by Daniel Smith
“Well, James,” Holmes said to Lowell as they all sat down, “this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.”
I didn’t need any laying on of hands to feel that I too had at last been admitted to what Howells called “the fine air of high literature.” The evidence was overwhelming. A hundred-and-forty-two years into its existence, the Atlantic no longer referred to its authors and editors by all three of their given names. So far as I could tell, that was pretty much the only change that had been carried out since Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The place hummed with old-school Yankee propriety—which is to say, it didn’t hum at all. Business was conducted in a genteel hush, in closed-door isolation or quiet consultation at a tall table that was referred to, after the ancient Greeks, as the “agora.” And all editorial comments and alterations were made on paper. In 1999! On actual, physical, pulped, pressed, and dried paper! As if every newspaper and magazine and one-man literary journal on the planet weren’t already making the leap into digital editing. As if technological innovation had been frozen somewhere around V-E Day.
The place was a marvel of decorum and self-assurance. It was everything I wanted. The magazine felt like home, in the best sense of that word—a place of refuge, comfort, and well-being, a lap my mind wanted to nestle into and fall asleep in. My mind desperately needed this very home; I was convinced of that. Over the past three years I’d come to detect a simple, distressing pattern to how my anxiety waxed and waned. At school, in Massachusetts, it was ever-present but tolerable; at home, on Long Island, it was ever-present and all-consuming. Every holiday, without fail, the same transformation took place. Driving across the Throgs Neck Bridge; pulling into Port Authority on the twilight-dim Greyhound; thudding down on the tarmac on the Logan–LaGuardia shuttle; peering up at the schedule board at Penn Station as it flipped through all the characters in its guts, waiting for news of the train that would carry me east through all the stations whose names I’d heard the conductor intone so many times (Woodside, Jamaica, Hillside Facility, New Hyde Park, Merillon Avenue, Mineola, Carle Place, Westbury, Hicksville) it was like a prayer—no matter how I traveled the trip’s last leg caused my ribs to grow cold and my mind frantic and I’d descend into a haze of anxiety that would only lift when I had returned north, weeks or months later. At first I blamed the encroaching idleness, which is as much anxiety’s plaything as the devil’s. Then I blamed the seasons—the depths of winter and the heights of summer just happening to be the conditions under which my anxiety flourished. Before long, however, I had drawn the obvious conclusion: the culprit was home itself. The atmosphere there exacerbated my anxiety as predictably as smog exacerbates asthma.
The response I am talking about is not simply a matter of regression, though that was certainly part of it—the well-known syndrome wherein returning home causes the adult psyche, and in particular the adult Jewish psyche, to revert to an earlier stage of development. (Portnoy: “Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy. . . . Did I say fifteen? Excuse me, I meant ten! I meant five! I meant zero! A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!”) It was more conscious than that. By now I’d learned that to control my anxiety I needed controlled surroundings. A sturdy exterior was the best bulwark against a disordered interior. And home, as anyone could see, was not a controlled surrounding. With my mother in charge, it was more like a carnival—boisterous, sensational, diverting, filled with noise and energy—and it undid all my efforts at self-improvement. When I finally returned to school in mid-January or late August I felt like a bowl of Jell-O that had been taken out of the refrigerator too soon.
I wasn’t asking for much, you see. I wasn’t aiming high. I just wanted to be a nice cold bowl of Jell-O.
• • •
In addition to having the hush of a reading room, the Atlantic’s offices were physically library-like, the walls lined with leather-bound volumes of back issues, books on travel and science and history and cuisine, and reference material of every kind imaginable. After hours I loved to tour the premises, browsing.
The best place to browse was a windowless room off the main hallway, where a horseshoe of aluminum filing cabinets housed the past several decades of the magazine’s correspondence—breezy salvos between powerful editors and boldface-named authors. “Dear Ms. Oates . . .” “Dear Mr. Naipaul . . .” “Dear Mr. Bellow . . .” “Dear Mr. Nabokov . . .” On a dusty, tattered old couch crammed between the cabinets and an IBM Selectric I’d sit and read folder after folder, rapt. The one folder whose contents I read repeatedly, and with the furtive delight of a Peeping Tom, was labeled ROTH, PHILIP. Like his novels and stories, Roth’s correspondence gave the impression of an uncompromising, fierce mind at work.
The folder contained almost twenty years’ worth of exchanges between the author and William Whitworth, much of it concerning some freelance work Roth was quietly doing for the magazine, evaluating manuscripts. Roth’s evaluations were always to the point: “I would have liked for that essay to be good,” he wrote, “but it isn’t.” Often they were funny: “I don’t like stories about kids who say ‘Jesus’ at the end of a paragraph.” Sometimes he allowed himself a bit of personal grousing: “I’m feeling a little like a beached whale at the moment. Waiting for the tide to rise and wash me out to where the water is deep.” Sometimes he boasted: “Too bad you couldn’t come to the reading—had ’em hanging from the rafters.” Sometimes, as in this, from the summer of 1993, he despaired: “Things stink, don’t they? I’ve been very depressed by Janet Malcolm’s case, as I think I may have told you, and even more depressed by Bill Clinton’s case.”
Then, in 1995, the Atlantic’s chief literary critic, an ancient, forbidding dowager who wore fur hats and smoked cigarillos, dismissed Roth’s most recent and most ambitious novel, Sabbath’s Theater, in two haughty lines: “As a protest against inevitable death, sexual excess is as futile as any other. Mr. Roth’s latest novel makes it tiresome as well.” Roth fired off an arctic display of wounded pride, excoriating Whitworth for having “abrogated” his duty as an editor in allowing the review to be published.
Whitworth’s response was a model of pacification. He expressed sincere regret, but not remorse. He explained that he could correct his writers’ grammar, or stop them from insulting racial and ethnic groups, but “I can’t tell them what to think.” He rehearsed the magazine’s admiring critical record in regard to Roth’s work, which, he added, he valued “above that of any other contemporary novelist.” A few years pass, and the correspondence resumes on its old, friendly course.
I found all this exactly as it should be. The Jewish writer sputtered, pouted, and raged; the goyische magazine kept its head. The goyische magazine always kept its head. Being able to keep one’s head was what it meant to be goyische, and what made the Atlantic seem as if it could only be a salutary place for a young man of my sensibility—a corrective institution. Even when the reserve displayed at the magazine was intimidating, I tried to take it as a useful lesson in how to live with less fear and trembling—how to conceal emotion and, through concealing, how to feel it less.
And sometimes it was intimidating. Not a month after being hired, I was working in my office when all of a sudden I saw the figure of a man reflected in my computer screen. I swiveled my chair to find Whitworth in my doorway. He was a thin, striking man, with a shiny head ringed with gray and a thick beard like his nineteenth-century predecessors. He wore a bowtie and a three-piece suit that hung in folds off his frame. I’d never met him before.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello.”
“I’m Bill.”
I indicated that this was information I already possessed.
“I’d like to ask you a question,” he said. Whitworth was from Little Rock and had a mellifluous Southern drawl. He’d covered the civil rights movement for the New York Herald Tribune and written profiles for The New Yorker. I was in awe of him. “I’m as
king this question of some of the younger staff members.”
“All right,” I said, and steeled myself.
For a long while he just looked at his shoes, as if there were something written on them. Finally, he lifted his eyes and said, “So, who would you say is responsible for the Holocaust?”
The Holocaust! I can honestly say I hadn’t expected that subject to come up. I don’t know what I’d expected. A point of grammar, perhaps. Something about literature or science or youth culture. But the Holocaust? Why in God’s name was he asking me about the Holocaust? All of a sudden a wave of paranoia I’d never experienced swept over me. Was he asking me about the Holocaust because I was a . . . could it be that . . . I mean, was he really asking others? Was he asking the gentiles? I was the only Jew under forty in the place, and it wasn’t exactly like I passed. Could it be that—
That’s when I remembered. The magazine was preparing a cover story about the London libel trial that pitted David Irving, the military historian and Holocaust denier, against the scholar Deborah Lipstadt. It was a long, complicated article that dealt as much with the details and collective memory of the Final Solution as with the vagaries of English libel law. Whitworth was consulting me about youth culture, in a way. He wanted to know what a young person knew and thought about the Holocaust.
“Well,” I said, aiming to impress, “there are of course conflicting views on that. For all the controversy stirred up by Daniel Goldhagen’s book, which I personally found overwritten, his thesis that the Holocaust was the result of a strain of so-called eliminationist anti-Semitism in the German population itself is at least worthy of debate. So, too, are the arguments about Allied and especially American indifference to the fate of European Jewry. Painful as it is to consider, let alone talk about, I also think it’s important to mention the inability of most European Jews, in particular those in Austria and Poland, to recognize the scope of the Nazi threat sooner and, when they did recognize it, to resist more violently. Of course, if you really want to get at the root of the tragedy you have to contend with the economic brutality of the Treaty of Versailles. I mean, I understand the impulse to hold the Kaiser accountable to the—”
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. I mean specifically.”
“Specifically?”
“Who specifically would you say was responsible for the Holocaust?”
I made the face children make when they can’t tell if they’re being toyed with or not. Whitworth’s own expression offered no guidance.
“Um,” I said, and then again: “Um . . . Adolf Hitler?”
He nodded. He seemed pleased. “OK,” he said. “Thanks for your help.” Then he walked away, the only trace of him the receding clatter of his pocket change and the pounding of my heart.
For many minutes afterward I berated myself. Adolf Hitler? Really? Had it really been necessary to include the man’s first name? What other Hitler could I have meant? Chuck Hitler? Murray Hitler? Samantha Hitler? “Ah, Hitler you say, but which one?” Once I’d muddled through the obligatory self-lacerations, though, I began to see that there just might be a therapeutic example for me in the exchange. Clearly some concern, some spark of worry, had brought Whitworth to my door; he came out of his office too rarely for it not to mean something. His concern, I supposed, was that the name Hitler wouldn’t resonate as deeply with my generation of readers as it did with others, that we wouldn’t quite get it, or if we did get it that we wouldn’t quite care. If this was true it qualifies, I submit, as a fairly neurotic concern—this was Hitler we were talking about, not Bing Crosby. The resonance doesn’t vary from generation to generation. Nonetheless, the important thing was that Whitworth hadn’t exposed his concern. He didn’t blurt it out or try to justify it. Nor did he dismiss it or stifle it. He addressed it in a straightforward, practical way. He thought to himself, “I have a nagging worry. What’s the best way to neutralize it?” Then he identified that way and carried it out.
Et voilà! No more concern.
The more I considered his approach, the wiser it seemed. The more I considered it, the more it also seemed redolent of the job for which I had been hired. What had Whitworth done, after all, but fact-check his worry? He’d acted according to the very principle I was then being trained to apply to the magazine’s manuscripts and galleys: that there is no problem for which there isn’t a solution, so long as you know where and how to look. Logic. That was the guiding idea, and at that early stage in my tenure it still seemed to hold great therapeutic promise.
The whole checking process seemed to hold therapeutic promise. The way I was being trained, the first step the fact-checker took when he was assigned an article was to go methodically through the piece and draw a straight line beneath anything that gave off even a whiff of factuality: names, dates, numerical figures, physical descriptions, job titles, anecdotes, quotations, photo credits . . . anything. As often as not, the result was a document in which nearly every word was underlined. But the process dictated that the checker not be daunted by this sight. The process dictated that the checker proceed in as orderly a manner as possible—either sequentially, if the piece allowed it, or by color-coding the facts according to their reputed sources and working through the colors one by one. Every time the checker confirmed a fact he was to draw a single, neat slash mark through it.
The first step in confirming a fact was to determine the most efficient method of investigation. Even in the pre-Google days, this could be very simple. That the Magna Carta was issued in 1215 is a fact that can be found in any dictionary. Usually, however, there was more work involved: getting in touch with sources, reading interview transcripts and newspaper articles, tracking down obscure reference materials. Sometimes there would be no clear answer at all, in which case a bit of creativity was in order. For example, one of the first pieces I was assigned to check was an essay by a young poet about a stretch of time he’d spent as a long-haul truck driver. Toward the end of the essay, the poet described the best roadside places along his route to urinate: “In Alabama exit 318 on the southbound [I-65] is a gem. The ramp cuts into a rock face that rises twenty feet above the shoulder, clung to by daring pine trees and vines with orange flowers. Crickets chirp.”
By consulting a road atlas in the Atlantic’s library, I was able to confirm that there is in fact an exit 318 on the southbound I-65 and that the exit is in Alabama—Falkville, Alabama, to be precise, approximately fifty miles south of the Tennessee border. That crickets were chirping on one or all of the nights on which the poet emptied his bladder I could not confirm; that is the kind of assertion beside which a checker is permitted to make the notation “on au.”—short for “on author.” But I was able to confirm, with the help of a twenty-five-year-old article in The Florida Entomologist (“A Morphological Key to Field Crickets of Southeastern United States”), that the common southeastern field cricket, Gryllus rubens, does indeed flourish loudly in that part of Alabama. The obstacles I faced lay between these facts. How could I possibly verify, sitting as I was at a desk in Boston, that an interstate off-ramp 1,200 miles away cut into a twenty-foot rock face clung to by evergreens and orange-flowering vines? On the day before the issue was to close, the sentence was the last one standing. At last I took a deep breath and found the number for the Falkville police department. An amused sergeant listened as I explained my plight and then sent an officer out to look at the foliage.
This was an instance in which the facts as written checked out. When they didn’t the checker was compelled to follow up by proposing a solution to the author. In some instances (rare, but they did happen) the assertion would be patently false; for example, Columbus sailed to America in 1493, FDR’s first secretary of state was Shecky Greene, Wilt Chamberlain is a homosexual. These cases left no room for argument. The author had no choice but to submit to reality. Much more common were those cases in which reality itself was subject to dispute. Direct quotations were notorious in this regard. When calling a source a checker wo
uld often find that, rather than happily acceding to the wording as written, the source would deny, dispute, squirm, complain, and threaten, and that, when confronted with such resistance, the journalist would become ornery, insulted, and recalcitrant. In these cases, the checker’s job is to play something like the role of the judge in Kramer vs. Kramer. The goal is to seek a fair settlement that redounds to the health of the child. You don’t want either side getting what they’re not supposed to get or losing what they’re not supposed to lose. All you want is to know where reality lies, and to establish that you have to remain as level-headed as possible. You have to be cool, clinical, and detached—a sort of scientist of journalism. You have to be able to shut off the emotion, both yours and others’, and focus on the evidence. Nothing but the evidence.
