Do anything long enough, and you hang up a record. Just go to bed every night, and before you know it you’ve passed Sleeping Beauty. Set down the dog’s dinner, day by day, and pretty soon he’s put away enough Alpo to feed the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving. “Hey,” said a colleague of mine, sticking his head in my office door the other day. “Did you know that you’ve rejected fifteen thousand stories here? I just figured it out. Fifteen thousand, easy.”
Well, thanks. I got out a pencil and did some figuring, and decided that eighteen thousand was probably more like it. I tried to envision that many manuscripts trudging back home again in the rain, and to imagine the reception they got there when they rang the bell—“Oh. You again”—and, wincing, I heard the mumbled apologies and explanations. Then I added on all the other mournful regiments of rejected fiction sent back from this salient, down the years, by fellow-editors of mine in the same line of work: a much larger body of the defeated and the shot-down—a whole bloody Caporetto. “We regret . . . ,” I murmured unhappily to myself. “Thank you for . . .” I sounded like a field marshal.
The regret is real, though it may vary in depth from one manuscript to the next. What is certain is that no one can read fiction for thirty-eight years, or thirty-eight weeks, and go on taking any pleasure in saying no. It works the other way around. You pick up the next manuscript, from a long-term contributor or an absolute stranger (“Prize in Undergraduate Composition; two summers at Pineaway under Guy de Maupassant; stories in Yurt, Springboard, and Yclept; semifinalist in . . .”), and set sail down the page in search of life, or signs of life; your eye is caught and you flip eagerly to the next page and the one after that. Can it be? Mostly, almost always, it is not—or not quite. You read on to the end (well, not always to the end) and then make a note to yourself about what you will say to your old friend who hasn’t sold a story here in two years, or what to put, in some lines scribbled at the end of the printed form, to the young or not so young author who has laid his or her soul out on these eighteen pages but somehow not in a way that makes you want to slow down and enter this particular bar in company with Jay and Hugo and Lynn, or hear more of what was said on the back porch on a particular night of recriminations and fireflies. Sometimes there is a little descriptive passage or some paragraphs of dialogue, or the tone or tinge of a page or two, to single out for praise or encouragement, but even these responses, let it be said, may go into a return letter as much to make yourself feel better, a bit less of a monster, as in any great hopes of getting a socko manuscript from this same author in a month’s time.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about fiction. “How do you get a story published in The New Yorker?” somebody asks. “Send it in, and if we like it we’ll publish it,” I reply, and my interlocutor shoots me a knowing look and says, “No, seriously—”
“Are you looking for the typical New Yorker story?” someone else asks. “Sure, lady,” I want to answer back. “The one that’s exactly like Borges and Brodkey and Edna O’Brien and John O’Hara and Susan Minot and Eudora Welty and Niccolò Tucci and Isaac Singer. That’s the one, except with more Keillor and Nabokov in it. Whenever we find one of those, we snap it right up.”
A distinguished reporter here, the author of long, ferociously researched articles, stopped by to see me one day in great excitement, to say he was giving up all this drudgery and would write only fiction from now on. “Fiction writers never have to leave their desks, do they?” he said.
“Well, no,” I said. “Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“They have to get up to vomit,” I said.
A visiting reporter from a media journal once asked, “What are you people looking for in the fiction line? What are your standards?”
I stalled for time. “I don’t know what they are,” I mumbled at last. “We’ve never decided. We want something good—you know, something we like.”
“No, seriously,” she said, but when she saw that we were serious (I had cunningly laid on some colleagues) she closed her notebook. Her piece never appeared.
The writers are the main players, which means that we can hurry past such esoterica as the opinion sheet, on which two or three or more fiction editors weigh in helpfully or warily or stubbornly (“Hate to disagree, but—”) on an incoming manuscript; often the process turns up some structural flaws, and the work is shipped back to its creator for minor or major repairs. Or rejected. No contributor is spared this blunt possibility, which may explain why certain celebrated authors have attempted to negotiate an acceptance before a story of theirs is sent along, or have stopped submitting altogether. Lack of unanimity on an opinion sheet is not uncommon, nor is the brave or truculent silence of a dissenting editor in the face of a story that has been taken in spite of his or her fervent objections: a turn of events that brings brief, rushing doubts about the future of Western civilization, or about the sanity of the Editor, who has had the last word. This is a weekly, thank God, and a few days later we fiction people are out in the hall exclaiming over a new manuscript, by an old standby or a total unknown, that has just gone the rounds: “Have you read it? Isn’t that terrific!” Some writer has made our day, and we are collegial once again, gleaming in reflected brilliance.
Just as there is no one way to write a story, there is no one way to edit it for publication, or to deal with its author over an extended period of time. What is being set down here, I mean, is one editor’s experiences and recollections of these semi-private matters—a selective history that cannot give proper honor to my departmental colleagues, past and present, or to writers whose work did not happen to come my way. What I noticed about bygone fellow fiction editors at the magazine—among them, Robert Henderson, William Maxwell, Robert Hemenway, Rachel MacKenzie, Frances Kiernan, Patricia Strachan, and Veronica Geng—was how much alike they were in their passion for their work, and how different in the ways they went about it. The same holds true for my present friends and everyday companions here, whose devoted attentions continue the long line of New Yorker stories—over six thousand of them so far—while properly encouraging its alteration, almost issue by issue, in directions unforeseen. Fiction is special, of course, for its text must retain the whorls and brush-splashes of the author: the touch of the artist. At the same time, the editor should not feel much compunction about asking the writer the same questions he would put to himself about a swatch of his own prose: Is it clear? Does it say what I wanted it to say? Is it too long? Does it sound right—does it carry the tone that I want the reader to pick up right here? Is it, just possibly, too short? And so on. (It’s no coincidence, by the way, that so many New Yorker fiction editors have also been writers.)
Some distinguished editors here have forsworn most such meddling, particularly with young contributors, on the theory that the writer almost always knows best. My own instincts lean the other way, for the obligation to preserve the sanctity of a neophyte’s script is counterbalanced by my hope that he will, by life habit, come to ask himself those short, tough questions as he writes along, never omitting the big question at the end: Is it good enough? Is it any good at all? Lifelong practitioners—the best ones, I’ve noticed—ask themselves this every day: that’s why they look the way they do (hunched over their word processors, or at the bar next door), which is like morticians.
That new story we exclaimed about will be brilliant, but perhaps not right away. A week has gone by, and its author—a young man in his twenties, let’s say, not previously published in The New Yorker or anywhere else—is in my office. We are sitting side by side at the desk, with his manuscript between us, and on its top page he finds some light pencillings and question marks. What’s this? The joyful, sunstruck expression he has worn ever since he got the good news fades a fraction; middle age, one could say, has just begun. They edit fiction here? “Don’t worry,” I say. “Let’s take a look. Down here, do you want these three whole lines about the dog, who doesn’t turn up again in the story until . . . until over here on page 11? Do you want to say something quicker about the dog? Up to you . . . But before this, up here at the top of the paragraph, I’m not sure why the father seems so bitter. Do you need to explain that, or have you made him seem angrier than you meant to? Well, let’s mark that and move on . . . Over here on page 4, just after Lucinda goes off in the truck, you’ve used this same construction for the third time in a row—you’ve got awfully fond of those dashes. Want to do it some other way? And then here’s your ‘dirgelike darkness,’ right in the middle of this wonderful scene. Can darkness have a sound? What should we do about that?”
I pause and look at him. He is trying to decide whether I’m simply a bully or someone out to steal his writer’s soul. Perhaps it’s neither. How can he be persuaded that these are the same wireworms and dust balls that every writer discovers in the corners of his beautiful prose, no matter how carefully he has woven it and laid it down? The young man looks pale, and who can blame him? He feels himself at a brink. He wants to be an artist, but he also wants to be a pro. His words, which once looked so secure, so right, are beginning to let him down. Why is this all so hard? Why has the language suddenly turned balky? He needs time to think it over.
“Never mind the dashes,” I offer now. “I think they’ll work fine. And you can look at that ‘dirgelike’ later on, when this is all in type.”
We go on to the next page, and I have a passing brief memory of other writers, sitting just here to my left, as we bend over a manuscript or a proof together. William Maxwell, cheerfully x-ing out a proposed line change (marked “for clarity” at the margin of the galley), smiles and says, “I don’t want to be too clear.” Donald Barthelme, encountering a short paragraph with my “Omit?” at its flank, sighs and reddens. He is the cleanest of writers, and proud. “Well, yes, goddam it, if you say so,” he mutters at last. “I count on you to get the hay out.” And then it is my turn to wonder if I’m right. Later on, I may recall some words of William Shawn’s—the only advice about editing I ever heard him put forward. “It’s very easy to make somebody’s manuscript into the best story ever written,” he said. “The trick is to help the writer make it into the best story he can write on that particular day.”
If I could do it, I would invite the first-time author to come back on a day when I am sitting here with John Updike, going over the galley proofs of a story of his, or discussing them with him on the telephone. Updike has rewritten (in his angling pencilled handwriting) some lines of his, up on top of a long paragraph, and we are trying to decide about a word in the middle of one sentence. “Well, you may be right,” he says in his soft, musing way. “Which do you think sounds better?” He says the phrase with the word in it over to himself once or twice and makes a decision. The following day, after this and a dozen other burning trifling matters have been resolved, I overnight the revised page proofs to him at his home in Massachusetts, and two days later—on the morning the story must go to press—the proofs come back to me with the word and the whole section we discussed crossed out. The top of the paragraph has been redone in pencil, done differently: the content is the same, but the tone, the feeling, of the passage has shifted. Elsewhere on the proofs, Updike has altered some bits of punctuation, crossed out things, reworded something else. This is the way the story will appear in the magazine, and, later on, the way it will read in the next collection of Updike’s stories. The book will go into libraries, and into some school and college curricula, I imagine. The way the story reads—the words that students will find in the book and will believe were put down that way from the beginning, cut in stone—is only another stage in the struggle to get the writing to do its work: the version that the author and the editor had to let go of in the end.
The young writer’s own galleys (with some of the queries and suggestions taken, others not) will be finished up, too, one day, and he and I will shake hands, out by the elevators. The story will appear next week—a great moment for us both. He is launched, and his tippy little canoe will soon disappear round the bend, on a journey whose duration no one can tell. I don’t think he knows how short it may turn out to be, or how unimaginably long. “Let us hear from you,” I say.
Reading short-fiction manuscripts can be wearing and wearisome from day to day and week to week. Every human situation, every sort of meeting or conversation, is something you have read before or know by heart. But then here comes a story—maybe only a couple of paragraphs in that story—and you are knocked over. Your morning has been changed; you are changed. A young woman and her sister, a nun, are talking in the back yard in the evening, and Sister Mary Clare says that she is going to take a vow of silence. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?” she asks, and her sister says no, it’s a good idea.
“If you care, I’m not very happy,” Sister said.
“You were never happy,” Melissa said. “The last time I saw you laughing was the day that swing broke. Remember that day?”
Spare and pure, the story murmurs along to its ending. It is intimate and painful and then it stops, and these particular lives go on. It is Mary Robison’s “Sisters,” her first acceptance here—though not, I believe, her first submission. It was written in 1977 and now feels like part of its time, but what I felt when I came to those lines is still fresh and strong. Every fiction editor here has had such an experience, and eagerly waits for the next one.
That same era brought a freshet of striking fiction from Ann Beattie: along with the painful, sensual feelings of loss in those stories came assemblages of characters apparently insatiable for company but increasingly alone—young men and women talking and cooking, arriving from somewhere, telling stories, picking up on ironic details, patting the dog, getting drunk, changing the music, driving to town for pizza, waking up in the night, waiting for something else to happen. The titles—“Vermont,” “Tuesday Night,” “Shifting,” “Downhill,” “A Vintage Thunderbird,” “Colorado,” and the rest—are a generational montage now, but the stories remain vital news for anyone who read them when they were just written and just out.
“Epiphanies” became the chic, dismissing word for scenes of this kind, but other forms of the short story, arriving here in due course, seemed only to reach the same ends by a different route. Bobbie Ann Mason’s scrupulously detailed accounts of a younger K mart generation of Southerners, living in mobile homes and shabby condos and making do with the remnants of their parents’ lost rural America, brought characters less inclined to linger on what was happening around them but perhaps no less aware that something had been going wrong in their world. Mason is such a sharp noticer of down-home detail—her people make Star Trek needlepoint pillows, own cats named Moon Pie, unexpectedly find the name “Navratilova” floating in their heads, and know that “Radar Love” is a great driving song—that we sometimes don’t give her her full due as a chronicler of American loss. I remember once asking whether her men and women felt emotion without always finding ways to show it, and she said, “I don’t understand. I thought these stories were nothing but emotion.” Then, a year or two later, while she was finishing her poignant post-Vietnam novel, “In Country,” a section of which ran here in 1985, she called me and said, “The emotion has turned up. I don’t think I can stand much more of this.”
We editors wait for whatever it is that the writers are trying to discover, and sometimes it arrives here in surprising forms. Once, it arrived in a flash—a gas explosion in a parking lot, where some kids were listening to Bruce Springsteen over their radios and had flicked their lighters during “Born in the U.S.A.” That 1988 story, Alan Sternberg’s “Blazer,” was the first of his gritty, eloquent panoramas of southern Connecticut mechanics and builders and carpenters and cops and landfill inspectors toughing out hard times and industrial decline, along with their wives—who, all in all, were handling it a lot better than they were.
Stories and groups of stories work differently, and may require editors and readers to learn their particular tone and language before they can reach us, sometimes while an author is also struggling to find a direction or an opening that is not yet clear. Now and then, a writer stakes out an entire region of the imagination and of the countryside—one thinks of Cheever, Salinger, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver, and now Alice Munro and William Trevor—which becomes theirs alone, marked in our minds by unique inhabitants and terrain. Writers at this level seem to breathe the thin, high air of fiction without effort, and we readers, visiting on excursion, feel a different thrumming in our chests as we look about at a clearer, more acute world than the one we have briefly departed. Reading Alice Munro’s tales (the old word fits here) brings back for me, every time, the mood of thrilling expectancy with which I read the entrancing events in all those variously tinted fairy-story collections of my childhood—“The Blue Fairy Book,” “The Yellow Fairy Book,” “The Grey Fairy Book,” and the rest. Trevor’s stories, by contrast, are quieting, but with the awful calm of acceptance: his precise, deadly stitchings of country or family circumstances and cruelties leave their victims, for the most part, silent or almost decorously murmurous in resignation.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s stories, arriving here (on crinkly, tightly typed airmail paper) from India in a steady stream through the sixties and seventies, moved at a pace that sometimes made me fidget or sigh impatiently for more action and swifter developments—but only while I was still in the early pages. Reading along, I would find myself slowing, and listening to the sounds and hours of a different continent, as I grew aware of the grinding societal weight with which lives were being fixed, in comical or gruesome or affecting fashion, in the multilayered modern India she knew so well. Mrs. Jhabvala, who is Polish but is married to an Indian architect, wrote, in the introduction to her last collection, “Out of India,” of her deep discomfort with the hypocrisies and ironies of her second country. “I have no heart for these things here,” she said, and, “All the time I know myself to be on the back of this great animal of poverty and backwardness.” Almost in self-defense, it appears, she watched and wrote. Her stories can be satirical (a wealthy, Anglicized young Indian, making out with a similarly modernized girl on a date, thinks, I am kissing a Parsee), or simultaneously touching and tough-minded (an old woman attempts to explain the lifelong passion that keeps her close to the elderly, Dutch-born sahib who has been her careless lover), or scarifying (in a similar situation, a police superintendent sexually mounts his Muslim mistress while encouraging her to pray out loud, after her fashion, on her knees). Jhabvala’s fiction runs more to novels these days, and since leaving India she has given most of her attention to screenwriting, as her Oscar-winning screenplays for the long-established Merchant-Ivory production company attest. It would be ungrateful to complain.
The movies have also snatched away a different but no less valued contributor, Woody Allen. Most of his work for this magazine, to be sure, came in the form of wild parodies and casuals, which isn’t quite what we’re talking about here, but at least one submission, “The Kugelmass Episode,” is a dazzling short story, a Koh-i-noor of the form—not the first attribute that would come to mind while one is wheezing or pounding one’s thigh in happiness over the C.C.N.Y. humanities professor Sidney Kugelmass, who, through the ministrations of a magician, is able to bring the live Emma Bovary to New York (he stashes her at the Plaza) and, conversely, to visit her at Yonville. Allen’s modest early submissions here so resembled the work of his literary hero S. J. Perelman that I had to remind him that we already had the original on hand; he saw the point and came up with the remedy, almost overnight. Those first casuals also seemed to carry a joke, or sometimes two or three jokes, in every sentence—something that didn’t work as well on the page as it did when one heard the same stuff during one of Woody’s standup routines at the Bitter End. “Fewer laughs?” he said doubtfully, and, horrified at the thought, I nodded yes—yes, please.
“Whatever Works” should be the sampler that a fiction editor keeps affixed to his wall, or up over the water cooler. Mary Robison’s story “Yours” seemed to have some missing manuscript pages when it turned up in the mail in 1980, but after I’d read its seven hundred and ninety words it was plain that a single line more would be much less. “We” was the title of Mary Grimm’s 1988 story about a Midwestern working-class neighborhood of young newly married women friends, and the pronoun was repeated through multiple scenes, in paragraph after paragraph, as the group became less obsessed with sex and more with children, tried out recipes and new jobs, and grew older and more private together. The “we” was an impossibility, a trick, but one that became more pleasing and useful and right as the story moved to its terrific conclusion.
You never know. Edith Templeton’s engaging first-person stories of her childhood in the grand-monde nurseries and castles of Czechoslovakia in the nineteen-twenties, which ran here thirty years ago and more, offered no preparation for “The Darts of Cupid,” in 1968, a rending erotic love story about a married British woman working in the United States War Office outside London during the Second World War: a novella of power and perfection. Twenty-three years passed, and then here came her “Nymph & Faun,” a twisted tale about money and wills and antique silver and marital cruelty that unfolds, at length, in a writhingly intimate conversation between an art dealer and a reclusive older woman, a widow, who understand each other because each can speak the drawling, edged, deadly language of the British upper crust. Mrs. Templeton, who lives in Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, readily admits that most of her stories are true stories, but this time the mining and extraction of a clear line of events from her many pages of manuscript, and then her early and late galley proofs (on which her interpolations, done in green ink, ran to dogs and artists, British naval parlance, psychiatry, Mayfair scandals, quotations from Dante and Isaac Singer and Thomas Mann, visits to a Maharaja and the King of Nepal, Hemingway’s suicide, and the workings of international art dealerships), produced from each of us long letters filled with questions and explanations but set down in tones of trust and mutual pleasure over the work we were engaged in together. It almost made me wish I’d been an antiquarian, so that I could concentrate on keeping hold of things instead of taking them out. We parted at last (we have never met), after exchanging a final thick set of airmailed galleys and agreeing that it was time to push this child out the door to fend for itself. I have at hand a page of her correspondence, discussing point 14, on galley 20, where she describes a figure of Dürer’s, in the story. “I’d like it to stand—hood, scythe, hourglass . . . death being alone, and not wanting to be had up for speeding.” And she adds, “As Goethe said of a painter, ‘He doesn’t paint red velvet, but the idea of it.’ ” Her stories, she wrote to me farther along in this letter, were “outside facts underpainted with subjective feelings”—a definition of fiction that will do as well as any other.
What becomes clear is that we can’t sum up this tough, shifting, indefinable medium with these samplings, or talk about a few New Yorker story writers while excluding the vital many, including those scores of contributors who gave us one or two or three wonderful works of fiction and then, for one reason or another, or for no apparent reason, could not or did not write more. To convey some idea of the long flow of fiction here, I can do no more than list a handful of splendid contributors, whose names and work will have to stand for the rest: Eudora Welty, Mavis Gallant, Gabriel García Márquez, Nancy Hale, Brian Friel, Jean Stafford, Jean Rhys, Edward Newhouse, Robert M. Coates, Peter Handke, Roald Dahl, Deborah Eisenberg, Milan Kundera, Mark Helprin, Michael Chabon, Tom Drury, Doris Lessing, Shirley Hazzard, Frederick Barthelme, Peter Taylor, Laurie Colwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Adams, Cynthia Ozick, Nicholson Baker, Thom Jones.
There have been stories in this magazine that felt like nothing in the language that had come before, and there is great pleasure for me in thinking back to some of our predecessor fiction editors—among them Katharine White and Gus Lobrano and William Maxwell—and imagining what they must have felt when they first read John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” (or “Goodbye, My Brother” or “The Country Husband”); Frank O’Connor’s “My Da”; Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”; J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”; Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lance”; Harold Brodkey’s “Sentimental Education”; Muriel Spark’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”; and many others.
It’s funny, too, to look back at myself, thirty years ago, opening the stories from Donald Barthelme (with his name typed at the top left corner of the manila envelope) that first brought us his pasteups and headlines, the falling dog, the pitched street battles with bands of Comanches, the lost fathers, Eugénie Grandet and Montezuma and Hokie Mokie, and the seven men—Bill, Hubert, Kevin, and the others—living with Snow White while she dreams of princes and pushes her shopping cart. “What is this?” subscribers asked indignantly, and though it wasn’t always easy to frame an answer, what we all knew for certain, editors and readers (most of them) alike, was that we were lucky.
The new is alluring, but not always what matters most. What is more pleasing to a long-term editor or a loyal subscriber than to watch a master of fiction—a Prospero or a Jefferson of the form—as he walks his thematic acres and then, once again, falls to work? John Updike, unfailingly curious and spirited and reflective, circles back to the Maples, or to his native Pennsylvania small town, or to his mother and her death, reopening and revisiting lives and connections he has been setting down in these pages for forty years; and some of the late stories—“A Sandstone Farmhouse,” “His Mother Inside Him,” “Playing with Dynamite”—carry a grave power not touched by him before. William Maxwell goes home to his boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois, still again, to bring back a shocking sixty-year-old murder (that novel, “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” ran here in 1979), or to tell about his brother’s terrible accident, or to reconsider the complex, silent lives of the black servants in his family’s house and in other houses then, and, if we think at first that we have been there before, the story, without fail, will show us why this trip was essential for him and for us.
Weeks and stories go by, and one of the records that are being run up, one realizes, is a life’s work. V. S. Pritchett is as old as the century, and, while there is little about him that feels monumental, he is England’s grand master of the short story and our language’s presiding man of letters. He has been a contributor to this magazine for forty-five years, and, if he has at last laid aside his pen, the total of his published pieces here (stories and incomparable reviews and critical works), which stands at a pausing hundred and four, will always suggest that the next one may turn up in tomorrow’s mail. Reading the stories once again, we see the freedom he has felt with strangers and odd ducks, and hear his avidity for dialogue. Children and elders, clubmen and decorators, hairdressers and antiquarians and bullying menservants, cranky or sensual widows, and gardeners and shopkeepers and artists are on hand, in story after story, all crammed together, misunderstanding and mystifying each other, giving themselves away in noble or squalid fashion, startling themselves with life.
Sir Victor has always insisted that he is more craftsman than artist, and claims that plots are almost beyond him, but he is too modest. The three interconnected Noisy Brackett stories, which begin with “The Key to My Heart,” are made up of car chases, crooked business dealings, drunkenness, gossip, class snobbery, and comic invention: the ingredients of a Feydeau farce, one might say, except that they are also stuffed with heartbreak and sexual suffering. Rereading them, you relish the craftsmanship, but then your eye is caught, once again, by something else. Birds, for instance. I had remembered “. . . and the rooks came out of the elms like bits of black paper,” in “The Key to My Heart,” but not “A soft owl flew over the lane.” The short adjective, instead of the expected adverb, is art itself, and makes a place and a mood and a time of day, an entire scene, out of seven words.
Call back the interviewer. This is what we’re looking for in the fiction line: We want that owl. ♦
