Floating Down Memory Lane

By CALVIN TRILLIN

In 1980, I published a comic novel called Floater that was set in an unnamed newsmagazine. I shouldn't have been surprised at how often I was asked about the extent to which my fictional magazine was really TIME, where I had worked for a few years in the early '60s. Instead of the conventional disclaimer, after all, Floater began with a claimer: "The character of Andy Wolferman is based on John Gregory Dunne, though it tends to flatter. The other characters are fictional."

In Floater, the magazine's Lifestyle section schedules stories on such trends as obscene topiary and the hot new fashion of wearing two-thirds stockings (two-thirds of the way to the knee or two-thirds of the way up the leg or maybe a third missing in patches; nobody seems to know). The writers feel oppressed by an editor they call N.R.F., for No Redeeming Features. The Medicine writer often comes down with the symptoms of the disease he's writing about. Office romances are carried on so discreetly that the rest of the staff becomes aware of them sometimes only through a surprise wedding invitation or a particularly mortifying scene in the hall. Was that what the TIME of the early '60s was like?

Well, sort of. In that era, TIME did use the term floater to designate a sort of utility infielder who moved from section to section as a replacement writer. The magazine was still rigidly divided into such sections as Education or Sport or Press--a method of organizing the week's news that Briton Hadden and Henry Luce had invented roughly 40 years before. In the jacket copy of my novel, I'd acknowledged that I was the newsmagazine floater referred to as having tried "to escape an overlong stay in the Religion section by writing 'alleged' in front of any historically questionable religious event."

TIME had invented something called group journalism. Reams of copy from correspondents all over the world flowed in to what was called TIME Edit, the New York operation that actually produced what appeared in the magazine. (Under group journalism, the voice was the authoritative tone of TIME; there were no bylines.) TIME Edit had a large staff that was in constant contact all week through meetings and story conferences and fact-checking sessions. People had some time on their hands at the beginning of the week and were thrown together in a late-night crisis atmosphere at the end of the week. All the writers and editors were male; all the researchers and secretaries were female. No wonder there were so many wedding invitations and mortifying scenes in the halls.

Even if I'd known how to write serious fiction, a comic novel would have been the natural form for me to use in recalling that era. Looking back, it seemed so entertaining--all those people in that two-floor hothouse. In the haze of my memory, TIME Edit sometimes floats by as an extended country weekend, enlivened by the fact that some of the guests don't get along absolutely perfectly. It's brought to mind when I hear literary-conference phrases like "the solitary life of a writer" or "the lonely craft of writing." At TIME Edit, loneliness was not a problem.