I met Bob in 1946—the year after the invention of the printing press. I'd gone back to Duke University after being in the Marines, and Bob had come to Duke after service in the Army Air Force, and he looked about sixteen years old. We met in a tobacco-fragrant part of West Durham, in a sort of seedy salon presided over by an editor of the Duke Press named Ashbel Brice.
Brice called me Junior, and he called Bob—a year or so younger than me—Junior Junior. Brice introduced Bob and me to our first glorious dry martinis and also, bless him, to Joyce and Faulkner and Yeats. Bob's and my friendship was cemented by our passion for books and writing, which at that age is such a touchingly committed, exquisitely focused matter, like religion. We were also united, in that painfully repressed era, by our unrequited longing for girls. I recall walking on the Duke campus with Bob and glimpsing an especially gorgeous coed sauntering by. I said wryly, “Well, Bob, you can't have everything.” To which he replied, in despair, “You can't have anything!”
When he married, I was his best man. I've never seen anyone in such ghastly throes of prenuptial nervousness. To allay his anguish, I walked him up Fifth Avenue to the Central Park Zoo, where I tried to distract him by showing him the lions and tigers. We were late getting back to St. Patrick's. His bride, Gloria, was frantic. “Where have you been?” she shouted. Bob replied, accurately in fact: “To a cathouse.”
With the exception of my first novel, Bob has been the overseer of all the thousands of words I've written for publication at Random House. What a splendid overseer he has been. Bob's reputation has of course preceded him, and people have often asked me what it is that has made him such a great editor. I can't explain the source of his genius—the why of it—but I can briefly describe the mysterious and baffling process whereby his amazing intuition has taken hold and gone to the heart of a problem.
I've learned to dread the tiny, nearly invisible pencil marks Bob will make in the margins of a manuscript. I dread and welcome them. I dread them because, as we go over the text together, they are almost invariably ego-damaging, uncannily catching me out in some little nasty self-indulgence I thought I could get away with. But with Bob you can't get by with these moments of laziness or failure of clarity or self-flattering turgidity; he pounces like a cobra, shakes the wretched phrase or sentence into good sense or meaning, and soon all is well. How sweet-mannered and gentle Bob is—but how ruthless, how uncompromising. That's why the better part of me has learned to welcome those faint little pencil marks: They signal perception and wisdom.
But there is something beyond this devastating technical brilliance that has made Bob Loomis so important to me. It goes beyond the pleasure I take in seeing his happy life with his second wife, Hilary, and his son, Miles. It has to do with the faith and loyalty and the friendship of—I can scarcely believe it, saying these words—half a century. Had it been mere editorial wizardry, that would have been wonderful, but, even so, scarcely enough. What has sustained me for so many years as a writer is the knowledge that possibly the oldest friend I have is always there and, without necessarily speaking the words, patiently urging me on, helping me in spirit to continue striving to be the artist I hope to be.
[At Random, no. 17, Spring/Summer 1997.]