The job of the typing pool was to type manuscripts. When I arrived at the magazine these were typed, in the main, on manual typewriters, as they always had been. On busy days, the typing pool was a noisy place. Generally, a manuscript would be submitted to the typing pool after the editor of the magazine had read it. The editor’s name was William Shawn. He was invariably referred to Mr. Shawn. In other cases though, particularly when the writer was a longtime contributor to the magazine, or what I learned was called a staff writer, these manuscripts would be handed to Mrs. Walden by the writers themselves, full of cross-outs and overwriting, by hand, between the lines, at the bottom and top of the page, and with arrows pointing to other sections, or the back of the page, or to other pages which would be connected by the writer’s own hieroglyphs. Mr. Shawn read these once they were typed.
Because it was clear that typing manuscripts of any length was beyond me, I was set to work typing Mellecker letters. These were the different types of rejection letters that were returned with almost all the submissions that arrived in the mail of “Fact” or “Reporting” pieces. There were twelve versions, which ranged from encouraging notes to, most often, brief regrets (the phrase was “not quite right for us”); editors who read the submissions would paper clip a slip with a number scribbled on it to the manuscript. They were called Mellecker letters because a real person, Miss Mellecker, signed them. I was also put to work typing summations, written out by hand, of ideas for stories for the section in the front of the magazine called “Talk of the Town.” These also emanated from Miss Mellecker’s office. They were about one hundred and fifty words apiece, and were gleaned from the deluge of press releases that were sent to the magazine’s mail room each week. Miss Mellecker sorted these and wrote the summations. These were then typed and mimeographed, and a set of them was available in Miss Mellecker’s office, and in the “second” office outside of Mr. Shawn’s office, for writers to peruse. I would learn that only very few of these press releases resulted in stories: most of the story ideas were generated by the writers themselves; the best of these, according to the ethos of the magazine, were ideas that could not be summarized at all, that couldn’t be pitched, because the story was simply something that happened, that the writer noticed and felt like talking about: it would be impossible to know what he thought about it, beforehand, and even during, until it was written: it was the writing that happened.
None of this was talked about. The Mellecker letters were typed on canary yellow “seconds” paper: “Oldest Garbage Scow Retired from Active Use” or “First Annual Steel Drum Festival” or “Bagel Store Celebrates One Hundred Years.” There was a small-town feel to these missives. The magazine inside its flocked urbanity retained a small-town incredulity about New York: a kind of “looky-here” that was at once put on, and not. One of the magazine’s writers who had helped to establish this tone of voice had in fact found it almost impossible to live for any stretch of time in New York, and with his wife, a fiction editor whom many believed really ran the magazine, had decamped decades ago to rural Maine, where bundles of galleys and proofs arrived daily and returned with the aura of sea air and manure on them. This writer was also the author of three children’s books. In two of them, animals who could not speak (a pig and a swan) were saved by writing, and in the third, a man who is born a mouse escapes from Manhattan in pursuit of a broken heart. (Many years later my children, all in turn, were entranced by these books; I found increasingly that I could not read them aloud without crying, and their father, who could trumpet like a swan but was not a writer, took over.) His wife, an avid gardener, wrote a column which was, among other things, about reading seed catalogs: the best garden, it seemed to go without saying, was the imaginary garden in the mind, in winter. Among the writers were extreme cases of the magazine’s contrapuntal gait, the side step, a refusal to be quite in line. A recurring subject was wandering around, often by a “far-flung correspondent.” There was no place the writer wasn’t a tourist, incredulous even—crucially—at home. Or in time; regular clockwork, calendar time. A friend we knew wrote, in the magazine, about her refusal to own a working timepiece: at the end of the piece her mother tells her that if she does not buy a clock, she will blow up her house. That in the end that was what happened to the life we knew—that an almost brutal recalcitrance to tell time became itself a time bomb—was then remote.
There was almost no one at the magazine then, I knew by instinct, who had not been the wistful one out in the schoolyard, the one with one fast friend, trying to get Boo Radley to come out of the house. The press release about the bagel store came back, predictably, with a note in the editor’s snail track handwriting, always in pencil, as if committing to ink would be going too far: not for us, he thought, perhaps next year. What does it mean to be always just off, to make a point that the point isn’t the point? (As I write I am trying to fit in, somewhere, that from what I can find, almost no one who wrote for the magazine during that time, including those of us who are still alive now, has a Web site—that such an idea, of putting oneself forward, runs counter to not participating in ordinary time.) Hopeless to imagine otherwise, really, because what might seem, now, like possible alterations we could have made in how we thought of ourselves, ways we could have gone this way instead of going that way into a sort of purdah—how it could have happened differently—were foreign to the place we literally found ourselves: the face-powder halls, the ladies’ lavatory with the glimpsed door, which it took me only a day or two to discover contained a cot, with a pillow tucked into a freshly laundered pillowcase and a folded blanket, for anyone who, as the morning wore on, felt that they had to lie down in a dark room.
I lasted three days in the typing pool. On the morning of the fourth day Mrs. Walden called me into her office. In the magazine’s barely decipherable patois, delivered sotto voce, and in a faint tone of apology, for unnamable fates at work, forces beyond our control—there was at that time a kind of Star Trek feel to the office, in which a butterfly net, pith helmet, good manners, and lucid prose would suffice to keep the forces of evil at bay—she told me that there had been a change in circumstances. I was sure I was being fired. It turned out, instead, after some circumlocution, that I was being asked if I would consider, even remotely, being moved from the typing pool. Would I mind, instead, working for Mr. Shawn? I was perched on a chair with a rush seat (much of the furniture at the magazine’s office, like the couch by the elevator, seemed to consist of castoffs from summer houses that had been sold to pay taxes, combined with the most utilitarian kind of office furniture, metal desks, and old file drawers that stuck and had to be cajoled back on track. I was about to become intimately familiar with the latter). The rush pricked the backs of my legs. I was wearing tights, and I could feel a run starting. Since my arrival at the magazine, I had seen Mr. Shawn once, at the elevator. I had happened to be waiting with Mr. Gibbs, whom I had not seen since my interview, and he had introduced me to a small, elderly man, with a pink face and an air of extraordinary cleanliness, wearing an overcoat and a gray suit. I had noted the overcoat. It was a warm day in early May. That spring, Mr. Shawn must have been about seventy. Mr. Gibbs told him my name, and explained my presence by saying that I was “helping Mrs. Walden in the typing pool.” Mr. Shawn nodded. He turned on me a look of extraordinary kindness tinted with resignation. Then he blushed. I understood, suddenly, that he was shy. Without holding out his hand, he murmured that he hoped I would be happy at the magazine. An elevator arrived, and Mr. Gibbs and I stepped into it. I made a move to hold the “open” button so that Mr. Shawn would not be left behind, but Mr. Gibbs gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, and the doors closed behind us. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps Mr. Shawn was waiting for someone. I didn’t think to question how Mr. Gibbs knew this.
In her office, Mrs. Walden had kept on talking, without a pause in which I could make a suitable response. She must have picked up the phone or made a prior arrange
ment, for the door to her office opened and a girl about my age came in. Mrs. Walden’s own murmur, like lake water lapping at stones, stopped. She sighed and gave the girl a grateful look. “Here’s Alice,” she said. “She’ll explain it to you.”
It was the girl with copper hair. Mrs. Walden made a fluttering gesture with her hands. It was a signal to go. If I had known that this was the end, really, of falling under Mrs. Walden’s gentle aegis, I probably would have clutched at her. As I got up, the ladder climbed up my tights. When we were outside Mrs. Walden’s office I gestured it to it ruefully. The girl shrugged. An acceptance and even expectation of indignities and inconveniences—laddered tights, late trains, muddles of all sorts—was part of the ether I had entered, though this was not yet known to me, nor was the convention of addressing these incidents, by translation, in a kind of Esperanto, with the catch-all phrase, equal parts literal and ironic: “Onward and Upward.” This tag occurred in ordinary conversation as well as the “header” for various articles, “Onward and Upward with the Arts,” “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” and so on. It was possible to rise above anything. “Well,” said the girl, who up close I saw had fine, almost translucent skin and a piercing gray-green gaze, “Obviously, I’m Alice.”
It was lunchtime and again, the typing pool was empty. In three days I had noticed that the pool operated in two kinds of time, in which things either had to be done immediately or in a kind of lurch and go. We perched on two hard schoolroom chairs. The news was not altogether good, but it was delivered in a voice of trenchant sanity, which was an almost physical relief after my wandery conversation with Mrs. Walden. The job I was being offered was as “second assistant” to Mr. Shawn. This job consisted of sitting in the office where I had first seen Alice illuminated by the gooseneck lamp. No one, I learned, wanted this job. This was because the second assistant’s direct superior was a woman, who I will call Janice, who was a bully. She was domineering, patronizing, contrary, and rude to almost everyone who tried to see Mr. Shawn, and it was the second assistant’s job to placate them. Janice was obsequious, however, to the writers she was afraid of. These were writers who, for one reason or another, had a special relationship to Mr. Shawn.
Alice had been in the job for three weeks. The previous girl had quit and returned to Mrs. Walden and the typing pool. Alice was now slated to work in the Books Department. This was run for mysterious reasons by the magazine’s theater critic, a termagant with an acerbic wit and very little patience. A few years later when I began reviewing books and I made an attempt to enter the book room to see what had come in, she would turn on me with a glare, “Don’t even think of poking around.” That afternoon a book that I had wanted to review, but hadn’t mentioned to her, would land on my desk. But that was later. I poked at the ladder in my tights and made it worse. “Don’t do that,” said Alice.
I took the job. As Alice had promised, at the beginning at least, it was terrible. It was worse, I think, for me than it was for Alice, because her family, I had gleaned, had something to do with the magazine. What, exactly, was unclear, and I didn’t like to ask her. Her aunt, or was it her cousin, I learned, was an editor in the Fiction Department. Or something. Subtly, this protected her from Janice’s worse excesses. Janice was a small, large-bosomed woman with glossy black hair that she wore slicked back in a stiff ponytail. She favored cinched belts, patent-leather handbags, and high heels, which was a blessing because when she got off the elevator I could hear her, click-clack, click-clack, coming down the hall, a warning to me to be on guard.
My job was to answer the phone, type letters, file both incoming and outgoing mail (carbon copies were kept of all Mr. Shawn’s correspondence, some of which, inexplicably, years later, was dumped into the East River), and fetch Mr. Shawn’s lunch. Under no circumstances could Mr. Shawn be left alone to answer the phone or receive visitors. He did, I would learn, have a private phone line he answered himself.
On Tuesdays, I was also responsible for what was termed the “Talk” call. For this I went around to almost all the writers who had offices downstairs, on the eighteenth floor, and inquired, after knocking, and poking my head around the corner, whether they might have any “Talk.” There were perhaps twenty or so offices on the eighteenth floor and I knocked on the door of any writer who might remotely be thinking of writing “Talk of the Town” that week. At the beginning I carried a list: some of the writers on it wrote “Talk” almost every week, but others had not contributed a “Talk” piece for years. The idea was that if they were not asked, they might be offended. (Conversely, I see now, it must have been torture, for writers—some of whom had not produced any writing at all for months or even years—to have me brightly poke my head around the door every Tuesday). The deadline for “Talk of the Town,” was 4 p.m. If the writer had implied that he might be writing a “Talk” piece, I then went back by 3:45 to collect it, often waiting in a chair, after the writer had scooped off hats, blazers, mufflers, and collections of old proofs dating back several years, while he or she typed furiously. There was a big clock in the hall on the eighteenth floor. A few years later when I had an office there, the ticking of the clock on Tuesdays hounded me. (In 1991, when the last remnants of the magazine as we had known it were disbanded, and the offices moved across the street, I rescued the clock from a Dumpster; it now hangs in my kitchen above the pantry door, its work of reproach seemingly never over, late, late, late: for school, for the train, for whatever I was trying to accomplish that was just out of reach, an eternal deadline dream, above the boxes of cereal and pasta. My children learned how to tell time on it. )
The next morning I distributed the printed “Talk” galleys to all the offices on the eighteenth and nineteenth floors. Usually I slipped them under closed doors: not many writers arrived by 10 a.m. There were no set hours for writers. They were either in their offices, or not. Some offices had been locked, dust sheathing their particular haul of cast-off furniture, for years. One writer, a man then in his sixties, had been the magazine’s Asia correspondent for decades. He was often out, of course, but one morning when I was delivering “Talk” his door was open. “Talk?” I said, apologetically. He asked me my name. I told him, and he then asked me how old I was, and how long I had been at the magazine, and where I had gone to school. I was too young to feel that the questions were impertinent; I was only a few years, after all, away from the questions to which children are asked perpetually: How old are you? What grade are you in? What’s your favorite subject? When I answered the last question he leaned back in his chair and smiled. He said, genially, “You look like Radcliffe girls are supposed to look.”
I had very little to go on, to interpret this remark. For a moment I thought, wildly, of Ali MacGraw in Love Story. I felt, vaguely, that I should reject it as inappropriate and chauvinistic. This seemed, then, however, beside the point. To a large degree, the magazine existed in a world that predated the one in which I had marched in college, holding up a banner that said “Take Back the Night,” listening endlessly to a boy I knew who wished he could be a lesbian. Entering its portals, I had in some way slipped backward in time. Nice girls don’t cross their legs. It was a world I knew. When my mother took the train from Long Island into New York, she called it “going to town.” In her top drawer was a box of white gloves that smelled faintly of Shalimar. The magazine still employed a switchboard operator. The New Yawka, she said, answering it. In my imagination, it was a world in which I felt at home. It behooved no one to flail at what was, in the end, I thought then, inconsequential, and I did not know then about the consequences of different kinds of silence that came out of compartmentalizing, the Joseph Cornell box filled with shells and tiny figurines, good manners which contained and hid a kind of violence. Shut the door after you, he said. I left, thinking that at least I looked like something.
What was it about the straws? I find, trying to remember, that I can’t recall whether I was supposed to take the paper of
f half of the straw, without touching the straw itself, and then hand it to Mr. Shawn, holding the paper end, or the reverse. It must have been the former because I know I was not supposed to touch anything directly. The straw was on a tray, with a small carton of milk. I don’t remember, either, what kind of sandwich was on the tray, or if it was a sandwich or a small carton of cottage cheese. Later, Mr. Shawn occasionally took me out to lunch, at the Algonquin or more usually the Oak Room at the Plaza, where he would have some soup and saltines. I know now that because often he would need to eat two dinners at two different apartments at the end of the day, he paced himself at lunch, but then it seemed of a piece with his cold weather gear—muffler and overcoat—in all but the hottest weather; the air of otherworldliness and mystery, in which the coat, too, emphasized Mr. Shawn’s vulnerability.
He was sensitive to cold, to germs, and was afraid of enclosed spaces. I learned that the single elevator operator was kept on by the building’s management expressly on Mr. Shawn’s behalf. This was the reason he did not go down in the elevator with Mr. Gibbs and me; he was afraid of automatic elevators. He was afraid of traveling over bridges, and of flying. This meant that he depended, entirely, for his knowledge of the world—after about the age of thirty—on the writers who were his eyes and ears. When he left the city in the summer he ventured only as far as Bronxville, a few miles north of the office, from which he was driven into the city every day in a town car, because he did not drive. This vulnerability—linked to an inability to deal, to feeling overwhelmed—was in radical opposition to the magazine’s Bunyanesque mantra “Onward and Upward,” and was twinned with an equal admiration for derring-do high jinks (trapeze walkers, fire-throwers, bartenders, presidents). A result was that the magazine was, among other things, a Festschrift of stories told to allay fear—of silence, of enclosed spaces, of the open road, of secrets. As Leontes says in The Winter’s Tale, “Your actions are my dreams.” There were many complaints, for example, about ——. The general feeling was that he could not know, for if he did, he wouldn’t allow it. I think, though, that he did.
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