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My Mistake

Page 11

by Daniel Menaker


  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 restra
in 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.

  As I begin the work of editing, coarse and fine, I begin to understand the cliché “God is in the details.” It’s also the case that failed intentions are in the details, and confusion is in the details, and the unconscious is in the details, and camouflaged freight is in the details, and deception is in the details, and self-deception is in the details, and provocation is in the details, and surreptitious editorializing is in the details, and so on. God—if by God the agnostic means precision, clarity, genuine feeling, accuracy—is in the details only when the writer (or speaker, for that matter) knows himself and exactly what he is doing: rare.

  Many New Yorker reporters have been more nearly informational than stylish or literary—E. J. Kahn, Elizabeth Drew, Robert Shaplen, Joseph Wechsberg, Philip Hamburger, Connie Bruck, Henry Cooper. In contrast to these stand John McPhee, Renata Adler, Jonathan Schell, Susan Sheehan, Bill Barich, Roger A., and, the greatest of all, Janet Malcolm. And many others. But it would have been impossible to fill a weekly magazine of many pages with original reporting that reached the level of literature; it took too long to develop those fancy pieces and to see them through to press. So the magazine had to have a steady supply of more pedestrian journalism and columns and reviews and brief reviews—and that stuff often needed a lot of editing.

  Despite all this scut work, or because of it, with Mr. Maxwell gone I feel as if I’m still a little on the non-grata side of persona. A dog with bones occasionally being thrown in his direction. Waiting to fail. Especially in view of my having supported the union drive. No one is encouraging me, really; no one is shepherding me. Roger Angell does ask me to solicit translations of fiction by Latin American writers, in view of the success of Gabriel García Márquez and the vogue for Jorge Luis Borges, whom the magazine already publishes. I do so. I keep a logbook of correspondence with and submissions by Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mario Vargas Llosa, and José Donoso and their agents and translators. One or two pieces seem to me right for The New Yorker. No one agrees with me.

  Further: Maxwell accepted and published five short stories by me in a row—stories that were collected in Friends and Relations, the collection that Robie Macauley had so much grim fun with. After Mr. Maxwell leaves, my new editor, Frances Kiernan, rejects thirteen submissions in a row, over the course of three or four years. (She is titular head of the Fiction Department. I think her taste is generally questionable but pretty much right in my case.) I do manage to write some more humor for the magazine—parodies of Howard Cosell, Chinese Communist propaganda, a Zen-ish book about exercise, Running and Being, and so on—and some Talk of the Town pieces. But these successes do not succeed in making me feel less like the Pluto of the magazine’s editorial solar system.

  For instance: During a transit strike, I hitchhike around Manhattan and write a Notes and Comment about it for the Talk of the Town section. The last part of the piece consists of an exchange between me and a fellow–transportation improviser. “How are you getting around?” I ask him. “Diesel,” he says. “Diesel?” I say. He points to his feet and says, “Diesel get me anywhere.”

  The piece appears in page proof the next day, a couple of days before Talk goes to press. The “diesel” ending has disappeared. I’m not surprised, as I know that like many people and publications, The New Yorker has a longstanding aversion to puns. But I thought this one was pretty good, and ironically aware of itself.

  I submit an Author’s Proof to Shawn which courteously asks that the ending be restored. He calls me into his office and says, “Mr. Menaker, I see that you would like to restore the [pause] pun at the end of this Talk piece.”

  “Yes,” I say. “It seemed to me to rise above the usual objection.”

  “I see,” Shawn says. “Well—and I don’t mean in any way to criticize you; you must believe me that this is not a judgment of you—you probably don’t and can’t understand why we can’t do this. I really mean that—I don’t expect you to know the full extent of the mistake this would be. You probably just aren’t aware of it. But if we were to run the ending of this piece the way you’re asking us to, it would destroy the magazine.”

  Forty

  Max Frisch’s novella Man in the Holocene appears in its entirety in The New Yorker, complete with drawings, diagrams, varied typefaces. It was submitted to me, and with the essential layout-and-design help of Bernie McAteer, in the Makeup Department, where galleys are still physically push-pinned down on gummy green desktops, I see it through to publication. It has been four years since I became an editor—four largely lackluster, pariah-like years. But when Man in the Holocene is published, Roger offers his congratulations.

  A note from a reader, passed along to me, about Man in the Holocene: “Your issue of May 19th was a big waste of any reader’s time with 72 pages given to that incoherent, irrational, uninteresting piece by Max Frisch. You alienate your readers by filling your pages with such trash.”

  How did the Frisch and how do all the other stories The New Yorker publishes find their way into its pages? The two stories we publish every week are chosen out of some two hundred and fifty submitted. So if, say, twenty-five of those submissions earn more than a cursory glance, then the acceptance rate from even that select group—of approximately two a week—is under ten per cent. So we start out with pieces that have arrived much closer to whole—and fine—cloth than are the often rough-woven assigned and pre-approved dispatches from the factual precincts of the so-called real world.

  When a story comes in that one of us fiction editors—variously, over the years, Roger Angell, Charles McGrath, Gwyneth Cravens, Veronica Geng, Linda Asher, Pat Strachan, Frances Kiernan, and I—think has a chance or comes from a previous contributor and therefore might deserve a second look, he or she writes an “opinion” on it and sends it around for others to weigh in on. The opinions are sometimes called votes. Then, with the opinions attached, the story goes to Shawn for his final say. Here is a single set of opinions, denuded of all names except for mine and Shawn’s.

  To _____ from _____ :

  She’s toned down the drinking—left some of it in but made it less explicit and kept analysis to a minimum—and she’s given us a lot more of the two women. I don’t think it ranks with her very finest stories, but I think she’s caught the affection and n
eed that characterize their relations, and the story has the feel of life. It occurs to me that a better ending might be “I reach to stroke him; he allows this, responding with a purr—and then is as suddenly gone,” because there is something fragile about this . . . idyll. Any minute it could all fall apart. The story needs some fixing here and there, but it’s the best thing she’s done in a long time.

  To _____ from _____ :

  Agree. Still not much of a story, in some ways, but I think the writing saves it—it’s natural and intelligent and always convincing. As you say, the best she’s done in a long while. Agree also with your suggestions for the ending—or with anything that would eliminate the last paragraph. She means the reader to see through it, of course, but it’s still flat, almost canned.

  To ____ from Menaker:

  The way the first twelve pages consist of phone calls and recollections still seems to me awfully awkward and slow, and though I agree that her having toned down the drinking a bit helps, I’m afraid that this time around the writing in the whole piece seemed to me at best workmanlike and at worst wooden, and I can’t account for the difference between my reaction and yours and ____’s. I thought there were clinkers and hasty explanations and dead sentences everywhere—so many, in fact, that the story became tedious and hard to concentrate on. I’m sorry, but I just don’t think we should publish this.

 

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