Good Prose (19 page)

Things out of place or proportion give rise to a “bump,” a term that I never liked to decipher in the margin of a page, back when Todd still wrote his comments. “A bump is worse than it sounds, isn’t it?” I asked him once.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s not just something you drive over. It means
these things in a story aren’t connected, they aren’t meshing, they don’t meet. And so it gets you worried about the logic of the structure of the story.”

“Taking the spin off” can be the solution not only to a melodramatic sentence, but to a problem of tone that infects a whole manuscript. A phrase like “someone went mad for blood” has, among its other demerits, a bossy quality. Taking the spin off can be translated roughly as: Don’t try to
tell
the reader how to feel.

“You have to manage this” means something nearly opposite. Opposite also from the old saw “Show, don’t tell,” of which my college teacher Robert Fitzgerald once said, “It’s a good rule, and it’s meant to be broken.” To manage something can mean slowing down an important scene to make it bigger than the things that are supposed to be little, and to do that you might try to find one moment in a story that can stand for many others. Or management might require a generalization, a summarizing statement that doesn’t seem didactic. Todd calls this sort of statement “a brilliance,” as in, “We need a brilliance here.” He has supplied me with several over the years, phrases that I transposed a little or even used verbatim. In reference to the life of inmates in a nursing home in my book
Old Friends
, for instance: “The problem with visitors is they have to be thanked for coming and forgiven for going away.”

Todd told me he didn’t think editors should make up sentences for writers. “I’ve done it, but I don’t like to do it,” he said.

“But there are lines I’ve taken from you shamelessly. Ones you gave me in conversation.”

“Well, conversation is one thing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something mystical.”

For years Todd prodded me to offer moments of generalization in the midst of a story or near its end. “How are we supposed to feel about all this?” he would ask me in our days at
The Atlantic
. I felt resistant usually, sometimes recalcitrant. I had long imagined that a story, even in nonfiction, ought to be its own best explanation. I still believe this. So does Todd, who puts the matter this way: “You want to avoid didacticism or a tone of insistence, or some form of allegory where people represent ideas.” But at some point that I can no longer name, I understood that he was asking not for moralizing, not even for brilliances to put on the page, but for a sharpening of understanding. I began to feel that a successful narrative depends on buried generalization, on establishing a hierarchy of ideas—I picture one of Calder’s hanging mobiles—to serve as the story’s inner structure.

An abstraction can sometimes guide repairs to a part of a story that seems stubbornly inanimate. In draft after draft of
Strength in What Remains
, I wrote and rewrote the portrait of an ex-nun, to me a captivating character. The portrait lengthened with every rewrite. It had reached about forty lifeless pages when Todd’s puzzlement lifted and he was able to give me both an estimate of the portrait’s proper length—about fifteen pages—and also an idea to contain it. “Focus on the quality of her mercy,” he said. Both kinds of advice usually help. Defining the length of a passage forces you to throw away the nonessential, and knowing the central idea tells you what to keep and where to put the accents.

Every story has special problems, and these usually get names, which I find reassuring—if a problem can be named, its solution can’t be far away. “The problem of goodness” was Todd’s phrase for the difficulties posed by the character Dr. Paul Farmer. Sometimes solutions can also be named. While writing
The Soul of a New Machine
, I worried and worried that I didn’t know enough about the main character, Tom West, whose special vanity had been to make himself mysterious to me as well as to his team of computer engineers. Never mind, Todd told me. West could be brought to life partly through suggestive external details, and partly through other characters’ perceptions of the man. Todd actually said, referring of course to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enigmatic title character: “That’s all right. You can do a Gatsby on him.”

The lingo that we now use over manuscripts preserves some of the remnants of books and articles past. To say “Which is fine” about matters that are decidedly not fine brings back the elementary school principal whose favorite line it was and the book in which he was a minor character. Likewise the carpenter who, on finishing a piece of clever joinery, declared, “Perfect or equal,” and the nineteenth-century architect who drew up plans that would have had a building’s top-floor windows sticking up out of the roof and who began his apology to the builder by saying, “I have made a sad mistake.” Our talk has become infected with nostalgia, or, I prefer to think, maintains a sense of continuity. We have made sad mistakes before, which is fine, but we have always fixed them in ways that to us seem perfect or equal. We sign off sometimes with a line I heard back in Iowa City from the novelist Frederick Exley, who—long ago, half drunk in
a bar at midday—told me, “This Iowa Writers’ Workshop is an avoidance. It’s a way of avoiding the
terribly lonely
and
deadly serious
business of getting on with it.” Repeating the phrase—“Well, back to the terribly lonely business”—has been for me a way to make fun of those sentiments as if I’ve never fallen for them and before I have a chance to fall for them again. And they remind me that getting on with it has not been an entirely lonely business for me.

It has taken, on average, about three years for me to research and write a book, long enough for each to seem like an occupation in itself. A time has always come when I’ve wanted to quit that job and at the same time have been afraid of losing it. It would be worth having an editor if only to know when a book is finished. We used to go on a trip when Todd declared a book nearly done, with briefcases full of manuscript, in order to work without distractions. An inn in Maine in winter was the most productive setting, the most stimulating a hotel on a topless beach on St. Martin.

For the finish work, we set up what we call “watches.” As I rewrite and he rereads, we keep an eye out for overused words and phrases. In one book the words “all right” were on the watch list; in another I had used “fluorescent” in almost every description of the story’s setting. Repetitions, “reps,” we long ago agreed, can be as destructive to a reader’s confidence as, for instance, a flaw of tone or structure. And of all a story’s problems, reps are the easiest to fix. The importance of the finish work, I think, is inversely proportional to the time and effort it usually requires.

When the page proofs come, we read the book aloud to each
other, pausing now and then to imagine bad reviews, an exercise in magical thinking—as if something imagined has actually happened, because, as everyone knows, fate abhors repetition, too. I recall, with an equanimity that was years in the making, an evening when he called to break the news that a very bad review had just appeared. What he actually said was: “Kidder, there was one review we forgot to write.”

•

I suppose it is typical of human relations that I thought I knew Todd better in the first years of our collaboration than I think I know him now. The other day, for instance, he mentioned that he had met a mutual friend of ours while hitchhiking, and I was astonished.

“
You
were hitchhiking?”

“I was a hitchhiker,” he said. “I once hitched across the country.”

I couldn’t reconcile the two pictures that entered my mind: my enduring picture of Todd the gentleman farmer in a rumpled tweed jacket, and this picture he drew of himself, lifting a thumb by the side of a road—though he allowed as how he had not worn a knapsack but had carried a leather valise. I was amused, of course, and I sensed a small unease under my amusement. I had the same feeling about his writing. He rarely mentioned it, and then one day by accident I found myself reading a short article of his in a magazine, an occasional piece in which Todd accompanies one of his daughters on a college tour. I read: “We met our tour guide, and then she asked us her name. ‘Hi, my name is Melissa?’ ”

It was like hearing a very familiar voice in a crowd in a foreign city. It was as if he had been living another life, in secret. Granted I knew him as a person with a gift for privacy, but of course the secret was mainly my invention. I had an investment in a limited view of him. Over the years, I had done a Gatsby on Todd, unconsciously but on purpose.

For a long time, we played the parts of the libertine writer and the steady, Maxwell Perkins–like editor without literary ambitions of his own. Or rather, I enacted that cliché and he, I think, went along with it. I relied on what it gave me: the vital connection to an editor who I could plausibly imagine was right, almost always; and the avuncular friendship of an elder who possessed many qualities I lacked and therefore didn’t have to cultivate, among them and above all, restraint.

Writers who need editors have to learn to listen, really listen, to advice that no one wants to hear—that you should jettison hard-earned pages, that you must start again. But how an editor delivers this advice makes all the difference, or has in my case, anyway. Every piece of writing, even classic works, can be ridiculed. So much the worse for nascent stuff by nascent writers. The risks at places like Iowa are premature development of the self-critical faculty and the loss of the unwarranted confidence that every writer needs. At least for some of us, being told a piece of writing stinks is the same as being told that we are once and for all bad writers, and therefore also deficient persons. It was decades ago when
The Atlantic Monthly
’s head editor, Bob Manning, scrawled his note to Todd, saying of me, “Let’s face it, this fellow can’t write.” But Todd told me the story only recently. I guess he thought I was finally stable enough to take it.

He has never spoken harshly to me about a piece of my writing. I assume that he has always managed to say what he thinks, but he has done this gradually, in stages. “It’s fine, keep going” for a rough draft is followed by, “Well, Kidder, this is progress” for a later one. He said once that he thought a writer—meaning me, I think—should learn to look at what he’s written with “a little objectivity.” Fair enough, but I think the ability to preserve the distinction between the writer and the writing is a skill an editor needs more than a writer does.

An editor of course has his own personality to accommodate while accommodating the often troublesome personalities of writers. There is something in Todd that keeps him from expressing a warm feeling outright, at least in public. Though I haven’t often emulated it, I recognize that kind of reserve. I grew up surrounded by it, and as I grow older I find Todd’s kind of reticence increasingly attractive. Whatever its origins, it usually functions as a form of courtesy, and in the special sphere of being edited, it has obvious value. Among other things, it assures you that your editor means at least as much as he says.

I like to remember the first book we worked on together,
The Soul of a New Machine
. Not just the book itself but also the time of working on it, and especially the final phase. It took place over perhaps a week, or maybe two, in Todd’s office at
The Atlantic
. I loved that shabby-genteel place, especially after hours. Sometimes when I was there at night working on an article, I would take a break and wander the halls. The place was utterly still then and felt vast in space and time, the night watchman’s marijuana smoke rising from the basement. I could wander into an office and gaze at framed letters from writers who had published
in
The Atlantic
, studying the signatures of Twain and Emerson, Thoreau and Wharton, and dreaming.

That computers had not yet replaced typewriters was, in retrospect, a blessing. When the manuscript of
Soul
had improved enough to be considered a reasonable facsimile of a book, Todd and I spread its parts on the carpet in his office, as we had sometimes done for articles. Tall windows flanked the fireplace, shedding plenty of light on the piles of typewritten pages. Spreading the pages across the floor in itself lent the illusion of distance and control as we walked among the piles like a pair of Gullivers. In the afternoons, Heinekens helped us through the difficulties. Where should this thing really begin? Aren’t the proportions off? Why do we give thirteen pages to that and only two to this? Now and then Todd picked a couple of pages off the floor for closer scrutiny, and said of some passage I had long admired, knowing it was grand and indispensable, “You could do without this.” That was when I began to learn a skill which for me needs constant relearning, how to fall out of love with my own words. And, much harder of course, how to let go of some perfectly lovable words that nonetheless are at odds with the whole.

By the time we were done, Todd’s office smelled a little like the inside of an old taxicab, but ashes still lay in his fireplace—it was late winter, I think—and the smell of creosote mitigated the odor of my incessant cigarettes. He squared up the edges of the tattered final manuscript and placed it on his desk. “Well, Kidder, this is a pretty good book,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve read another quite like it.” High praise, the highest I have ever heard from him, or want to hear. In a week or two it would begin to
wear off and I would start to wonder what he thought I should do next. For me, nothing much has changed since then.

I came to
The Atlantic
in the fall of 1969, three or four years before Kidder hove into view. He remembers me in those days as a tweedy, venerable, proto-curmudgeon. I remember myself as a skinny, bookish, and tentative youth, and I think an objective observer at the time would have sided with me.