Sundays With Noel | The Nation

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November 22, 2024

According to his former lover and protégé Joan Didion, Noël Parmentel was “an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the insider.”

American writer Joan Didion and her husband and writer John Gregory Dunn work together in their library in Malibu. (Henry Clark/Condé Nast via Getty Images)

There was a time when Noel Parmentel, an occasional contributor to this magazine who recently died, called me almost every Sunday. I pick up the phone and hear him in a sharp voice: “Lingeman? Noel.”

I wasn’t always happy to have my Sundays interrupted like this, but looking back I’m glad he dropped the pennies. What did we talk about? Probably, the gossip about the cases at St Nation and literary affairs in general. Noel was well-read. I remember him once telling me to fire a certain man who he said, to quote Graham Greene, was a member of the “non-torturable class”. Noel and I were members of the same generation of wannabes who burst into New York in the sixties, trying to make a name for ourselves. There was, of course, a business element to my relationship with Noel. Sooner or later he throws an article idea at me like a lion tamer swinging a steak in front of one of his charges. Noel knew what he was doing. He was a professional and an excellent writer. Here’s a free sample of his prose style cut from a piece he wrote for us about a con man named Stu Leonard called “Stew’s Dairy Skim Scam”.

“Stew Leonard’s trial date is set for October 20th in Federal District Court in New Haven, where Fairfield County’s big butter-and-eggs man (now heavy on light opera buff Gotterdammerrung) will learn his fate. On the advice of Watergate prosecutor James Neal’s attorney, Leonard pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to defraud the federal government of $17.5 million in taxes” that he and three Norwalk co-defendants took from the world’s largest dairy. The recommendations call for up to five years in prison on top of the $15 million fine already levied. Absent divine intervention, Leonard will trade his Holstein rags for Danbury studs. Old McDonald never had days like this.

Now that, J-school graduates, is a leader!

Thus, our Saturday conversations were not in vain. Some of his best ideas found their way into articles in the Nation.

But wait, I hear you say. Wasn’t Noel a conservative member of Bill Buckley National review?

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True enough. But Noel was politically ambiguous. As one of his friends, the writer Dan Wakefield, put it, he “destroyed the right on the pages Nationturned and did the same to the left inside National review and blew both sides Esquireand everyone loved it.’ Regarding his politics, he defined himself as a “reactionary individualist”.

His former lover and protégé, the novelist Joan Didion, put it more scathingly: “He belonged to no one, he was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the insider.”

In addition to being a great writer, Noel had the deal-making instincts of a literary agent shark. Add to that the fact that he was an enabler, a generous motivator of his fellow writers. When he and Didion were on the same page, he pushed her to finish her first novel, A Running River. After they broke up and eventually dumped her, he set her up with John Gregory Dunn, then a Time writer, whom she later married. The couple emigrated to the left bank, where they became sought-after screenwriters.

Noel himself had great talent and originality as a magazine writer. Indeed, the article he published in the Esquireattracted me and, I think, Viktor Navasky Nationeditor at the time to request his prose. It was a satirical dispatch from Young Americans for Freedom, a group of young, pimply conservatives, called “Pimples and Ecstasy.”

It occurred to me now that even amid the political stress of the sixties and seventies, Noel and I could talk to each other regardless of the rifts. Perhaps there is a lesson in this for modern writers. Richard Lingeman is the author of eight books and a former senior editor at Nation.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, Nation

Richard Lingeman

Richard Lingeman, former senior editor Nationcovered books and writers for The New York Times Book Review in the 1970s. Author biography Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey and Sinclair Lewis: High Street Rebel.