My Mistake (14 page)

So within Maxwell's delicacy there lurks a terse kind of assurance. In his writing, some of his sweet sentences and many of his neutral ones pull up short—end abruptly, even curtly, as if he were requiring his language and his own voice to return to plain speech and unsweetened reality. From “Over by the River”: “A child got into an orange minibus and started on the long devious ride to nursery school and social adjustment.” “He smiled pleasantly at George and watched Puppy out of the corner of his eyes, so as to be ready when she leapt at his throat.”

More often than one might at first realize, the gentility of his style falls away altogether, and when it does, it reveals the frank and sometimes grim man who is always standing behind it and is perhaps using civility of expression in part to make more emphatic the awful shocks that—since his own mother's death when he was a child—he knows lie in wait for all of us. From
So Long, See You Tomorrow:
“Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.” From “Over by the River”: “If people knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn't want to have anything to do with him.”

In his conversation and his actions, Maxwell embodies this tension between civilization and its discontents, between the longing for a rational and cultured life and the bad luck and regrets and emotional anarchy that sabotage it. During those high-toned dinner discussions, when something difficult or bitter comes up, as it sometimes does, I can feel both Maxwell and his wife not only accepting its arrival but welcoming it. In a letter to me he writes: “Bad behavior one never really regrets in any serious way.”

While I am training to be a fiction editor, working in Maxwell's office every day, I hand him some poems of mine, hoping that he will see the genius that resides in them but that others have always been blind to. Maxwell hands the poems back to me the next day and says, “Stick to prose.” As an editor, Maxwell is similarly concise and efficient. He is in the office only three days a week but gets six days' worth of work done. (And he consistently takes that hour's nap every day.) He reads, edits, and responds to stories with remarkable promptness and unfailing courtesy and professionalism. Despite his sometimes rarefied literary inclinations, he is always open to strange and tough writing. And his editorial hand is the subtlest, least cavalier I will ever see. “Don't touch a hair on its head,” he will say when I begin to scout around for ways to show off at the expense of perfectly good writing.

Unlike many editors, he feels that his first responsibility is to the text, not to himself or to the company that pays him. He is as distant from corporate as a cloud is from a clam and as far as I know has no use for office politics or machinations. In that way, in the way of the artist, he is subversive. And although he enjoys praise and gratitude, they never seem to go to his head; he never usurps the primary role of the author or congratulates himself or becomes puffed up about his sharp eye for talent or his eminent position. If he wants an editorial change and the writer refuses to go along, Maxwell never gets angry. He will give way but seldom change his mind. Once, when I am frustrated about an author's resistance to fixing an obvious problem, Maxwell says to me, “It's all right. Apparently it's a mistake she needs to make.” Often, when the writer sees that Maxwell will give way, with grace, he himself will give way. It is an editorial version of kung fu—of winning by seeming to yield. But of course it is not combat; it's help.

Under Maxwell's tutelage, I learn not only to leave writing and writers alone for this reason or that—it's good enough, or it's a mistake she (or he) needs to make—but to temper my overall office impulsiveness. It's like a professional adjunct to analysis. Instead of getting into arguments, sometimes heated, with checkers or proofreaders, I learn to have conversations with them instead. At one point, Lu Burke, an OKer, says to me, “Dan, you really have changed. It's really noticeable.” Since Lu herself is famous for her irascibility and disdain, I think, but do not say, “And vice versa, at least for a moment.”

 

Thirty-eight

 

Members of
The New Yorker
's editorial staff start a movement to join the Newspaper Guild. The magazine has given the staff skimpy raises for some years despite strong advertising revenues. Partly because of my mother's example, I'm sure, I am the only editor who signs a union card, meaning that I support the unionization of the staff, even though, as management, arguably, I can't be in the union. Roger Angell and other more senior editors remain neutral on the issue. (During the brief union drive, when someone laments that the magazine has no dental-insurance plan for its employees, Jonathan Schell reminds everyone, “Dostoyevsky didn't have a dental plan.” And when we were all first arguing about joining the Newspaper Guild and I said to Jonathan, in my office, that I thought people who worked for the magazine ought to have some power over the conditions of their employment, he replied, “I'm sorry, Dan, but I can't continue this conversation when you use the word ‘power' in any sort of connection to
The New Yorker
.”) I am certain that they hope this event will finally lead to Shawn's resignation. He is in his mid-seventies now.

Shawn is not going anywhere. He keeps feinting toward this successor and that: William Whitworth (a quiet, smart Arkansan editor and writer), Jonathan Schell, Charles McGrath, and, ludicrously, the then-twenty-four-year-old writer William McKibben. When the staff resists these successor choices, why, then, Shawn has no choice but to stay on.

The union movement falters. An inevitably powerless Employees Committee is elected in its place.

When Shawn dangles McGrath before the staff as the next Editor—I'm guessing at least partly at Roger Angell's urging—he often works with Shawn in Shawn's office. Lillian Ross has her own telephone line to Shawn's desk, Chip tells me. And when that phone rings, he says, Shawn's face falls and his shoulders slump as if in despair. It begins to occur to me that this man is not only master of but slave to his circumstances.

 

The writing of my alleged novel for Doubleday has yet to get off—to say nothing of get out from under—the ground. I don't even know where to dig. So I write to my editor, Ken McCormick, asking to be released from the contract and enclosing a check for the meager portion of the novel's meager advance I've received. He tells me a few days later that he hasn't cashed and won't cash the check but has framed it and put it up on his wall, because it's the only time he can remember that an undunned writer has ever paid back any part of an advance for an undelivered book.

 

I marry Katherine Bouton. After having written and published two wonderful nonfiction pieces in the magazine, one about an archeological dig in Turkey and one about scientific research in Antarctica, she has left
The New Yorker
to become a free-lance writer. Later, she will work for the
New York
Times
—for the magazine, the book review as its Deputy Editor, the magazine again as its Deputy Editor, and finally the daily culture section. The people who work for and with her have great admiration for her editing skills and straightforward professionalism.

Katherine and I will have fertility problems when she and I try to conceive a child. We will undergo in-vitro fertilization, which will result in three ectopic pregnancies. Devastating. But we will adopt our first child, William Michael Grace Menaker, in 1983, and our second, Elizabeth Grace Menaker, in 1986. And in 2013, I say they are the best kids I could ever have hoped for, the old-fashioned way, in-vitro-wise, adoptive, or sprung fully diapered from the brow of Zeus.

As with almost all marriages I know, except for the one in a hundred that seem unvexed and therefore, to me, in a way not entirely real—maybe the ones in which the husband chronically and without irony refers to his wife as “my bride” and the wife refers to her husband as “my beloved”—we will have other difficulties. They will to some degree be caused by ancient problems, such as those old fears of intimacy, which will hurt my family, myself, and others. But Katherine is a rock of good sense and practicality and friendship, an excellent mother, and we endure, and we build a good and loving life together.

 

Thirty-nine

 

Susan Sontag sells a short story, “Unguided Tour,” to
The New Yorker.
In it, a woman says, “I stroke my delirium like the balls of the comely waiter.” Veronica Geng, Sontag's editor, tells me that Shawn has called her into his office to discuss this passage. According to her account, Shawn said, “Miss Geng, I don't want this word in
The New Yorker,
but I don't think there's any way to avoid it. Still, we owe it to our readers at least to try to find an alternative. So let's just take a minute or two to think it over.” A couple of uncomfortable minutes passed. Shawn then said, “I don't suppose ‘stones' would do.”

Veronica, who is hired as a fiction editor a little after Chip McGrath and I are promoted to the same position, says to me one day, about a writer she is working with, “Doesn't he remind you of Henry Green?”

“I'm not sure I know who that is,” I say, having learned the kind of gentility so often deployed to disguise ignorance or hostility.

Veronica puts her hand to her mouth as if to cover a laugh of disbelief and disdain. “You're a fiction editor at
The New Yorker
and you don't know who
Henry Green
is?” she says.

A few months later, she tells me that a writer she's working with reminds her of the novelist Anthony Powell. She pronounces Powell's last name to rhyme with “trowel.” Actually, it more or less rhymes with “school.” I keep my mouth shut.

 

Penelope Gilliatt, a writer and movie reviewer for
The New Yorker,
is found to have plagiarized certain passages in her piece about Graham Greene from Michael Mewshaw's literary memoir and from other sources. I'm present when one of the guys in Makeup, Johnny, hands copies of a new piece by Penelope to the subaltern who distributes galleys. “One for Checking,” Johnny says. “One for the editor, one for Collating, one for Penelope, and one for the author.”

I primarily edit fiction, but also some hoary columns, like Concert Records, which no one else wants to handle. Winthrop Sargent, former music critic for the magazine, has been put out to Concert Records pasture at least partly on account of his later reviews' intense and incessant diatribes against atonal music. His columns have devolved into almost nothing but listings of new classical recordings, their serial numbers, and brief comments. Very brief. “The Hindenberg Concertos, J. S. Wach. Vox Diabolique #ETC543210. Absorbing.” “‘Valse Manqué,' I. Bebusy. Canoli #UR666. Quite good.” And so on. I have come up with three corresponding rotating subtitles for these columns: “Potpourri,” “Grab-Bag,” and “Miscellany.” And I have written some more fiction and Talk of the Town and humor for the magazine.

And I work on some book reviews, one of which, by Robert Coles, offers a good example of the kind of heavy editing I and other editors often have to do. Dr. Coles is a renowned psychoanalyst. I had fact-checked his Profile of Erik Erikson four or five years earlier. When I'm done with the review, the first manuscript page looks like some kind of runic artifact or super-modern musical composition. It's so detailed and scholiastic that I herewith offer only the first two sentences as they appeared in that manuscript and as some of their contents appeared in the magazine, as an example of the heavy work that editors sometimes had to do.

So the first two sentences originally read:

 

In the early 1970's the United States Corps of Engineers went about constructing yet another dam, meant to restrain an overbearing river. For a year before that sad and final turning point in the life of a particular American Midwestern community took place, a young writer and woodcutter, educated at Mars Hill College in North Carolina's western mountain country, came to an abandoned farmhouse in the soon to be flooded village and began getting to know the survivors, as they would soon enough turn out to be, of a place that had been for nearly two centuries home for many people.

 

And here is most of the material in those sentences as they first appeared in
The New Yorker:

 

In the early nineteen-seventies, the United States Army Corps of Engineers set about constructing yet another of its dams, to restrain Caesars Creek, a tributary of the Little Miami River. This project required the sacrifice of the two-century-old Ohio farming village of New Burlington, which was south of Dayton and just north of Cincinnati; the town occupied the site of the reservoir that would be created by the dam's construction. During the sad and final year in the life of this Midwestern rural community, John Baskin, a young writer and woodcutter, lived in it, in an abandoned farmhouse, and came to know its inhabitants. He has turned the experience he had in New Burlington into an excellent book—“New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Village” (Norton)—which is hard to classify.

 

As you can tell, the edited version, with the help of the answers to Checking queries that I put in the manuscript, introduces and relocates and untangles and puts off some factual material in an effort to present the basics of the book and the book's subject into more logical and less compressed—and less lamentational—form.

My actress girlfriend in our early New York days, when I was teaching at Collegiate, was taking classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, under Sanford Meisner. She explained to me then the mistake of “indicating” feelings in performance. When you “indicate” while delivering lines, you show you are aware that you're acting and the audience will register the effort, the artificiality, of what you're doing. A lot of prose writers similarly indicate. They don't trust the facts and their objective observations to carry the weight of their attitudes and judgments. But they do carry that weight, as shown at
The New Yorker
most singularly and powerfully by John Hersey's “Hiroshima.” This was one of the most operant editorial philosophies at the magazine. Some writers carried it to a mannered extreme, but most benefited from its application.