"In the time we were there," Gessen recalled, "all these clubs opened up. We would sort of emerge from the office on a Friday night, and there would be velvet ropes . . . people in line, drinking."
It was a startling way to end a day spent contemplating the Frankfurt School. But n+1's soldiers were undaunted.
"With n+1, there was a time when people thought we were kidding: 'This is just a way of drawing attention to themselves.' But we weren't kidding. About two years ago, when we were putting out Issue 5, people really started hating us a lot. Because it really became clear that we were not kidding."
The journal, which has since moved, to Brooklyn, is often seen as a manifesto of elitist, male-centered high culture, living off the fumes from bound copies of Dissent. Gessen admits he and the gang were "perhaps too conscious" of their forebears.
But his war against mediocrity and for seriousness in writing and thought, he insists, does not require living in the past. "I think it's very much a living culture," he said over his Brooklyn ale. "There are a lot of people who really share these values, who were raised on this literature but who have talked themselves out of it."
It's what drove an attack on the website Gawker in the latest issue.
"These are people who were raised on print culture, everything they know they know from print culture, who now say, 'Those values are dead. You and I,' they say, 'believe in them, but those people out there do not.' And I'm telling you, they do! There are a lot of people who believe in this stuff, and they don't think it's a joke. They don't think the only way literature can survive is as this whimsical plaything of the upper class, which is frankly what McSweeney's is doing."
He's aware of the threats, the problems in publishing and elsewhere: Gessen doesn't want insularity and chumminess to kill literature and ideas as they killed poetry, "where really nobody but poets read poetry." The forces antagonistic to intellectualism, he insisted, usually come from inside.
"It's a self-inflicting kind of thing: 'Only we who are so privileged can indulge in this thing.' " He sees reasons for hope in Oprah Winfrey choosing Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" for her book club, in the people from India and Turkey who want to write for n+1.
"For people from that part of the world," he said, "high culture is extremely democratic, it's not elitist! It costs $2 to buy a paperback classic; they're the cheapest things in the bookstore."
