And, finally:
To _______ from Shawn [at the bottom of the opinion sheet, in his chicken-scratch]:
Sad to say, I reacted to this pretty much the way Mr. Menaker did. Also, I found it totally unconvincing. I’m very, very sorry. Nevertheless, I think Yes.
What? Yes? After that response? My paranoid fantasy is that Shawn has said yes because he agrees with me, if you see what I mean. Anyway, despite the atypicality of the final decision here, the opinions above pretty accurately represent the way the Fiction Department works. There are prejudices, small amounts of politicking (back-channel conversations), favorites-playing, and so on, but the process stands in unusually favorable contrast to what will happen at the magazine later, after Shawn and his successor, Robert Gottlieb, leave, and what I’ll encounter in book publishing.
Taken together, the opinions in the Fiction Department over the years will come to embody a fundamental difference in the literary responses of us editors. Some prefer what I think of as restrained and implicative dramas—the stories of Ann Beattie and Mary Robison, for example—and others, like me, go for more overtly dramatic and strange stuff. I think of “The Pugilist at Rest,” by Thom Jones, the stories of Ann Cummins and Allegra Goodman, and the work of Michael Cunningham and Michael Chabon. But Donald Barthelme, unclassifiable, championed by Roger Angell, is the magazine’s fiction magus. No one writing serious and accomplished literary fiction then or later will escape his influence. Even if you’ve never read a word by him or never even heard his name, he is in the air you breathe as writer of fiction. Same goes for Woody Allen and his influence on other writers of humor. Same goes for Lorrie Moore, I think. Same goes for some deceased authors who dwell in some obscurity for the general reading public, like Henry Green. (Who are today’s Influence candidates? McEwan? Munro? Mantel? One is, for sure, Coetzee.)
Influence: My wife and I are renting Roger’s house in Brooklin, Maine, near where his stepfather, E. B. White, lives. No kids for us yet. The bay’s water sparkles. I recall a story Roger tells about Walter Cronkite’s feckless efforts to dock at Brooklin. He is coming into the harbor and people are yelling “Hello, Walter! Hello, Walter!” at him. He waves, evidently cheerful about the recognition, as his boat runs aground. The people were actually yelling, “Low water! Low water!” Oh, yes: Influence. I write a piece of humor, a parody of Chinese Communist propagandistic press releases, called “Certain Questions in the History of the Party.” I think it’s probably just silly, but I show it to Katherine and she likes it. I send it to Roger and he loves it. Doesn’t change a word. It’s only when I see it in The New Yorker that I understand the Oedipally wishful, Roger-related, dinner-party-hosting subtext of the piece. And I wrote it in his house. Here it is, an interlude:
CERTAIN QUESTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF THE PARTY
BEFORE COCKTAILS
Despite the clarity and correctness of the invitation issued by our host, Moo Ving-van, for seven, Mr. Bo Tai and Mrs. Bo appeared at six-thirty, throwing matters into discontent and confusion at the outset. However, at that time, as at so many times before, Moo was able to temper principle with pragmatism, and gave Bo and Mrs. Bo productive things to do, such as arranging the canapés correctly and helping Moo to devise a seating plan for dinner which would maximize pleasant conversations and simultaneously distribute the party’s two left-handers to his right and the right of Mrs. Moo. This strategy, which had been pioneered by Moo, helped to avoid contention and “kept a lot of peas off the floor.”
Also, Moo put some beer in the cooler and filled the ice bucket with ice for mixed drinks while Mrs. Moo set up the croquet course and, with the help of Mrs. Bo, generally tidied the house, so as to accomplish what Moo called “getting everything really ready before the guests arrive.” Unfortunately, Moo was unable or unwilling to take similar foresighted steps to check Mrs. Moo’s flirtism, which, as we can see now, had recently been undermining his judgment and proved “to be very bad” for the party.
BEFORE DINNER
At seven, Moo welcomed Mr. Don Wenow and Mrs. Don, and made a completely correct introduction of Don and Mrs. Don to Mr. Bo Tai and Mrs. Bo, since they all “seemed more than few feet up in the air” about whether they had met before. Don overcame a brief moment of difficulty in “starting things off in a good way” by initiating a discussion of ridiculism in mortgage rates. It was clear even at this early stage that Don was utterly devoted to the success of the party. The humorous twins Mr. No Go and Mr. No Weh arrived next, and after they were carefully and accurately introduced by our respected host, Mr. No Weh said, “It is a much more difficult task to tell us apart than to tell us the location of the bar,” which caused some big groans and “kept things rolling in a great manner.” Then came Mr. Hai Enlo and Mrs. Hai and their elderly cousin, Mr. Ah Choo; the writer Mr. Hao Yubin and his most recent fiancée, Miss Shi Zaten; Mr. Mee Omai and Mrs. Mee, from next door; and the young schoolteacher Mr. Ti Fatoo and his wife, Ms. Hoo Mi, who practiced the approved social variationism of retaining her maiden name. Miss Dun Merong, who lived in the city and was the last to arrive, explained that she had taken several incorrect turns.
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 Sid
ewalk 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 clas
s 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.”
My Mistake Page 12