A Tenacious Grip on Journalism

Maggie Scarf's life has fallen into place very neatly--a Nieman fellow and well-known free lancer, she has published articles regularly in The New York Times Magazine, and has published several books. Yet with all this behind her, Scarf does not attribute her journalistic fortunes solely to talent or luck. Rather, she feels they are a direct result of her "hanging in" ability, of her tenacity.

Scarf does not look like someone who has had to struggle through the journalist's world. Although 43, she looks a decade younger. The aggressiveness one would imagine she needed to succeed as a writer seems not to have affected Scarf personally. The impression one gets when meeting her is that she has successfully retained her warmth and a sense of humor. Perhaps the best way to contrast her to other journalists is the contrast she herself saw at the first few Nieman fellow conferences. The other fellows continually shot questions to the speakers; they asked "tough questions and even became angry if they did not get the response they wanted. Scarf smiled as she described the intenseness of the other journalist. Her interviews as a free lance writer have been on a one-to-one basis and her easygoing manner reflects this.

Although Scarf speaks as if her journalistic successes came about quite naturally, they did not. Tenacity, to a large extent, created her career. "I was an early drop-out. I finished three years of college and then got married and spent the next ten years trying to finish school. And when I was almost finished, we'd move," Scarf says with a shrug that indicates she feels no regret. After this ten-year long attempt to finish school, Scarf turned to writing children's books because of what she saw as a need for some sort of personal fulfillment. "I sent chapters of a children's book I had written to Random House and they offered me a contract, so I finally dropped out of school altogether."

"I was writing those children's books and I got a job at the Yale Radio Station. (My husband is a professor at Yale and I have two daughters there.) I did a program on mental health in a New Haven asylum where they were using a milieu therapy, which was totally new at the time. I thought it was a terrific program but the director didn't like it and it was never used." So Scarf received the asylum director's permission to write an article--even though she had written only one article before, for Yale Magazine--and subsequently spent three months in the asylum gathering information for her article, which as yet had no publisher.

Scarf spent three months working on the article, a time, she says now, when she felt totally lost. "At first I didn't understand what was happening, and then I started to realize I was on the track of something interesting and totally new," but she didn't know where to go with it. So she called the New York Times "and talked to a woman about my article," she says, leaning forward eagerly. But despite Scarf's own enthusiasm, the initial reception from the Times was "frosty." She submitted the article anyway and a week later the same woman called her to say, "We're buying your article. Who are you?" Scarf credits her tenacity rather than luck for her success with the Times. "You don't need pull" to have an article read, Scarf says, adding, "They read everything." But, she emphasizes, "you need the ability to be vulnerable and take a chance."

Although her work has centered on the behavioral sciences, Scarf, having majored in French literature at Temple and Stanford as an undergraudate, had no previous experience in psychology. Her more recent article are on such topics as: "Goodall and Chimpanzees at Yale," "Normality is a Square Circle or a Four-Sided Triangle," and "He and She: Sex Hormones and Behavior." Like her experience with the New Haven mental health program, when Scarf finds a subject which interests her, she'll immerse herself in it totally--what she calls a sort of "autodidactic" approach.

Since Scarf's work is for general audiences and not scientific publications, she says she translates her interviews with experts, and the technical, more scientific information she collects, into lay language. "Writing is a part of learning what you've learned about," Scarf says. It's the actual writing, Scarf maintains, that clarifies the reasearch she has done. When writing for the more traditional women's magazines, Scarf says the issues not only have to be clarified, but over-simplified as well, because the editors, Scarf feels, "do not give enough credit to their readers. The New York Times feels that everyone who reads the paper is capable of some energetic thinking."

Scarf's most recent research--on depression in women--grew out of her curiosity over why people--both men and women--commit suicide. A large percentage of women who attempt suicide are between 18 and 30, but most of them do not succeed. A large proportion of men who attempt suicide are in their early 50's and late 60's, and they do succeed. "Women take pills and ingest things. Men use guns and more violent means," Scarf says. "I'm interested in the active versus the passive aspects." She wrote articles on all these aspects of suicide and they eventually led her to articles on depression. "I started on easy things for Cosmopolitan magazine. I was intrigued by the numbers--there are many, many more depressed women than men. The numbers are four to one or four to two, depending upon the area of the country. What happens to women that is different from what happens to me?" She pauses, then questions some more, "Is it their lives, their circuitry, their hormones? Are men finding different outlets, such as alcoholism? Is there a difference between women who are making events happen and those who allow the environment to act upon them?" It's these complexities she says she intends to submerge herself in just to "see what happens." Maybe, she acknowledges, nothing will happen. "It all depends on what I come across and just how swell it is," Scarf says, leaning back into her chair.

Her research on depression in women has led Scarf to believe that the women's liberation movement has created entirely new problems for women to deal with. When observing women at a psychiatric hospital this summer, Scarf found many of them to be frustrated by the conflict between traditional societal positioning which requires "nice, soft-spoken women" and the demands of new consciousness. One encounter this summer that Scarf said jolted her was with a bright woman, who from appearances, should have been very contented. The woman confided to Scarf that "If I kill myself, I won't have to find a career."

According to Scarf, many of these women "don't know how to be their own person or do their own thing." Another woman was admitted to the hospital because "her world had fallen to pieces." Her husband had had an extramarital affair with her best friend, yet she would not admit anger toward her husband. When she was finally able to confront the real reason behind her feelings, she became aggressively angry with her husband. The male attendants tried to subdue her, thus doing what Scarf considers to be "positioning" the woman. Her inability to express anger had caused her psychiatric difficulties, yet display of this anger is not "feminine."

Although Scarf would like to see a series of articles or a book come out of her depression research, she has made no definite commitments. "People have told me they're interested in such a book, but I think you can freeze if you know someone is waiting for you to produce." Scarf has been offered contracts for articles by The New York Times, but she "does not want to be forced to do things in any order. The Times could keep me very busy, but there are certain things that are richer and that I'd like to find out about myself."

One of these richer things is the chance to delve into other kinds of writing. This year as a Nieman fellow, she will have the opportunity to begin work in fiction, both on her own and as a course for credit. Scarf says she would like to write a novel, but that she doesn't know if she can "sustain herself in the unknown for the two years it would take to write the novel."

Although Scarf only writes about what interests her, she keeps extremely busy and has produced a copious amount of material. In part, it is for this reason that she applied for the Nieman fellowship. "The Nieman is definitely allowing me to do something I couldn't do otherwise. This is coming at an absolutely crucial time in my career. I have done articles. Now I want time to think, read, write and explore," Scarf says. "I think I applied because this seems to me as if it was made for people who weren't getting time to think. It's going to be relaxing to sit down and learn with someone else. It will be nice to have information organized and given perspective."

She paused for a second to add, "I suppose I have the feeling I've been practicing without a license."

Being a Nieman at Harvard gives her a whole different feeling than that which she experiences as a "Yale faculty wife." "The Nieman facilitates things," she says. "The community comes out to greet you. Here I am given real access to people." Scarf views Harvard as a "special place" in terms of her research, since a lot of work on depression and adult development has been done here. But she feels not much work has been done on female development--a topic she feels is very important.

Scarf has been "hanging in" for a long time so that this year promises to be a relaxing interlude in her career. She will, however, continue a rigorous reading and writing schedule, complete with commuting to and and from New Haven, spending four days and three days here. "I'll try to get as much interchange as I can with students here," she says. "But in some ways it is stressful not to be with my family in the same way. It can't be the same with me traveling this way. Some decisions have to be made by telephone and without gestures and eyecontact, it's a different feeling." Scarf's family will probably move to Cambridge during the second semester. "I do a lot of reading for courses on the train," she says.

In any case, the Nieman is an important aspect of Scarf's journalistic development. "I think it's going to be a terribly enlarging and crucial thing. I applied because I thought it was a good idea, but now that I've dipped my foot, I think it's a great idea."