My Mistake (15 page)

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 need 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.

 

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.