My Mistake (13 page)

As I've said,
The New Yorker
is fat with advertising, especially in the fall. This may explain how Shawn can follow his wastrel way of buying and killing pieces. I believe he believes that he is sustaining writers. As I am in psychoanalysis at the time, I begin to see how ultimately cruel and manipulative this practice is, how it doesn't so much string writers along as string them out, as with an addiction, and makes them dependent on one man's mini- magus decisions.

 

Thirty-five

 

I have at last become a decent copy editor and, still like that utility infielder, am filling in at other, arcane
New Yorker
desks: collator (taking all the changes from different proofs and putting them on one proof, for revision); A-issue editor—not nearly so grand as it sounds (it just means reading final galleys against ads, to point out any “conflicts,” such as an ad for a cruise ship running alongside a piece about a cruise ship's sinking); proofreader for the tiny typography of Goings On About Town.

Gardner Botsford, the great,
WASP
y editor who is the stepson of the magazine's Publisher and chief stockholder, Raoul Fleischmann, oversees the tiny type of Goings On. He tires of repeating the same copy for a long-running Broadway play and begins to insert, in order, short (blurb-length) passages from a novel of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. As a copy editor, I notice this small literary prank and like it. After a few weeks of doing this, Botsford drops off the galleys of GOAT (as it is called) and asks if I know what novel morsels he's purloining. For the first time, I look at the prose very hard for a minute or so and then say, “I don't know which novel it is, because this passage has no characters' names, but I think it's by Jane Austen.” He's impressed.
I
'
m
impressed. Obviously.

 

Bob Bingham teaches me how to play squash at the Harvard Club, across the street from the magazine's offices. When he flubs a shot, he gets that eye-blazing kind of anger he had when he upbraided me a few years earlier—but comically (he thinks). He holds the squash ball in his hand, glares at it, loudly addresses it as “Sir,” and berates it for its waywardness. Players on adjacent courts often shout at him to be quiet.

Some of
The New Yorker
's other staff, for all their Olympian airs, fall prey to the squash explosion of the mid-Seventies. A squash ladder goes up on the nineteenth floor bulletin board. My closest rival (six years younger than I am, I feel a strange compulsion to point out) and I play once or twice a week at courts opened and owned by a writer named Harry Saint, who more closely resembles an upper-crust F. Scott Fitzgerald character than anyone I've known before or after.

I never lose a three-of-five-game set to this rival. And then I do. But my opponent makes his own mistake, the mistake of saying after the game, in the locker room, that I will never beat him again. If he hadn't said that, he might have been right; our games were always close and somewhat tense, given a similarly competitive situation at the magazine. But as he did say it, he never beats me again. The laurels a year or so later prove very comfortable to rest on.

The blessings of sibling rivalry's legacy. I'm still proving myself to Mike, and I will not give up, on the court or in
The New Yorker
's offices. But the curses of it, too—the intensity, the absence of composure, the anger of competition.

It's at this age that I begin to understand what probably held me back from being a more accomplished athlete through high school and college. I just didn't have the confidence and the will that goes with it to practice hard and, most important, to
think,
because—well, because in some general way I was afraid. During my short and mediocre squash years, I find out what my high-school soccer coach, Frank Nelson, meant when he took me aside four or five times and said, “Danny, don't be in such a hurry to get rid of the ball. It's as though you're afraid of the responsibility or something like that. But you can handle it if you give yourself a little time to think about what you're doing. A lot of times soccer is actually a slow sport. It's a little bit like chess.”

How much did I miss, out of haste, intensity, and anger? How much would I come to wish that I had learned about a quieter kind of effort and persistence earlier on, about winning for myself instead of proving myself to, or against, others? A lot. But how much did I gain from this single-mindedness and this same intensity? A lot. I actually did slow down in my thinking in squash—a very, very fast sport. I actually did put my mind to copy editing and learn it; as you can see, I even mastered the semicolon. Later, in book publishing, when I wanted to get a quote from an important writer for a book I was editing, I would open my skull and tear my brain apart to find some connection to that person. And when, later, I faced medical challenges, I would try to become as expert in the illnesses and treatments involved as a layman could be. In one instance, when the doctors themselves weren't sure what course to take, I went against their first recommendation and may have saved my own life, at least for a while. “Look it up,” my mother would say when I was in high school and asked her what a word meant. Eventually, when I get the more destructive and self-defeating elements of my competitiveness under some control, the kind of mild obsessiveness she was encouraging, the obsessiveness further developed at Swarthmore, blossoms into deep curiosity, and my intense focus serves me well.

 

The New Yorker
's Business Department institutes a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. (Mandatory retirement rules are still legal, obviously.) It does this, some people who should know tell me, in order to force Shawn to retire. But he takes the rule and tortures it into requiring everyone over sixty-five who is not a department head to retire. This little pretzel exempts him and Carmine Peppe, the head of the Makeup Department, from having to leave. But it means that some others, including three fiction editors—Rachel MacKenzie, Robert Henderson, and Mr. Maxwell—will have to leave. Mr. Maxwell tells me that he hopes and believes this turn of events will allow me to become an editor.

I don't know this at the time, but, as Mr. Maxwell tells me later, he goes to Shawn and agrees to leave quietly, provided Shawn gives me a chance to be a fiction editor. Apparently Shawn's twist on the business department's new rule opens him to regulatory challenges. In any case, Shawn agrees—how unhappily I can only imagine. (At one point earlier, when somehow I managed to discuss being an editor with Shawn, he said that I just wasn't a
New Yorker
editor, and that “no one can learn to be a
New Yorker
editor.”)

Shawn calls me into his office. “It has been decided,” he says, drawing from authority's auto-replenishing supply of the passive voice, “to give you the opportunity to be an editor. You have in recent months been very cheerful and persistent.”

“That makes me sound a little like a golden retriever,” I say—my mistake again—“but thank you.”

“As you know, Mr. Maxwell will be leaving the magazine in January, so you will work with him directly, in his office, for three months, as will Mr. McGrath, who will also become an editor.”

 

So here I am, apprenticing to be a
New Yorker
editor with William Maxwell, working in his office with him for three months. I'm the first reader for a story by Judith Speyer called “The Man with a Balloon in His Heart.” I think it's very good and ask Mr. Maxwell to read it. He agrees, and
The New Yorker
buys it.

The story includes this passage: “You are an asshole. Your mother is an asshole. Your father is an asshole. I am lost in a den of assholes.” Shawn notes in the margin of the galleys, with a tone of Homeric sadness, that he sees “no way around” using this word—another first in the magazine's history. In his quiet way, Mr. Maxwell clearly enjoys Shawn's discomfiture.

I work in Mr. Maxwell's office every day and leave only for lunch and when he takes his daily nap, at around one or two. We sit there, and together we read manuscripts that have been submitted to him, and I shadow-edit pieces that have been accepted and try my hand at editorial correspondence with writers. We go over the Checking proofs side by side, discuss titles, and review copy-editing suggestions about commas and typefaces and whether to run in a two-line quote from a poem or set it line-for-line in 9-point type.

It's all a little
raffiné
for me, though I admire and respect Mr. Maxwell tremendously. Or
because
I admire him so much. I feel out of place. I belong back down on the Copy Desk on the nineteenth floor, with Chip McGrath, who is also about to become an editor, smoking and making sarcastic jokes about the magazine's hoi polloi proofreaders and collators and its desperate writers, who wander the halls like Hades' restless shades. Or I belong out on the sidewalk, where they tried to throw me four years earlier and I hung on like a barnacle. Having struggled so hard to become an editor, I now miss being marginal and expendable, with nothing significant expected or wanted from me. I feel on the spot.

Why did I want to do this, anyway? To pretend to be mannerly, a person of letters, when I want to be a person of beer and cigarettes and impregnable skepticism? Isaac Bashevis Singer comes in to talk about the editing of a story he has just sold to us. Mr. Maxwell introduces us and says, “Mr. Menaker has made some small editing suggestions that we'll talk about when we go over the galleys. I hope you don't mind.” Mr. Singer looks me up and down and says, “So young?” Bernard Malamud comes in for an editorial meeting and Mr. Maxwell introduces us and says, “Mr. Menaker has a couple of ideas about the ending that I think are worth discussing.” I say to Mr. Malamud, “Please call me Dan.” He says, “So soon?”

Finally, I squirm into a confession of this sense of unworthiness to Mr. Maxwell. One day, over tea—he has tea every afternoon—I say, “I'm not sure I'm suited to this. I feel like it's all above my head. It baffles me why you picked me out to train for this job.”

“Well, I don't agree with you,” Mr. Maxwell says. “I think you're perfectly suited to it. You know how to read like an editor and you know what it means to be a writer. And you dress for the part.” He laughs.

“Well, thanks, but still, the atmosphere is so quiet and, well,
special.
”

“What can I do to make you feel more comfortable?” he says.

“It's nothing anyone else does or doesn't do. It's me. I mean, if you had any idea how much I
swear,
for example, I think you'd be appalled.”

Mr. Maxwell finds this uproariously funny. “Is that all?” he says. “We can certainly address that.”

For the next few days, he goes out of his way to curse when we talk together. He isn't making fun of me or of what I said. He is genuinely trying to put me at ease. It doesn't work. It's just hilarious to hear this slender, elegant literary fellow, who maintains the most refined correspondence with people like Elizabeth Bishop and Mavis Gallant and John Updike, injecting obscenities into his casual remarks.

“You know, this isn't working,” I tell him after a while. He has just said something like “Let's go over the fucking Author's Proof.” “It's worse.”

Mr. Maxwell finds this even funnier. I start to laugh too. He says, “All right—I'll stop. But no more of this fish-out-of-water business. You'll just have to take my word for it. You'll grow into it.”

When I get to know him better, it turns out that Mr. Maxwell curses, naturally, a fair amount himself, in his own, delicate way.

 

Many, many years later, a dog, a Tibetan terrier, comes into my family's life. We name him Maxwell. A tribute or an insult? A tribute, as far as I'm concerned, because a dog figures in one of my fondest memories of the man. In Mr. Maxwell's novella
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
based on a true story about passion and murder on a farm in the Midwest and published in its entirety in
The New Yorker
well after he has left, William Maxwell invents, for the purpose of witnessing some crucial events, a thinking dog. As in: “The dog took note of the fact that he didn't do any of these things.” And: “The dog couldn't imagine what had gotten into them.”

This thinking dog causes a stir in the Fiction Department at the magazine when the work is about to appear in its pages. Maxwell's editor is Roger Angell, and he and others of us in the department think that the thinking dog is a mistake. On several occasions Roger urges Maxwell to put the thinking dog to sleep. Maxwell is reported to have responded, in Bartleby-esque fashion, “I'd like to keep it.” Roger Angell is not and never has been an easy editor to face down, but this is no contest. If you look back at
The New Yorker
issues of October 1 and October 8, 1979, you will find the thinking dog there, thinking away, to say nothing of taking note and imagining. He probably suspects that some time ago someone wanted to rub him out, and he may even pause to wonder why you're there checking on him.

William Maxwell is widely regarded as a sweet and gentle man. And he is—sometimes, in his writing and editorial sensibility and in his personal and social lives, almost to the point of preciousness. If you tell him that you have just taken your son to camp or that your wife had burned a roast the night before, his eyes may fill with tears. A few wiseacres at
The New Yorker
refer to him as “Waterworks.” The atmosphere at the dinner table in his apartment on East 86th Street can be so literary and artistic that it seems to depart the hardscrabble world entirely. (Maxwell's wife, Emily, is a painter.) A lot about Tolstoy and two Elizabeths—Bowen and Bishop. The voices so quiet and modest that they can hardly be heard. And his taste in literature can be very special. For example, the way he loves those elf stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner. But he stuck by them until the end. In a letter in November 1999, responding to my teasing him about those pieces, he will write, “Your inability to get any pleasure in Sylvia's Elfin stories has driven me back to the book. I read the first story last night and was beside myself with pleasure.”