The city doesn’t care. The city is jauntily indifferent to the man who’s traipsing through the Loop just before rush hour, head bent against the spring wind, overcoat buttoned snugly to vex the chill, toting an exquisitely battered briefcase.
He happens to run one of the world’s top literary magazines, but the city shrugs it off. Can’t be bothered. The city is what it is: dirty, crowded and noisy, especially below the elevated train tracks, where the racket is relentless and ear-shredding and sporadically unbearable.
Ian Jack, as it happens, is in heaven.
“It’s just thrilling,” says Jack, a burly, bearded Brit with a twinkle in his voice. “To see trains in the middle of the street! I love the architecture of the stations and the ironwork above the streets. I suppose it’s that terrible thing called nostalgia — it reminds you of how cities once were.”
Nostalgia, that fussy old coot of an attitude, is not a sensibility you’d normally assign to a man such as Jack. For the last decade, he has written for and edited one of the world’s sleekest, coolest, most provocative and least conventional literary journals, Granta.
Nostalgia is what Granta’s enemies — those who sniff at its ambitious themes and scoff at its glittering roster of star scribblers — might be accused of harboring.
But Ian Jack? Nostalgic?
“I’m always surprised and delighted when Granta is referred to as ‘cutting edge,’ ” he says, chuckling. “I think, ‘Oh, what a blunt old knife it really is.’ I’m a quite conservative person in terms of my approach to literature. I like stories. I’m too fond of clarity.”
Granta, published four times a year in London, is one of those magazines whose influence far exceeds the size of its circulation, which hovers at about 70,000 per issue. There’s the occasional short story, but what really keeps it humming are crisply written, blazingly topical essays and journalism.
Three years ago, Granta achieved overnight infamy with an issue titled “What We Think of America” — a grab bag of essays about Sept. 11, 2001, by writers from around the world. Included was a headline-making screed by British playwright Harold Pinter that called the United States a “fully-fledged, award-winning, gold-plated monster.”
Being notorious, though, isn’t Granta’s goal. Being surprising and scintillating is.
“It can fairly be said that it’s the most successful literary magazine in the world,” Jack claims. “The most wonderful thing about Granta is that we have subscribers in virtually every country in the world. Even in Mongolia, there are one or two subscribers.”
Jack’s presence in Chicago on a spring afternoon late last month is directly attributable to Granta’s chronic habit of publishing the world’s best new writers. For the ninth year running, Columbia College Chicago sponsored Story Week — a mix of readings, lectures and panel discussions enabling the school’s creative writing students to hear from pros such as Jack, Dave Eggers and Sandra Cisneros about how to hone their craft and, God willing, get published.
After a session with students, Jack is ready for a look at the Chicago landscape, home to the elevated trains that so enthrall him.
Jack, 60, looks every inch the literary lion, with his imposing size and shaggy mane of brownish-gray hair. In the midst of answering questions about the state of contemporary letters, he sneaks peeks at the latticework of the “L” tracks overhead. When a train screams by, he indulges in a reverent pause.
It’s in the telling
About creative writing programs, though, he is decidedly less enthusiastic. “My host here is Columbia College, so I must be very careful, but — well, there is a carpentry that you can recognize that goes into a lot of American writing. The workshop. The getting the sentence right, the getting the structure right. There’s a great deal of craft. But the trouble is, how many people have anything to tell you?
“That’s the trouble,” he continues. “You’ve got to have something to tell us. It doesn’t matter how it’s been shaved or planed or whether the nails are banged in the right places. I see a lot of things that are perfectly well executed — and quite dull.”
Yet reports of literature’s imminent death, he believes, are ludicrously misguided. “The mistake most people make is to say, `Where is the Dickens of today’s England?’ But when Dickens was writing, there must have been a couple of dozen novelists who were no good at all. And I think that’s always been the way.
“There have always been a great number of bad or ordinary books produced and a very small number of good ones. The proportion is probably the same. But there’s a greater pool now.” Hence what seems like a preponderance of the subpar.
Jack is in a good position to make such judgments. Granta receives more than 100 unsolicited manuscripts each week — which doesn’t include the work Jack actually requests from established writers such as Doris Lessing and Luc Sante — and most of it comes from the United States, he says.
“The States has this great cottage industry, this production, this conveyor belt, of people who are being taught to be writers. So they have to submit things. I don’t blame them. I want them to carry on. If you start to complain about having to read something,” Jack says ruefully, “you obviously have never worked in a shipyard or a coal mine. It’s not the worst thing in the world to do, having to read something. But I have to say, the chances of getting something we can use from that are very slim.”
Among Granta’s most distinctive features is photography, several pages of which Jack usually includes in each issue. It’s always offbeat, always a slightly sideways look at something familiar that is rendered exotic by the photographer’s perspective.
“Some people say, `Why are you devoting all this space to photographs?’ I’ve got no answer to that, really — just that nobody else seems to be doing it,” Jack says. “I do like documentary photography. The more photography aspires to be art, the less I like it. I think one of the troubles of photography now is that a great self-consciousness has crept in.”
For the current issue, titled “The Factory,” Jack sent photographer Alec Soth to a stamping plant in Minnesota to chronicle the place and its people: oil congealed on a metal part; a guy in a baseball cap; a work shirt hanging from a hook, with a patch with the name “Dave” sewn over the left breast pocket; a water fountain; dirty sneakers in a corner.
That mix is pure Granta: funky, unexpected, mundane, quietly radiant. The magazine is never what you think it’s going to be — but once you see what it is, you think, “Ah, of course.”
Jack says, “I like pictures that tell a story, just like I like pieces that tell a story.”
Storytelling has captivated Jack from an early age. He was born in England to Scottish parents; the family moved back to Scotland while Jack was still a toddler. He sidestepped college and became a librarian, applying relentlessly to newspapers for a writing position. Finally, the East Kilbride News took a chance and hired him, and a career was born. Jack moved steadily up the ladder of British newspapers, including a stint as foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Times that got him to India and Pakistan.
Clarifying the murkiness
In 1995, he took over the editorship of Granta from Bill Buford, who was heading for The New Yorker. Granta’s presentation had always been murky and mysterious — there were few tip-offs about just what you were reading, and if you didn’t know whether a story was fiction or non-fiction when you started it, you sometimes weren’t sure when you finished it, either — and Jack is trying to change that, ever so slightly.
“Granta was so minimal — it never announced what it was,” Jack says. “I began to worry that, if you picked it up in a bookshop you wouldn’t really know what you’d looked at. I kind of like to know what I’m reading.”
Still, Jack doesn’t want the magazine to lose its edge, its ability to get under readers’ skins. After Sept. 11, “I heard more and more people say they didn’t like America, that it was behaving in very imperialistic ways. I got in touch with as many writers as I could in as many countries as I could, to describe their experiences with America, good or bad.
“Although everyone has hostile feelings toward American foreign policy, America remains the most attractive civilization in the world to large numbers of people — including me.”
So would he move here with his wife and two children, ages 12 and 11?
Jack pauses. “I don’t know. America kind of scares me. I’d hate to be poor here. In Europe, in general, you feel a level of protection by the state. And I’d hate driving cars all the time.” He adds, “I do think the most threatening thing in the world is America’s consumption.”
He has written several books, including “The Crash that Stopped Britain” (Granta Books, 2001), an account of a notorious train accident that pointed up deadly flaws in the nation’s rail system.
Having both written and edited what other people write, Jack has no doubts about which is trickiest.
“Editing, however difficult it can be, is always easier than writing. Writing is the hard part. The reputation of the magazine depends on the writing inside it. I realize this is an obvious and banal point, but it should never be forgotten.
“A good novel,” he declares, “is an unsurpassable thing. It really is. I used to think that non-fiction was a kind of truer thing than fiction. But I’ve come to see that the novel is probably the truest expression of the state of the world. You can’t quarrel with it.
“Writing’s writing. It should be capable of describing anything.”
A Granta sampler
Granta, the literary magazine published in London and edited by Ian Jack, is published four times a year. Each issue has a theme: “Country Life” will come out in the summer.
Previous themes include “Food” (winter, 1995), with an article by J.M. Coetzee; “India” (spring, 1997) with articles by V.S. Naipaul and Arundhati Roy; “London” (spring, 1999), with articles by Julian Barnes and Dale Peck; and “Love Stories” (winter, 1999), with articles by Raymond Carver and W.G. Sebald.
The spring 2005 issue is “The Factory.” Here is an excerpt from “Chocolate Empires,” an essay by Andrew Martin:
A chocolate factory consists of large rooms with walls of whitewashed brick, a few machines, a few people — looking lonely among the machines — and a lot of white pipes. To understand the factory, you must understand the route of the chocolate through the pipes. It will rise at will up through a ceiling, emerge through a floor, cross from one factory block to another. To keep it moving, the chocolate factory is kept at the melting temperature of chocolate: blood temperature. The whole place, in fact, reminded me of a Christmas Day at home: slightly cloying warmth, bright lights, chocolate smell.
— Julia Keller
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jikeller@tribune.com
