactly flush or secure. A British transplant, he brought an unusual trans-Atlantic perspective to the literary scene. He was a versatile man who reviewed books, films and theater, and wrote novels, memoirs and studies of baseball and American popular music. I’ve read just about everything he wrote and have loved every reliably endorphin-administering sentence.
I met Sheed just once, at a long-gone writers’ bar in Greenwich Village, the Lion’s Head. I introduced myself and tried to deliver just enough praise to keep him from becoming uncomfortable and to avoid making a fool of myself. There was so much more I could have told him and wanted to ask him, but that was not the time or place.
I should have invited him to lunch.
Gerald Howard
New York, 2024