Robert Gottlieb replaced William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987. If eccentricity was a criterion for the job, Bob was qualified. At one point, he had a toaster in his office that erupted two slices of plastic toast every hour on the hour. In the longest conversation I ever had with him, the toast popped up three times. It was late in the day and I missed as many trains. Bob knew how to listen, but the conversation was primarily monologue and had to do with his role in “saving The New Yorker.” He was not all plastic toast. Prompt and clear in reaction to manuscripts, he knew what he was publishing and was smarter than most writers, certainly this one. He had edited books for thirty years and been editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf. In his time at The New Yorker, I once submitted a piece that was almost eighty thousand words long. The following morning, he called to discuss it, rendering me speechless. To read eighty thousand words would take me two weeks. Maybe two months. When Gottlieb said he had read the manuscript, I didn’t believe him; but then he analyzed two lengthy set pieces and their role in the over-all structure, told me where the scientific descriptions were and were not clear to him, and listed changes I might make to enhance the composition.
He was just as swift with “Looking for a Ship,” but one item stopped him from the day I turned it in until “Looking for a Ship” appeared in The New Yorker nine months later. I had gone to Miami, Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura, Guayaquil, Callao, and Valparaiso on the merchant ship Stella Lykes, and had written sixty thousand words, of which Gottlieb was buying all but one. It had come out of the mouth of a sailor named John Shephard, who said, “It’s a rough life. Rough life. Go ashore, you spend your money, get kicked in the tail. Plenty of friends till the money runs out. A seaman smells like a rose when he’s got money, but when he has no money they say, ‘Motherfucker, get another ship.’”
In the family of recoiling words included in The New Yorker for the first time, “motherfucker” had yet to be born. “Fuck” was alive but barely. John Cheever had agreed to delete it from a story published in the nineteen-fifties, in a tradition of compliance that extended to and beyond Alice Munro in 1980. During all that time, the editor of The New Yorker was William Shawn, who pluralized himself in the quiet expression “not for us.” If he thought a euphemism was possible, Shawn would ask for one.
Writing a humor piece in the nineteen-sixties, Calvin Trillin imagined a maternity-dress shop called Mother Jumpers.
“Oh, no, not for us.”
As Trillin has recounted in public and in print, he mentioned to Mr. Shawn that Mother Jumpers “was itself a euphemism.”
“Yes, well, not for us.”
The cartoonist Lee Lorenz, the art editor of The New Yorker for twenty years, was of the opinion that the magazine had “a somewhat undeserved reputation for prudishness.” In a collection he compiled in homage to George Booth and to Booth’s herded cats and cross-eyed dogs, Lorenz wrote, “During the social upheavals of the sixties, while other publications were gleefully replacing the asterisks in s**t and f**k, the magazine stuck to its tradition of avoiding ‘street language.’ More than anything else, this attitude flowed from Shawn’s reluctance to seem ‘trendy.’”
If you want to meet ten different William Shawns, read Lee Lorenz, Lillian Ross, Allen Shawn, James Thurber, Roger Angell, Ved Mehta, Renata Adler, Brendan Gill, Garrison Keillor, and the book in your hand. I don’t think trendiness was uppermost among Shawn’s concerns when a “motherfucker” was trying to infiltrate his magazine. Mr. Shawn—this one-man “we,” who would not accept advertising for cigarettes, or, in some instances, genital-contact clothing—was more than prepared to see Trillin’s Mother Jumpers go off to another magazine, as he had been when he was said to have turned down Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,” because a character mentioned a diaphragm.
Sara Lippincott, in a short piece written in the nineteen-seventies, tried a variant of “Use it or lose it,” the Cialis of its time. Shouting from her bicycle at a New York bus driver, she said, “Move it or lose it!” Even that left Mr. Shawn blushed out. In his magazine, he was having none of it. “Why?” she asked him. Actually, she had no idea whence the expression derived. Shawn dodged her question. She asked again. He reddened and wouldn’t tell her.
In the same long-gone era, however, Shawn accepted “ram it” in a piece by Trillin about Lester Maddox, the Governor of Georgia, who said publicly that “the federal government could take its education money and ‘ram it.’” Shawn at first asserted that no such ramming was going to occur in The New Yorker. Trillin thought of leaving the magazine if Shawn did not relent. “What he was telling me … was that I had to stop listening when the other reporters were allowed to keep listening, and I didn’t know if I could do that. Finally, he said he’d think about it overnight.”
Next morning, Shawn called the writer and addressed him with a characteristic formality that would never change. Very softly, he said, “Hello, Mr. Trillin. How are you? Is this a convenient time to talk?”
Stet “ram it.”
This was like the floating bits of vegetation that fifteenth-century navigators encountered a hundred miles from unplotted continents. At The New Yorker, euphemisms would someday fade. Someday, yes. But not by 1974, six years after “ram it,” when I went into the insemination of quarter horses in contrast to the eroticism of Thoroughbreds. Try to imagine the reddening Mr. Shawn reading a manuscript that included this, and meanwhile forget about looking for it in the archives of the Shawn New Yorker:
Go Man Go stands at stud at Buena Suerte Ranch, in Roswell, New Mexico, his life an apparent idyll. Firm white fences surround his private paddock. His name is writ in gold on his private barn beside his own demarcated pastures. When the time comes for him to serve his purpose, though, he is led around to the clinic, where a group of mares has been prepared by teaser stallions. Handlers—halters in hand—hold the mares and hold the teasers. A teaser is not restrained as he moves close to a mare. He nuzzles her. He rubs against her. He makes deep sexual sounds. His heart pounds. His blood courses. Her blood courses, too. Nostrils flaring, he tries to mount. Forcefully, he is pulled down and away. He is dragged off to a corral. The mare has ovulated and is ready. Teaser stallions do not last long. In a matter of months, they break down psychologically. Now, with fourteen or so mares teased up, Go Man Go is brought to the scene. He will not cover one love in a pasture, but fourteen mares in a clinic. One of them is presented to him and, without preliminaries, he mounts. A vet stands beside him. At the ultimate moment before penetration, the vet diverts Go Man Go into an artificial vagina. A heavy leather tube, lined with plastic, it is about two feet long and has a suitcase handle. In its outer walls are two valves, one for compressed air and the other for water heated to a hundred and sixty-seven degrees. Injected hot water bubbles with air, giving Go Man Go a sense of grand reception. “He doesn’t know what is happening,” the vet explains. “He thinks he is inside the mare.”
A bottle in the artificial vagina catches the sperm and semen, which are immediately placed in a spectrometer. Fifty million sperm are counted off, and syringed into a teased-up mare. Fifty million more go into the next mare. One ejaculation will more than cover the entire group. Go Man Go is led back to his private pasture, dragging behind him his shattered metaphor: Go Man Go, standing at stud.
And not by 1975, needless to say, when I had paddled a hundred and fifty miles through the North Maine Woods in bark canoes with, among others, Henri Vaillancourt, the man who had made the canoes, using only an axe, an awl, a crooked knife, and a froe, sewing the hulls snug with the split roots of black spruce and other evergreens. He proved to be as headstrong in the woods and on the water as he was artful and deliberate in his shop, and he managed the trip as if he were the owner-skipper of a bireme. The last six miles were southeast-to-northwest over Caucomgomoc Lake, which is two miles wide, and when we came out of Ciss Stream and reached the lake we faced a headwind so strong that it was sinking deep troughs between high waves from which spray curled up like smoke. Vaillancourt dictated that we ignore this forbidding condition and cross the lake. We proceeded on. Scarcely a hundred yards northwest, the low-freeboard canoes were shipping water, and Vaillancourt’s bowman, Warren Elmer, whose wariness of Vaillancourt’s judgment had amplified day by day, now turned and bellowed at him, “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!”
Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word—with its silent “c” and its quartzite “k”—more shocking than a thunderclap. My parents thought it was a rhetorical crime. Mr. Shawn actually seemed philosophical about its presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, were in no sense as burdened as he was. Or as I was. Or as their grandparents were. In the car in their middle-school years, they batted that word between the back and front seats as if they were playing Ping-Pong. Driving, and hearing those words reach a critical mass, I once spontaneously bellowed (in an even-tempered, paternal way), “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—I can say it, too!”
Well, maybe in a car, but not in The New Yorker, not in 1975, and I didn’t need to be told. I had been writing for the magazine for a dozen years. There were no alternatives like “f—” or “f**k” or “[expletive deleted],” which sounds like so much gravel going down a chute. If the magazine had employed such devices, which it didn’t, I would have shunned them. “F-word” was not an expression in use then, and the country would be better off if it had not become one. So Warren Elmer said “fucking” on Caucomgomoc Lake, but the quote in The New Yorker was “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”
1980. Onward and no change of altitude. For example, in the last issue of that year, a line disappeared from Alice Munro’s “The Turkey Season,” and the gap was ficused over.
Munro in manuscript, presumably, for this is what appeared when “The Turkey Season” was collected in her book The Moons of Jupiter:
He said he had got sick of it, though, and quit.
What he said was, “Yeah, fuckin’ boats, I got sick of that.”
Language at the Turkey Barn was coarse and free, but this was one word never heard there.
The New Yorker:
He said he had got sick of it, though, and quit.
Language at the Turkey Barn was coarse and free, but in telling us this Brian used an expression that is commonplace today but was not so then.
Seven years later, in the last months of Shawn’s editorship, the soap sank at Procter & Gamble.
Trillin turned in a piece in which a financially beleaguered Nebraska farmer blamed his troubles on “the Goddam fuckin’ Jews!” Trillin:
I said that I felt I had to talk to Mr. Shawn about the quote, which was vital to my story, although I knew he had a lot on his plate and I wasn’t going to get on my high horse if he said no. Mr. Shawn asked about the possibility of a euphemism. I told him that the quote was from a state-police transcript. We talked about other options for a while, and finally he said, “Just go ahead and use it.” I mumbled something and backed slowly out of the office, thinking that if I made an abrupt move he might change his mind.
Into this milieu strode Bob Gottlieb, and when “Looking for a Ship” went to press he was three years into the job. Here and there in the piece were various shits and fucks, but they did not preoccupy him. The vocabulary of the sailor John Shephard still did preoccupy him: “Motherfucker, get another ship.”
On the day that the piece was to close, Bob called to ask if I would come see him in his office. I loved going to his office. Not just for the toaster. He kept part of his purse collection there. He asked if I might think it advisable to reconsider the sailor’s word.
Shephard didn’t reconsider it, I responded. How could I?
Bob said it was possible.
I said I preferred things as they were.
Bob leaned over a bright-yellow four-inch Post-it pad and in big black letters wrote MOTHERFUCKER on it with a Magic Marker. He was wearing an open-collared long-sleeved shirt. He stuck the Post-it on the shirt pocket. He said he would call me again later in the day.
I went back to my cell. Oddly, there was another brief passage in “Looking for a Ship” that might have concerned him, but he made no comment, ever, and—who knows—may not have thought it over. It dealt with tedium, and the yearning of people who go to sea to get off the sea.
Here by free will, and (in most cases) with histories behind them of decades on the sea, these people act like prisoners making “X”s on a wall. I was to hear Jim Gossett say to William Kennedy one morning, “Peewee, we’re under fifty days now. Forty-nine to go.” This brought to mind graffiti I had seen on the State of Maine, the training ship of the Maine Maritime Academy. As part of the curriculum, students spend two summers on the State of Maine. The graffiti said, “Only 13 more MFD’s, only 12 more MFD’s, only 11 more MFD’s,” and so on down a toilet stall. The “D” stood for “day.” To me it seemed a strange thing for someone to write who was going to college to go to sea. But no professional mariner would fail to understand it.
Off and on that day, Gottlieb walked the halls of the magazine wearing his MOTHERFUCKER Post-it as if it were a name tag at a convention. He looked in at office after office and loitered in various departments. He drew a blush here, a laugh there, startled looks, coughs, frowns. He gave writers moments of diversion from their writing. He gave editors moments to think of something other than writers. He visited just about everybody whose viewpoint he might absorb without necessarily asking for opinions. In the end, he called on me. He said The New Yorker was not for “motherfucker.”
* * *
I was very lucky to come into The New Yorker when I did, its vocabulary notwithstanding. My first piece was in 1963, but it was generically a memoir, and short, a “casual” in the magazine’s terminology, processed by the fiction department although it was fact. The piece that changed my existence came two years later, and was a seventeen-thousand-word profile of Bill Bradley, who was a student at Princeton. Shawn edited the piece himself, as he routinely did with new writers of long fact, breaking them in, so to speak, but not exactly like a horse, more like a baseball mitt. For a week or so before the press date, we met each day and went through galleys from comma to comma, with an extra beat for a semicolon. One point he was careful to make several times was that he was not interested in buying pieces that “sound like The New Yorker.” I imagine he was referring to the first-person plurals of The Talk of the Town (as Talk was written then), because the signed pieces he was publishing were not homogeneous. Nobody was going to look at an unlabeled swatch of S. J. Perelman and think it was written by Hannah Arendt. Now and again, Mr. Shawn said things that were most encouraging to a fretful, not to say neurotic, unconfident writer. He had had a lot of practice. He was fifty-seven when I met him. When he turned seventy-nine, he would still be The New Yorker’s editor. Among the varied forms of writing that regularly appeared in the magazine, his own greatest interest seemed to lie in the potentialities and possibilities of long nonfiction.
I wasn’t aware of any of that before 1965. There was no masthead, and I had never heard of him. Like most readers, I thought The New Yorker was put together by some sort of enlofted tribunal, a consortium of editors “we.” I had just wanted since high school to see something of mine in The New Yorker, and I had been continually rejected by The New Yorker until I was in my thirties. And now I was sitting nineteen floors up in an old building on Forty-third Street in a nondescript room with a polite and formal small bald man talking three-two zones, blind passes, reverse pivots, and the setting of picks. The defensive structures and offensive moves had been unknown to him, and soon he would forget them, but this week he wanted to understand them and passionately cared that they were clear. For some reason—nerves, what else?—I had forgotten to find a title before submitting the piece. Editors of every ilk seem to think that titles are their prerogative—that they can buy a piece, cut the title off the top, and lay on one of their own. When I was young, this turned my skin pink and caused horripilation. I should add that I encountered such editors almost wholly at magazines other than The New Yorker—Vogue, Holiday, The Saturday Evening Post. The title is an integral part of a piece of writing, and one of the most important parts, and ought not to be written by anyone but the writer of what follows the title. Editors’ habit of replacing an author’s title with one of their own is like a photo of a tourist’s head on the cardboard body of Mao Zedong. But the title missing on the Bill Bradley piece was my oversight. I put no title on the manuscript. Shawn did. He hunted around in the text and found six words spoken by the subject, and when I saw the first New Yorker proof the piece was called “A Sense of Where You Are.”
I have been grateful for that for more than fifty years, but it did not make me any less wary of Shawn. About nonfiction titles, he had a set of basic prejudices that he presented as clauses in the constitution of the magazine. The name of the subject shall not be the title, for example, even if the subject is oranges, as was the case in the second long piece I handed in to him, my first as a staff writer. I called it “Oranges.” That was the topic. What else did anyone need to know? Mr. Shawn took “Oranges” off the top and set up a proof called “Golden Lamps in a Green Night.” Yes. You are not George Booth’s dog. Your sight lines have converged on Shawn’s title. He took it from Andrew Marvell’s “Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda,” which was quoted in the text. After I went to pieces, Mr. Shawn mercifully picked them up as “Oranges.”
A couple of years later, after I turned in a piece I called “The Crofter and the Laird,” Mr. Shawn again invoked the no-subjects-as-titles clause, and this time his solution was so unintrusive and touching that I felt defenseless. It ran in The New Yorker as “The Island of the Crofter and the Laird.”
He wasn’t all commas and quirks. He said definitive things. When I asked him if I could do a piece on oysters, he said, slowly and softly, “No. That is reserved, in a general way, for another writer.”
“Another writer” was as close as he would ever come to naming another writer in a conversation with another writer. Shawn was the hub of a bicycle wheel and his writers were the spokes. He kept them separate, stiffened, discrete—connected to him but not to one another. One rare and reckless time, speaking to me in low and confidential tones, he mentioned “facile writers” (not, of course, by name) and the price that facile writers pay for their facility, and the suspicions that accrue to their velvet prose, and so on until I found myself hoping that he thought my own work was as rough as a shingle beach. If you were male, he called you Mister. “Hello, Mr. Singer. How are you? Is this a convenient time to talk?” He was never more familiar than that. The formality seemed practical to me. It’s easier to get rid of someone you call Mister. Think how much harder it would be to fire someone you were calling Sandy. If you were female, Mr. Shawn called you Miss or Mrs. He was born in 1907.
Two highly germane anecdotes about William Shawn and food—one concerning caribou in Alaska, the other about animals dead on the road in Georgia—have appeared in my book Silk Parachute and are quoted here:
Soon after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed, in 1971, which resulted in the reorganization of Alaskan land on a vast and complex scale, I developed a strong desire to go there, stay there, and write about the state in its transition. When I asked William Shawn if he would approve and underwrite the project, his response was firm and negative. Why? Not because it was an unworthy subject, not because The New Yorker was over budget, but because he didn’t want to read about any place that cold. He had a similar reaction to Newfoundland (“Um, uh, well, uh, is it cold there?”). Newfoundland, like Florida, is more than a thousand miles below the Arctic Circle, but Mr. Shawn shivered at the thought of it. I never went to work in Newfoundland, but, like slowly dripping water, I kept mentioning Alaska until at last I was in Chicago boarding Northwest 3.
The first long river trip I made up there was on the Salmon and the Kobuk, on the south slope of the Brooks Range. At some point, I learned and noted that the forest Eskimos of that region valued as a great delicacy the fat behind a caribou’s eye. Pat Pourchot, of the federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation (in recent years Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources), had organized the river trip and collected the provisions. Pourchot’s fields of special knowledge did not include food. For breakfast, he brought along a large supply of Pop-Tarts encrusted with pink icing and filled with raspberry jam. This caused me, in the manuscript ultimately delivered to the magazine, to present from the banks of the Kobuk River a philosophical choice:
Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias—the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian—which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?
There was in those days something known as “the Shawn proof.” From fact-checkers, other editors, and usage geniuses known as “readers,” there were plenty of proofs, but this austere one stood alone and seldom had much on it, just isolated notations of gravest concern to Mr. Shawn. If he had an aversion to cold places, it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food. I had little experience with him in restaurants, but when I did go to a restaurant with him his choice of entrée ran to cornflakes. He seemed to look over his serving flake by flake to see if any were moving. On the Shawn proof beside the words quoted above, he had written in the wide, white margin—in the tiny letters of his fine script—“the pop tart.”
* * *
So I have no idea by what freakishness of inattention Mr. Shawn had approved my application, a few years earlier, to go around rural Georgia with a woman who collected, and in many cases ate, animals dead on the road. She actually had several agendas, foremost of which was that she—Carol Ruckdeschel—and her colleague Sam Candler in the Georgia Natural Areas Council were covering the state in quest of wild acreages that might be preserved before it was too late. Under this ecological fog, Mr. Shawn seems not to have noticed the dead animals, let alone thought of them as anybody’s food, but I was acutely conscious from Day 1 of the journey and Day 1 of the writing that my first and perhaps only reader was going to be William Shawn. It shaped the structure, let me tell you. Where to begin? With the weasel we ate the first night out? Are you kidding, I asked myself, and did not need to wait for the answer. This was an episodic narrative of eleven hundred miles—embracing an isolated valley in the Appalachian north and Cemocheckobee Creek, in the far south—and I could start in the shrewdest possible place in the structure that was to be shaped like a nautilus through chronological flashback. Where to begin? Near Hunger and Hardship Creek, on the Swainsboro Road, in Emanuel County, we had come upon a dying turtle—a snapping turtle. There had been a funny scene with a sheriff who tried to shoot the turtle at point-blank range and missed. A turtle is not a weasel. Snapping turtles are not unknown to commercial soupmakers. Weighing a snapping turtle against weasels and water moccasins did not require consultation. The scene on the trip that had followed the turtle was a stream-channelization project—no food for squeamishness there. And after the turtle and the channelization I could go off into the biography of the central figure (Carol Ruckdeschel) and I’d have managed what turned out to be eight thousand words of a Shawn-wise beginning before I had to start over and eat that weasel.
I turned in the manuscript and went for a five-day walk in my own living room. The phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Mr. McPhee. How are you?” He spoke in a very light, very low, and rather lilting voice, not a weak voice, but diffident to a spectacular extent for a man we called the iron mouse.
“Fine, thank you, Mr. Shawn. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. Is this a good time to be calling?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, I liked your story.… No. I didn’t like your story. I could hardly read it. But that woman is closer to the earth than I am. Her work is significant. I’m pleased to publish it.”
Carol measured the weasel. She traced him on paper and fondled his ears. His skull and skin would go into the university’s research collection.
As a research biologist, she gathered skulls and pelts for Georgia State University, whose students in their labs wore them out so quickly that they needed frequent replacement.
With a simple slice, she brought out a testicle; she placed it on a sheet of paper and measured it. Three-quarters of an inch. Slicing smoothly through the weasel’s fur, she began to remove the pelt. Surely, she worked the skin away from the long neck. The flesh inside the pelt looked like a segment of veal tenderloin. “I lived on squirrel last winter,” she said. “Every time you’d come to a turn in the road, there was another squirrel. I stopped buying meat. I haven’t bought any meat in a year, except for some tongue. I do love tongue.” While she talked, the blade moved in light, definite touches. “Isn’t he in perfect shape?” she said. “He was hardly touched. You really lose your orientation when you start skinning an animal that’s been run over by a Mack truck.”
“Fine, thank you, Mr. Shawn. How are you?”
Carol put the weasel on the tines of a long fork and roasted it over the coals. “How do you like your weasel?” Sam asked me. “Extremely well done,” I said. Carol sniffed the aroma of the roast. “It has a wild odor,” she said. “You know it’s not cow. The first time I had bear, people said, ‘Cut the fat off. That’s where the bad taste is.’ I did, and the bear tasted just like cow. The next bear, I left the fat on.” The taste of the weasel was strong and not unpleasant. It lingered in the mouth after dinner. The meat was fibrous and dark.
* * *
In discussing a long fact piece, Mr. Shawn would say, often enough, “How do you know?” and “How would you know?” and “How can you possibly know that?” He was saying clearly enough that any nonfiction writer ought always to hold those questions in the forefront of the mind.
In a ruminative, digressive way, he once remarked that he thought young writers were “taking longer to find out what kinds of writers they are,” and he could think of no explanation. There was practical depth in those words alone, though. The writing impulse seeks its own level and isn’t always given a chance to find it. You can’t make up your mind in a Comp Lit class that you’re going to be a Russian novelist. Or even an American novelist. Or a poet. Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.
I spent my teen-age years and well beyond them worrying about what sort of writer, if any sort of writer, I might become. I wrote in many genres in college, including poetry, showing such originality that after my friend George Garrett published some excellent free verse called “Fire Engine” I soon offered the Nassau Literary Magazine a short, stubby poem called “Fire Plug.” Parody was not my intention, any more than plagiarism was my intention when I wrote of the tower of a ski jump that it swayed in the wind like readers of the Boston Evening Transcript. I was nineteen years old. Young writers generally need a long while to assess their own variety, to learn what kinds of writers they most suitably and effectively are, and every bit of that is what Shawn was encapsulating when he said the process seemed to be lengthening through time. Lengthening since when? He must have meant the nineteen-thirties, when he was a young editor. The process seemed very long in the fifties and sixties. In my case, after some television plays and who knows what, fictions became far between. I became completely absorbed with long nonfiction. The degree of difficulty in all forms of writing is high, and this was no picnic, but at least it felt right for me, as other forms did not. I have long thought that Ben Jonson summarized the process when he said, “Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.” Gender aside, I take that to be a message to young writers.
Art is where you find it. Good writing is where you find it. Fiction, in my view, is much harder to do than fact, because the fiction writer moves forward by trial and error, while the fact writer is working with a certain body of collected material, and can set up a structure beforehand. It is sometimes said that the line between fiction and nonfiction has become blurred. Not in this eye, among beholders. The difference between the two is distinct. Curious this: “Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.
Mr. Shawn was in the class of leaders who see no succession, like certain dictators, publishers, headmasters. Yet of course, as he advanced in years, the question of what would happen next grew around him like a rind. He reacted with stratagem. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, at least ten years before he actually retired and fifty before he meant to retire, he called me (as he did many other writers) and said he would like to try spreading some of his usual functions, implying but stopping short of saying that retirement was what he had in mind. From now on, he said, I would be dealing less with him about editorial matters than with Mr. Bingham. When something came up, I was to call Mr. Bingham. Only at certain times, Mr. Shawn said, would he be dealing directly with me; and those occasions would be, first, when I had an idea for a story and wished to propose it; second, when I had a completed manuscript to give to him; and third, when the story went to press.
Across his last decade as editor, he had almost as many dauphins as the French did in five hundred years. Or seemed to. And each of Shawn’s heirs was never more than apparent. As Confucius might say, You are what you can’t become, but you can see to it, for a time, that no one becomes what you are. Shawn’s successive designees were staff writers and staff editors. One by one, he raised them up, spotlighted them, and later found a reason (or seemed dismayed by a reason) to put them down. By and large, no two parties were offered the same explanation, and this resulted in misapprehensions, misunderstandings, enmities, and disappointments. Bystanders fell with the principals. This was not the only downside of an otherwise benevolent dictatorship, but it was probably the most cruel. He told Robert Bingham, for example, that Bingham would become The New Yorker’s editor; and Bingham, preparing himself mentally, lived with the expectation for a year or so before Shawn asked him to stop by when it was convenient, and told him that he was not to be the next editor, because, in the word Shawn used, Bingham was not of sufficient “character.” An earlier dauphin had died. Ever after, Shawn invoked his memory when needed, saying, with a helpless look, that the deceased candidate had been the one person in modern history fully qualified to become the next editor.
Mr. Shawn understood the disjunct kinship of creative work—every kind of creative work—and time. The most concise summation of it I’ve ever encountered was his response to a question I asked him just before we closed my first New Yorker profile and he sent it off to press. After all those one-on-one sessions discussing back-door plays and the role of the left-handed comma in the architectonics of basketball—while The New Yorker magazine hurtled toward its deadlines—I finally said in wonderment, “How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?”
He said, “It takes as long as it takes.”
As a writing teacher, I have repeated that statement to two generations of students. If they are writers, they will never forget it.
* * *
Shawn also recognized that no two writers are the same, like snowflakes and fingerprints. No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.
There are people who superimpose their own patterns on the work of writers and seem to think it is their role to force things in the direction they would have gone in if they had been doing the writing. Such people are called editors, and are not editors but rewriters. I couldn’t begin to guess the number of onetime students of mine who have sent me printed articles full of notes in the margins telling me what the original said. An editor I know (not professionally) tells me that he sees this topic from the other side and most writers need what they get. He will never convince this writer. My advice is, never stop battling for the survival of your own unique stamp. An editor can contribute a lot to your thoughts but the piece is yours—and ought to be yours—if it is under your name.
Editors have come along who use terms like “nut graph”—as in “What this piece needs is a good nut graph”—meaning a paragraph close to the beginning that encapsulates the subject and why you are writing about it. That sort of structural formalism is a part of the rote methodology that governs the thought of people who don’t have better ideas. Nut-graph moles have now and again infiltrated the subsummit levels of The New Yorker. One mole told the editor C. P. Crow, in handing him an article to edit, that it was missing a nut graph, gratuitously adding, a bit later, that the author of the piece “sure knows how to tell a story.”
Crow said, “So why don’t you let him tell it.”
Off and on, Crow edited pieces of mine for thirty years, and, after Bob Bingham died, was my principal editor for more than a decade. Crow was affable, likable, garrulous, thoughtful—yes. But with regard to the words in front of him he was a study in indiscernibility, not to say mystery and enigma. Did he like the piece? You weren’t going to hear it from him. He had not bought the piece. The overarching editor had bought the piece. Had Crow even read the piece? Half a dozen times—as would gradually become clear in fine, emergent detail. Crow, who detectably loved food, was the garde-manger of the New Yorker process, reacting to the marginalia of grammarians, fact-checkers, first readers, second readers, closers, lawyers, and the Supreme Eyeshade, selecting the marginalia on a short spectrum from valid to imperative and passing them along to the author.
With Mark Singer and Ian “Sandy” Frazier, Crow spent a lot of time at my fishing shack, where he referred to Mark and Sandy—even when they were over sixty—as “the children.” He once remarked of a dish I was preparing in advance that by afternoon it would be “dirty bacterial soup.” I still wondered if he felt that way about some of my pieces of writing, but one day—out of nowhere, twenty-five years after editing something of mine about who knows what—he told me that he had just finished rereading it from a book on his shelf at home.
Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage than at the end of the publishing process. Writers come in two principal categories—those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure—and they can all use help. The help is spoken and informal, and includes insight, encouragement, and reassurance with regard to a current project. If you have an editor like that, you are, among other things, lucky; and, through time, the longer the two of you are talking, the more helpful the conversation will be. At The New Yorker, I have had such luck, from those initial conversations with William Shawn to successive ones with Bob Bingham, Sara Lippincott, Pat Crow, John Bennet, and David Remnick, and also—in the shaping of books at Farrar, Straus and Giroux—with Harold Vursell, Tom Stewart, Patricia Strachan, Elisheva Urbas, Linda Healey, Natasha Wimmer, Jonathan Galassi, Alexander Star, and Paul Elie, himself an author of nonfiction books, whom I look up to as a writer and who, as an editor, seemed to care as much about my books as his own.
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William Shawn and Roger W. Straus Jr., the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, were friends across the years, and in 1987 Roger actually hired Mr. Shawn, setting up an office for him in Union Square, after new owners of The New Yorker accomplished for Mr. Shawn, with respect to retirement, what he had no sincere interest in accomplishing for himself. The dissimilarity between Roger and Mr. Shawn could not be exaggerated. They were a pea and a prawn in a pod. Shawn grew up in the middle of the merchant class. Roger was born with a copper spoon in his mouth: the Kennecott Copper Corporation, American Smelting and Refining. His mother was a Guggenheim. Shawn was as shy as he was soft-spoken. Roger was a fountain of garrulity. Words came out of him so fast that he tried to economize by saying, at the end of every other sentence, “et cetera, et cetera, and so forth, and so on.” If something was marvelous, it was “mawveless.” His words wore spats.
He was a publisher, not an editor, but his conversational attention to writers was, to say the least, voluminous. He nagged a little. Oddly, it was he who would ask when was I going to get my act together and finish some piece for The New Yorker, while Shawn, in twenty-two years, never did. But mostly, with Roger, it was just talk—in person from time to time, but mainly on the telephone. I was a beginner when he began that. He published my first book, in 1965, and he called maybe forty times a year for something close to forty years.
Roger belonged to the Lotos Club, an institution housed in a mansion on the Upper East Side and devoted to literature and art. In the early nineteen-nineties, the club planned a state dinner in Roger’s honor and asked me and Tom Wolfe, as FSG authors, to speak. When the day came, and my turn came, I said, “I hope you don’t mind if I speak from notes. In an author-publisher relationship of nearly thirty years, this is the first opportunity I have had to get some words in edgewise, and I don’t want to let even one of them get away. Last fall, after I was invited to speak here on January 30th, Roger Straus soon called me to say that this was entirely the club’s idea, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth, and so on, and definitely not his idea. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I told them I didn’t think you were very bright.’ He said that he did not want me to feel any obligation whatsoever to him. There was no need for me to have to come all the way in from Princeton. Et cetera, et cetera. And so forth, and so on.
“I said, ‘That’s not the issue, Roger. That’s not what we’re discussing. What I need to know is, Is it all right to say “Fuck you” in the Lotos Club?’
“He said, ‘I see the lines along which you are thinking. Of course it’s all right. It’s perfectly all right. And, besides, you’re not a member.’”
When I was quite young, I was inadvertently armored for a future with Roger Straus. My grandfather was a publisher. My uncle was a publisher. The house was the John C. Winston Company, “Book and Bible Publishers,” of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and on their list was the Silver Chief series, about a sled dog in the frozen north. That dog was my boyhood hero. One day, I was saddened to see in a newspaper that Jack O’Brien, the author of those books, had died. A couple of years passed. I went into high school. The publishing company became Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and my uncle Bob’s office moved to New York. When I was visiting him there one day, a man arrived for an appointment, and Uncle Bob said, “John, meet Jack O’Brien, the author of Silver Chief.” I shook the author’s hand, which wasn’t very cold. After he had gone, I said, “Uncle Bob, I thought Jack O’Brien died.”
Uncle Bob said, “He did die. He died. Actually, we’ve had three or four Jack O’Briens. Let me tell you something, John. Authors are a dime a dozen. The dog is immortal.”
As I have mentioned before, in various places and publications, Roger Straus would have understood not only my grandfather but also my great-grandfather Joseph Palmer, a farmer who had a mill pond and a sawmill on Doe Run, about thirty miles west of Philadelphia. He made, among other things, book boards—the hard parts of what are now called hardcover books. He sold them to Charles Ziegler, my great-uncle, who owned Franklin Bindery, and whose best customer was the John C. Winston Company. Winston claimed to publish more Bibles than anyone else in the world, and at the other end of their list was my grandfather’s specialty, the hardcover equivalent of the newspaper extra. In 1912, he published a quickie on the Titanic while the bubbles were still numerous and the ice had yet to melt.
Being a publisher, my grandfather naturally kept a pair of pearl-handled .44-calibre Colt Peacemakers in a velvet-lined box in his study.
I dealt with Roger Straus without an agent. Contractual negotiations took place in private conversation between us. I risked foolishness. I once asked Roger, “How much money am I losing as a result of not having an agent?” And he answered, “Not a whole hell of a lot.”
One time, when he was contracting to publish a hefty hardcover book with my name on it as author, I asked him for an advance, and he said, “Fuck you.” That is exactly what he said. Truth be told, though, the book was an amalgam of fragments of other books, for which he had long since paid advances.
He always said that he wanted to publish authors, not books. This principle contained not only an admirable loft but also a faint implication that if you had a dog you could bring it to the party. In 1968, when we talked about publishing what was to be my fifth book but first collection of miscellaneous pieces, I said to him, “This one isn’t going to make a nickel. Collections never do. I’m grateful to you just for publishing it. Don’t bother to pay me an advance.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “I’m your publisher. Of course I will pay you an advance. I insist.” And he named a sum so low that I am somewhat shy to reveal it.
In fact, it was fifteen hundred dollars. The book was published in 1969. It did not do well over the counter. It took fourteen years to earn back the fifteen hundred dollars. Notice something, though: after all those years, it was in print. Commercially, that book could not have been a bigger dog if its title was Remainder. In conglomerate publishing, it would have vanished three weeks after it was published. But Roger kept it in print, as he kept all my books—marginal and otherwise, hardcover and soft—in print. When I cashed his checks, I could hear the tellers giggling as I walked away, but even in my Scottish core I really didn’t care. Across the first decade of the twenty-first century, that ancient collection of miscellaneous pieces sold about seven hundred copies a year. A small figure. But for that book—for any trade book—forty-some years is an amazing longevity. Thanks entirely to its publisher. The dog is immortal.
At the Lotos Club, after telling some of those stories, I said, “Tom and I are here because Tom is the house eagle and I am the company mule. I say that with no false humility. I say it as plain fact. I would not know how to light a bonfire if someone handed me the match. I write about geology. In a sense, I am selling rocks. In Union Square, I know a sucker who will buy them.”
In 1975, I began teaching my course in factual writing at Princeton. Annually, until after the turn of the millennium, Roger drove down in his Mercedes and talked nonstop to the assembled students—et cetera, et cetera, and so forth, and so on—with a cumulative rate of repetition of four per cent. He repeatedly came to the course in a period when his health was inconvenienced by cancer. The students were always well prepared to interview him, but one question was enough. “Could you tell us about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?” someone said. And Roger said, “Eighteen years ago, when I first started having serious intercourse with the big A…” and he was off and running for three hours of free association.
When The New Yorker appeared to Roger to be heading down some sort of tube, he came to my campus office and offered five independent book contracts aggregating a sum that would not impress a hedge-fund manager but might have impressed a literary agent had one been present—or, as I said at Roger’s memorial service, in 2004 at the 92nd Street Y, “It was enough money, actually, to keep me alive until this moment, which Roger may have had in mind. I’m a little sorry that I am speaking at his service rather than he at mine, because it would have been a lot more entertaining the other way around. I used to try not to think about the possibility that some day the dialogue would end, the hundreds and hundreds of phone calls, the flying humor. He was there in my thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, and was still leading me up the street on a leash when I entered my seventies. If he kept back money that he might have laid on me, I’m particularly happy about that now, because I’m sure he has it with him, and he’ll need it.”