Checking my work, Dave Jackson drew his pencil through the entire word “flower” and brought the line out to the margin and wrote “flour,” making my timid mark into something bolder, and then printed my initials firmly in the upper right-hand corner: MN.
I was thrilled to have found such a flagrant error, but dismayed to see my initials. Could there be a duller combination of letters of the alphabet? I had always printed my initials as MJN, which I thought was more elegant—my pen name was going to be M. J. Norris (though I hoped no one would figure out that my middle name was Jane). But I didn’t have the nerve to correct Dave Jackson. He nipped out my middle initial, just like that, and baptized me into the culture of The New Yorker.
I went back down to the library, back to my paste pot and my single-edge razor blade and the special pen with white ink for printing writers’ names in block letters on the spines of the black scrapbooks. I was proud of myself for finding that mistake, but I had to suppress any sign of excitement. Because no great intellectual effort was expected of me in the library, and the work so nearly resembled things I had done in kindergarten (albeit with blunt-edged scissors), I celebrated by going across the street to the Blue Bar at the Algonquin and having beer and peanuts for lunch. Later that week I got a note through interoffice mail. It said, “I thank you, the writer thanks you, Eleanor Gould thanks you, the proofreader thanks you, the fact checker thanks you, we all thank you for doing what we in all our numbers could not do: catching the flower for flour in the Christmas list on food.” At the end were scrawled the initials GB: Gardner Botsford, the breezy, regal editor whom the men of the makeup department had told stories about on my very first day. It elated me. I had made my first catch.
Chapter 2
THAT WITCH!
I ALWAYS FORGET THAT, IN THE popular imagination, the copy editor is a bit of a witch, and it surprises me when someone is afraid of me. Not long ago, a young editorial assistant getting her first tour of the New Yorker offices paused at my door to be introduced, and when she heard I was a copy editor she jumped back, as if I might poke her with a red-hot hyphen or force-feed her a pound of commas. Relax, I wanted to say. I don’t make a habit of correcting people in conversation or in print—unless it’s for publication and they ask for it, or I’m getting paid.
We copy editors sometimes get a reputation for wanting to redirect the flow, change the course of the missile, have our way with a piece of prose. The image of the copy editor is of someone who favors a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people’s errors, a lowly person who is just starting out on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers. I suppose I have been all of these.
But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn’t poking up—unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.