The Voice recruited new talent just by offering a place to publish, and it did not have to pay much. Illustration by Jules Feiffer. Illustration by Fantagraphics

The first person known to have said, “The Village isn’t what it used to be” was the writer Floyd Dell. That was in 1916. Dell was from Illinois, and he had lived in Greenwich Village for less than three years. The Village is that kind of place: almost everybody who lives there has come from somewhere else, but when a new person arrives they tell him, “Man, you should have been here last year.” The Village is kept alive by immigrants who, immediately after they settle in, start worrying that the Village is disappearing. A community that insecure needs a newspaper.

The Village Voice was founded in 1955. It is one of the most successful enterprises in the history of American journalism. It began as a neighborhood paper serving an area about a tenth the size of the Left Bank, in Paris, and it became, within ten years, a nationally known brand and the inspiration for a dozen other local papers across the country. By 1967, it was the best-selling weekly newspaper in the United States, with a single-day circulation higher than the circulations of ninety-five per cent of American big-city dailies. It survived the deaths of four other New York City newspapers and most of its imitators, and it has had a longer life than the weekly Life. But, in books about the modern press, it is given a smaller role than it deserves.

Success may be part of the reason. The Voice was, from the start, a for-profit venture. For many years, it hung on by its teeth. Between 1955 and 1962, it lost nearly sixty thousand dollars; the combined salaries of its editor and its publisher, for that entire period, was eighteen thousand dollars. But, when it hit the black, it got very fat very quickly. In 1968, the paper ran 1.7 million lines of display ads and four hundred and sixty thousand lines of classifieds—twelve hundred individual advertisements every week. The typical issue was eighty pages; two-thirds of the book was advertising.

Advertising may seem to fall into the same category as richness, thinness, and approval, one of the things you can never have too much of. But a paper that is more than two-thirds advertising starts to look like what is known in the industry as a “shopper”—a free publication that people pick up for the ads, and that no one really reads, a paper that has editorial content mainly for the purpose of self-respect. The quality of the Voice’s editorial content has varied, but it was never just a shopper. Still, its prosperity may have obscured its originality. The Voice changed journalism, because it changed the idea of what it was to be a journalist.

The Voice was not the first local paper in Greenwich Village. The Villager, which had been founded in 1933, was distributed free to twenty-seven thousand readers. The Villager promoted itself as “Reflecting the Treasured Traditions of This Cherished Community”—which is a reminder that there has always been an upscale Village that has more in common with the Upper East Side than it does with Avenue A. But the voice of the Villager was a prewar voice, and the voice of the Voice was distinctly postwar. The cultural history of the Village is a Slinky on a staircase: it seems to flip over every three years or so. The Voice appeared around the time of the Beat writers, who were followed by the folkies, but the paper’s sensibility took shape earlier, in the period right after the Second World War.

Intellectually and creatively, the center of the postwar Village was the New School. When the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the G.I. Bill—was passed, the New School’s Adult Education Division added a B.A. program in order to take advantage of the act’s education benefits, and enrollment more than tripled. The New School was also an attraction because of the presence of what Anatole Broyard, in his flavorful memoir of Village life in the nineteen-forties, “Kafka Was the Rage,” called “the storm troopers of humanism.” These were the European émigrés, refugees from totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, who taught in the Adult Education Division. These men and women had been witnesses to history; they carried its scars, and they wore its authority. Their students regarded them, and many of them regarded themselves, as bearing out of the burning wreck of Europe the ark of Western art and thought. One of the storm troopers was Jean Malaquais.

Malaquais was practically the incarnation of the twentieth-century dangling man. His real name was Wladimir Malacki, and he was born in the Warsaw in 1908. His father, who was a classicist, and his mother, who was a musician, later died in the camps. He left Poland in 1926, travelled in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, worked as a laborer in France, and ended up in Paris, in 1935, where he changed his name (he took his new name from the Quai Malaquais) and began writing novels. André Gide admired Malaquais’s first novel, “Les Javanais,” a story based on his experiences as a miner in Provence, and he made Malaquais his private secretary. Malaquais fought for the Loyalists in Spain, where he was arrested as a Fascist provocateur by the Russians and nearly shot.

When the Second World War began, he was drafted into the French Army and captured by the Germans. He escaped (not difficult in the early months of the war; Sartre was a prisoner and escaped, too) and fled to Marseilles, where, with the help of the underground Emergency Rescue Committee, which also got Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, André Breton, and Marcel Duchamp out (all of them ended up in New York City), he managed to get to Venezuela, Mexico, and, finally, the United States. After the war, Malaquais returned briefly to Paris, where he published his most ambitious novel, “Planète sans Visa,” about an international group of exiles in Vichy France. And it was there, in 1948, most likely at a party given by a man named Harold Kaplan, who was the Paris correspondent for Partisan Review, that Malaquais met Norman Mailer.

Mailer was twenty-five. He had just finished “The Naked and the Dead,” and he was living in Paris with his wife, Bea, and taking a course at the Sorbonne called “Cours de la Civilisation Française”—a G.I. Bill special. Malaquais was forty. He was a Trotskyist, which signified, by then, mainly a superior and disillusioned leftism, a position from which anything, including anarchism, might follow. Malaquais naturally considered his grasp of conditions infinitely more hardheaded than Mailer’s; he thought of Mailer, as he later put it, as “kind of a Boy Scout politically and intellectually.” “Even then,” he said, “he had this talent for expatiating about philosophers he didn’t have the vaguest understanding of.” Accustomed to outmuscling more cautious friends and colleagues, Mailer seems to have enjoyed being outmuscled by Malaquais, and Malaquais became his guru, his boxing master, his Drew Bundini Brown—a relationship that was lifelong. At the end of 1948, Malaquais returned to New York and began teaching modern literature at the New School. And, soon after, at a party at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, he introduced Mailer to one of his students, Dan Wolf.

“Fortunately, treatment will be relatively inexpensive, since you have the generic form of the disease.” Facebook

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Wolf was in his mid-thirties, and his career was without an obvious trajectory. He was born, in 1915, on the Upper West Side; his father was in the antique business. After finishing high school, he travelled in Europe, then served as a private in the Pacific theatre. He left the service in 1946, moved to the Village, and started attending the New School on the G.I. Bill. Wolf and Mailer liked each other and became good friends. Mailer’s marriage was breaking up, and, one night in 1951, Wolf suggested that he might want to meet Adele Morales.