Sundays With Noel | The Nation

There was a time when Noel Parmentel, an occasional contributor to this journal, who died lately, used to name me practically each Sunday. I’d choose up the telephone and listen to, in his gravelly voice: “Lingeman? Noel.”

I wasn’t at all times joyful to have my Sundays thus interrupted however trying again I’m glad he dropped the dime. What did we discuss? In all probability gossip about doings on the Nation and literary issues generally. Noel was well-read. I keep in mind him as soon as telling me to put off a sure one that, he mentioned quoting Graham Greene, was a member of the “non-torturable class.” Noel and I have been members of the identical technology of aspirers who invaded New York within the sixties hell-bent on making a reputation for ourselves. There was a enterprise factor in Noel’s and my relationship, in fact. In the end, he would dangle an article thought earlier than me like a lion tamer waving a steak earlier than one in all his expenses. Noel knew what he was doing. He was a professional and a helluva author. Right here’s a free pattern of his prose fashion lopped from a bit he wrote for us a couple of grifter named Stew Leonard, titled “The Skim Rip-off at Stew’s Dairy.”

“Stew Leonard’s judgment day is ready for October 20 in Federal District Court docket in New Haven, the place Fairfield County’s huge butter and egg man (now the heavy in a light-weight opera bouffe Gotterdammerrung) will study his destiny. On recommendation of counsel—Watergate prosecutor James Neal—Leonard copped a plea of ‘conspiring to defraud the Federal Authorities of taxes on $17.5 million’ that he and three Norwalk co-defendants skimmed from the World’s Largest Dairy Retailer. Tips name for as much as 5 years of jail time on prime of an already levied $15 million advantageous. Within the absence of divine intervention, Leonard shall be buying and selling down his Holstein glad rags for Danbury pin stripes. Outdated MacDonald by no means had days like this.”

Now that, J-school grads, is a lede!

So, our Sabbath talks weren’t in useless. A few of his finest concepts ended up as articles in within the Nation.

However maintain on, I hear you saying. Wasn’t Noel a conservative contributor to Invoice Buckley’s Nationwide Assessment?

True sufficient. However Noel was politically ambidextrous. As one in all his mates, the author Dan Wakefield, put it, he “savaged the best within the pages of the Nation, would flip round and do the identical to the left in Nationwide Assessment and blasted each side in Esquire, and everybody liked it.” As for his politics, he outlined himself as a “reactionary individualist.”

His former lover and mentee, the novelist Joan Didion, mentioned it extra caustically: “He belonged to nothing, He was an outsider who lived by his means to govern the within.”

Along with being an aesthetic author, Noel had the deal-making instincts of a shark literary agent. Add to that the truth that he was an enabler, a beneficiant motivator of fellow writers. When he and Didion have been an merchandise, he pushed her into ending her first novel, Run River. After they broke up finally dropped her, he fastened her up with John Gregory Dunne, then a author for Time, whom she later married. The pair emigrated to the Left Coast, the place they grew to become in-demand screenwriters.

Noel himself had nice expertise and originality as {a magazine} author. Certainly, an article he revealed in Esquire, was what drew me and, I believe, Victor Navasky, the Nation’s editor on the time, to solicit his prose. It was a satirical sendup of the Younger Individuals for Freedom, a cabal of pimply younger conservatives, titled “The Pimples and the Ecstasy.”