Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  On the De Grasse the night of the Captain's Gala, a day and a half before New York, Evelyn and I are in close embrace, dancing to the Jerome Kern chestnut "You're Devastating." Our dancing has picked up, and we know how to let the slow lift of the floor tip us together, and to wait for the sensual tilt and counterflow of the departing wave. The bandleader, Tony Prothes, gives us a little nod as we swing by. He remembers us from the trip over, I've decided, but of course he's good at this. Like our cabin steward and the second sommelier and the barman Charles—Jules? Gérard?—he goes back to the Normandie, before the war. Half an hour later—or is this on another crossing, years later?—I am sitting at a cabaret table next to Mme. Hervé Alphand, the wife of the French Ambassador, whom I met at a cocktail party earlier in the evening. Tall and olive-skinned—I think she is Greek by origin—she will become one of the great Washington hostesses. She is wearing an amazing evening gown, and when I say something about it she suddenly spreads the skirt's thick folds so they cover my knees and those of the man on her opposite side. The three of us are under the multicolored skirt, which lies in glistening heaps, holding us together. "Mainbocher," she says, smiling. "It's élégante, don't you think? It brings pleasure."

  At the Comic Weekly

  Working Types

  I'VE gone off to work at The New Yorker on more than ten thousand mornings, and can't quite get out of the habit. My second office there was a slotlike space inherited from the august, pipe-smoking Geoffrey Hellmann, and next door to the saintly William Maxwell, who became my colleague and mentor in the fiction department, and the editor of my nonbaseball stuff. In time, I edited him, as well—a happy back-and-forth that was often the custom in those days. In editorial temper, he was a keeper-inner and I was a taker-outer, but we so enjoyed each other that the difference never came up. Later on—this was still in the magazine's red office building on the north side of West Forty-third Street—I became august, too, and moved into a nice corner office down the hall, where one of the windows offered views into other New Yorker offices up or down a flight or directly across from me, all containing fellow-writers and editors, who could be observed typing or telephoning or reading newspapers or snoozing or (a lot of the time) staring morosely at the wall. My new space had been occupied twenty years earlier by my mother, then the fiction editor of the magazine; the first time I opened the closet door I found myself facing a long vanity mirror and, preserved beneath it as if in the Smithsonian, a round box of her Coty face powder. When I mentioned the coincidence of occupancy to the psychiatrist I was visiting back then, his jaw fell open. "The greatest single act of sublimation in my experience," he proclaimed.

  I remember running into Maxwell in the hall one day after lunch, when I was carrying a present I'd just bought for my five-year-old daughter, Alice, at the Music Masters store in the lobby—a 45-RPM Little Golden Record of Tom Glazer singing "The Little Red Hen" and other kiddy folk songs. I winced when Bill asked what it was, because I knew that his daughters Brookie and Kate had been brought up since the nursery on a diet of Debussy and Schubert, with Chopin for breakfast. "Oh, Roger!" Bill exclaimed, when he peeked into my package. "You're so worldly."

  Maxwell had a great feeling for my work, and was patient with me when the process was reversed. I learned more from trying to edit him than the other way around. I still recall a recalcitrant sentence of his, near the bottom of a galley, that we stared at and scribbled over together for a good ten minutes. "It's still not clear," I said at last and when Bill, leaning his head on one hand, murmured, "I don't want to be too clear," I saw, as if in parable, the artist's heart that ruled his editor brain. Other contributors who had already sensed this preference and sensibly entrusted their work to his care included Eudora Welty and John Cheever and Frank O'Connor.

  And here, within a page or so, has emerged a problem for anyone in trying to bring back a trove as rich and fraught and jumbled in private recollection as The New Yorker. Reaching into a mountain of meaning and back issues, I have produced a ghostly whiff of my mother and Bill Maxwell shrivelled to an anecdote. More is always required. If I were to go on at decent length about Maxwell, I'd bring up the loss of his mother in the flu epidemic of 1919, when he was ten, and point out how often he returned to this appalling event in his fiction—she died six or eight times in the pages of The New Yorker, I think. His last and best novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow—we ran it in the magazine, in two successive issues in 1976—begins with his mother dead again and his father almost undone by her death, endlessly walking the floor of their house after supper, with the son (the future author) walking beside him, with one arm around his waist: "He would walk from the library into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather's clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room....Because he didn't say anything, I didn't either." In the book and in his later stories Maxwell reconstructed a household and a family and his home town, Lincoln, Illinois, as it was then, putting in furniture and seasons and times of day, along with relatives and neighbors and children and servants and dogs and conversations, to the point where readers came to know these streets and living rooms and kitchens almost as if they had emerged from their own recollections and family letters: a work of art. Alice Munro, a modern master, likes to take vacation trips to authors' locales, like Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi, and she told me once that Maxwell's Lincoln, Illinois, was just about her favorite.

  Still in my Maxwell piece, I'd mention his brilliant conjectures in the same book about the elusive and (as he insists) unreliable powers of memory that surface so powerfully when we go back to our hoarded scraps of scenes and tones of voice. "Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable," he writes, "and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end." And surely I'd have to look for some tie between Maxwell's scholarship and literary classicism and his wide-eyed, sometimes infuriating purity of gaze, that preserved innocence that began in him—or so I believe—when he understood that he'd have to keep his mother and her absence clearly in sight for the rest of his life.

  That portrait belongs in another book that I no longer expect to write. Other New Yorker pals and paladins would be there, too—William Shawn, Frank Sullivan, James Thurber, John O'Hara, Ogden Nash, Donald Barthelme, V.S. Pritchett, Saul Steinberg, Brendan Gill, Edith Oliver, Jim Geraghty, Garrison Keillor, William Steig, Veronica Geng, Charles McGrath, Charles Addams—whom I knew and served with or under, and observed and edited (some of them) and had drinks and lunch and laughs with but can't get around to here. I feel an obligation, a lost chance, with but a few. It's too bad, for instance, about Victor Pritchett, perhaps my favorite editee ever, going back to my days as an editor with Holiday magazine, for which he was writing pieces about Spain and London's inner City. Early in the sixties, Carol and I became closer friends with the Pritchetts, Victor and Dorothy, during a sweltering August when by accident they sublet the apartment directly upstairs from us while Victor did research for a forthcoming travel book of his about New York. When we asked them at last, gently enough, about some pounding noises we'd been hearing overhead it came out that it was only the sound of bare heels: the two were going around naked up there, to keep cool. I was still Victor's editor a quarter century later when, in his eighties, he produced a late rush of fresh and vigorous new stories. In one of them, "On the Edge of the Cliff," a story about an old man in love with a young woman, there came a passage that brought Victor himself, unmistakable, into the room with me. "From low cliff to high cliff, over the cropped turf, which was like a carpet, where the millions of sea pinks and daisies were scattered, mile after mile in their colonies, the old man led the way, digging his knees into the air, gesticulating, talking, pointing to a kestrel above or a cormorant black as soot on a rock, while she followed lazily yards behind him. He stopped impatiently to show her some small cushioned plant or stood on the cliff's edge, like a prophet, pointing down to the fall
s of rock, the canyons, caverns, and tunnels into which the green water poured black and was sucked out into green again and spilled in waterfalls down the outer rocks. The old man was a strong walker, bending to it, but when he stopped he straightened, and Rowena smiled at his air of detachment as he gazed on distant things as if he knew them."

  This passage is cited (and no wonder) in a vivid new biography, V. S. Pritchett, by Jeremy Treglown, which relieves me of any remaining promises I'd made to myself to keep Victor whole and someday try to get him down on paper. Enough will stay on in my mind, including a last luncheon in London that Carol and I had with him and the rueful and vivid Dorothy, when the sunlight fell across the table and glanced off our empty cups as we lingered late with our talk and laughter. Victor, well along in his eighties by now, told Carol that he'd been startled to find himself dreaming lately about the Queen Mother, who was over ninety and still going strong.

  "Well, that's not surprising, is it?" Carol said. "She's so lively—doesn't everyone here still dream about her?"

  "Erotic dreams?" Pritchett said.

  I'd need to talk about Shawn, the quickest reader and most perceptive editor I've known, but also, in his later years, the most contradictory and self-destructive. His extreme shyness, his privacy and courtesy, and his killingly long work weeks have already been set forth and extolled in memorials, as have his lavish compliments and commitment to writers whose work he admired. For all that, the stubbornly clinging portrait of him is of a small, nervous fellow, terrified of elevators and prudishly on guard against the arrival of a four-letter word in his magazine. This misses him by a mile. At his daily best, he was outsized in intellect and imagination, and if thought-burdened, anxious first of all that the magazine might stop being funny. He knew all the bad words but believed that once he'd given way about the ban to some star fiction contributor or department writer—Pauline Kael kept snapping at his heels about this—he'd have to do the same for others, and the magazine would soon be awash in street talk.

  He and I became at ease in time, and shared some private jokes. One of these concerned my old jazz writer friend, George Frazier, who in later years had begun writing a popular weekly column, "The Lit'ry Life," in the Boston Globe, in which he would comment in the fashion of Pepys or a latter-day H. L. Mencken about journalism, music, Harvard, clothes, sports—anything. Here, every few months, he would drop in a little boosting item on my behalf, which I can now offer only in paraphrase: "When is William Shawn going to take his faltering hand from the wheel of The New Yorker and turn it over to the oh, so qualified Roger Angell?" The suggestion embarrassed me, of course, but if Shawn was irritated he must have been aware that I'd had no part in the matter. We also both knew that the proposal was beyond unlikely: it was loony. After that, whenever another version of Frazier's grand plan for me appeared, Shawn, blushing but enjoying the moment, would say, "So, we've had another little message from your friend up in Boston," and watch me writhe. "'Friend'!" I would cry. "Bill, the guy is killing me!"

  What I'd like to add, since it's barely been noticed, is that Shawn was a genius editor of fiction—a reader apparently attuned to the many dozens of conflicting voices and weird takes that were surfacing in our mail every day back then. He was just as quick about humor: quicker. The ongoing Perelmans; the young Keillor casuals; the first Woody Allens; the crazy Trows and wild young Fraziers; the pearllike Brickmans and convoluted Gengs—all excited him and made his day. "I don't know what this is," he sometimes said, pink with pleasure, "but it's wonderful."

  He loved the baffling, mysteriously moving first Donald Barthelme stuff, and in 1965 saw at once that we would absolutely have to take his short novel, Snow White, in its entirety: Snow White dreaming of a prince while she lives in a close domestic arrangement with Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, and Dan, and at one point complaining, "I am tired of just being a horsewife."

  "I suppose we'll have a lot of complaints about this," Shawn said to me, "but who cares when it's the real thing?"

  The New Yorker fiction department took a jolt in 1975 when an unexpected compulsory retirement policy took away Maxwell and the long-tenured regular Robert Henderson. It was to Shawn's credit that he allowed the department to reform itself around a much younger nucleus of editors—Chip MacGrath, Daniel Menaker, Fran Kiernan, Veronica Geng, Linda Asher, and, in time, Pat Strachan. Suddenly transformed from the youngest to the oldest fiction man, I was the titular chief, but fiction buying and editing now became a looser and more entertaining process, particularly after we took on the emotional and fervently intelligent Geng. "Jesus Christ, how can you all be so goddam stupid and pigheaded not to see that this story is absolutely the one best [worst] thing we've seen around here in months or maybe goddam ever?" she'd cry, after a difference in opinion had surfaced. Tears and slammed doors generally followed. Door slamming, a retort that had declined to invisibility under the gentle Shawn, was back, accompanying a general playfulness and decline of formality. Chip and Dan and I became world-class pushpin flingers. (A heavyweight, sharp-pointed leaden pushpin, delivered underhand with a last-minute spin imparted by a reverse snap of the thumb and forefinger of the flinger, will fly arrowlike toward its target, fifteen feet away, and stick fast in a plaster wall or a posted old Nixon photograph or outlandish manuscript page.) We also joined a larger group at the magazine who'd become adept at forging Shawn's signature on a faked memorandum or a pink buck-slip, or imitating his mothlike voice on the telephone. Sandy Frazier was unmatched here and could engage you for several minutes of polite, wildly uncomprehending conversation with the great man before reality or a suppressed giggle allowed you to expel a breath. Chip was athletic and boyish, and after we'd moved to new quarters across Forty-third Street, in 1989—Shawn had departed by then, succeeded by Robert Gottlieb—he sometimes set sail up and down the long new corridors on his inline skates.

  From time to time back then Shawn would be approached by one or another of the staff's intellectuals and asked why the magazine didn't run more world-class fiction. How come Mailer's stuff didn't make the grade here? Where was Gore Vidal or Italo Calvino or Gunter Grass? Why didn't we stop our old dependence on agents and submissions and cut down our number of fiction readers and editors and simply commission stories from the known élite? Shawn, in his customary mode of polite agreement, would appear sympathetic to the suggestion, and sigh miserably over the state of things, but of course he knew better. Commissioned fiction is one way to do it but perhaps not the best, since it eliminates surprises and does not leave room for the essential guarantee of quality, which is the rejection. Almost every New Yorker fiction writer, no matter how well established or beloved by readers, faced the possibility that a clunker of his or hers would get the heave. Shawn, to be sure, granted protection to S. J. Perelman and Jerome Salinger, whose pieces, never seen in manuscript by the rest of us, would magically appear in galleys a day or two before the issue they were to run in was ready to close; if they were ever turned down we never heard about it. But other top-rank contributors were not so fortunate; John Cheever and John Updike, when interviewed together on an early Dick Cavett show, admitted to the occasional New Yorker rejection with something like wry pride. E. B. White suffered a rejection now and then, too, although the decision would nearly demolish Shawn. He found it painful to disappoint anyone about anything, and the semi-independent status of the fiction department allowed him relief when he'd been given a bad story written by a staff member or an exalted author. "They didn't like it," he'd say miserably. He had no such option with his fact writers, and many a windy or arid or bottomless piece of reportage inexorably appeared in the magazine as a result.

  Knowledge of our sternness undoubtedly cost us some prime submissions by writers too certain of their own importance to face disappointment, but we held firm. This in turn, led to the curious and hilarious occasional phenomenon of the sub rosa submission—a story or novel selection from a great sensibility first introduced by a quiet telephone cal
l from the sensibility's agent to a particular editor friend at the magazine, sometimes Shawn himself. If we liked this great story or section of a novel and wished to run it, fine, the idea went, but if somehow we didn't then it never had been submitted at all and could scarcely be said ever to have existed, so word of its presence in our office could not be permitted. Some fiction actually did make it into our pages by this means, including stories by Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Shawn played along with the rigmarole, though reluctantly, and I recall a morning when he appeared at my door with a manuscript chunk of Norman Mailer's outsized Egyptian novel, Ancient Evenings, in his hand. "This isn't exactly a submission," he began, "but if it were, do you think you could perhaps take a look..." I did read it and thought highly of one section of its many pages, but Mailer would not consider a cut and the whole sneaky project went up in smoke.