by Brian Doyle
I suppose the whole concept of the editorial Yes is properly the bailiwick of another essay altogether, but I cannot help pondering the positive for a moment, for there are so very many ways to say yes, more than there are to say no, which is interesting on a philosophical and cultural level as well as an editorial one. You can say yes with glee and astonishment, you can say yes with the proviso that you anticipate changing this bit or that, you can say yes while also saying we’ll need to sail toward one more draft, you can say yes to a piece of the piece, you can say yes to the idea but not to the piece, or you can, in a sense, say yes to the writer but not to the piece — this isn’t quite for us, but we’re interested in the verve and bone of your work, call me. The best advice for saying yes I’ve heard came from a friend of mine who edits a nature magazine. Use the phone, he says. It matters that a voice says yes. This is the same guy who says you should always envision a writer as your mom when you say no, so as to avoid being snotty, and that you should overpay a young writer on principle once a year, just to mess with the universe.
My friend James and I have for years now plotted a vast essay about editing, an essay we may never write because we have children and paramours and jobs and books to write, but we take great glee in sketching it out, because there are hundreds of subtle joys and crimes of editing, and editing is hardly ever what the non-inky world thinks it is, which is copyediting, which is merely the very last and easiest piece of editing — rather like a crossword puzzle, something you can do near-naked and beer in hand. Real editing means staying in touch with lots of writers, and poking them on a fairly regular basis about what they are writing and reading and thinking and obsessing about and what they have always wanted to write but haven’t, and also it means sending brief friendly notes to lots of writers you have never worked with yet in hopes that you will, and also it means listening to lots and lots of people about lots and lots of ideas, some or all of which might wend their way into your pages, and it means being hip to the zeitgeist enough to mostly ignore it, and it means reading your brains out, and it means always having your antennae up for what you might excerpt or borrow or steal, and it means tinkering with pieces of writing to make them lean and taut and clear, and always having a small room open in the back of your head where you mix and match pieces so see if they have any zest or magnetism together, and it means developing a third eye for cool paintings and photographs and drawings and sculptures and carvings that might elevate your pages, and writing captions and credits and titles and subheads and contents pages, and negotiating with and calming the publisher, and fawning at the feet of the mailing manager, and wheedling assistants and associates, and paying essayists more than poets on principle, and soliciting letters to the editor, and avoiding conferences and seminars, and sending the printer excellent bottles of wine on every holiday, including Ramadan and Kwanzaa, just in case.
And dickering with photographers, battling in general on behalf of the serial comma, making a stand on behalf of saddle-stitching against the evil tide of perfect-bound publications, halving the number of witticisms in any piece of prose, reading galleys backwards to catch any stupid line breaks or egregious typos, battling on behalf of the semicolon, throwing away all business cards that say PROFESSIONAL WRITER, trying to read over-the-transom submissions within a week of their arrival, deleting the word unique on general principle and sending anonymous hate mail to anyone who writes the words fairly unique, snarling at writers who write We must or We should or, God help us all, the word shan’t, searching with mounting desperation for a scrap or shard or snippet of humor in this bruised and blessed world, reminding male writers that it’s okay to acknowledge that there are other people on the planet, halving the number of times any writer says me or I, checking page numbers maniacally, throwing away cover letters, checking the budget twice a day, and trying to read not most but all of your direct competitors, on the off-chance that there might be something delicious to steal.
And then away to lunch.
My friend James has a lovely phrase for the joy of actually editing a piece: mechanic’s delight, he calls it, and I know whereof he speaks, for I have sipped of that cup with a deep and inarticulate pleasure. I have been down in the engine room of very fine writers’ minds, my fingers following the snick and slide of their ideas into sentences. I have worked like hercules to clean and repair a flawed piece and bring out the song fenced round by muddle. I have distilled vast wanderings into brief journeys. I have snarled with delight to discover a writer deliberately leaving a fat paragraph for me to cut, a gift he confessed with a grin. I have said no to the great when they were fulsome and yes to the unknown when they were stunning. Many times I have said yes when I should have said no, for all sorts of reasons, some of them good, and more times than I know I said no when I should have said yes.
I have rejected essays but turned them into letters to the editor. I have rejected essays but asked to borrow one or two of their paragraphs for class notes in the back of my magazine. I have rejected essays but recommended submission to another magazine, which is a polite service to the writer, but I have also rejected essays and inflicted the submission on another magazine, which is a venial sin. I have rejected essays by pleading space concerns, which is not always a lie. I have rejected essays I admired for inchoate reasons that can only be caught in the tiny thimble of the word fit, about which another essay could be written. It doesn’t quite fit, could there be any wider and blanker phrase in the language, a phrase that fits all sorts of things?
I was lucky to train under wonderful and testy editors, a long brawling line of them, starting with my dad, who edited a small trade newspaper, laying it out in the basement of our house with redolent rubber cement and long strips of galleys and galley shears the size of your head. He was and is a man of immense dignity and kindness, and no editor or writer ever had a better first editor than my dad, to whom I would show my early awful overwritten overlyrical self-absorbed stories, which he would read slowly and carefully, and then hand them back, saying gently beginning, middle, end. I thought he was going nuts early, the old man, but he was telling me, in his gentle way, that my pieces were shallow, and that no amount of lovely prose matters unless it tells a tale — a lesson I have tried to remember daily since.
On my first day as an editor, in Chicago many years ago, beneath the roar and rattle of the elevated train, the first great editor I worked for gave me a gnomic speech about how we do not use the word hopefully to begin a sentence here, another remark I never forgot. Later, in Boston, I worked for a very good editor whose mantra was elevate the reader, and then I worked, again in Boston, for a genius editor who actually had a bottle of whiskey in his desk and a green eyeshade in his office. He cursed beautifully, in great rushes and torrents, and wrote like a roaring angel, and had been in a rabbinical seminary, and had shoveled shit in an Australian circus, and driven a cab in Brooklyn, and much else. As testy and generous a man as I ever met, and a glorious editor, whose driving theme was say something real, write true things, cut to the chase. More advice I have not forgotten (hopefully).
Some of the best yesses I have issued over the years: yes to a sixty-year-old minister in Texas who had never published an essay in his life or even sent one to an editor but he finally wrote down (very slowly, he told me later) a brief piece about the two times in his life, many years apart, a Voice spoke to him out of the air clear as a bell and to his eternal credit he did not in the essay try to explain or comment on these speakings for which refusal to opine I would have kissed him, given the chance. Yes to a twenty-year-old woman who wrote a lean perfect piece about her job running the ancient wooden-horse carousel in a shopping mall. Yes to a sixty-year-old woman who wrote the greatest two-line poem I have ever seen to date. Yes to a quiet Mormon man the age of Christ who wrote an absolutely haunting essay about laughter (which was also funny). Yes to a twenty-year-old woman who was a waitress in a bar in a rotten part of town and wrote a haunting brief piece about the quiet pe
ople who sat at the bar every night when it closed. Yes to a sixty-year-old man who drives a bus and wrote a piece about a six-year-old girl who was so broken and so hilarious and so brave that when I finished reading the essay I put my face in my hands and wept. Yes to a fifty-year-old doctor who had sent me arch essay after arch essay but finally sent me a perfect essay about the best teacher she ever had, to which I said yes so fast I nearly broke a finger. Yes to half of an essay by Andre Dubus, an essay we were cheerfully arguing about when he died of a heart attack, and I asked his oldest son if I could print the good half and not the mediocre half, and he said yes, which made me smile, for I could hear Andre cursing at me happily from the afterworld, in that dark amused growly drawly rumble he had when alive.
When my own essays are rejected I immediately inflict them on another editor, whereas I am always mindful of my dad’s advice that a piece isn’t really finished unless it is off your desk and onto another’s, and I am that lesser species of writer who can never stay focused on One Important Project but always has four or five pieces bubbling at once, so my writing life is a sort of juggling act, with pieces flying here and there, some slumping home through the mailbox and others sailing sprightly away in their Sunday best, eager and open-faced. When one slouches home, weary and dusty, I spruce him up and pop him into the mail and lose track until either he comes home again riddled with arrows or I get a postcard from another desk, sometimes in another country, I’ve found a home!
And then every few years I gather some thirty or forty together again, actually printing them out and spreading them out on the floor, a motley reunion, so as to make a collection of essays, and I have often thought that there is an essay even in this small odd act, their jostling for position, my kneeling over them attentively, worrying again about their health, listening to their changed and seasoned voices, listening for who wants to stand by whom, putting them in parade order like kindergartners bounding off on a field trip, two by two like braces of birds. No one ever talks about the paternal aspect of being a writer, the sending of your children off into the world, where they make their own way, go to work, enter homes, end up in the beds of strangers, and only occasionally do I hear news from the frontier. But such is the wage of age.
Why do editors say no, anyway? Well, I cannot, of course, speak for All Editors, and I cannot even properly speak for myself, because I reject some pieces from a murky inarticulate intuitive conviction that they’re just not our speed, but there are some general truths to note. We say no because we don’t print that sort of material. We say no because the topic is too far afield. We say no because we have printed eleven pieces of just that sort in the past year alone. We say no because the writing is poor, muddled, shallow, shrill, incoherent, solipsistic, or insane. We say no because we have once before dealt with the writer and still shiver to remember the agony which we swore to high heaven on stacks of squirrel skulls never to experience again come hell or high water. We say no sometimes because we have said yes too much and there are more than twenty pieces in the hopper and none of them will see the light of day for months and the last of the ones waiting may be in the hopper for more than two years, which will lead to wailing and the gnashing of teeth. We say no because if we published it we would be sued by half our advertisers. We say no because we know full well that this is one of the publisher’s two howling bugabears, the other one being restoring American currency to the silver standard. We say no because we are grumpy and have not slept properly and are having dense and complex bladder problems. We say no because our daughters came home yesterday with Mohawk haircuts and boyfriends named Slash. We say no because Britney Spears has sold more records worldwide than Bruce Springsteen. We say no for more reasons than we know.
Even now, after nearly thirty years as an editor, years during which I have rejected thousands of essays and articles and poems and profiles and ideas (even once a play, I have rejected a play, there’s the phrase of the day), I still, even now, often feel a little sadness when I say no. Not always — I feel nothing but cold professionalism when I reject a submission from someone who clearly hasn’t the slightest idea or interest in the magazine itself, and is just using the magazine as a generic target for his or her work; for example people who submit fiction, which we have never published — or never published knowingly, let’s say.
But far more often the writer has looked at the magazine, and is submitting something we might publish, and did make it with all his or her heart, and it just doesn’t make it over the amorphous and inexplicable bar set in my head, and I decline their work with a twinge of regret, for I would so like to say yes, to reward their labor and creativity, the way in which they have opened their hearts and souls, the courage they have shown in bleeding on the page and sending it to a man they do not know, for judgment, for acceptance, for rejection. So very often I find myself admiring grace and effort and craftsmanship, honesty and skill, piercing and penetrating work, even as I turn to my computer to type a rejection note, or reach for one of our own printed rejection slips, to scrawl something encouraging atop my illegible signature. So very many people working so very hard to connect, and here I am, slamming doors day after day.
After lo these many years as a magazine editor I have settled on a single flat sentence for my own use (“Thanks for letting me read your work, but it’s not quite right for this magazine,” a sentence I have come to love for the vast country of not quite right, into which you could cram an awful lot of sins), but I still have enduring affection for the creative no, such as this gem sent to a writer by a Chinese publication: “We have read your manuscript with boundless delight, and if we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next 1,000 years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.”
I have been an editor for thirty years, and in those dark and inky years during which my eyesight has gone and my fingertips have been hammered into blunt squares, my patience evaporated and my posture shot to hell, I have never seen, given, or received anything to top that as a rejection notice, and so I conclude as once did that noted editor Henry Louis Mencken, of Baltimore, who once finished a harangue aimed at newspaper editors (whom he called “a gang of pecksniffs”) by noting that “no one has asked me for my views, and moreover, my experience in the past has not convinced me that they are desired. So perhaps I had better shut up and sit down,” which I do.
Mr Dubus
He died in winter, his heart failing him at home on a hill above the Merrimack River, and his death in 1999, at age 62, robbed this nation of its finest Catholic writer. No one since Flannery O’Connor wrote with such grace and honesty of the power of faith in American lives, and I believe that no one in America ever wrote with such sinewy beauty of the sacrament of every moment and the stunning simple daily miracle of the Eucharist. We can savor, with pleasure and respect, the work that Andre Dubus left behind at his early death — a novel, eight collections of stories, two extraordinary collections of essays — but we mourn the silence of a man who portrayed, as no one before or since, the struggles and joys of Catholic faith woven through American life.
There have been, and are, wonderful tellers of that tale: O’Connor, J.F. Powers, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy among those deceased; Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, James Carroll, and Paul Wilkes among those living. Powers’ tales of rectory and monastery life are classics, but of fiction writers who have tried to show the heroic and haunted struggle for grace in daily life, I believe O’Connor and Dubus stand clear against the rest, and Dubus, like O’Connor, was also a deft and passionate essayist in later life.
Dubus’s own life fell into two great watersheds: before and after the night of July 23, 1986. Before that hot night on a highway he was a writer known for his stories of people under pressure, admired for the honesty of his stories, the way they looked gen
tly and respectfully at the lives of the poor, the tired, the troubled, especially in the tougher sections of the declining mill towns along Massachusetts’ Merrimack River valley. Before that night he’d been a captain in the Marines, a Louisiana boy who’d arrived finally in New England to be a college teacher. He’d been married twice, blessed with five children, had another child on the way; but then came that night on a highway.
Driving home, he stopped to help a young couple whose car had hit an abandoned motorcycle. As he helped them to the shoulder of the highway, a speeding car barrelled into them, but Dubus — in an instant reaction he attributed to his Marine training — yanked the woman out of the way. She was injured only slightly, but the young man was killed, and Dubus’s legs were smashed beyond repair. For the next 13 years he lived in a wheelchair, and in that chair he conducted a brave and tender and difficult search for both the grace to live his own new life and ever more direct ways to write about courage under duress. And more and more he wrote about sacraments, about the miracle of every moment, about the grace of God he felt and tasted and savored everywhere he spun in his chair.
“A sacrament is physical, and within it is God’s love,” he wrote, “as a sandwich is physical, and nutritious and pleasurable, and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love; even harried or tired or impatient love, but with love’s direction and concern, love’s again and again wavering and distorted focus on goodness; then God’s love too is in the sandwich. On Tuesdays when I make lunches for my girls, I focus on this: the sandwiches are sacraments. Not the miracle of transubstantiation, but certainly parallel with it, moving in the same direction. If I could give my children my body to eat, again and again without losing it, my body like the loaves and fishes going endlessly into mouths and stomachs, I would do it…”