My Mistake (12 page)

When it comes to the byline at the end of the piece, I say that I'd like it to be “Dan Menaker.” Mr. Maxwell strongly urges me to use “Daniel Menaker.” He says, “You're a professional writer, not some fellow who lives across the street.” “Grief” is not the first thing I've written that has been published. A piece of mine about television-network news has appeared in
Harper
'
s Magazine.
Another, about the PBS documentary
An American Family,
was in the
Atlantic.
I write these pieces in small part because I've always held strong opinions about television but mainly because I am watching it obsessively, as if it were not TV but an IV, a drug to distract me from my despondency and nameless fear. But when
The New Yorker
publishes that first story, I begin to think of myself as a writer.
The New Yorker
does that to a person.

My parents are proud. I hope that somehow the story has done more than just remind them of our loss—as if they needed reminding—but made something out of it, as it has for me. My friends congratulate me. My coworkers—I don't know. Some must be jealous. But it seems that the story is true enough in its feelings to affect many of its readers, inside and outside the magazine. My own publication reaction has far less to do with beginning to make a name for myself than with the relief of finishing something I had no choice about starting.

 

For a publication called
[MORE],
a Seventies magazine about journalism, I write a piece about New York City's three local-news weathermen. They are Tex Antoine, Gary Essex, and Dr. (of Optometry) Frank Field. The editor at
[MORE]
sends the piece back to me with “Improve!” scrawled on the first page, and, on page three or four, “Make better!” I send it to the
New York Times
Arts & Leisure section, they publish it, largely unedited, and the next day Dr. Field calls me and complains at length about “(of Optometry).”

Still halfway out of
The New Yorker
's door, as an April Fool's joke I write a piece for the
New
York Times
Travel section about a visit to the Royal Enclave of Schwindelheim, an (obviously) made-up nation-state that features, among other tourist attractions, the longest chain-link fence in Europe. I get three or four letters from readers who admired the piece and want more information about how to get to Schwindelheim and what other sites they should visit.

 

Thirty-four

 

The payments I get for these pieces and for the next couple of stories I sell to
The New Yorker
seem meager years later, but they don't seem meager at the time. My half of the rent for the shared apartment on West 75th Street is $75 a month. The one or two thousand dollars I'm paid for the first story in
The New Yorker
allows me to buy a wonderful old Martin steel-string guitar, for a comparative fortune given my financial circumstances. My roommate and I sing those folk and union-song and bluegrass standards that have stayed with us. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Keep Your Hand Upon the Throttle,” “Join the CIO,” “Long Black Veil,” “John Hardy,” “Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms,” “Dark as a Dungeon,” “Wildwood Flower.”

 

At
The New Yorker,
about as far from Appalachia as one can get, there are editors and writers and then there is everyone else. Most of us who haven't made peace with copy editing or fact checking for the foreseeable future want to be one or both of the former. There isn't much room, especially with so many desperadoes jostling each other in the halls as staff writers, and with editors, once they have landed in their coveted chairs, almost never getting up, and the other, aging Flying Dutchman types who grayly haunt the corridors hoping that a piece they wrote about Indonesian metallurgy two years ago may yet see the light of publication day.

At some point when I am still in trouble—this leprous period, this untouchability, lasts for about three years—I ask to see Mr. Shawn to try somehow to regain his good graces. I am sitting in his office, on the couch to the side of his desk. He turns his chair to face me. I notice that I have sunk way down
into
the couch, and although I'm about eight inches taller than Shawn is, I'm looking up at him. Tom Wolfe described this same subsiding-cushion phenomenon in his
New York
piece. After I plead my case, he says to me quietly, “Mr. Menaker, you could go anywhere else and be a . . . star.” Distaste fairly drips from that last word.

Another time, with me still supposedly on my way out—and really and truly trying to find another job (I'm offered a position at the
Saturday Review,
but it folds the next week)—when I ask about writing a piece about Swarthmore, he says, “Well, I really don't mean to criticize you. I don't expect people, even the people who work here, to understand these matters and these distinctions. But what you want to write is an
article,
and
The New Yorker
doesn't publish . . .
articles.
”

No diminutive has ever sounded smaller. There is a whole list of words Shawn hates, some of which someone has fashioned into this sentence: “Locating his gadget at the urinal, Tom Wolfe saw a photo of the intriguing, balding tycoon.”

The women's-undergarment word “teddy,” which occasionally appears in the column On and Off the Avenue, drives Shawn particularly crazy. “Isn't there some other word to describe this piece of clothing?” he asks in his tiny handwriting in the margin of a piece. He uses variations to register this objection repeatedly, as in “Can't we find another way to refer to this?” and “Must we include this word? There has to be a way around it.”

 

I'm still working as a copy editor at
The New Yorker.
I've hung on, and since I started writing short stories and humor for the magazine, the authorities appear to be tolerating me instead of shunning me. This is Purgatory, I guess. I have just co-written and published “The Worst,” a parody of a bestseller called
The Best,
a list book of the best stereo, the best wine, the best this, the best that. (Our Worst Wine: Switchblade; Worst Mammal: Jimmy's Tapir; Worst Ice Cream Flavor: I'ma Lima Sherbet; etc.) My co-writer is Charles (Chip) McGrath, who has recently arrived at the magazine as a copy editor. We work in the same crummy office.

For some reason, Chip and I are both in the hall just outside Copy Editing. Roger Angell, the best baseball writer in the world, the legend-in-his-own-time editor who works on most of the magazine's humor, and the hater of Goldie, Lillian Ross's little rat of a dog, is walking toward us with a pained expression on his face. He's holding a piece of paper in his right hand, flapping it up and down.

“Sorry, guys,” he says. “I really hoped that something like this would never happen.”

“What did we do?” I say, still on edge because of the trouble I got into earlier and my precarious position.

“It's just a rule we have,” Roger says. “I'm afraid you have to return the payment for that humor piece.” He flaps the piece of paper up and down some more.

“But why?” Chip says.

“It's just a rule—you couldn't have known about it. But you have to return the payment. I'm sorry.”

“What rule?” I say.

Roger holds the paper still for us, so that we can read it. “The rule is that any writer has to return the payment for a first humor piece when the magazine receives a fan letter about it from Groucho Marx.” He laughs.

Chip and I pass the letter between us. Roger goes away, chuckling. When we go back to our office, we decide to flip a coin for possession of the letter. I win. It says we're as good as S. J. Perelman, a writer I have never found funny, but by God I will take it.

A couple of weeks later, my roommate and I decide to find places of our own. The green parrot I've bought, whom I've named Edward J. Brownstein, after my analyst, is driving my roommate crazy with his squawking. He's also very proprietary about me and will attack others if they come near me when he's sitting on my shoulder. Ed is not a great talker. He imitates Readie's cackling laugh—since I've moved back to New York, Readie has occasionally cleaned our apartment—and he says, “What are you doing, Ed?” Which is what I say to him when I get home. And he imitates police sirens, at a distance, the way they sound from the street below. And, because I sometimes leave the radio on for him when I go to work, he says, “All news all the time.”

Jerry and I flip a coin to see who gets to stay and who has to leave. I lose. I think, “I'll take the Groucho coin toss over this one any day.”

 

More pranks: Pauline Kael,
The New Yorker's
movie critic, is always trying to provoke Shawn with her rowdy language. He has asked me to let him know if there is anything he—sorry: “we”—might find offensive in the copy when it arrives at the Copy Desk, so I sometimes have to call him at home in the evening when Pauline hands her column in late. If he has objections, he tells me to substitute “TK TK” (“to come”) for the offending passage. So one night I decide that I should call him about her description of a scene in which a man butts his head into a woman's crotch. It's mild, but why take chances when I am still on such shaky ground?

“I don't like it,” he says. “Let me think . . . ‘Vagina' wouldn't work.” He pauses a few more seconds and then adds, “Because that's the opening.”

Actually, he isn't the first to know about the crotch. When I first called, Mrs. Shawn answered. I said, “Mrs. Shawn, this is Dan Menaker calling from
The New Yorker.
”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Menaker. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. And you?”

“Fine. How can I help you?”

“Well, I'm copy-editing Miss Kael's Current Cinema column, and there's something in it that I think Mr. Shawn might object to, and as I think you know, he has asked me to call him under such circumstances. It's sort of marginal this time, but I thought I should check.”

“Oh.” A giggle. “I'm sure you're right—Mr. Shawn would want to know. He should be home very soon. But in the meantime, why don't you tell me what the trouble is and I'll tell him the minute he walks in the door.”

“It's a little embarrassing. Maybe I should just talk to Mr. Shawn.”

“You're married now, aren't you, Mr. Menaker?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Well, then, I think it's perfectly all right for you to tell me.”

 

After having those stories published in
The New Yorker,
I sign up with Doubleday to do two books, a collection of short fiction and then a novel, which is less a gleam in the eye than a tiny pinpoint of light, like that of a negligible star shed 400,000 years ago on whose very existence an astronomer at Mount Palomar has already cast doubt. The following year, the collection,
Friends and Relations,
is published.

“Daniel Menaker's stories in ‘Friends and Relations,' trying very hard to be 1970's up-to-date, have a wearying sense of deja-vu about them . . . These [stories] have . . . certain twinges of feeling that—I guess—are meant to pass as Deeper Thought.”— Robie Macauley, in the
New York
Times
Book Review.

“Don't worry about it—it doesn't mean anything,” a colleague at
The New Yorker
says to me, radioactive with Schadenfreude. “He's obviously jealous,” someone else says. “It says more about him than it does about the book.” “He's the fiction editor at
Esquire
—he just has it in for
The New Yorker.
” (This last is said sincerely, and just possibly with some degree of accuracy.) “Listen, most books don't ever get reviewed in the
Times.
”

 

One of the things I have to do as I continue to copy-edit and hang on to the cliff of employment at
The New Yorker
is make entries onto and delete entries from the “long-fact list.” This list consists of all the major nonfiction pieces the magazine has on its bank, the top five or ten places on the list indicating priority for publication. We say “on” rather than “in” the bank for riverine reasons, I think; these pieces aren't in a vault but waiting to be launched and travel downstream to publication. (I've since learned that “bank” is an old printing term; it refers to a cabinet on whose slanted top galleys of type are stored, thus “on the bank.”) In any case, the long-fact list grows for months at a time. Shawn buys more pieces than the magazine can ever run. I come to learn that payment for each of these pieces runs from five to twenty thousand dollars.

It's my understanding that on grounds of space and sometimes taste,
The New Yorker
turns advertising away in the fall, in the lead-up to Christmas. It does this because 248 pages is the limit for a magazine to be bound in the traditional way. If the writing and advertising pushed it beyond those 248 pages, it would have to be “perfect-bound”—have a flat spine with the pages glued, instead of being “saddle-stitched,” a folded and stapled spine. Shawn won't allow this to happen. Nevertheless, the magazine's revenues evidently allow Shawn to buy too many pieces for the magazine to run, and then also to buy off their authors.

Every six months or so, when the list becomes laughably long—forty or fifty pieces or more—I get a directive simply to lop off about half of them and make a new list. They not only disappear from the list but also lose any chance of ever being published. So let's say I get such an instruction—am told to remove twenty of fifty pieces. That means the magazine is basically throwing away around $200,000. In order to try to contain the rage among those writers who have been strung along, sometimes for years, and whose work has now bitten the dust, Shawn often pays them still more—a kill fee, on top of the original payment for the piece. I believe the kill fee is about two or three thousand dollars.