Now that I had the attention of the table I fell silent, except for making popping sounds with my lips and palatal clicks with the tip of my tongue. It was an extraordinary performance, even if I say so myself, for someone to whom the very notion of putting on a show was anathema. The timing was masterly. I let as much as twenty seconds slip by between certain clues and then, just when they thought I had stalled, rattled off three in as much time again. I had the whole thing out in six and a half minutes, including a magnanimous minute of grace allowing Spilkin – who had given up his own efforts to gaze at me, envious and amazed – a shot at the last clue.
I felt sorry for him, eventually, and nearly revealed the deception: I had just done the puzzle for the second time that day. My first effort, discarded in the waiting room at the General Hospital, where I’d gone for my blood pressure pills – and my Valia, for the nerves − had taken the better part of an hour.
In the years that followed, I sometimes surprised Spilkin watching me as I did the crossword at my usual pace, gazing out of the window between clues, sipping my tea. The expression on his face was slightly hurt and exasperated, as if I was patronizing him. I nearly confessed more than once. Now I’m pleased I didn’t.
As for the appropriate balance between gravity and levity in my dealings with the world, I am happy to say that it was restored in due course, when my acquaintances of those far-off days were scattered to the winds. Composure is everything. In the end, I was not so much a Rip van Winkel, who was immoderate and foolish after all, but a Derrick van Bummel. You remember, the schoolmaster in the same tale – dapper, learned, undaunted by ‘the most gigantic word in the dictionary’. One can even forgive him his drawling aloud from the newspaper, seeing that his companions were unqualified to do it for themselves.
*
If I had had my way (or a better start in life, if you’d rather), I would have been a proofreader of dictionaries. Lexicographical proofreading is the ultimate test of skill, application and nerve.
A proofreader worth his salt grieves over an error, no matter how small, in a printed work of any kind, from a chewing-gum wrapper (‘Did you know that the jodphur originated in India?’ – Ripley’s Believe It Or Not) to a Bible (‘Printers have persecuted me without a cause’ – Psalm 119, verse 161). Every error matters, not least because admitting even one into respectable company opens the door to countless others. Everyone welcome! the cry goes up, and the portals are flung wide. Only by striving constantly for perfection, and regretting every failure to achieve it, can the hordes be kept at bay.
However, errors once made should be acknowledged and understood, and their implications distinguished from one another. The repercussions of an error are nearly always bounded by the context in which it occurs. In certain exceptional spheres, such as pharmaceutical packaging, apparently minor errors may have fatal consequences. In the more mundane healthy climate, most errors on the part of the proofreader, committed in a spirit of honest endeavour rather than laxity and laissez-faire, are like ripples on a pond: disturbing but contained, and eventually finite. An error in the pages of a novel, for instance, may be compounded by reproduction, sometimes tens of thousands of times. Yet despite this wasteful abundance, the error itself seldom transcends the covers between which it is caught like a slow-moving insect, unless through the agency of an ill-tutored student, or a civilian foolish enough to seek instruction in these quarters. The good proofreader, the craftsman in pursuit of perfection, seeking to uphold standards but failing honestly, acknowledges the flaw, the place where the eye blinked and the hand slipped, and accords it its proper, proportionate place. Then he turns his attention to the work at hand.
Some say that an error of the right kind in the right place, something not too ugly, something truly devious, an error that demonstrates by its elusiveness how easily we might all slip into error ourselves, might have a purpose, perhaps even a beauty, of its own. One beggar at the banquet, they contend, cleverly disguised as a righteous burgher, discovered looting the cheeseboard and unmasked, will make the rest of the company savour their fine liqueurs more appreciatively. I myself find this conceit specious – as if a fly in the ointment improved it – although I grant that it might have some validity in a certain kind of publication, say, a coffee-table book or a hand-printed caprice. An error in that neck of the woods is hardly the end of the world.
But a proofreading error in a dictionary is invariably catastrophic.
Such an error is sent out into the world to multiply. It inveigles itself into the hearts of a trusting public. It works its mischief, like an odourless poison or a magistrate’s moustache, under the very nose of authority. It is exuberant and prolific. It has the capacity to generate its misleading progeny in an infinite number of places. It may introduce errors where none existed before, and unteach the best-learned lessons. It may settle down in respectable company and become naturalized as a citizen of good standing, until not even the most discriminating neighbour knows its shady past. The Great Cham himself gave us several bastards born on the wrong side of the galleys.
So it is easy to see why the dictionary should be the foremost test of proofreading skill, the Everest of proofreading, the Qomolongma, as a contracting Sherpa (7) might style it. Sadly, I was never able to plant my blue pennant on this summit.
After dictionaries, I would say that certain kinds of reference work present the greatest challenges: maps, calendars, timetables, technical manuals, logarithmic charts, diagnostic cyclopaedias, operating instructions, recipe books, telephone directories. And I was fortunate enough to make the last-mentioned field my own for two decades and more.
Erasmus of the Department once told me that some very authoritative authors did not regard publications such as these as proper books. In the opinion of these gentlemen, and Charles Lamb was mentioned by name, almanacs and guidebooks are ‘non-books’ – biblia abiblia, they spitefully put it. I wouldn’t know about that. When someone says, ‘Are you in the Book?’ which book do they have in mind – Essays of Elia? Even the Bible, that perennial best seller, needs qualifying as the Good Book; but the Book, plain and simple, is the telephone directory, and that’s all there is to it.
The demands of the telephone directory are different to those of the dictionary, of course. The emphasis falls less on first principles and final appeals than on service and convenience. Here, the errors the proofreader commits may be ranked according to the degree of inconvenience that results. On this scale, misspelling a surname but maintaining its alphabetical position is the least of blunders. People are understandably particular about the orthography of their personal names, especially those in which doubled consonants or optional concluding vowels create many variants: ‘with one t’ (or two) and ‘with an e’ (or without) are most commonly specified. But the fact is that only the most forgetful ever need look up their own telephone numbers in the directory, and people are as lax about the spelling of others’ names as they are finical about their own, and so the chances of causing offence are negligible. An error in the address is more bothersome; it may lead to misdirected mail, or turn an outing into a wild-goose chase. But again, few people consult the directory to obtain addresses. Placing a name out of alphabetical order is rather more serious: the user of the directory might not be able to find the number he is seeking. But the gravest error a proofreader can commit is undoubtedly a wrong number. It is inconvenient for the user, who is unable to reach the party he seeks; and it is annoying for the subscriber, who does not receive his calls; but for the third party whose number has been given by mistake, and who therefore receives all the misdirected calls, it can be a nuisance beyond enduring. Should this innocent bystander be a private citizen, and the directory entry falsely advertising his number a commercial enterprise, the volume of wrong numbers may be such that the victim has no choice but to sacrifice his own number, effectively rendering himself invisible.
The proofreading of numbers is a taxing business, requiring the highest levels of co
ncentration. Needless to say, I was rather good at it. Not infrequently, I was seconded to assist in difficult operations involving other directories. But the one task that always gave me grey hairs, in the days when their colour still concerned me more than their number, was the proofreading of the emergency telephone numbers. I give them here to show that I have not lost my touch entirely, and also because one can never be too careful these days. Please note that they are for the Greater Johannesburg area only.
Flying Squad 10111
Ambulance 999
Fire Brigade 624-2800
Hospital 488-4911
Poison Information Centre 642-2417
Water 403-3226
Electricity 080011-1550
Gas 726-3138
*
As a young man, I briefly entertained the ambition to wield the blue pencil. There have been some fine editors, even of novels, and a handful who are virtually illustrious. Saxe Commins of Random House, whose famous blue staff could strike poetic bubbly from the most prosaic rock. Pascal Covici, midwife and manservant to John Steinbeck. Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, topiarist of the verdant shrubbery of Thomas Wolfe’s imagination. All Americans, you’ll note, adept at bathing themselves in limelight.
But there has never been a famous proofreader. God forbid. If one should ever pretend to an exalted position, treat him with circumspection. He is undoubtedly a charlatan.
I became a proofreader; there was hardly a choice involved. Proofreaders are born, and made, in the back rooms.
As for being a fabulist, nothing was further from my mind. There are more than enough of those. In any event, invention never interested me. I had no wish to add to the great bloated mass of the given; I wished to take something away from it. To be not a contributor, but a subtractor. The impulse was alembical. Possibly even alchemical; over the years, my attention shifted more and more from the perfected product to the parings, the shavings, the dross. In the end, I was only happy when I was up to my elbows in rejectamenta. Mr Crusty was the wrong label; Mr Spare Parts might have suited me. Some people found the idea unpleasant. Merle would not let me rest.
‘You know Aubrey, when I see you sweating over this system of yours, it makes me sad.’
This was a new one. The Records always made her giggle like a schoolgirl.
‘How’s that?’
‘What’s going to become of it? It’s all very well us amusing ourselves with it, but it would be nice if it had some broader application, if more people could somehow … use it.’
For a moment I thought she was going to stoop to that ghastly American ‘utilize’, but ‘use’ was bad enough. Spilkin had said something similar: What are you going to do with it? What is it for? This was rich, coming from the fun-and-games specialists, the hedonists. They were up to something.
‘My Records have a use, thank you very much. I’ve said it a thousand times: it’s a system of exempla. Each of these entries is a stitch in time, my dear.’ Dear was daring.
‘But who’ll be interested in it in this unwieldy form? It’s raw material, really, it’s all odds and sods. You should work it up into something longer, something people could read.’ She was turning some of my clippings over, sizing them up shrewdly, as if imagining ways of tacking them together with a storyline. ‘Paragraphs and things, threaded together. The cobbling would be fun.’
Fun. That more familiar three-letter word warned me what was really behind all this. But a train of thought was already puffing down my one-track mind. I had recognized long before that my exempla needed to be embodied in sentences in order to capture the proofreader’s true function and inculcate his habits of mind. Perhaps I hadn’t gone far enough. If sentences were good, why shouldn’t paragraphs be better? One of the great problems of proofreading was precisely the tension between momentum and inertia. The story was a horse that wished to bolt, and the unwary or unpractised proofreader might find himself thrown and dragged behind its flashing hooves.
But the wicked Bibles and lying dictionaries cautioned me.
‘It’s possible, a story of some kind, with all my corrigenda, my “things to be corrected” woven into it. But where will I put the correct versions, my “things corrected”? Weaving them in too will be an impossible task. It will spoil the story.’
‘Leave them out. Make it more interesting for whoever reads it. That will be the fun of it, as always: inventing order. Not extracting it, mind you, like a lemon-squeezer, but creating it.’
‘Leave them out! What if it falls into the wrong hands? Some story full of contrived errors could wreak havoc among the impressionable.’ A ticklish sensation crept over my skull at the thought: the follicles puckering, trying to make the vanished hair stand on end.
‘Forgive me,’ said Merle, ‘but isn’t this exactly what you spend your life doing – hunting for errors? Why deny others the pleasure?’
‘My corrigenda are accidents of carelessness or ignorance, designated as such, and held up for scrutiny. The perpetrators had no evil intent. What you are proposing would be premeditated. And in such fatal concentrations. It scares me. In any event, I’m a professional.’
‘It won’t be for greenhorns.’ She seized my writing hand, with the pencil still in it, and squeezed it till it hurt. Thankfully it wasn’t my left hand, my thumbing hand as I think of it: the bones of that, and the thumb-bones in particular, have been weakened by a lifetime of thumbing through. ‘It will be for the amateur, in the best sense of the word, for those who are already in the know – or like to think they are. It will preach to the converted and renew their faith. It will be sent to try them. It will be a test of skill for the whole clan of proofreaders – prospective, practising and pensioned-off. It will further the aims of your noble profession.’
And with that, ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ – although I still hadn’t dubbed it that – was born.
*
When I think of those times now (casting some shadows from my mind), they are dappled with daylight sifted through the north-facing windows of the Café Europa. Like gold dust blown in off the dumps. My golden days, caesar salad days, days of whiskey and roses. All in all, a moisturizing season, with the sap rising in dusty veins and the juices in the grey matter trickling.
Four people around a table. A round table. No. 2. We got to know one another a little, and to like one another to the same modest extent. There was not much depth to our association. I acknowledge it freely. I can scarcely recall a conversation now that could not be plumbed with a teaspoon or a swizzlestick, depending on one’s preference. But it was stable, reliable, secure – qualities some of us only came to appreciate fully after we had been overwhelmed by flimsy, crooked things. In my day, solidity was a virtue. Yet all around, the cry goes up for transparency, as if the capacity to be seen through were laudable, as if a house were better made of glass than stone.
The Records grew in leaps and bounds. There were now four people clipping items from newspapers and magazines, jotting down scraps from shop windows or advertising flyers. None of them had my practised eye, of course, but Spilkin came up with some gems. Even Mevrouw Bonsma made some well-meaning contributions from sheet music and knitting patterns – notably that old chestnut, ‘knit one, pearl one’. Soon I was spending half an hour a day cataloguing the new acquisitions.
Every other waking moment was devoted to transforming the System of Records into the Proofreader’s Test.
I am an accomplished composer of letters to the press, as I hope I have demonstrated, and an expert curator of lists, ditto. But the Test was a new departure for me. I came to regard it as in essence fanciful. I had very little experience as a consumer of fancies and none whatsoever as a producer, but that is exactly what seemed to be required. Although my ‘raw material’, as Merle encouraged me to think of it – the phrase never ceased to remind me of meat – had all been culled from published, or at the least, public sources, I was now required to place the elements into entirely new and undeniably imaginary relationships
with one another. Imaginary relationships … I was like a man who, never having held a needle between his fingers, is given some mismatched offcuts, a fistful of gauds and ribbons, a few skeins of thread, and commanded to make himself a suit of clothes.
I took my cue from Merle, laying sentences side by side, building up paragraphs incrementally, nudging those into groups or ‘fascicles’, as I called them, allowing the Test to shape itself anyhow. I found that this patchworking obliged me to begin inventing as well. When a sentence wasn’t quite the right shape, I had to lop off a bit here or add on a bit there, cutting my cloth to suit the pattern − not my pattern, but its own. This was fancy, pure and simple, and so antithetical to my usual way of working, which consists of a precise and considered re-establishment of the disturbed order, that I frequently lost my nerve and wished to throw the whole project over. I forged myself a golden rule: the corrigenda themselves, the tesserae that formed the substance of the Test, could not be invented. The plaster (and I did seem to require quite a bit of it) mattered less. I took comfort in the thought that the laws that governed my seemingly random activities were bound to become apparent as I went along. In other words, I trusted that this detour through the thickets of invention would bring me back, wiser and happier, to the manicured lawns of the given.
For quite some time now, I have been inclined, looking back, to think that this is exactly what happened. But just lately, new doubts have beset me. Perhaps I shall never walk in that garden again?
Merle became my inspiration. I tried out sentences on her occasionally, as they took shape, but I always baulked at a paragraph. And naturally the finished material was kept from the others. Mevrouw Bonsma was relieved, I think. Spilkin, on the other hand, was always looking over my shoulder and winking so deliberately you’d have thought he was trying to demonstrate the musculature of the eye. It got to the point where I had to carry my confidential papers with me to the Gentlemen’s room to answer the call of nature.
The Restless Supermarket Page 11
