My Mistake (10 page)

The editorial process is exactly as elaborate as
New Yorker
readers would surely like it to be. The Checking proof goes to the editor, who looks it over with the writer, and then sends it to Collating, and Miss Gould's proof goes to the editor and then to Collating, and if there is an author's proof it will go to Collating, and Mr. Shawn's proof will go to the editor and then to Collating, and then Ed Stringham or Mary-Alice “I'm just swotting away” Rogers will take all the accepted changes and put them on a single proof and send it to the Makeup Department, where Irish and Italian men—Johnny, Joe, Carmine (the very short boss there), Bernie, and the Irish fiddler Pat—are pinning the columns down onto soft green desktops and figuring out “ornaments” and the type runarounds they necessitate and newsbreaks (the funny bits, from any text source, sent in by readers, to be printed at the ends of pieces when there is space to fill) and rolling up and putting the mounted galley proofs in a plastic container and sending it up a pneumatic tube somewhere for revision, or as a final. Smoke in that room too. So much smoke everywhere.

From Makeup, the final proof, or a proof for revision, goes to Chicago. One of the guys in Makeup will say, “It's already in Chicago,” and I say to Phil Perl, my boss, “It's in Chicago.” I don't know quite what that means, but I like to say it. It's like Narnia or Atlantis. Chicago. Chicago is where the printing plant R. R. Donnelley is. Time, Inc.'s magazines are printed there, too.

 

Nothing can express the transience of most periodical journalism as eloquently as a lot of the writing I work on as a Checker. A Letter from Paris, by Janet Flanner, on what is special about
this
Bastille Day. A Letter from the Space Center, by Henry S. F. Cooper, about scientists' anticipation of what the first moon rocks will reveal. Just the anticipation of the findings, not the findings themselves. One of Henry's interviewees says they will prove to be a “blockbuster”—that seemed to be the consensus. A lot of facts in these pieces are wrong. (Miss Gould might well have circled that last sentence and written in the margin, “No sense? Facts can't be wrong?”) If, for example, Henry Cooper says it's white, it may be black. If he says Neil Armstrong drinks tea, he may drink coffee. If he says there are 14,700 pounds of thrust, there may have been 741,000 pounds of pressure. It gets to the point where when I call some of the scientists Henry uses for sources, they sigh a little and settle in for a long, and generous, session of rectifications. But, to be fair, space travel does deal in pretty technical and minute detail, easy to get wrong. I will find out how easy when I do some reporting later on, among many other places in this very book, whose first draft referred to a friend and contemporary as having founded a magazine that began publication in 1855.

Oh, and about Janet Flanner: In one column she refers to a story by “de Maupassant.” I dutifully check the reference and find out that it is an ignorance to use the “de” when mentioning this writer's name. I put the suggested correction on my proof, which goes to Gardner Botsford, Ms. Flanner's editor, who is also the stepson of Raoul Fleischmann, the Publisher of
The New Yorker.
Mr. Botsford
X
es it out. I make an exception to my no-pushback rule and tell him that all literate sources agree that the “de” is a mistake. I go into his office and gently restate the case, with some backup documentation in hand. “You are telling
Janet Flanner
how to write a
French writer
'
s
name?” he says. “Get out of my office.”

Speaking of errors and Gardner Botsford: At
The New Yorker
's anniversary party, given by the Business Department every February—to celebrate the publication of the magazine's first issue—and widely disdained but always attended by Editorial, I go to remove what I think is a piece of thread from Mr. Botsford's lapel. My mistake. I'm right—it is thread, red thread—but somebody deflects my hand, thank God, and tells me that that red thread is the insignia of France's Legion of Honor, which the French government conferred on Mr. Botsford after the Second World War, for heroism during the invasion of Normandy.

But in contrast to these ephemera, I also get to work on many pieces that have lasting journalistic or literary value: John McPhee's dual profile of tennis players Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, Richard Harris's three-part Profile of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Renata Adler's account of the abortive effort of Biafra to secede from Nigeria.

This last piece contains perhaps the most vexed assertion that I have to check in my two and a half years as a Checker: “Major Dennis Umeh, a thirty-one-year-old surgeon who enlisted in the army on the day before the war, said the hospital had twice been strafed and bombed by MiGs.” Not only can I not confirm that significant fact about the hospital, it is disputed by the Nigerian government (of course) but also by the Red Cross and, quite surprisingly, by the Biafrans themselves, who had every reason to confirm the assertion whether it was true or not. And I can't track down Major Umeh. The sentence is allowed to stay in the piece, partly because it is a statement not by the reporter but by someone else and also because the author herself insists it is true. You might think that fact-checking is almost always a 0-1 operation—it's right or it's wrong—but this incident's ambiguities turn out to be not all that unusual and show how hot a spot Checking can be.

Renata Adler is very smart and tremulous. Essential tremor, I would guess. She has a famous gray braid down her back and is fidgety. She has a law degree and a little later on serves on the congressional Watergate Committee, which impresses me a lot. She tells me, once, that she became a writer in part because she wanted to know writers. A good reason and a bad one.

The New Yorker
gets some letters about the Biafra matter, as I expected we would. Fred Keefe comes into Checking, and Phil Perl says, “Uh-oh, it's Fred.”

When I need help, Phil lolls around the stacks, plucks down a book seemingly at random, opens it, often goes to the back (index), then flips through pages disgustedly, turns one more page, lazily digitates what I'm looking for, and wanders over to me with the fact in question safely, lepidopterously pinned.

Some of the books:
The Social Register
(surprisingly reliable),
Who's Who
(less so),
Jane's Fighting Ships,
Grove's Dictionary of Music
and Musicians
(superb), the venerable
Britannica
(good but often idiosyncratic and sometimes even argumentative),
Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition
(still the gold standard methodologically, I believe to the day of this writing, though increasingly out of date), the less respected but in ways still useful
American Heritage Dictionary,
the estimable
Chicago Manual of Style.
Altogether, it resembles an agoraphobe's conquest of the world to master these books, which contain the world, in their way, and to be able to be sure at the start of your journey that without mishap or missed connections you will end up where you are headed.

However consciously or un-,
The New Yorker,
a kind of Jonestown of the literary/journalistic realm, encourages in its employees an ethos of superiority, essentialness, and disregard for fad and fashion. Shawn himself, in his words and demeanor, appears to disavow any self-importance. He wants to be taken as a quiet, modest man who puts the greatness of the institution he runs above all else. This faux-modest version of occupational vanity, in combination with native timidity, keeps very intelligent people in the same, often dead-end, jobs for years, simply because they can say, in this modestly quiet voice, that they work for
The New Yorker.
Great institutions, so long as they are small, will often (a) eventually take themselves too seriously and (b) try to camouflage their pride with self-effacement.

Shawn always claims that
The New Yorker
does not and cannot, with integrity, try to attend to what a reader might want to read. We publish what
we
like, and hope that some people might want to read it too. This modest formulation of hauteur finds its best expression in a remark made by a Checker when the magazine finally breaks down and adds a real table of contents—as opposed to the almost microscopically small and cryptic listing that seemed on occasion to fly around and land obscurely in Goings On About Town. The real table of contents arrives shortly after I do, and the new feature has been kept a secret, and when we all get our First Run Copies on a Monday morning, a collective gasp of dismay goes up from the Checking Department. A colleague finally says, “This is just
awful!
How could we
do
such a thing.” Being green, I say, “Well, don't you think it's a good idea for readers to know what's in the magazine?” She says, “It's none of the readers' business what's in the magazine.”

There are seven of us, including Phil. Phil slops around the place in that lazy-looking and fed-up way, but as I've said, he knows where to find anything in the reference books that line the metal shelves. Occasionally a Checker, at wit's or initiative's end, will call out “Room at large!” and ask a question. Less than a week after I arrive at
The New Yorker,
one of my colleagues says, “Room at large! What does ‘Angeleno' mean?”

“Someone who lives in Los Angeles,” I say. I feel as though I've just passed a test.

“It doesn't look like there's a lot in here,” Phil says, putting a tedious piece by E. J. Kahn about efforts to establish vocational schools in Micronesia down on my desk. Then he says, “Did you notice my shoes?” I say no, I haven't, and look down and see shoes with colorful layered heels, like alternating slices of Muenster and beets. “Wow,” I say. “Those are some shoes.”

“You like them, eh? Guess how much they cost.”

“Gee, I don't know—must have been a lot. Seventy dollars?”

“Thirty-four fifty-nine,” he says, heavy on the
f
's, for emfasis.

“What a great deal,” I say.

“Guess how much I paid for this shirt,” he might say. It would be burgundy with a strange sheen.

“It's a nice one. Thirty-nine?

“Nope! Eight bucks. Canal Street.”

“Wow! Very special!”

The second week I am in Checking, the phone on my desk rings and “Hello, is this Mr. Menaker?” a miniature voice says.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Menaker, this is William Shawn.”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Shawn,” I say. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, there's a sentence in Notes and Comment about the number of troops who are in Vietnam right now, and I would like you to check that with the State Department to make sure it's right. It's from a news story, and I don't know if it's reliable.”

The people on the Vietnam Desk at the State Department always laugh when I check the reporter Robert Shaplen's Vietcong body counts with them. They think the CIA feeds him inflated numbers. Jonathan Schell is writing powerful Notes and Comments against the war in The Talk of the Town while Shaplen is writing semi-apologias for the war in the middle of the magazine. Schell is one of the Harvard crowd. Shawn has hired three or four of his son Wallace's fellow–Harvard undergraduates—Hendrik Hertzberg, Schell, Anthony Hiss.

“Sure,” I say. “I'll do that and let you know.”

When I hang up, a few of the other checkers within earshot are staring at me.

“What's wrong?” I say to the person who sits across from me.

“You said ‘Hi' to Mr. Shawn?” she says. “You don't say ‘Hi' to Mr. Shawn—you say ‘Hello.'”

 

Twenty-eight

 

One night, in the early-morning hours, in the apartment I share with Jerry Cotts, a friend from Swarthmore, I wake up terrified—of absolutely nothing. It is a classic panic attack—racing pulse, cold sweat, terror like none I have ever known, except maybe for a foreshadowing of it on the lower level of Grand Central back when I was eight years old, and my general trepidation as a kid. But it
feels
like absolutely out of nowhere. You may think that the classic anxiety of certain kinds of New Yorkers, tending toward the Jewish kind, is a stereotypical joke, thanks principally to Woody Allen. But I am here to tell you that it is no joke, for any locale, race, or ethnicity. If someone you know truly suffers from what is now called a generalized anxiety disorder, it is fucking
awful.
Yes, the handling of such a person, in friendship or in love or in work, is best when it's sympathetic but matter-of-fact and even businesslike. I know that now. I can do that now. Even with myself, on those mercifully rare occasions when the old panic approaches. But for pity's sake don't dismiss this affliction as a chimera or a ruse or a plea for attention or any of the other at least implicitly condemnatory assessments that so many so often make of it. It is all too real, itself and nothing else, and it can be disabling. It came close to disabling me for life. The prospect of lunch with a colleague was torture. Flying was a sentence. Social life an ordeal. It's no wonder that with Valium always on my person and the need to lose myself in something that would take my mind off this dread, I throw my energy into fact-checking so violently. I start psychoanalysis and keep the Valium in the shirt pocket over my heart. This goes on, gradually abating, for many years.

This terrible fear, which quickly and typically develops into fear of the fear, has to be in large part a delayed reaction to my brother's death, two years earlier, and an even more delayed reaction, perhaps, to childhood problems, and maybe—maybe even more likely—to the separation from my family in early infancy. In someone else, those events might develop into no trouble at all. But they do in me. And the work I have to do to deal with them convinces me, if I needed convincing, that the seeds of other people's psychological difficulties are almost always planted very early, that they often blossom hideously in youth, that it is the devil's own work to overcome or so much as moderate them, and that while they may be tamed, they are, like trumpet vines, like tenacious rhizomes, essentially un-uprootable.