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the determining factor in his split from the
Voice.
As Mailer acknowledged in
Advertisements for Myself
, his dispute went deeper, to a philosophical schism between his desire that the paper be radical Hip (a word he capitalized as if it were a religion, which it was at the time for him) and the paper’s more conventionally bohemian and “politely rebellious” stance of opposition. Mailer’s discernment of the conservative temperament guiding the paper’s pirate course hit on something that’s often overlooked. It is one of journalism’s more interesting parallels that the
Village Voice
and William F. Buckley’s
National Review
were founded in the same year, 1955. Though the
Voice
was to become an embattled clubhouse for the scruffy urban left and
National Review
the flagship for the preppy urbane right, their birth canals were not as antithetical as it might seem. Both were founded in opposition to a liberal consensus that had gone blah and paternal with platitude and complacency. In the foreward (the misspelling is intentional) to
The Village Voice Reader
, Dan Wolf wrote, “Those of us who started the
Voice
had long since been left cold by the dull pieties of official liberalism with its dreary, if unspoken, drive to put every family in a housing development and give each child his own social worker.” That was a sentiment to which
National Review
’s founding editor, William F. Buckley Jr., could assent with a splash of holy water. The difference was that Buckley wanted to convert ideas and ideology into electoral, legislative, and executive power. Wolf didn’t. He and the
Voice
’s publisher and co-founder, Ed Fancher, a psychoanalyst whose defusing calmness was a credit to the Freudian playbook, weren’t fixed upon some future sun-risen horizon, conjuring a hero on horseback (a Goldwater, a Reagan). Wolf didn’t harbor national ambitions that might someday be inscribed in capital marble.
    At the
Voice
the answer to the pukewarm pieties of official liberalism and the remedy for boredom were the unofficial individuality of locals sounding off in print as if the paper were their personal mike. Anticipating the blogosphere, the
Voice
thinned the distinction between professional keyboard peckers and stir-crazy amateurs in fifth-floor walk-ups, presenting a Beat-flavored alternative to the vaunted notion of the author as member of a sacred novitiate whose brow was sprinkled with the beneficent ashes of Lionel Trilling’s cigarette. Dainty aesthetes and goateed pedants could apply elsewhere. For me, discovering the paper at a historic newsstand in Baltimore called Sherman’s that stocked underground weeklies and rad-hip incendiaries such as
Ramparts
and
Evergreen Review
, the
Voice
threw off a black soot that no other rag could match (I must have been the only person to hook school in order to hit the Enoch Pratt Free Library and spend the afternoon marching through its bound volumes of
Partisan Review
, then scoot over to Sherman’s to stock up on the latest bombardments in the
Berkeley Barb
and the
East Village Other
, then drop in to the Marxist bookstore whose basement was piled with mildewy back issues of the
Nation, Saturday Review
, the
New Republic
, before catching the Greyhound home). You couldn’t even read the paper without getting your hands smudged with what looked like powder burns. In a time of strife it was the real fisticuffed goods. While so many underground papers went paisley wild with psychedelic art and five-alarm headlines fresh from the police-state blotter, the
Voice
—from the photography of Fred McDarrah to the barricade reporting by byliners whose press credentials were slung around their necks like militant dog tags (as witness the photo of the valiant
Voice
reporter Don McNeill on the paperback cover of
Moving Through Here
, blood trickling down his Dylanesque face)—practiced front-page cinema verité. It doled out a rough cut of history steeped in the radical hubbub and