"Pssst, wanna read some hot narrative?" (journalism-school memories)

• Author: Levine, Art

"PSSST, WANNA READ SOME HOT NARRATIVE?'

When I first arrived at Columbia journalism school in 1972, I couldn't help but be impressed by by-lines of graduates pinned to the bulletin board. There, displayed like glittering prizes in the race for renown, were clippings from The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and, of course, the most revered institution of all, The New York Times. Each by-line was carefully circled in ink, followed by a modest "CJS' and the year of graduation. You, the clippings whispered to us, were about to become the finest of the Fourth Estate.

The first rude blow to my ego was the discovery that I wouldn't get published for a year. As someone who'd just been a star feature writer and editor of my college paper, this was the equivalent of oxygen deprivation. Other former hotshots seemed equally depressed at our new anonymity. We spent the bulk of our time going through rote article-writing exercises that were graded by aging geezers who had once worked on The New York World-Telegram. A typical exercise might involve the teacher reciting some facts, then leaving the room as we composed an article under simulated deadline pressure. "Go with what you've got,' he told us as we struggled to fabricate a story from a few minutes of scribbling. While this maxim may not seem like much, it was one of only two concretely useful things I learned while attending Columbia. The other was the advice of our "teacher' of investigative reporting: "If you look like a bum, you'll get treated like a bum.' So, with tuition and living expenses costing my family $9,000, I calculate the value of each hackneyed adage at a mere $4,500.

In the area that most interested me, magazine writing, the school was hopelessly behind the times. The New Journalism had been creating a stir since the late 1960s, and I was hoping to emulate my heroes, David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Gay Talese. After all, I was in New York City, the heart of this journalism revolution. But I quickly discovered that the school's elder statesmen regarded Wolfe and his ilk as charlatans who simply fabricated facts and dialogue. There was absolutely no interest in the demanding particulars of the latest magazine writing: the narrative reconstruction, dialogue, or description that made it all so powerful. Two of my teachers showed some sympathy to the new style, but they didn't have the inclination or, perhaps, the knowledge to teach it in any depth. So we were...