by Roger Angell
I kept thinking of him writing this, and the noise his typewriter would have made, and got a thrill when I noticed that the ribbon is getting a little pale by the time he gets to the last page.
Thanks again, Wylie, and all the best,
P.S.: Please let me know if this does get published so I can get hold of it again.
TO HERBERT MITGANG
February 17, 2010
Dear Herb:
Thanks for your letter and the kind words. Brief was a skinny slick-paper G.I. magazine published in Hawaii—we used the Honolulu Advertiser presses and distributed around the four million square miles of the Central Pacific by ATC planes. It cost 15 cents per copy and looked sort of like Life. We actually made a small profit in the end but conscientiously drank it all up in a series of magnificent postwar parties. Circulation was around eighteen thousand per week, as I recall it. It started as a small G.I. weekly for the 7th A.F. but I was sent out early in 1944 by the A.A.F. with three other writer-reporter guys to make it better, since they knew that the theater would become huge once the war ended in Europe. It was called Brief because of “briefings”—you know, wartime intelligence distributing. We did O.K., scored some beats, but ran into trouble with an editorial attacking Ernie Pyle (he came late to the Pacific and was only associating with Navy brass, etc.), which came out the day before he was killed on Ie Shima. I remember a guy in my barracks stopping by and saying, “Wake up—you just killed that old man.”
I wrote a lot and had a weekly column, and helped put the thing to bed every week, so I never got to the Marianas or anywhere else. But I liked the job and was pretty good at it. I was in my early twenties.
Glad you’re hanging in there, Herb. I’m still at work here every day but don’t work very long hours, thank God. But I’m way younger than you. I won’t be 90 till September. I’m glad you like The New Yorker.
All best, as ever,
TO RAY SMITH
February 18, 2010
Dear Ray Smith:
Thanks for your letter and thank you in particular for reminding me of Andy White’s thoughts about the Xerox matter. What hurts now, in a time when newspapers and other publications are dying off in such scary numbers, is his sentence, “Not all papers are independent, God knows, but there are always enough of them to provide a core of integrity and an example that others feel obliged to steer by.”
Not so, it turns out, and who can believe that blogs and tweets will fill the gap? I worry about this every day. You and the Gardiner Gazette are the exception, and congratulations to you both.
Yours & best,
* * *
* Wylie Daughty is the daughter of John O’Hara.
WEST SIDE STORY
Home in the city on a broiling Saturday, Carol and I threw in the towel early, opting for an afternoon full retreat to the sixplex on Broadway at Eighty-fourth Street, where a “Parsifal”-length submarine-warfare drama (ping-tongg! ping-tongg!) might keep us cool until almost sundown. On the way, we would stop at Harry’s Shoes, just across Broadway from the theatre, where I’d try to snap up a pair of unfashionable, low-gunwale Keds for our upcoming vacation. Weekend afternoons at Harry’s can remind you of a Marrakesh souk, but when at last, sneaks in hand, I spotted a vacant try-on chair and threw myself into it, the man sitting to my right, putting on his new sneakers, was Alfred Kazin. City etiquette in these circumstances calls for silence, but he and I had met, now and then, at book parties and the like, and I introduced myself.
“Oh, sure,” Kazin said, giving me an engaging smile. Though he is seamed and white-haired, there was a lot more student than prof in his gaze. He made a little swishing gesture through the air with one hand, and I nodded yes, right: I was the baseball guy. Our wives were introduced—both of them, I think, enjoying the odd situation, with the seated gents now lacing and stomping like kids and the women standing momlike before them, looking stern about size and fit. The wives went off together, hunting for a salesman and perhaps for some less bankerish choices for their guys, footwear-wise, while Kazin and I, thickly surrounded by the Reeboky hordes, chatted about our boyhood ballparks, here in the city. I offered the Polo Grounds, name-dropping the likes of Mays and Mize, Ott and Hubbell, but he topped me when he said that he remembered Ebbets Field but not for the Dodgers.
“We used to go to the opera at Ebbets Field when I was a kid,” he told me. “I went to ‘Faust’ with my father once. Nobody knows it now, but the mayor—the first one I can remember, from back in the twenties—sometimes arranged for free opera there for a few summer days. I don’t know which opera company—I can’t imagine they were any good. But he was there in person, walking up and down the aisles and reminding us what he’d done. ‘Are you having fun? Are you having fun?’ he’d ask. ‘It’s courtesy of your mayor, John F. Hylan, and don’t you forget it!’ ”
I said that I’d interviewed Mayor La Guardia once, for my school paper, after waiting all day in his office. I could no longer remember anything he’d said but still kept the vision of his feet, under the vast mayoral desk, not quite touching the floor.
“Yes!” Kazin said. “A small man but a big mayor. The best.”
Judith Dunford, Kazin’s wife, had arrived with a salesman, and while their order was being written up her husband checked his watch and said, “We’re just right.”
They were headed for the sixplex, too, it turned out—and for the same underwater epic. “Judith wanted ‘Little Odessa,’ ” Kazin said, “but I had a different plan. Anything not to think!”
After we said goodbye, Carol and I looked at each other and said, “Isn’t New York great” at the same instant. Just after that, while I was standing at the cashier’s counter, the Kazins came past me, with the critic carrying his Harry’s parcel under his arm. “In New York,” I heard him say, “you go for shoes and meet a writer.”
All this happened exactly a year ago. The name of the movie was “Crimson Tide.” I recall nothing about it except Gene Hackman losing his cool and Denzel Washington really keeping his. Remembering the Kazins at Harry’s Shoes is a different story: that’s easy.
Talk, July, 1996
CRYING MAN
Walking my dog last week, I came upon a man crying in the street. He was sitting on the raised stone ledge of a back-yard fence separating two small apartment houses, his back against the iron bars, with one hand up to his face. The dog gave him a glance and we moved on by, but when I stopped after a decent distance and looked back he’d bent forward in his misery and I could hear sobs. A thin, tall man, perhaps in his late forties, his pale face now glistening with tears. Black jeans, gray shirt, some sort of jacket. My first thought was to go back and ask if there was anything I could do. My dog is a young fox terrier, and I thought that his charm might perk up the poor guy for a moment. I held back, though, immobilized by New York’s code of privacy and because I was embarrassed. He hadn’t noticed us, and the soft sounds of his grief now seemed to be the main event on the block we were on. What had happened? What rotten news had come his way? His mother had died. His girlfriend—they’d have been together for three years, come January—had gone away to São Paulo for good, leaving a note on the kitchen table and a longer message on his e-mail. His cat Max unaccountably fell down the airshaft. His lover, who runs an art-moving business, had been hit by a bicycle on Greenwich Avenue and required neurosurgery. His job—he was a furniture restorer; an anesthesiologist; an associate curator; a cloud-computer analyst and designer; a private-school gym teacher—had been terminated by budget considerations. His father, the retired oboist, urgently needed a live-in companion with experience in dementia. I didn’t know or need to know. But I had patronized this sidewalk neighbor with my imaginings. His loss was his own, and unimaginable. The dog and I resumed our tour, and I was surprised by unexpectedly remembering what crying is like.
Not that I shouldn’t have known. Weeping is visible just about every night on the evening news, around bombing sites or after violent weather events, a
lso at memorials and candlelight vigils, or, more locally, near the end of the half hour, from neighbors of the abruptly deceased. (Women who cry in movies nowadays, and even some on the TV news, often wipe away dampness with a delicate gesture of their fingertips, to preserve eye makeup.) But my man had been crying for real, with no one else around. Men don’t want to cry, of course, because it’s unmanly. Women cry more warily than they once did, perhaps, weighing the implications. We cry at the shrink’s office, or choose not to. For grownups, tears, when they do arrive, come from a considerable distance but startle us with their familiarity. Crying has not been in the conversation, but, yes, we know how to do this. This is an old dance step; it’s swimming resumed. What’s also been forgotten and is now quickly and strongly restored is the comfort of giving way to these awkward seizures and shakings, the swift flooding and thickening of sinuses, and then our sense of shame and need for apology also giving way, if we’re lucky, to acceptance and perhaps more and still more tears, more Kleenex, and a bit of peace.
When the dog and I came back to the same place fifteen minutes later, the man had gone, and my generous thoughts about him had stopped, too. No crying today, please. No more reminders around here about this magical ten-cent restorative, and the million waiting reasons we’ll be needing it. Not right now, or next week, either. Spare us, mister—O.K.?
Post, November, 2011
STORYVILLE
Do anything long enough, and you hang up a record. Just go to bed every night, and before you know it you’ve passed Sleeping Beauty. Set down the cat’s dinner, day by day, and pretty soon he’s put away enough Meow Mix to feed the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving. “Hey,” said a colleague of mine, sticking his head in my office door the other day. “Did you know that you’ve rejected fifteen thousand stories here? I just figured it out. Fifteen thousand, easy.”
Well, thanks. I got out a pencil and did some figuring, and decided that twenty thousand was probably more like it. I tried to envision that many manuscripts trudging back home again in the rain, and to imagine the reception they got there when they rang the bell—“Oh. You again”—and, wincing, I heard the mumbled apologies and explanations. Then I added on all the other mournful regiments of rejected fiction sent back from this salient, down the years, by fellow editors of mine in the same line of work: a much larger body of the defeated and the shot-down—a whole bloody Caporetto. “We regret…,” I murmured unhappily to myself. “Thank you for…” I sounded like a field marshal.
The regret is real, though it may vary in depth from one manuscript to the next. What is certain is that no one can read fiction for thirty-eight years, or thirty-eight weeks, and go on taking any pleasure in saying no. It works the other way around. You pick up the next manuscript, from a long-term contributor or an absolute stranger (“Prize in Undergraduate Composition; two summers at Pineaway under Guy de Maupassant; stories in Yurt, Springboard, and Yclept; semifinalist in…”), and set sail down the page in search of life, or signs of life; your eye is caught and you flip eagerly to the next page and the one after that. Can it be? Mostly, almost always, it is not—or not quite. You read on to the end (well, not always to the end) and then make a note to yourself about what you will say to your old friend who hasn’t sold a story here in two years, or what to put, in some lines scribbled at the end of the printed form, to the young or not so young author who has laid his or her soul out on these eighteen pages but somehow not in a way that makes you want to slow down and enter this particular bar in company with Jay and Hugo and Lynn, or hear more of what was said on the back porch on a particular night of recriminations and fireflies. Sometimes there is a little descriptive passage or some paragraphs of dialogue, or the tone or tinge of a page or two, to single out for praise or encouragement, but even these responses, let it be said, may go into a return letter as much to make yourself feel better, a bit less of a monster, as in any great hopes of getting a primo manuscript from this same author in a month’s time.
—
THERE SEEMS TO BE a lot of misunderstanding about fiction. “How do you get a story published in The New Yorker?” somebody asks. “Send it in, and if we like it we’ll publish it,” I reply, and my interlocutor shoots me a knowing look and says, “No, seriously—”
“Are you looking for the typical New Yorker story?” someone else asks. “Sure, lady,” I want to answer back. “The one that’s exactly like Borges and Brodkey and Edna O’Brien and John O’Hara and Susan Minot and Eudora Welty and Niccolò Tucci and Isaac Singer. That’s the one, except with more Keillor and Nabokov in it. Whenever we find one of those, we snap it right up.”
A distinguished reporter here, the author of long, ferociously researched articles, stopped by to see me one day in great excitement, to say he was giving up all this drudgery and would write only fiction from now on. “Fiction writers never have to leave their desks, do they?” he said.
“Well, no,” I said. “Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“They have to get up to vomit,” I said.
A visiting reporter from a media journal once asked, “What are you people looking for in the fiction line? What are your standards?”
I stalled for time. “I don’t know what they are,” I mumbled at last. “We’ve never decided. We want something good—you know, something we like.”
“No, seriously,” she said, but when she saw that we were serious (I had cunningly laid on some colleagues) she closed her notebook. Her piece never appeared.
—
THE WRITERS ARE THE main players, which means that we can hurry past such esoterica as the opinion sheet, on which two or three or more fiction editors weigh in helpfully or warily or stubbornly (“Hate to disagree, but—”) on an incoming manuscript; often the process turns up some structural flaws, and the work is shipped back to its creator for minor or major repairs. Or rejected. No contributor is spared this blunt possibility, which may explain why certain celebrated authors have attempted to negotiate an acceptance before a story of theirs is sent along, or have stopped submitting altogether. Lack of unanimity on an opinion sheet is not uncommon, nor is the brave or truculent silence of a dissenting editor in the face of a story that has been taken in spite of his or her fervent objections: a turn of events that brings brief, rushing doubts about the future of Western civilization, or about the sanity of the Editor, who has had the last word. This is a weekly, thank God, and a few days later we fiction people are out in the hall exclaiming over a new manuscript, by an old standby or a total unknown, that has just gone the rounds: “Have you read it? Isn’t that terrific!” Some writer has made our day, and we are collegial once again, gleaming in reflected brilliance.
Just as there is no one way to write a story, there is no one way to edit it for publication, or to deal with its author over an extended period of time. What is being set down here, I mean, is one editor’s experiences and recollections of these semi-private matters—a selective history that cannot give proper honor to my departmental colleagues, past and present, or to writers whose work did not happen to come my way. What I noticed about bygone fellow fiction editors at the magazine—among them, Robert Henderson, William Maxwell, Robert Hemenway, Rachel MacKenzie, Frances Kiernan, Pat Strachan, and Veronica Geng—was how much alike they were in their passion for their work, and how different in the ways they went about it. The same holds true for my present friends and everyday companions here, whose devoted attentions continue the long line of New Yorker stories—over six thousand of them so far—while properly encouraging its alteration, almost issue by issue, in directions unforeseen. Fiction is special, of course, for its text must retain the whorls and brush-splashes of the author: the touch of the artist. At the same time, the editor should not feel much compunction about asking the writer the same questions he would put to himself about a swatch of his own prose: Is it clear? Does it say what I wanted it to say? Is it too long? Does it sound right—does it carry the tone that I want the reader to
pick up right here? Is it, just possibly, too short? And so on. (It’s no coincidence, by the way, that so many New Yorker fiction editors have also been writers.)
Some distinguished editors here have forsworn most such meddling, particularly with young contributors, on the theory that the writer almost always knows best. My own instincts lean the other way, for the obligation to preserve the sanctity of a neophyte’s script is counterbalanced by my hope that he will, by life habit, come to ask himself those short, tough questions as he writes along, never omitting the big question at the end: Is it good enough? Is it any good at all? Lifelong practitioners—the best ones, I’ve noticed—ask themselves this every day: that’s why they look the way they do (hunched over their word processors, or at the bar next door), which is like morticians.
That new story we exclaimed about will be brilliant, but perhaps not right away. A week has gone by, and its author—a young man in his twenties, let’s say, not previously published in The New Yorker or anywhere else—is in my office. We are sitting side by side at the desk, with his manuscript between us, and on its top page he finds some light pencillings and question marks. What’s this? The joyful, sunstruck expression he has worn ever since he got the good news fades a fraction; middle age, one could say, has just begun. They edit fiction here? “Don’t worry,” I say. “Let’s take a look. Down here, do you want these three whole lines about the dog, who doesn’t turn up again in the story until…until over here on page 11? Do you want to say something quicker about the dog? Up to you…. But before this, up here at the top of the paragraph, I’m not sure why the father seems so bitter. Do you need to explain that, or have you made him seem angrier than you meant to? Well, let’s mark that and move on…. Over here on page 4, just after Lucinda goes off in the truck, you’ve used this same construction for the third time in a row—you’ve got awfully fond of those dashes. Want to do it some other way? And then here’s your ‘dirgelike darkness,’ right in the middle of this wonderful scene. Can darkness have a sound? What should we do about that?”
