The New Yorker practices a “close” style of punctuation. We separate introductory clauses with a comma (though not necessarily in fiction), but not when they follow a conjunction (except “since” or “although”) or when the meaning is restrictive. It’s not always easy to decide what’s restrictive. That’s where judgment comes in. For instance, here is a sentence, chock-full of commas, that was quoted by Ben Yagoda in an online article for the New York Times: “Before Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret . . .” Yagoda wrote, “No other publication would put a comma after ‘died’ or ‘cancer.’ The New Yorker does so because otherwise (or so the thinking goes), the sentence would suggest that Atwater died multiple times and of multiple causes.” He added, “That is nutty, of course.” The Times—and Yagoda, who teaches journalism—prefers an “open” style of punctuation, where all the words stream together and every phrase or clause is of equal moment, leaving the reader to figure it out. Some readers are especially proud of their ability to figure it out and like to write letters of complaint and, put, a, comma, after, every, word, to show us the error of our ways.
Secretly, I agreed with Yagoda. Once, when I was working on a Gould proof—transferring changes from Eleanor’s proof onto a Reader’s proof—I had the unsettling thought “What if Eleanor ever loses it?” What if all these commas and hyphens and subtleties of usage prove to be the products of a benign delusion? During the Reagan administration, everyone knew that Reagan had some form of dementia, but no one could do anything about it. The country was running on automatic. What if that was the case with Eleanor and The New Yorker? She was getting old, and she went deaf in her later years, so she was tragically isolated from the sounds of speech that were represented in the words she groomed. There was not a single thing anyone would be able to do about it. No one would enter the copy department and say to Eleanor, “Drop the pencil and step away from the desk.” We were in her thrall, as the nation was in Reagan’s thrall. I jumped up and went to my boss’s office and said, “What if Eleanor goes crazy?” From the expression on her face—“You’re only figuring this out now?”—I knew that we were all well advanced down the path.
Having been teased in the Times about New Yorker commas, I took a good hard look at the comma shaker, Lu Burke’s protest against the indiscriminate sprinkling of commas. In fact these commas were not indiscriminate. They marked off segments of the sentence that were not germane to the meaning. The point of the sentence Yagoda had chosen for mild ridicule is that Atwater expressed regret before he died. What he died of and when he died of it are both extra details that the author, Jane Mayer, provides only to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. Cause and date of death are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. They are nonrestrictive. I might even have been tempted to bury the obituary in parentheses, like a whisper: “Before Atwater died (of brain cancer, in 1991), he expressed regret . . .” Parentheses often act like giant commas, and commas like tiny parentheses. And it struck me as sad that anyone could be so distracted by the punctuation of a sentence that he failed to absorb the meaning of the words.
A while later, I received a letter objecting to the commas in this opening sentence of a piece by Marc Fisher: “When I was in high school, at Horace Mann, in the Bronx, in the nineteen-seventies, everyone took pride in the brilliant eccentricity of our teachers.” The gist of that sentence is that at Horace Mann students enjoyed interacting with their crazy teachers. But if all you see when you read it is the commas, you miss that. Close punctuation is not meant as a guide to stops and starts, like Dickens’s and Melville’s commas. The New Yorker isn’t asking you to pause and gasp for breath at every comma. That’s not what close punctuation is about. The commas are marking a thoughtful subordination of information. I really don’t see how any of them could be done without. The writer went to only one high school, a very special one-of-a-kind private school that happened to be in the Bronx, and the time that he went there was the nineteen-seventies. None of that is particularly interesting except in the context of a piece that promises to be about the bond between students and teachers. The punctuation is almost like Braille, providing a kind of bas-relief, accentuating the topography of the sentence. It looks choppy, but you don’t have to chop it up when you read it. It is Aldo Manuzio’s comma taken to its logical extreme. It’s not insane—it’s not even nutty. It’s just showing what’s important in the sentence in a subtle way. Another publication would let you figure it out for yourself. And, if that’s what you want, you can always read some other magazine.
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In the summer of 2013, in New Haven, where I had gone for the wedding of a friend, I picked up a copy of Light Years, by James Salter. I started it in an old hotel, the Duncan, feeling slightly sad that I had never gotten to go to Yale and wondering if I would have access to my friend, a delightful combination of a Catholic and a classicist, now that he was married. Light Years is about a marriage, its surface—an enviable round of dinner parties and indulgent Christmas projects (the daughters of the house actually have a pony) in a picture-postcard setting within commuting distance of Manhattan—and its coming apart from underneath. James Salter is a pen name. The writer’s name was James Horowitz. His fiction had run only once in The New Yorker, but the staff writer Nick Paumgarten had recently written a long piece about him, and there was so much buzz about it in the office that I read it on my own time.