My Mistake

by Daniel Menaker

  This last piece contains perhaps the most vexed assertion that I have to check in my two and a half years as a Checker: “Major Dennis Umeh, a thirty-one-year-old surgeon who enlisted in the army on the day before the war, said the hospital had twice been strafed and bombed by MiGs.” Not only can I not confirm that significant fact about the hospital, it is disputed by the Nigerian government (of course) but also by the Red Cross and, quite surprisingly, by the Biafrans themselves, who had every reason to confirm the assertion whether it was true or not. And I can’t track down Major Umeh. The sentence is allowed to stay in the piece, partly because it is a statement not by the reporter but by someone else and also because the author herself insists it is true. You might think that fact-checking is almost always a 0-1 operation—it’s right or it’s wrong—but this incident’s ambiguities turn out to be not all that unusual and show how hot a spot Checking can be.

  Renata Adler is very smart and tremulous. Essential tremor, I would guess. She has a famous gray braid down her back and is fidgety. She has a law degree and a little later on serves on the congressional Watergate Committee, which impresses me a lot. She tells me, once, that she became a writer in part because she wanted to know writers. A good reason and a bad one.

  The New Yorker gets some letters about the Biafra matter, as I expected we would. Fred Keefe comes into Checking, and Phil Perl says, “Uh-oh, it’s Fred.”

  When I need help, Phil lolls around the stacks, plucks down a book seemingly at random, opens it, often goes to the back (index), then flips through pages disgustedly, turns one more page, lazily digitates what I’m looking for, and wanders over to me with the fact in question safely, lepidopterously pinned.

  Some of the books: The Social Register (surprisingly reliable), Who’s Who (less so), Jane’s Fighting Ships, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (superb), the venerable Britannica (good but often idiosyncratic and sometimes even argumentative), Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition (still the gold standard methodologically, I believe to the day of this writing, though increasingly out of date), the less respected but in ways still useful American Heritage Dictionary, the estimable Chicago Manual of Style. Altogether, it resembles an agoraphobe’s conquest of the world to master these books, which contain the world, in their way, and to be able to be sure at the start of your journey that without mishap or missed connections you will end up where you are headed.

  However consciously or un-, The New Yorker, a kind of Jonestown of the literary/journalistic realm, encourages in its employees an ethos of superiority, essentialness, and disregard for fad and fashion. Shawn himself, in his words and demeanor, appears to disavow any self-importance. He wants to be taken as a quiet, modest man who puts the greatness of the institution he runs above all else. This faux-modest version of occupational vanity, in combination with native timidity, keeps very intelligent people in the same, often dead-end, jobs for years, simply because they can say, in this modestly quiet voice, that they work for The New Yorker. Great institutions, so long as they are small, will often (a) eventually take themselves too seriously and (b) try to camouflage their pride with self-effacement.

  Shawn always claims that The New Yorker does not and cannot, with integrity, try to attend to what a reader might want to read. We publish what we like, and hope that some people might want to read it too. This modest formulation of hauteur finds its best expression in a remark made by a Checker when the magazine finally breaks down and adds a real table of contents—as opposed to the almost microscopically small and cryptic listing that seemed on occasion to fly around and land obscurely in Goings On About Town. The real table of contents arrives shortly after I do, and the new feature has been kept a secret, and when we all get our First Run Copies on a Monday morning, a collective gasp of dismay goes up from the Checking Department. A colleague finally says, “This is just awful! How could we do such a thing.” Being green, I say, “Well, don’t you think it’s a good idea for readers to know what’s in the magazine?” She says, “It’s none of the readers’ business what’s in the magazine.”

  There are seven of us, including Phil. Phil slops around the place in that lazy-looking and fed-up way, but as I’ve said, he knows where to find anything in the reference books that line the metal shelves. Occasionally a Checker, at wit’s or initiative’s end, will call out “Room at large!” and ask a question. Less than a week after I arrive at The New Yorker, one of my colleagues says, “Room at large! What does ‘Angeleno’ mean?”

  “Someone who lives in Los Angeles,” I say. I feel as though I’ve just passed a test.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s a lot in here,” Phil says, putting a tedious piece by E. J. Kahn about efforts to establish vocational schools in Micronesia down on my desk. Then he says, “Did you notice my shoes?” I say no, I haven’t, and look down and see shoes with colorful layered heels, like alternating slices of Muenster and beets. “Wow,” I say. “Those are some shoes.”

  “You like them, eh? Guess how much they cost.”

  “Gee, I don’t know—must have been a lot. Seventy dollars?”

  “Thirty-four fifty-nine,” he says, heavy on the f’s, for emfasis.

  “What a great deal,” I say.

  “Guess how much I paid for this shirt,” he might say. It would be burgundy with a strange sheen.

  “It’s a nice one. Thirty-nine?

  “Nope! Eight bucks. Canal Street.”

  “Wow! Very special!”

  The second week I am in Checking, the phone on my desk rings and “Hello, is this Mr. Menaker?” a miniature voice says.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Menaker, this is William Shawn.”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Shawn,” I say. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, there’s a sentence in Notes and Comment about the number of troops who are in Vietnam right now, and I would like you to check that with the State Department to make sure it’s right. It’s from a news story, and I don’t know if it’s reliable.”

  The people on the Vietnam Desk at the State Department always laugh when I check the reporter Robert Shaplen’s Vietcong body counts with them. They think the CIA feeds him inflated numbers. Jonathan Schell is writing powerful Notes and Comments against the war in The Talk of the Town while Shaplen is writing semi-apologias for the war in the middle of the magazine. Schell is one of the Harvard crowd. Shawn has hired three or four of his son Wallace’s fellow–Harvard undergraduates—Hendrik Hertzberg, Schell, Anthony Hiss.

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll do that and let you know.”

  When I hang up, a few of the other checkers within earshot are staring at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I say to the person who sits across from me.

  “You said ‘Hi’ to Mr. Shawn?” she says. “You don’t say ‘Hi’ to Mr. Shawn—you say ‘Hello.’”

  Twenty-eight

  One night, in the early-morning hours, in the apartment I share with Jerry Cotts, a friend from Swarthmore, I wake up terrified—of absolutely nothing. It is a classic panic attack—racing pulse, cold sweat, terror like none I have ever known, except maybe for a foreshadowing of it on the lower level of Grand Central back when I was eight years old, and my general trepidation as a kid. But it feels like absolutely out of nowhere. You may think that the classic anxiety of certain kinds of New Yorkers, tending toward the Jewish kind, is a stereotypical joke, thanks principally to Woody Allen. But I am here to tell you that it is no joke, for any locale, race, or ethnicity. If someone you know truly suffers from what is now called a generalized anxiety disorder, it is fucking awful. Yes, the handling of such a person, in friendship or in love or in work, is best when it’s sympathetic but matter-of-fact and even businesslike. I know that now. I can do that now. Even with myself, on those mercifully rare occasions when the old panic approaches. But for pity’s sake don’t dismiss this affliction as a chimera or a ruse or a plea for attention or any of the other at least implicitly condemnatory assessments that s
o many so often make of it. It is all too real, itself and nothing else, and it can be disabling. It came close to disabling me for life. The prospect of lunch with a colleague was torture. Flying was a sentence. Social life an ordeal. It’s no wonder that with Valium always on my person and the need to lose myself in something that would take my mind off this dread, I throw my energy into fact-checking so violently. I start psychoanalysis and keep the Valium in the shirt pocket over my heart. This goes on, gradually abating, for many years.

  This terrible fear, which quickly and typically develops into fear of the fear, has to be in large part a delayed reaction to my brother’s death, two years earlier, and an even more delayed reaction, perhaps, to childhood problems, and maybe—maybe even more likely—to the separation from my family in early infancy. In someone else, those events might develop into no trouble at all. But they do in me. And the work I have to do to deal with them convinces me, if I needed convincing, that the seeds of other people’s psychological difficulties are almost always planted very early, that they often blossom hideously in youth, that it is the devil’s own work to overcome or so much as moderate them, and that while they may be tamed, they are, like trumpet vines, like tenacious rhizomes, essentially un-uprootable.

  It doesn’t matter. Well, it matters, to me. But if there’s anything more boring than analysis itself, it’s hearing about someone else’s analysis. I would not put any reader or friend through the details of my therapy, the first half of which was conducted by a decent, patient man, the second by a colorful and confrontational fellow who once said, when I answered one of his questions the way he evidently wanted me to, “Ah-hah! At last the penis goes into the vagina!”

  So I am a demon Fact Checker, even when I start out, as “the drudge.” The drudge is the newest Checker and has to work on all the pieces that no one else wants to work on—Concert Records, On and Off the Avenue. And with all the writers whom no one else wants to work with—Lillian Ross, Thomas Whiteside, “Audax Minor” (Gilbert Ryall), the Race Track columnist. And who cleans out the metal-wire box of dead proofs every Monday morning. And after a couple of years, they promote me to Copy Editor.

  Thirty to thirty-two

  Checking has its real-world aspects: trying to resolve conflicts (even if only vicariously) in the reporting of that selfsame Vietnam War (Shaplen versus Schell), phone calls to Columbia professors to check on misreported sweater colors, congressional records, Jane’s Fighting Ships, and strafed/unstrafed Biafran hospitals. Copy editing at The New Yorker takes me into a more fugitive and cloistered world. You have to spend your days looking up that it is indeed “congressional” and not “Congressional,” and other such fine points. When Bob Bingham says to me, “It has been decided”—as if by some plenipotentiary power that gains its nutrients solely from the passive voice—that I should learn copy editing, I have no real idea of what lies in store. This, even though my mother was a copy editor and even though Copy Editing, the office, lies just down the hall and through the nineteenth-floor elevator lobby and immediately to the right. I have almost never ventured into this warren in my more than two Checking years. I am also ignorant enough of office dynamics and psychodynamics to not realize how rare it is to get out of Checking and to have this chance, and how envious my fellow-Checkers may be. (Some of them turn out to be lifers and many others simply drift away. Later, one Checker, by his own admission a real Checking fuckup, drifts away into fame and fortune, in part by describing that factoid sub-world of periodical literature and his drastic shortcomings when he inhabited it—Jay McInerney, in Bright Lights, Big City.)

  When an editor, any editor, finishes the preliminary editing of any piece, he—and it was always a he in those days, except for the fiction editor Rachel MacKenzie—sends it to the Copy Desk. Mr. Botsford, Mr. Bingham, Mr. Weekes (Talk of the Town), Mr. Whitaker, Mr. Crow, Mr. Knapp, Mr. Angell, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Hemenway, Mr. Shawn, Mr. Henderson. Do you notice not only the gender but the ethnicity here, except for Shawn, who is Jewish, even if not by name? (His family name was Chon.) Copy Editing applies New Yorker style to whatever manuscript is in its hands and indicates how the piece should be set up. Title (Annals of Copy Editing, say, in 36 pt. Irvin), subheads (The Final Serial Comma and Its Discontents—I), body type (11 pt., 13½ picas), initials (3-line init. and caps—or caps and sm. caps, if the initial is the first letter of a proper noun or a name: “JAMES JAMES MORRISON MORRISON WEATHERBY GEORGE DUPREE said to his mother . . . ,” etc. Within the text that follows you have to know how to set block quotes (9 pt.), poetry (“line for line”), newspaper-syndicate names, and so on.

  A big black notebook beetles at us by our side, The New Yorker’s style book, long sheets of paper encased in plastic which have double columns of words and phrases and abbreviations on them. The book contains normal rules (numbers are written out in words up to and including one hundred, and above that numerals are used, except for the big round ones, like five hundred and one thousand) and marvellous eccentricities—like that one. The past tense and some other forms of “marvel” and “level” and other words like them get two, British-style l’s so as to keep the reader from reading “marveled” as “marveeled,” I guess—as if the reader would. Some other style-sheet entertainments: “polo pony”; no hyphen in phrases like “well-heeled” if they occur in the predicate; the names of ships are set in italics; “girl friend,” not “girlfriend”; “God damn it” or “goddammit.”

  Next to the Copy Desk is Collating, where Ed Stringham is dozing or setting his chair afire and Mary-Alice Rogers is still swotting away. Then comes an editor, Mr. Whitaker, his office a hoarder’s dream of train schedules and other railroad lore. He is a big, Churchillian-looking man in his sixties who always wears suspenders, a Princeton graduate, gay, I think, who fancies himself an acerb. He edits a lot of the magazine’s columns, including The Race Track, and himself appears in Talk of the Town stories as “Mr. Frimbo,” a train buff whose doings are chronicled by Anthony Hiss, Wallace Shawn’s fellow–Harvard alum, the son of Alger Hiss. Mr. Whitaker is also known as “Popsy.” When I first started as a Checker, I rode down in the elevator with the to-me-then-still-terrifying Popsy and stuttered out something about the day—something about its being nice, I’m afraid. Nineteen floors went by in silence, and when we got out, we turned in opposite directions. Then I heard, in Popsy’s petulant voice, “Young man!”

  I turned around and said, “Yes, Mr. Whitaker?”

  “Young man, just to say, you certainly have a way with words.”

  Next, on the short east dogleg of the nineteenth floor come the OKers, including, eventually, the aforementioned Kathy Black. These are sort of sub-editors who read the Final proofs of everything and ask questions, often important ones, as a fresh and very smart pair of eyes at the last minute. One of them—Helen—has tickets. That is, if a piece is closing and threatens to close late, she almost always raises a fuss, saying, “I have tickets!” Often she takes the tickets out of her purse and brandishes them. Are they the same tickets each time, I wonder, the ritual being so predictable. Are they tickets at all? I think so, because Helen does indeed love music, and going to concerts.

  Thirty-two

  “Who do you think you are?” That is Robert Bingham, husband to my cousin Janet, and now Executive Editor of The New Yorker. He slaps the letter I sent to William Shawn down on my crummy gray desk in Copy Editing. His eyes are blazing. “A member of the junior editorial staff!”

  “Well, I was trying to say something about Reich’s piece that would show—”

  “I know what you wrote,” Bingham says. “I asked what you thought you were doing.”

  “Well, no, actually, you asked me who I think I am.” My mistake.

  “A wise guy too, God damn it.” (Or was it “goddammit”?) “You made this point on the copy when it went through, and we considered it and thought there was nothing to it. Now you write a Department of Amplification and send it to Mr. Shawn?”

  “I didn’t
mean to be disrespectful. I meant it seriously.” Charles Reich is the author of the best-selling 1972 book The Greening of America. A more recent piece of his, about demonstrators in Washington, ended with a sentence as silly as it was ringing about the American people versus the authorities: “After all it is our Constitution, not theirs.” I have noted, on the manuscript and again in my now evidently incendiary letter to Shawn, that many in our government take a special oath—an oath that most private citizens do not have to take—to protect and defend the Constitution.

  Never mind. Maybe it is our Constitution. Maybe it’s Alex Trebek’s. That’s not the point. The point for me now is that I am in very bad trouble. It was not my place, as a copy editor, to make such a comment, and probably wouldn’t have been before, when I was a Checker. I knew that, but apparently I want to stage my own kind of protest—and get in trouble with the cops. It’s also true that I have not yet become a good copy editor, or even a competent one. I forget the final serial comma, I neglect to put a downward-pointing arrow at the bottom of a page that ends with a period, I forget to run brief, set-apart quotes into the body of the text, I let common misspellings, like “rarified,” slip by, and so on. A few days before Bingham arrives with this blow of bad news, Lu Burke, an OKer and another vigilante in The New Yorker’s grammar-and-usage posse, stopped by my desk, showed me something I missed—omitting a pair of single quotes inside double quotes—and said, “You don’t really want to do this work, Dan.”

  “We’ll have to talk about this some more, you know,” Bingham says at the end of this dressing-down.

  He comes back a few days later. The white-haired, red-faced late-shift copy editor is sitting at his desk near the dirty window that looks out over rooftops and a crumb of Fifth Avenue. He keeps a flask in the top drawer of his desk. He has, with regard to the top of that desk, already declined from the perpendicular to the parallel. Asleep. But Bingham asks me out into the hall anyway.