‘The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture’
By Tricia Romano
Public Affairs, 608 pages

In the mid-1950s, Norman Mailer was in a funk. His third published novel, “The Deer Park,” had received middling reviews, and, looking for a new outlet for his ideas that might eventually turn into another novel, he bought a 30 percent interest in the Village Voice, a new, controversial combination of a community newspaper and a European-style underground vehicle for radical and avant garde writers.

Mailer was not alone in his attraction to a publication that would confound what came to be called an age of conformity: “We wanted to jam the gears of creeping automatism,” a co-founder and the first editor in chief of the paper, Dan Wolf, declared. To Mailer, the Voice meant launching a “private war on American journalism, mass communications, and the totalitarianism of totally pleasant personality.” He invited readers to respond to his insults, and they did, calling him a whiner, a “narcissistic pest,” and an “adequate journeyman writer.”

In this epic oral biography, based on more than 200 interviews, it seems that everyone significant in the creation and perpetuation of a contrarian kind of journalism has a voice in its 88 chapters, with a “Cast of Characters” that spreads over 15 pages and a Timeline that begins on October 26, 1955, and ends in 2021, with the Voice online in irregular print editions. 

This book’s Contents pages convey the Voice’s cultural importance, covering off-Broadway theater, film, rock music, the art world, the “hippie generation,” the women’s liberation movement, and the “new journalism,” featuring regulars like Nat Hentoff on civil rights and Michael Musto (“La Dolce Musto”) covering gossip and New York nightlife.

Perhaps only an oral history could capture a newspaper that seems to take on its community and the world in such divergent ways. What single narrative voice could encompass the riot of opinion and reportage? “Our philosophy was you do not hire an expert; you hired someone who is living through the phenomenon worth covering,” a Voice editor, Richard Goldstein, says. He is the one who hired Jim Hobeman to write about film because he was an underground filmmaker, not an established film critic. 

The Voice was about “interesting sensibilities … attuned to the subject they wrote about,” which meant the writers might be amateurs, with no respect given to objectivity. It was also not unusual for Voice writers to attack each other.

The flavor of this trouble-making organ is captured In Jack Newfield’s yearly column about New York City’s worst ten landlords. A 20-year-plus contributor, Laurie Stone, touts the Voice as the original counterculture journalism — the opposite of the stuffy New York Times.

In an earlier age, the Voice would have been called a muckraking rag that exposed corrupt politicians, but to that tradition it added attacks on corrupt businessmen-celebrities, with President Trump as one of the major targets.

What began as mainly a paper founded by a group of Village males broadened its appeal with feminist writers like Vivian Gornick, Jill Johnston, and Susan Brownmiller. The Voice was nimble and shifted its priorities as the culture changed, and it did so much more quickly than conventional newspapers.

Eventually, other counter-culture publications proliferated, even as the Voice maintained its edge. It took social media, the difficulty of adapting to a digital world, a decline in ad revenue, changes in ownership, and the inevitable shifts in American culture to make the Voice less relevant and less of the moment.

A writer for the Voice, Tricia Romano has accomplished a prodigious feat, using some archived interviews but mostly “original testimony.” She has fact-checked “names, dates, and places where possible.” She has tried to “confirm how events took place from multiple sources.” That even this much diligence is not enough is apparent in her observation that “in an oral history, a person’s story is the story.”

The language in these interviews, as Ms. Romano notes, may offend today’s readers: “Certain words are no longer acceptable, but I believe it’s important to remain true to how people spoke, given that this is an oral history.” That last point is important, as what oral history cannot supply is sufficient context, with more characterization of who is doing the talking than a cast of characters can provide.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic.”