My Mistake (16 page)

Moo picked up the thread started by Don and steered the course of many conversations toward real estate. This was in principle the right thing to do for that phase of the party, but Moo could not seem to “leave it alone and change the subject in a subtle fashion,” thus committing the error of monotonism and trying arbitrarily to impose his personality on the development of the party. The drinks were correctly mixed, the Bucheron was entirely without the taint of the barnyard, and the Kavli Flatbrød was crispily fresh. Thus Moo made vital contributions to the party, rectifying, for instance, the stoned-wheat-thinism that characterized so many previous parties, and for these and his numerous past contributions we revere and respect him to this day. But his prying questions to Miss Dun Merong about what she paid for her co-op on West End Avenue in '78 and his interruption of the croquet match between the Mees and the Hais with repeated invectives against owner financing subverted the party, despite all of Mr. Don Wenow's efforts to “close the lid on that one and try some pickles from another jar.” Mrs. Moo analyzed the stalemate for her own purposes, drawing the young schoolteacher Mr. Ti Fatoo into the kitchen, where she tried to arrange a private party with him for a later date. The end result of these bad, incorrect, and wrong errors was that Moo neglected to ignite the charcoal in a timely fashion, forcing his guests to endure the Long Wait for dinner.

 

AT DINNER AND AFTERWARD

 

The meal itself progressed along a basically admirable line—avocado vinaigrette, steak, shoestring potatoes, cucumber salad, and a muscular Burgundy. But Moo became increasingly difficult and capricious in his conversation and behavior. Mr. Don Wenow, by making a graceful transition between group-occupancy restrictions and
Animal House,
at last managed to switch the topic from real estate to movies—a fully acceptable topic for any party. However, perhaps because he became aware that Mrs. Moo was attempting to commit serious leg and feet errors with Mr. Ti Fatoo, Moo spoiled matters here again by “a big failure to realize that he wasn't a four-year-old.” He cackled in a rude manner at the opinions of others, and then became morose about being forbidden to attend movies as a child. When others, led as always by the dedicated Mr. Don Wenow, tried to “get off the bus and go their own way,” Moo atrociously butted in with more tales of childhood deprivations, and denounced his father, Mr. Moo Cao, for being too proud and severe to make enough money, and for never playing catch with him in the back yard. Finally, in a desperate attempt to keep himself at the center of things, Moo indulged in clownism, playing foolish tricks with his silverware and, during coffee and dessert, tossing grapes up and catching them in his mouth.

These discourtesies gave rise to the notoriously embarrassing Six-Minute Liqueur, after which the guests “fled from the wreckage in a quick manner,” leaving Moo sullen and withdrawn. Mr. Don Wenow convened the intelligently strategic and now famous Meeting on the Sidewalk Outside Moo's House, and, ever loyal to Moo, explained to the others that perhaps his friend and teacher had given one party too many, and that Mrs. Moo's liaisonism might be the cause of Moo's mercurial actions. While not exonerating Moo for his mistakes, Don reminded us again that in the past Moo had blazed the trail in many party areas and had straightened out a large number of errors, such as charadism, fondueism, and hosts getting up in the middle of the meal and “fiddling with the dimmer in an ostentatious way.”

This analysis was so correct and balanced that it gave us a whole lot of understanding of Moo and a good perspective on his contributions and failings. In the new spirit of things, Don invited everyone to join him and Mrs. Don for what he called “a late breakfast” a week from the following Sunday, thus advising us “in a gentle and easy-to-take style” to reject brunchism, and at the same time obtaining agreement that the next party would be his.

 

Influence again: gently. I've had those thirteen consecutive stories turned down by the magazine since Maxwell left. That same summer vacation in Brooklin, I write another “clever” and callow short story, which Katherine reads. She says, gently, “You know, you can go deeper than this. You have real feelings, like everyone else. The story is smart enough, but I don't know—you could make your writing more honest in its emotions.” It works.

 

Forty-one

 

Speaking of opinions, or at least opinionating, when I edit Pauline Kael's column, I have to go down the stairs from the twentieth floor to the eighteenth and take her a proof with my suggestions on it. A fan is always on in her office, even in the depth of winter, and it blows directly on her and me as we go over her piece. I learn a lot about “voice” from her. At the beginning of our work together, she would see my changes, often having to do with some sort of illogic, because she spilled out her prose in such a headlong and heedless way, and she would read them aloud and say, with uncharacteristic politeness, “That's elegant, Dan, but it doesn't sound like me, really.” Then she would take the essence of the suggestion and render it into pell-mell Paulinese.

I learn after a while to make my suggestions in language closer to her own, and it helps me realize that
I
have a voice—this here voice, for what it's worth—too. And that every writer has one, and the more distinctive
and
natural—like complexity and unity, two qualities in tension—it is, the better it is. And she is for the most part very, very good.

As I came to understand as a copy editor, she also enjoys her side of the war between herself and Mr. Shawn. She bedevils him with risqué language and descriptions for the sole sake, I often think, of making gleeful fun of him when his proof arrives and we go over it. And she also furnishes me with a running commentary on the magazine's other writing. “What do you think of Notes and Comment this week, Dan?” she may ask.

“I thought it was—”

“It's soft,” she says. “It's really soft. The whole magazine is soft this week. I hope it gets
hard
again soon.”

Going to screenings with her can be embarrassing. They are usually held in small screening rooms, and everyone's behavior is on display to everyone else, and a professional silence and efficiency prevail. You go to the screening, you nod to a few people you know, you sit, you watch, you leave. But if Pauline finds a movie or any part of a movie absurd, as she does once with all of Luchino Visconti's
Ludwig,
about the degenerate life of Ludwig of Bavaria, with me in tow, she chortles and exclaims: “Oh, no!” “Oh, that's just awful.” “I can't believe this.” “This is ridiculous!”

She tells me that if she seriously disagrees with someone about three movies in any given year, it's hard for her to remain friends with him.

When my wife and I adopt our second child—our daughter, Lizi (Lizi's spelling, believe me)—and I tell Pauline about it, she is upset. Actually affronted. She looks at me angrily and says, “Now why would you do that?” I think my increasingly divided attention—which may have caused Pauline to respond this way to Lizi's arrival—leads to what happens next.

One day, after I have worked with Pauline for quite a while, Mr. Shawn suddenly appears in my office. He asks, “May I sit down?” (oh, honestly!) and then says, “Now, don't be upset, Mr. Menaker. I want to assure you that this is no reflection on your work. You have done good work with her and lasted longer than three or four other editors have lasted with her.”

At this point, since it was out of the blue, I have no idea what or whom he is talking about.

He goes on: “You lasted longer with her than Mr. Botsford did, you lasted longer with her than [someone else; I forget] did. Why, you even lasted longer with her than
I
did.” A small, unconvincingly reassuring chuckle.

I still don't know what he's talking about.

“But Miss Kael feels you may not have the time to work closely enough with her as her editor and would like to work with someone else.”

About half an hour after Shawn leaves my office and I'm done stewing over how I've failed, I feel a great weight lifting off me. No more stairs from twenty to eighteen to twenty, no more icy fan air, no more whole-column recitatives, no more embarrassing screenings, no more crossfire between Pauline and Shawn. For a while she got from me what she needed, and I learned a great deal about writing from working with her, and so the bad is gone, the good remains.

A real liberation, it turns out to be, and a lesson about looking at failure from a different angle.

 

I'm visiting Mr. Maxwell at his apartment and talking to him about why writers write. The
Paris Review
has just published an interview with him, conducted by John Seabrook, in which he says that writers generally write out of a sense of deprivation—emotional deprivation, I think he means. In his case, the specific depriving was the death of his mother, when he was a young boy. I ask him what he thinks writers hope to gain by addressing a sense of loss by writing. He says, “Attention, love, approval. The attention they feel they missed when they were young. This usually means attention from parents. It may not appear to be a serious matter to anyone looking in on the family from the outside, but to the child involved, who may be a particularly sensitive child by nature, it is serious.”

 

Finally on surer ground at
The New Yorker,
in part thanks to Frisch and getting in some pieces by Stanisław Lem, the Polish writer of idea-rich science fiction, I begin to understand how lucky I was in my education, from grade school to college to graduate school in English at Johns Hopkins—or, as Lyndon Johnson called it, when the university gave him an honorary doctorate in 1966, “John Hopkin.”

 

The Little Red School House was marvelous. (Three of its alumni—Tom Hurwitz, Angela Davis, and Elliott Abrams—were the subject of a recent book called
Little Red,
by Dina Hampton.) The teachers, many of them no doubt Communists, seemed to think they were educating children who would become the intellects of the Revolution, and they did their teaching with missionary zeal. And the professors at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins were of the highest caliber.

So I set about thanking some of them, including Sam Hynes, who kindly wrote back to me, “And thank
you
for all you have achieved.” And the madman professor of Romantic Poetry at Hopkins, Earl Wasserman. He had that monomaniacal subject-object interpretation of the main theme of the works of Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Wordsworth. Well, I mean, isn't all art ultimately about subjects and objects? Never mind, though.

Wasserman was a wonderful, crazy teacher, with a thick face, glasses, salt-and-peppery hair, and a deranged intensity. But he taught the closest possible reading and parsing of every word, phrase, sentence, stanza. It was humanities microscopy, and I realize that it has contributed significantly to whatever editing abilities I have.

So I write him a letter from
The New Yorker
thanking him for his valuable lessons in intellectual passion and verbal precision. He writes back something along these lines—I have misplaced the note: “Dear Mr. Menaker, As I recall you did quite a good paper about George Gissing's novel ‘New Grub Street' for Professor Miller's class in Victorian fiction. And I see from your magazine letterhead that that is exactly where you ended up. Sincerely, Earl Wasserman.”

 

Forty-two

 

I tell my analyst about seeing my mother's footprints on the ceiling at Barrow Street when I was four. He asks me, in his thick Spanish accent, “And why do you suppose this memory has estayed in your memory so vividly?”

“I don't know,” I say. “It must have been pretty weird for a four-year-old to see footprints on the ceiling and then be told that his mother could fly.”

“Who is this four-year-old you espeak of?”

“Me. What do you mean?”

“Oh, I see—you are Richard Nixon now, referring to yourself in the third person.”

“Well, I
was
four, you know—hardly the person I am now. I seem like a stranger to myself at that time.”

“But not so much a stranger that you do not remember this incident and claim it as your own, before you then disclaim it grammatically.”

“What's your point?”

“Well, there is a reason you recall this with esuch intensity and then disown it.”

“What is it?”

“This is for you to discover, but I will give you a clue. Did women wear eslacks back then?”

“How should I know? I guess not.”

“Especially not at a party, eh?”

“I guess not.”

“You have now run out of guesses. So how did those footprints appear on the ceiling?”

“They held her upside down.”

“Yes, and what was she wearing?”

“I don't know. A dress, a skirt.”

“Yes, a dress, an eskirt. And what might happen under these circumstances?”

“___”

“Oh, for the good Christ's sake, I will tell you. You were unconsciously fearful and hopeful then, as you are now, that her dress might have fallen down and people could look at her poosy, which is what you wanted to do too. This is why you disowned it, like Nixon.”

Many such exchanges with this mad genius of an analyst finally begin to make clear to me the unusualness, the unfortunateness, and the fortunateness of the romance between my mother and her two sons. My brother separated himself from it. But here I was doing her kind of work. You don't hear “in his mother's footsteps” very often. It wasn't only bad high-school science teaching that kept me from wearing the stethoscope I might have worn, and it wasn't only the hardships of a musician's life that kept me from taking up the fiddle in a serious way, which I so longed to do.