Work Experience

No one believes me when I tell them that I never actually accepted the Newspaper job . . . By the time we came back from that second lunch, it was simply a foregone conclusion that I had been hired, and the story of how had gone through several editions of the newsroom grapevine.

The speaker – and wide-eyed narrator of I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This – is Sarah Makepeace, ex-college girl from Four Corners, Massachusetts, newly arrived in Greenwich Village and keen to earn a byline on the front page. At the novel’s hub is a nicotine-fuelled New York city news-desk in the 1970s, when stories were hammered out on typewriters or phoned in from call-boxes – the era of Gloria Steinem and aviator glasses, the Women’s Movement at its militant height and Gay Pride before Aids struck. The 1970s aren’t a decade for which I normally feel nostalgic. But I too was starting out as a journalist then and was susceptible to the allure of newsprint. When Mary Breasted’s novel was published in 1983 I was bowled over by its seductive exuberance and the fizzing energy that hits newcomers to New York like steam rising off the sidewalks. Rereading it now, I find it still has form in the post-digital age as a period piece, infused with charm and ripe dialogue. The satire is more benign than savage, and social commentary is deftly filtered through the artless heroine’s nerve-racking education via the newsroom. Against the backdrop of Manhattan’s baking streets in the heat of summer are assembled a crack cast of back-stabbing reporters, politicians on the make, exotic street life and an undercover cop as moody as Marlon Brando. Radcliffe graduate Sarah is the ever-naïve comic foil, trailing Sixties ideals (‘It was a badge of our age, speaking the truth about our feelings’) in her uneasy transition from flower child to city reporter: ‘It was costing me a lot to live like a Sixties person. The rents in the Village were humongous and so was the price of grass.’ Broke for reasons she is reluctant to reveal, she freelances for Evil Eye, organ of the counter-culture and closely akin to Village Voice. She aspires to a staff job but the Eye is dismissive, though it commissions her to interview Ron Millstein, rotund and devious news editor on the establishment Newspaper, in order to expose his gross sexism. Lunch with Ron (whose lunchtime monologue to Sarah is a bravura performance covering three solid pages of text) unexpectedly lands her an offer to join his news team. Obeying Ron’s summons to the city desk, she is promptly blackballed by the Eye (which has managed to lose her interview) for selling out. Her best clothes are in hock at the dry-cleaners and her drooping tiered cotton skirt and flat-heeled sandals spread ripples of incredulity through the Newspaper’s assembled hacks. Her early attempts at reportage cause the sub-editors to groan and call for aspirin (‘Flicker said I was straining when I used “lambent” in a piece about ice-cream parlors’). Sarah is always the fall guy, outsmarted by her boss and baffled by the news team, which seethes with rivalries and undercurrents of ‘unspent revenge’. Even so, scoops keep falling into her lap. Some of these come her way via the love interest – another disaster area for Sarah in terms of political correctness. Assigned on her first day to write a (record high) weather story, she is picked up by an undercover cop called Kevin who carries a gun in a little square holster and is mixed up and in therapy because his marriage is on the rocks. Sarah’s first hot date with him is disarmingly presented in the manner of sex manuals, of which more later (‘“The boy is usually the one who makes the first move, but there are no rules about this,” Before You Try It advised’). A gun-carrying law enforcement officer – married, at that – is hardly a suitable choice for any self-respecting flower child, let alone for Feminist Faction approval. And yet . . . sultry Saturday evenings in her apartment segue into leaks from NYPD confidential files (his) leading to front-page stories (hers). The first, concerning the mayor’s unexplained disappearances, makes her name; the second, for complex reasons, gets her banished in disgrace to the cookery page. Mary Breasted herself wrote for Village Voice and the Washington Post and worked for five years on the New York Times in the 1970s; so this must be a fond reprise of the reporter’s life she gave up to marry her Irish diplomat husband. Her inside knowledge of newspaper jargon is wielded deftly. The buoyant tone nicely catches Sarah’s eager, often misdirected pursuit of her assignments. The storyline, much of it told through dialogue, moves smartly if circuitously. Among several subplots is a flashback to Sarah’s first ill-paid job running a youth community programme. After an episode in which her two young assistants go star-gazing on the roof with a girl who then mysteriously falls pregnant, Sarah thoughtfully provides them with educational sex manuals and is fired for ‘corrupting the morals of minors’. (The author’s first – non-fiction – book was entitled Oh! Sex Education! ) The two assistants return to test her liberal convictions again later when she is asked to stand bail for them, which threatens to sink her professional life once more. Sarah’s righteous belief, as a child of the Sixties, in ‘being honest about her feelings’ is severely tested, and the whole business of news-gathering is fraught with dilemmas. Where is ‘the truth’ when it comes to writing a scoop? How far should a girl go to coax a lead from the repulsively confident psychiatrist Felix? How can a story checking support for an outsider candidate swing his presidential nomination? (When I first read this book I was bemused by the arcane workings of US politics; such is the saturation coverage of American news today that the process now seems all too familiar.) Above all, Sarah is completely unprepared for the machinations of Ron, a colossal liar ready to sacrifice his protégé to advance his lead against his deadly rival, the national news editor. Pondering this ‘phenomenon of guile’ in her exile to the test kitchen, Sarah recalls that her college friend Ellie had once ‘let it all hang out’ on the subject of Henry James’s characters to an assistant professor of English, who replied: ‘To be quite, as you would put it, up front with you, Miss Bliss, you lack inner life, and that is why you find Henry James insipid. I pity you and all those who look to you for leadership. I sincerely do. You have no unspoken thoughts.’ ‘I guess he was basically right,’ Sarah muses. ‘I mean, there wasn’t any such thing as the unspeakable in our lives. It meant that lying was kind of a dying art for the class of ’72. When Watergate happened, we couldn’t believe it.’ Is Sarah for ever condemned to test recipes with Vinnie, former star columnist and fellow exile? Will she regain Ron’s favour, rejoin her hard-boiled colleagues on the news-desk and finally become a scoop artist? Funny and thought-provoking, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This is a grown-up story with a wryly upbeat resolution, as refreshing as those stylish wisecracking pre-war Hollywood movies whose female stars had all the best lines. But Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn et al. buckled down to wifedom in the final scene. What constitutes a happy ending for a bright young woman reporter in the 1970s, given that ‘since the Sixties a nice husband was a contradiction in terms’? You could settle for a guess. Better still, you could read the book.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Anne Boston 2015