The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

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  The Other Bob Sherrill (449)

  LA HAD FOLDED NOT LONG AFTER Sherrill suggested I become an editor, and he moved back to New York to work at the glossy but hip New Times until it folded, and then home to North Carolina, where he was doing some newspaper work in Durham. I had gotten associate editor jobs at San Francisco Magazine and City magazine and then become a senior editor at Outside.

  Dear Terror:

  This is the voice of your conscience speaking:

  Fuck you, Terry. By now you are probably saying “piece” and “superb” and “structure” and you probably even have little slips of paper that say, “We regret that your submission does not meet our present editorial requirements, etc….” Abysmal words that hang empty and impersonal on the giant dark screen of some poor fool’s mind…

  He was pitching me for a writing assignment, and that’s the way he opened his query. And of course he was giving me some editing advice, or a reality check, or maybe it was a test. His first story idea was a road piece.

  I’m gonna hit the old Appalachian Trail, I think, as soon as I’m fired here. Maybe before. The bucolic freeway. Nope. Greater solitude is to be found in Nathan’s on Seventh. Rackety-rackety. For you I’d want to make a study of the off ramps, and traffic in general, see how the charismatic fauna is doing. The point is, perhaps sadly, wild animals have learned to cope. They’ve learned how to live with us…hawks and groundhogs happy and fat in a suburbia cut up by tobacco farms.

  I was confused. I looked at a map of the Appalachian Trail, which is a highway as well as the hiking network I’d always thought it was, but what the hell anyway. I knew Bob always saved his best for last and, sure enough, after some rambling thoughts about the American musical theater and a notion he had for a “scientific” musical called The Big Bop Theory, starring God, he got to the other idea.

  Something on hippiebillies. Hip hicks. Into Drugs of all kinds. Still country but much more sophisticated in strange ways. One is now working on my sixty-fo fo’d (Sky Blue).

  I wrote to him that he should hit the old Appalachian Trail in search of hippiebillies and write the piece. Maybe he could work in some of that charismatic fauna coping on the off-ramps. It was Outside magazine, after all. Bob wrote back a month later that he was pleased that I was thinking like an editor. The bad news was that he had not been fired so could not take the assignment.

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  Rejection (1,492)

  AS ADMIRABLE AS IT WAS to be honest and decisive, enemies could be made stupidly and by accident, and terrible mistakes could test friendships. George Plimpton, as editor of the Paris Review, once turned down a story from his childhood friend Peter Matthiessen, calling it “risible”—something he regretted as long as they lived. A friend of mine from college became outraged after I rejected one of his poems at Rolling Stone. I told him the magazine didn’t run poetry anymore, which it didn’t. He never spoke to me again.

  The second-best answer an editor can give a writer is a “fast no.” Most editors are not very good at this and leave writers hanging, sometimes for months. No response is worse, of course, and that’s common, too. The arrogance drives writers crazy with humiliation. Some very good editors don’t care, but the best ones do. Or maybe the ones who care the most are writers themselves, like Lewis Lapham at Harper’s and then Lapham’s Quarterly, and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair.

  Some editors, like Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, wrote thoughtful, useful letters. Others tossed off notes full of veiled irony that was easily misunderstood, often beginning or ending with a sentence or two about how busy the editor was. This preoccupation with their own time (“things are crazed here at the magazine”) is still a quick jump to the uniform rejection note, a kiss-off engineered to shield the editor from further correspondence or, worse, becoming a target of abuse because he or she has tried to point out to overly sensitive and usually obstinate authors the specifics of how their manuscripts fell short.

  This from the Century magazine in 1890:

  Out of nine thousand manuscripts a year The Century can only possibly print four hundred or less. It follows that editing a magazine is not unlike walking into a garden of flowers and gathering a single bouquet. In other words, not to accept an article, a story, a poem is not necessarily to “reject” it. There may be weeds in the garden…but the fact that a particular blossom is not gathered into the monthly bouquet does not prove that the editor regarded the blossom as a weed, and therefore passed it by.

  Or this, composed by Hunter Thompson in the early 1970s for pieces sent to him care of Rolling Stone:

  You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate shit! Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again! If I had the time, I’d come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your skull. Why don’t you get a job, wino? Like maybe as a night watchman, or delivering the Shopping News. You [insert name of city] cocksuckers are all alike—just like those dope-addled dingbats at Rolling Stone. I could kill those bedwetting bastards for sending me these tedious and embarrassing tissues of delusions…and I wouldn’t mind killing you, too. Stick this manuscript where it belongs: up your ass.

  Cordially,

  Yail Bloor

  Minister of Manuscripts

  Hunter was never an editor but became a magnet for lofty ideas and bad writing about freak solidarity. Many admirers sent him page after page of their ramblings in the hope that he would help get them published in the magazine, where, with a strange and callow glee, many of the editors began using what became known as “the Yail Bloor letter” as a uniform rejection note.

  Fifty years earlier, Ring Lardner’s advice, in his book How to Write Short Stories (1924), was that it was always a mistake for a writer submitting a story to a magazine to enclose the called-for stamped, self-addressed envelope—“too much of a temptation to the editor.” After all, why should an editor spend time looking for new writers when he already knew way too many? (As quaint as envelopes sound, the temptation to ignore e-mail from unknown writers can make sending a traditional letter shockingly more effective—nobody gets mail like that anymore.)

  Well-known writers have always had the edge, although the wonderfully named Sumner Blossom devised a system to ensure fairness for unknowns when he was editing American Magazine in 1934. Manuscripts were evaluated with author’s name obscured to make sure they were judged on merit alone. Ha.

  The most implacable pieces almost always came from big-name writers on important subjects, with enterprising editors making aggressive assignments serving as the grease. Harold Hayes, then editor in chief of Esquire, in a 1964 staff memo to the Other Bob Sherrill, among others, wrote:

  A passive, inert, dull magazine…is usually made up of editors who sit around and wait for writers to send them queries, or pictures, or finished pieces upon which they can react and thus fulfill themselves….Magazine editing is not just the act of choosing, it is an act of assertion.

  Editors have to be optimistic, expecting to get what they ask for from writers and ever hopeful that the next issue will come together not quite so badly as the last one. This has always led to a kind of far-flung enthusiasm in the assigning process that underlines the well-known quip by William E. Rae, editor in chief of Outdoor Life magazine in the fifties and sixties: An editor is a man who doesn’t know what he wants but recognizes it instantly.

  John Cheever was more optimistic in his 1969 Paris Review interview: My definition of a good editor is a man I think charming, who sends me large checks, praises my work, my physical beauty, and my sexual prowess, and who has a stranglehold on the publisher and the bank.

  The crime writer, lawyer and newspaper columnist George V. Higgins took it the other way in On Writing, his 1990 book on the subject: Only a seriously disturbed person would sincerely wish to have an editor for a friend.

  I never heard editors talk about how disturbed and insecure writers might become as a result of relentless rejection, l
iving every day with what James Salter called “the feeling of injustice.” It was more fun for editors to characterize their jobs as overseeing petting zoos full of needy misfits and narcissists, a point of view that was always amusing to other editors but infuriating to writers. Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.

  My favorite exception came from Francesca Bell, a Native American poet who dropped out of middle school but found a way to crack the poetry establishment and its network of small magazines. In 2013, Bell had this poem published in Rattle:

  I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand

  and tell him personally,

  I’m sorry, but I’m going

  to have to pass on this.

  Though your piece

  held my attention through

  the first few screenings,

  I don’t feel it is a good fit

  for me at this time.

  Please know it received

  my careful consideration.

  I thank you for allowing

  me to have a look,

  and I wish you

  the very best of luck

  placing it elsewhere.

  Of course editors are mostly men and, fuckers that they are, the obvious observation that they are necessary probably goes back to papyrus. The earliest quote I found was voiced in self-defense by Charles Fletcher Lummis, editor of Out West magazine, in 1904; he said simply, Editors are necessary evils. Hunter Thompson said the same thing, noting with irony in his interview with the Paris Review in 2000, I’ve never sent [in] a piece of anything that’s finished.

  Specific definitions of editing are tricky, although the thinking divides along two distinct lines. The celebrated New Yorker editor Harold Ross and longtime contributor Brendan Gill articulated the extremes. Ross defined editing as quarreling with writers—the same thing exactly. In Here at the New Yorker Gill wrote, The work of a good editor, like the work of a good teacher, does not reveal itself directly; it is reflected in the accomplishments of others. Both Ross and Gill are right.

  The most ambitious definition I ever came across was from Norman Cousins, a longtime editor of the Saturday Review, when I was struggling to find pieces and cold-calling Jim Salter and other favorite writers to get Rocky Mountain Magazine launched. Cousins had written:

  Nothing is more ephemeral than words. Moving them from the mind of a writer to the mind of a reader is one of the most elusive and difficult undertakings ever to challenge the human intelligence. This is what being an editor is all about.

  This floored me with its combination of clarity and sensitivity. The ambition of it made me suddenly proud to be an editor. Thinking I would compliment Cousins in some editor-to-editor way, I wrote him a careful letter introducing myself. When I didn’t hear back I felt like a writer again.

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  Ed Abbey (2,633)

  COLD-CALLING WRITERS I ADMIRED and offering them assignments was impertinent and I knew it. I built up my nerve before making a call by telling myself what I liked about their writing. And I wouldn’t call without a story idea that I could be specific about. This worked out more often than not if I followed up right away with a letter and contract in the mail. Sometimes the hardest part was getting the phone number.

  Ed Abbey didn’t have a phone but was easy to recruit, once I tracked down his post office box in Oracle, Arizona. His novel The Monkey Wrench Gang was then the defining document for the wild-ass splinters of the environmental movement as it turned belligerent—birthing the militant Earth First! and Sea Shepherd. More important to me, his first nonfiction book, Desert Solitaire, read like observational sorcery, which is the kind of language Ed would make fun of but it’s what I told him when he called me collect after getting my postcard offering whatever assignment might interest him.

  “The last thing I need is another editor,” he said. “But I suppose I could use the money.”

  This was in 1977, when I was at Outside, and for the next ten years Ed and I usually had a piece going or at least percolating. He was a prickly edit, but funny about whatever I suggested, which always involved him writing more. He was usually on the road and I’d call him at a prearranged number, a bar pay phone in Moab, Utah, or wherever, and we’d talk through the piece. A week later I’d get whatever I’d asked for in the mail.

  We got together in person for the first and only time two years later, when Ed visited me in Denver, where I was editing Rocky Mountain Magazine. “Passing through,” Ed said, but he was also making a speech at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I was living in a solid little red brick house just south of Colfax Avenue, where the Denver dive bars and strip clubs were then.

  Ed didn’t call first, just rang my doorbell. Much taller than I expected, standing on the porch with a cragginess that didn’t make him ugly, but he was not handsome, either. He looked strong and difficult and more than anything like the cowboy he always insisted he wasn’t. An anarchist was what he was, from the confusingly named Indiana, Pennsylvania, who had left home after high school to find, as he put it, the West of my deepest imaginings—the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same. He could write cowboy better than anybody.

  Ed’s early novel The Brave Cowboy became the last black-and-white cowboy movie, Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, who said it was his favorite film. I saw it on television not long after my first conversation with Ed. It was the kind of movie that made romantics want to mount up—about a young cowboy at odds with modern society, rejecting technology, cutting down barbed wire, and as true to the West as sage. When his friend is locked up for refusing to register for the draft, he gets himself arrested, in order to break his friend out of jail, but winds up on the run on horseback, with helicopters chasing him. It does not end well, but Ed’s cowboy is true to himself (refusing even to carry a driver’s license or Social Security card) and wildly heroic. By the time Ed was standing on my porch, however, he was writing and giving speeches about how the beef industry’s abuse of our Western lands is based on the old mythology of the cowboy as a natural nobleman, the most cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales.

  Ed said he had been asked to speak about something goofy like “literary environmentalism” but that he always just talked about whatever he felt like when the time came and nobody ever seemed to mind. He was to appear the following afternoon on the University of Colorado campus, but tonight he was invited to a dinner party at the home of an important academic who had something to do with him getting invited to speak. After my deputy at Rocky Mountain, Karen Evans, came by my house for a drink, Ed insisted that we both go with him to the dinner. Karen, a polished woman with beautiful style, was skeptical, saying we would be imposing on what was surely an important dinner party for someone. Probably seated. Ed said he didn’t “give a hoot.”

  The hostess, a young academic wife in a short skirt, met us at the door with a smile for Ed—and wary accommodations would be made for Karen and me. Among the faculty guests, we met a handsome young guy in hiking boots and a tweed blazer who said we should give Buddhism a try. I thought try was a peculiar word to use, but Karen said he probably meant meditation, not Buddhism. Ed, meanwhile, was being monopolized sequentially by our host, an older professor, and the other important PhDs. After more than an hour of drinks, we were all squeezed around a long table under a bright chandelier in a formal dining room.

  Ed was at the head of the table, Karen and I next to each other on extra chairs wedged in at a far corner. Carefully seated up and down were obviously well-meaning people, and I inferred from the small talk that they wanted Ed to tell them about the spiritual importance of nature and the enlightenment he’d found as a back-country ranger in Arches National Monument, in Utah, when he was writing Desert Solitaire.

  One of the guests had a first edition that I could see had passages underlined on many pages, and he knew some of them by heart. He wondered if Ed could e
xpand on his idea that There are no vacant lots in nature. Better yet, could Ed tell the table what he was thinking when he first saw the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks. It was impressive, but Ed just shrugged and said, yes, that’s what he had written. Someone else suggested that Ed had become a “philosopher of nature,” but it was clear to me when I caught his eye that Ed wasn’t feeling very philosophical.

  Finally, in response to an achingly long question about the importance of saving the beauty of the desert canyons, Ed asked about what he had heard to be excessive drinking, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the Buddhists at their nearby Naropa Institute. It was a question to silence any dinner party, especially one with Naropa connections to some of the guests. But then, as several people finally pointed out in a low-key but surprisingly aggressive chorus, there really wasn’t much to all those rumors. The young Buddhist in the hiking boots said he could vouch for that, but his voice broke when he tried to say something about being misunderstood himself.

  “Well, then, just kidding,” Ed said, to everyone’s relief, but he was not smiling.

  Changing the subject, someone asked Ed to characterize his work—what was he going for in his writing? Ed frowned and said that wasn’t his job. “Maybe you should ask Terry,” he said, disappointing everyone. “He’s the editor.”

  This surprised me a little, but then I stepped into it. “Ed’s a dangerous writer,” I said, probably taking another drink. “He scares people like you.” It was a belligerent thing to say, and I was immediately sorry, but there it was. I think I then made some preposterous jump from the environmental movement to the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers and back to the radical environmental movement that Ed had inspired with The Monkey Wrench Gang. The table was turning from surprised to resentful, but now Ed was smiling.