Lu Burke sat in the office next to Eleanor’s, her desk facing a wall that James Thurber had drawn on in pencil—a self-portrait, a football player, a man slumped over a typewriter. She was a proofreader and proud of it. “Not everyone can read proof,” she used to say. Lu had worked at Life. At The New Yorker she read the fiction, valuing the writer’s voice over correct usage, and edited the cartoon captions and the newsbreaks, those column fillers that The New Yorker ran, making fun of other publications’ mistakes and making us acutely self-conscious about our own mistakes. “Are the glory years of The New Yorker gone forever?” This was the single typewritten line of a letter from a reader, seared in memory, sent in with a clipping from our pages, in which “chaise longue” had been erroneously rendered “chaise lounge.” (That’s how we said it in Ohio.) In her crisp, inimitable hand, Lu had added her own comment—“They certainly are!”—and circulated the letter. I never made that mistake again.
Lu wore Earth shoes and bluejeans and long-sleeved pullovers and stud earrings. She had short gray hair and snappy blue eyes. She patrolled the halls like a prison warden—you could almost see the ring of keys at her side—and she terrorized anyone new in the copy department. She had a jeweler’s eye for print, and kept a loupe on her desk. Also on her desk was a canister, with a perforated lid, about the size of a shaker for red-pepper flakes in a pizzeria, wrapped in brown paper, on which she had drawn commas and the words “Comma Shaker.” This was Lu’s comment on The New Yorker’s “close” style of punctuation: she thought we used too many commas. Instead of Fowler’s, she preferred a slim volume called Mind the Stop. Lu thought that elements of New Yorker style were ridiculous; for instance, our habit of putting points in I.B.M. when IBM itself had long since done without them, and of sticking a comma in Time, Inc., as if oblivious of the publisher’s own practice (and of the pun on “ink”). Yet there was no more zealous enforcer.
In almost every way Lu was the opposite of Eleanor. She would never make what she called “a wooden fix.” Eleanor might bend a sentence to her own logic; Lu would give it its head. Another colleague, Alice Quinn, once told me how Lu had explained the editorial process: “First we get the rocks out, Alice. Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer’s voice rises. No harm done.” I could picture Lu peering at Alice with her snappy blue eyes, as if she were amusing herself by trying to scare a child. Her proofs, like her manner and her handwriting, were crisp and persuasive (all right, she was a bully). If you laid something in front of her on the desk to ask a question—maybe something subtle about an antecedent—her eye would light on an egregious error, and she’d say, “Get rid of that o,” pointing to a hideous misspelling of “memento.”
The only time you had to use your judgment in collating was when there was a conflict between, say, the author and a proofreader, and the editor hadn’t been clear about which change he preferred, or when the author or a checker added something: it hadn’t gone through the copydesk, so it had to be styled. One of the first decisions I had to make was how to style “copy edit.” I made it one word: “copyedit.” The next day, Eleanor Gould not only undid my change in a revise of the piece but issued a style memo: henceforth “copy editor” was two words as a noun, hyphenated as a verb—“to copyedit.” It was uncanny: every time I had to make a decision and went with my instinct, I did the opposite of what Eleanor Gould would have done.
The great minefield in collating was a proof from the author, because that is where collating overlapped into copy editing (two words as a gerund). My job was to slavishly (and legibly) copy what was on the proof—I was a scribe—and not to correct or corrupt the text. But surely I wasn’t meant to copy errors. And nobody would appreciate it if I did something obtrusive like insert a question mark in brackets. Everyone would wonder where it came from. It was one thing to correct a spelling—make sure there were two n’s in “annihilate,” for instance—and another to judge what the author meant if he wrote that something or other was “immanent.” Was that a mistake? Or a philosophical position? I’ve never met a usage of “immanent” that made the word’s meaning clear to me. I took one such question to Eleanor Gould, who read it and said, in her slightly braying but kindly voice, “It sounds pretty imminent to me.”
Often a word would come up that I had never seen before and could not find in the dictionary. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there—I just couldn’t see it, probably because I didn’t want to see it. I had a skeptical streak and an ego, and at some level I thought that if I had never seen a particular word it didn’t exist. One year in the Christmas list on food, the writer inserted the word “terrine,” as in “a terrine of foie gras.” I had never seen the word “terrine” (much less an actual terrine full of foie gras) and couldn’t find it in the dictionary, neither the Little Red Web nor the unabridged. So I changed it to “tureen.” I might as well have changed it to “punchbowl.” It was no excuse that I came from a family that didn’t eat a lot of paté. (The fanciest thing we had on the table was Brown ’n Serve rolls, which we called Black ’n Serve rolls, because my mother usually burned them. A college friend made merciless fun of me in the dining hall when I complained that the butter tasted funny and it came out that I had been raised on margarine.) Fortunately, the structure of the department was such that several people, including the author, read the proofs the next day, and the word appeared in the magazine as “terrine.”