My Mistake (11 page)

It doesn't matter. Well, it matters, to me. But if there's anything more boring than analysis itself, it's hearing about someone else's analysis. I would not put any reader or friend through the details of my therapy, the first half of which was conducted by a decent, patient man, the second by a colorful and confrontational fellow who once said, when I answered one of his questions the way he evidently wanted me to, “Ah-hah! At last the penis goes into the vagina!”

So I am a demon Fact Checker, even when I start out, as “the drudge.” The drudge is the newest Checker and has to work on all the pieces that no one else wants to work on—Concert Records, On and Off the Avenue. And with all the writers whom no one else wants to work with—Lillian Ross, Thomas Whiteside, “Audax Minor” (Gilbert Ryall), the Race Track columnist. And who cleans out the metal-wire box of dead proofs every Monday morning. And after a couple of years, they promote me to Copy Editor.

 

Thirty to thirty-two

 

Checking has its real-world aspects: trying to resolve conflicts (even if only vicariously) in the reporting of that selfsame Vietnam War (Shaplen versus Schell), phone calls to Columbia professors to check on misreported sweater colors, congressional records,
Jane
'
s Fighting Ships,
and strafed/unstrafed Biafran hospitals. Copy editing at
The New Yorker
takes me into a more fugitive and cloistered world. You have to spend your days looking up that it is indeed “congressional” and not “Congressional,” and other such fine points. When Bob Bingham says to me, “It has been decided”—as if by some plenipotentiary power that gains its nutrients solely from the passive voice—that I should learn copy editing, I have no real idea of what lies in store. This, even though my mother was a copy editor and even though Copy Editing, the office, lies just down the hall and through the nineteenth-floor elevator lobby and immediately to the right. I have almost never ventured into this warren in my more than two Checking years. I am also ignorant enough of office dynamics and psychodynamics to not realize how rare it is to get out of Checking and to have this chance, and how envious my fellow-Checkers may be. (Some of them turn out to be lifers and many others simply drift away. Later, one Checker, by his own admission a real Checking fuckup, drifts away into fame and fortune, in part by describing that factoid sub-world of periodical literature and his drastic shortcomings when he inhabited it—Jay McInerney, in
Bright Lights, Big City.
)

When an editor, any editor, finishes the preliminary editing of any piece, he—and it was always a he in those days, except for the fiction editor Rachel MacKenzie—sends it to the Copy Desk. Mr. Botsford, Mr. Bingham, Mr. Weekes (Talk of the Town), Mr. Whitaker, Mr. Crow, Mr. Knapp, Mr. Angell, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Hemenway, Mr. Shawn, Mr. Henderson. Do you notice not only the gender but the ethnicity here, except for Shawn, who is Jewish, even if not by name? (His family name was Chon.) Copy Editing applies
New Yorker
style to whatever manuscript is in its hands and indicates how the piece should be set up. Title (Annals of Copy Editing, say, in 36 pt. Irvin), subheads (The Final Serial Comma and Its Discontents—I), body type (11 pt., 13½ picas), initials (3-line init. and caps—or caps and sm. caps, if the initial is the first letter of a proper noun or a name: “
JAMES JAMES MORRISON MORRISON WEATHERBY GEORGE DUPREE
said to his mother . . . ,” etc. Within the text that follows you have to know how to set block quotes (9 pt.), poetry (“line for line”), newspaper-syndicate names, and so on.

A big black notebook beetles at us by our side,
The New Yorker
's style book, long sheets of paper encased in plastic which have double columns of words and phrases and abbreviations on them. The book contains normal rules (numbers are written out in words up to and including one hundred, and above that numerals are used, except for the big round ones, like five hundred and one thousand) and marvellous eccentricities—like that one. The past tense and some other forms of “marvel” and “level” and other words like them get two, British-style
l
's so as to keep the reader from reading “marveled” as “marveeled,” I guess—as if the reader would. Some other style-sheet entertainments: “polo pony”; no hyphen in phrases like “well-heeled” if they occur in the predicate; the names of ships are set in italics; “girl friend,” not “girlfriend”; “God damn it” or “goddammit.”

Next to the Copy Desk is Collating, where Ed Stringham is dozing or setting his chair afire and Mary-Alice Rogers is still swotting away. Then comes an editor, Mr. Whitaker, his office a hoarder's dream of train schedules and other railroad lore. He is a big, Churchillian-looking man in his sixties who always wears suspenders, a Princeton graduate, gay, I think, who fancies himself an acerb. He edits a lot of the magazine's columns, including The Race Track, and himself appears in Talk of the Town stories as “Mr. Frimbo,” a train buff whose doings are chronicled by Anthony Hiss, Wallace Shawn's fellow–Harvard alum, the son of Alger Hiss. Mr. Whitaker is also known as “Popsy.” When I first started as a Checker, I rode down in the elevator with the to-me-then-still-terrifying Popsy and stuttered out something about the day—something about its being nice, I'm afraid. Nineteen floors went by in silence, and when we got out, we turned in opposite directions. Then I heard, in Popsy's petulant voice, “Young man!”

I turned around and said, “Yes, Mr. Whitaker?”

“Young man, just to say, you certainly have a way with words.”

Next, on the short east dogleg of the nineteenth floor come the OKers, including, eventually, the aforementioned Kathy Black. These are sort of sub-editors who read the Final proofs of everything and ask questions, often important ones, as a fresh and very smart pair of eyes at the last minute. One of them—Helen—has tickets. That is, if a piece is closing and threatens to close late, she almost always raises a fuss, saying, “I have tickets!” Often she takes the tickets out of her purse and brandishes them. Are they the same tickets each time, I wonder, the ritual being so predictable. Are they tickets at all? I think so, because Helen does indeed love music, and going to concerts.

 

Thirty-two

 

“Who do you think you are?” That is Robert Bingham, husband to my cousin Janet, and now Executive Editor of
The New Yorker.
He slaps the letter I sent to William Shawn down on my crummy gray desk in Copy Editing. His eyes are blazing. “A member of the
junior
editorial staff!”

“Well, I was trying to say something about Reich's piece that would show—”

“I know what you wrote,” Bingham says. “I asked what you thought you were doing.”

“Well, no, actually, you asked me who I think I am.” My mistake.

“A wise guy too, God damn it.” (Or was it “goddammit”?) “You made this point on the copy when it went through, and we considered it and thought there was nothing to it. Now you write a Department of Amplification and send it to Mr.
Shawn?
”

“I didn't mean to be disrespectful. I meant it seriously.” Charles Reich is the author of the best-selling 1972 book
The Greening of America.
A more recent piece of his, about demonstrators in Washington, ended with a sentence as silly as it was ringing about the American people versus the authorities: “After all it is our Constitution, not theirs.” I have noted, on the manuscript and again in my now evidently incendiary letter to Shawn, that many in our government take a special oath—an oath that most private citizens do not have to take—to protect and defend the Constitution.

Never mind. Maybe it is our Constitution. Maybe it's Alex Trebek's. That's not the point. The point for me now is that I am in very bad trouble. It was not my place, as a copy editor, to make such a comment, and probably wouldn't have been before, when I was a Checker. I knew that, but apparently I want to stage my own kind of protest—and get in trouble with the cops. It's also true that I have not yet become a good copy editor, or even a competent one. I forget the final serial comma, I neglect to put a downward-pointing arrow at the bottom of a page that ends with a period, I forget to run brief, set-apart quotes into the body of the text, I let common misspellings, like “rarified,” slip by, and so on. A few days before Bingham arrives with this blow of bad news, Lu Burke, an OKer and another vigilante in
The New Yorker
's grammar-and-usage posse, stopped by my desk, showed me something I missed—omitting a pair of single quotes inside double quotes—and said, “You don't really want to do this work, Dan.”

“We'll have to talk about this some more, you know,” Bingham says at the end of this dressing-down.

He comes back a few days later. The white-haired, red-faced late-shift copy editor is sitting at his desk near the dirty window that looks out over rooftops and a crumb of Fifth Avenue. He keeps a flask in the top drawer of his desk. He has, with regard to the top of that desk, already declined from the perpendicular to the parallel. Asleep. But Bingham asks me out into the hall anyway.

“Now look,” he says, “I'm sorry to tell you that we want you to look for another job.”

“When?” I say.

“We're not going to make you leave,” he says. “But we do want you to find another job.”

“OK,” I say.

“I'm sorry.”

“Me too.”

“You can take as long as you need to.”

It takes twenty-six years.

 

I'm sitting at the Copy Desk one Tuesday evening, in the middle of 1973, waiting to copy-edit some Talk of the Town stories that are coming through late—waiting in general, too, to find another job, as one lead after another either disappears or presents prospects so dismal (writing and copy-editing a plumbing-supplies corporation's newsletter, for example) that I would choose unemployment and maybe even starvation before applying for them. Basically a ghost in the house. A utility infielder standing in for the utility infielder. As Johnny Murphy in the Makeup Department said of one of the other
New Yorker
haints, “Forgotten but not gone.”

William Maxwell has sent down a short story by Sylvia Townsend Warner to be copy-edited, with a note saying “No rush.” But oh, why not? I'll just have to do it tomorrow, and there is almost certainly going to be time to do it tonight. Mr. Maxwell always asks for the most minimal copy-edit anyway. Like just indicating font, indents, space breaks, and so forth. I have noticed that when writers really deserve this kind of respect, he respects their deviations from house style and rules. And, alone among editors in this way, he always wants the manuscript to go back to him before it goes to Makeup and on to Chicago. I've caught sight of Maxwell a few times, said hello when he stopped by the Copy Desk to hand over a story. He is a slender, long-faced, elegant man in his seventies with a quiet, almost hoarse voice, usually dressed in a gray suit. I hardly know him at all. But I can tell that he puts the writers he works with above
The New Yorker
—that he feels it literarily incumbent on him to do so.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's story is another in a series of fairy stories she has been writing—fantasies about small supernatural creatures who have human frailties and desires but also have some minor-league powers. Like the lesser Greek gods. I've found these pieces pretty forced in their whimsy. In any case, in this story one of the fairies “bridles” at something, but only in the strict physical sense of the word—rears back as a physical reflex. He or she isn't resisting anything psychologically, isn't indignant. But the way the passage reads, it's unclear that that is the case. The reader might plausibly think that the character
is
objecting, and at that place in the narrative, that impression would be, in a minorly serious way, quite confusing. I have nothing to lose, so I write a tiny note about this matter in the margin and put the manuscript in the Out Basket with a routing slip to Mr. Maxwell.

The next day, Maxwell comes down to the Copy Desk with the Warner story in hand. Who cares at this point, I say to myself. The worst has already almost happened. He very gently puts the manuscript down on my desk, leans over next to me, turns the pages until he gets to the “bridle” passage. He points at it and says, “If you ever want to do this kind of thing again”—oh, no!—“don't hesitate.”

 

Thirty-three

 

I write a very short story called “Grief,” centered on my brother's death, and give it to Mr. Maxwell, about whom a little more now. He is a well-known fiction editor and writer at the magazine and has worked with John O'Hara, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Mavis Gallant, and too many others to name or even count. My story consists mainly of a dream I've had recently about my brother's coming back to Nyack to visit, ringing the front doorbell, my letting him in. He sits down on the couch smiling a smile so white that it's frightening. He assures my parents and me that he's all right. He goes to sleep and we can't wake him up. But he finally gets up, surrounded by a dense, cold mist, and says he has to leave.

Before the post–Sylvia Townsend Warner invitation, Mr. Maxwell has occasionally thanked me for a comma or a capitalization here and there. His frequent overriding of
New Yorker
style—he does it more than any other editor does—impresses me.

Maxwell comes down from the twentieth floor once again and hands my story back to me at the Copy Desk and puts his hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me and himself, and with tears in his eyes says he thinks it's very good but too short and “needs something around it—a frame.” So I try that and it's accepted and Mr. Maxwell edits it and
The New Yorker
publishes it. Writing it felt like releasing pressure from an emotional aneurysm that was about to rupture. It gave me a small measure of peace. I learn later that the magazine generally stays away from “dream” stories and stories about cancer, about the Holocaust, about putting aged parents in nursing homes. These subjects are either too familiar or too likely to overwhelm the human drama.