The Fulfilling Life of Steve Wasserman

Steve Wasserman never dominated the literary world as he may have imagined he would.  He was an extremely precocious kid and a voracious reader.  But something better happened; Wasserman found his way into an extraordinarily creative life working as a top-notch editor, teacher, literary agent, and respected book critic for the Lost Angeles Times Book Review which he ran for almost a decade.  In this terrifically engaging collection of pieces written over the past decades, Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays, Wasserman shows us what went into the makings of an incredibly fulfilling life.

 Wasserman’s humility and good-natured affectionateness for others is obvious from the start.  There’s a warmth about him that seeps out from his written pages.  He describes his good fortune as being in some ways a product of luck writing: “Geography is fate.  In the fall of 1964, a year after my parents left a hamlet of two thousand souls in Central Oregon for the cosmopolitan seductions of Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement burst forth.”  Wasserman, still a young teen-aged boy at time, fled for the streets and organized the first demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1965 among junior high school students in 1965.  In 1968, he was one of the leaders of a student strike at Berkeley High School that founded the first Black History department at an American public high school.

One of his first career breaks happened when he impressed Robert Scheer, who was the former editor of Ramparts magazine, who hired Wasserman as a researcher for the book Scheer was working on.  Scheer found him to be extremely helpful, and brought him into his social circle, despite his young age.  He soon found himself mingling with Susan Sontag, Frances Fitzgerald, Vivian Gornick, and other literary luminaries.  More importantly, the experience of working for Scheer prompted Wasserman to think about becoming an editor himself. He would go on to do so, working as an editor for New Republic Books, Times Books, Yale University Press, and Hill and Wang and The Noonday Press at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He was the involved in the production of Barack Obama’s “Dreams of My Father.”

Editing seemed to be his sweet spot.  He explains why:  “Working as an editor is a form of midwifery.  I helped birth ideas by others, smarter and more articulate than I could be on my best day.  It relieved me of needing to have an opinion about everything.  I do have opinions about everything, but most of them are unoriginal.  The greatest conceit of being an author is that you might need only to write on those occasions when you think you might really have something to say.  Prospecting as a publisher for writers more talented than myself, getting to be an author’s first critic, helping to craft and hone arguments, to find ways to cut through the noise of the culture and getting attention for deserving work, to advance public understanding and deepen civic conversation-all this became my life’s passion.”

 We hear Wasserman’s chronicle how he built relationships with authors and start to believe that his superpower was his ability to listen empathetically and patiently before offering his counsel.  We can see how his charismatic demeanor won the trust of many.  Susan Sontag allowed him to live in her apartment when she was abroad, and Wasserman recalls being spellbound by her extensive library.  He loved Sontag’s writing on everything from pornography to photography, to the aesthetics of silence and fascism, and the uses and abuses of language and illness.

Christopher Hitchens called for Wasserman when he was lying on his deathbed.Wasserman had edited many of Hitchen’s books and their close friendship had survived long dinners where they would fight savagely over the war in Iraq; Wasserman against it, and Hitchens for it.  Wasserman was Hitchens’s best man when he got married, and he returned the favor when Wasserman married his second wife.  Wasserman’s tightness with Hitchens was his normative style.  He had similar relationships with other authors he edited like Russell Jacoby, Frederic Raphael, and David Thomson. When later, Wasserman began to teach at USC’s Profession Writing Program, he brought the same caring, intensity and seriousness of purpose to his aspiring students. He kept an openness others abandon as they approach middle-age.

Wasserman waxes nostalgic for his early years in Berkeley and can still recall the “scent of night jasmine and tear gas.”  Berkeley had become the center of student protests and was the home of the Black Panther Party.   He spends several pages praising the work of Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (2012).  The book made extensive use of newly released FBI files that chronicle the unholy alliance between Ronald Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover who were engaged in trying “to demonize and marginalize citizens suspected to be of an oppositional bent.”  Telephones were tapped, agent provocateurs planted, and yet the FBI was unable to derail the new left.   Wasserman recalls always having a soft spot for the counterculture, as did his parents who would take him to demonstrations as a child.   He remembers sneaking out of bed at night to go to the tip of the staircase to listen to his parent’s conversations about changes they were certain were coming, whether we were ready for them or not.

 Wasserman was less impressed with Bryan Burrough’s American Berserk (2015), which he felt was missing a certain empathy that was essential in trying to understand the movement.  Burroughs asks: “Who were these people and what did they want and why did they do the things they did?”  Burroughs saw stains of intolerance and inauthenticity nestling beneath their chants about free love and equality.   He charts the demise of the leftist movement after the end of the Vietnam War but concedes that almost everyone was changed by the experience.  Burroughs writes “No one who was whipsawed by that turbulent era ever forgot it.” Wasserman gives Burroughs credit for some of his assessments but isn’t hesitant to criticize his writing as often being “deaf to the ambiguities that are at the heart of any exploration of character…”

 Wasserman takes us with him back in time to his adventures at Camp Kinderland which he attended in 1962.  It was where his parents met during the 1940’s.  Wasserman recalls sitting with other kids around a campfire singing Yiddish working-class songs that had haunting melodies he can still recall. Camp Kinderland was legendary for being a breeding ground for future radicals.  The names of their camp cabins were Paul Robeson, Henry Wallace, and Ana Paukner.  The counselors would try to create in their charges a “desire to organize on behalf of worker’s rights, to fight racism, to enfranchise, women, to end war…”  Wasserman became a staunch believer in the righteousness of sweeping societal change that remains with him to this day.

He clearly has a soft spot for the late Tom Hayden, whom he worked with when he was an editor for Yale University Press and Hayden was writing a book about the Vietnamese protest movement. He says of Hayden: “He never lost the capacity for outrage at the way things are. It kept him young. He was ever ardent, with a deep faith in the capacity of people to change. His constant efforts over many decades to reach out to others, to build alliances, to combat injustices, overcome racism, and deepen democracy are widely known.”

Wasserman’s sincere interest in others who have lives very different from his own is evident throughout these pages. His curiosity is boundless. While working as an editor at Doubleday, he frequently lunched with fellow editor Jackie Onassis, finding her to be charming and without pretension. He describes this notoriously secretive woman in a way that lets us see the world through her eyes explaining how “I saw a throughline in the books she acquired and edited. She concentrated on works by dancers, on Hollywood, on courtly life, and on myth. Many of her books were about being the exotic bird in a gilded cage: the bird wants to escape but can’t and so, over time, resigns itself to always being on view.  I thought the books reflected her life-a life that required remarkable self-discipline and rigor not to let the private woman become tainted by the public persona.  They were about the rituals and ablutions necessary to perform in that gilded cage, as well as the almost superhuman compartmentalization needed to keep secrets .  The most magnificent theme in her list was also a theme of her life.”

Wasserman is still not slowing down.  He is now the publisher of Heyday Books, an independent nonprofit publisher based in Berkeley that focuses on finding new voices.  One finishes his wonderful book feeling they have spent time with a man who understood how to become the creative director of his own life and took off flying.  Pictures of Wasserman on the Internet seem to confirm this assumption. One sees a handsome Jewish man of a certain age with a learned knowingness plastered upon his face.  But there is something else that catches you off guard; a certain gleam in his eyes that speak to a wondrousness some of us never get to see or feel.