Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, January 16, 1995                   TAG: 9501190039
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

THE MAGAZINE

The Oxford, Miss., editor published the likes of John Updike, Fred Chappell, Will D. Campbell, William F. Buckley Jr., Roy Blount Jr. and Donna Tartt.

And he learned not to answer the telephone in the morning.

"If someone called me at 8 o'clock, I never answered," said Smirnoff, "because I knew it was the credit card people."

Well, it's a new day.

The Oxford American - which in its first issue announced it would aspire to become "an invigorating magazine of mass appeal" - enters 1995 with at least an invigorated bank account.

This is thanks mostly to its famous new publisher, John Grisham. Grisham, who formerly lived in Oxford, now lives in Charlottesville, Va.

The mega-selling writer of pop fiction and the magazine editor of high intent have combined forces to giving the struggling Oxford American a glossy new look and a new lease on life - not to mention an aggressive new marketing campaign.

Some 60,000 copies of the February issue, its fifth, were printed - some 50,000 more than the previous issue - and distributed in bookstores across the country, magazine officials said.

To Smirnoff, a 31-year-old California native, high school dropout and lover of literature who began the magazine in his Oxford apartment, Grisham's sponsorship came not a moment too soon (the last, pre-Grisham issue carried an advertisement pleading "Please subscribe, before it's too late," accompanied by a photograph of someone hosing off a dead hog.)

Smirnoff confirmed that Grisham's investment - the size of which he delined to reveal - had saved the magazine. "Oh, yeah, it did," Smirnoff said.

Grisham declined to be interviewed.

He has not, however, declined to be controversial.

At Grisham's urging, the magazine has already adopted new standards on the appearance of profanity, graphic sex and violence within its pages. And Smirnoff said he is sending the contents of each issue to Grisham for approval now before publication.

Before anyone conclude this be unnecessary censorship, however, let it at least be noted in passing that the first edition of the Oxford American contained not one but three poems about trips to the toilet - including a poem by Pulitzer prize-winning novelist John Updike about his favorite bowel movement.

Anyway, rules or no rules, at least two contributors say they have no problem writing pieces for a magazine published by the author of "A Time To Kill."

People with their own magazines "have their own tastes," shrugged Oxford writer Barry Hannah, one of whose stories was accepted, then later rejected by the magazine when Grisham took over as publisher. (Smirnoff said he rejected the piece himself. He also said Hannah was paid for the work.)

"I've never published in 'The New Yorker,'" Hannah said - another magazine historically skittish about sex and four-letter words.

Hannah, who initially contributed stories to the fledgling magazine for free, simply submitted another, which was accepted.

He did say it would be "hypocritical" of Grisham to complain too much about violence. "After all, he's made his living on books that make murder interesting."

But Hannah also stressed that Grisham is his friend. "John and I are buddies. I don't think he's a monster, like that guy wrote."

Oh, yes.

That guy.

That would be Ed Hinton, Atlanta free-lance writer, author of an article on Grisham that appears in the January 1995 issue of the magazine GQ.

The article that noted Grisham has made $33 million in the past two years alone - while somewhat undiplomatically describing his writing as "awful."

That article that contains this sentence:

"In a long line of Mississippi writers, Grisham is a single aberration and paradox, the worst and the richest, the least distinguished and the most popular: 60 million sold, at last count, of his first five novels."

And compares him, quite unfavorably, to such "serious" Southern writers as Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Tartt, Larry Brown and Richard Ford.

These are, not incidentally, some of the very writers whose work has been appearing in the Oxford American over the past two years.

Grisham's involvement in the magazine, then, has at least the highly interesting side effect of wedding unusual bedfellows - straight and commercial fiction - in a single literary venture.

As writer Clyde Edgerton - a sometime contributor to the Oxford American - pointed out, should this bring some of Grisham's many readers to the magazine, it may all be to the good.

Edgerton - the North Carolina writer whose novel, "The Floatplane Notebooks," spawned a controversy of its own at Carroll County (Va.) High School two years ago - said it doesn't bother him that Grisham is now the publisher of the Oxford American.

But Edgerton also said the town of Oxford - home to the late Nobel laureate William Faulkner, and Mecca for many living writers who still revere his work - "seems to me uncommercialized, in good ways. It would be a shame if it was commercialized in a bad way."

Edgerton also noted that other Southern magazines of serious intent have appeared on the magazine scene recently, or soon will, including two published at Duke University, "Southern Culture" and "DoubleTake," and one in Oxford - "Reckon," to be published by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

The Oxford American, of course, has no university backing. It also seeks a wider audience.

Smirnoff, who settled in Oxford in the late 1980s when his car broke down near there, said the magazines he read about the South "did not show me the South that I know. ...There's more to the South than pretty porches and recipes and clean white people smiling."

He dismissed the popular "Southern Living" and others like it as "women's magazines." Many people, male and female, "aren't interested in that gloss," Smirnoff said.

So Smirnoff, who had meanwhile got himself a job working in the local Oxford bookstore, Square Books, set out to start his own magazine.

"People respond to quality," he said. "I think that people want a good magazine about the South. And it's our goal to provide that magazine."

That he succeeded in getting one issue together, let alone four, without Grisham's backing, is a kind of little miracle.

"He [Smirnoff] didn't have a big loan," said the magazine's executive editor, Scott Morris. "He didn't have big investors. Through charming letters, he was able to get some extraordinarily well-known writers to contribute to the first issue. He convinced them that a magazine from the South was necessary. And he convinced them that it couldn't be done without them."

All of the contributors to the first issue - which included Updike, Charles Bukowski, William F. Buckley and Grisham himself - wrote for free. "When John Updike responded," Smirnoff said, "I knew the idea was good."

Well, not to quibble.

But didn't Updike respond by sending a poem about excrement?

"I think it's a great poem. I would publish it again," Smirnoff said - though he later recalled that he could not, in fact, publish the Updike poem again, because the Oxford American has decided in the future to focus strictly on the South.

Smirnoff came to know Grisham by working with him on the article he wrote for the first issue, "The Faulkner Thing."

Grisham liked the work he did on the article, and began paying him to edit his novels as well, Smirnoff said. The relationship has continued - Smirnoff worked on Grisham's latest effort, "The Rainmaker."

The editor said he is a fan of Grisham's writing.

"I've always liked thrillers. Then I read 'The Firm.' It was one of those books that kept me up all night. I would never think that 'thriller' equals 'Faulkner,' or that one would even have to explain the difference."

In any event, when they decided to offer stock last year, and gain for the tottering magazine some capital, Smirnoff hesitantly approached Grisham. The writer agreed to buy in.

Later, they decided to ask him to be publisher as well.

"We needed a mentor," explained Morris. Morris is 28, three years younger than Smirnoff. Grisham, who was a practicing lawyer before he began writing novels, is 39. "He [Grisham] has a lot of business savvy."

Morris also said that, "contrary to the very negative article that just appeared abut him in GQ, he [Grisham] is a very serious person. He wants to see Southern literature flourish."

And maybe he will. Even Ed Hinton, who wrote the GQ article about Grisham, conceded the best-selling writer, with his cavernous pockets, may in the end prove the magazine's best chance for salvation.

"It's ironic," said Hinton - who in his article calls Grisham a "groupie" to serious writers - "but I think Grisham may be its only hope."