What's That Pig Outdoors? (24 page)

I saw his words and boiled with rage. The printer was a black man, and I am ashamed to say that I came close to replying in kind, with a racial epithet. But somehow I bit the word down and just glared silently at the fellow, who dropped his eyes in embarrassment as he realized that I had understood him. “I know what you said,” I thought fiercely, hoping he could read my mind as my face grew redder and redder. “And I'm not going to forget.”

We both, however, forgave. Tempers often flared under deadline pressure in the composing room, but real grudges were rare. After that, whenever we passed each other on the composing-room floor, that printer and I would nod silently to each other, sometimes with a slight smile. I don't know what went through his mind. Perhaps he was acknowledging that I was the aggrieved party in that little dustup and that it was good of me not to take the issue any further.

After the first year, however, the printers and I settled in more comfortably with each other, although some of the old-timers did keep their distance. I became good friends with a few of them, and one even invited me home to the biggest, most elaborate Italian dinner his wife could produce. Winning eventual acceptance by this tough, proud bunch gave me a good deal of satisfaction.

Nonetheless, under the best of circumstances the
Panorama
job was a difficult, sweaty one, because the composing-room work was squeezed in largely at slack times between the daily paper's six or more editions. We never locked up more than five minutes before deadline, and many was
the time we blew it by ten or fifteen minutes, inviting frenzied phone calls from the pressroom, which had its own deadline. On a few occasions we missed the late commuter trains carrying the early state editions of the weekend paper to the far corners of Illinois, and stern inquiries came down from the front office.

When the book editorship fell open in early 1973, I immediately applied. Dick Christiansen had left the
Daily News
to take over the helm of a fledgling city magazine, and the book editor, M. W. Newman, moved into his position. Van Allen Bradley had retired just two years before.

The book editorship of a major metropolitan newspaper is a post of some prestige, and it normally goes to a writer or editor of some renown, often a published author. Though I'd had regular weekly bylines as a reviewer and as the contributor of the little column on paperbacks, and had built up a small reputation on the paper as a competent stylist, I was still a nobody. But I held a few good cards.

For one thing, there was only one other applicant from within the paper, a reporter who'd written an excellent literary biography. He was well respected and a better writer than I. But he was also a prickly, difficult fellow, and nobody on
Panorama
needed another burr under the saddle. Moreover, the paper was not inclined to go outside to hire a distinguished and expensive name. By then the slow leaks in circulation, the paper's lifeblood, had turned into a raging hemorrhage. Marshall Field, the owner of the paper, had long before ordered budgetary belt tightening, including a clampdown on salaries.

I was available, and I was cheap. The paper could pay me the minimum Newspaper Guild critic's scale. Nobody knew if I could truly do the job, but I hadn't bungled the ones I had had, and in some of them I'd even acquitted myself creditably. To some of my superiors I seemed a good risk. Perhaps in the post I could build a wider reputation. Again, as had happened so often in my life, people saw enough potential in me to persuade themselves to take a chance.

In the beginning of my new job, I felt pinched by my inability to use the telephone. Much of the book editor's life deals with selecting books for review from the hundreds of galley proofs and finished copies that arrive
from publishers each week. Once those books are selected, reviewers must be found for them. Fortunately, Van Allen Bradley had built up a thick card file of reviewers, many of them distinguished authors, and his successors had added to it. Picking prospective reviewers for a given book wasn't a difficult task. Getting hold of them was.

Couldn't I ask a secretary or an editorial assistant to call them? Why, certainly, the managing editor said, whenever they're not busy. He was certain they'd be happy to help me out. The features department, however, had a normal complement of secretaries and editorial assistants, which is to say very few—three worn and harassed women to do gofer chores for the whole department of more than fifty reporters and editors. That was all the impoverished
Daily News
could afford. There are no luxuries at a newspaper on its last legs.

They tried, bless them, they tried. But it just didn't work. All they had time to say to the prospective reviewers was something rushed and breathless, like “I'm-calling-for-Henry-Kisor-book-editor-of-the-Daily-Newsand-would-you-review-the-new-book-by-so-and-so?”

An abrupt solicitation like that would not do when all the book editor could offer the reviewer was $25 ($50 if he happened to be a famous writer) and the competition paid three, four, or even five times that. No. One had to approach the matter with care and indirection, greasing the way with a little flattery, and persuade the prospective reviewer to appreciate that public understanding of the book at hand would be ill served in the absence of the reviewer's considered and invaluable opinion.

And if the prospective reviewer asked point-blank if the chances of
his
next volume earning a notice in the
Daily News
would be improved by his consenting to take the proffered book, one had to find new ways of saying no without quite appearing to do so. Promises like that couldn't be kept in book sections so small that barely a dozen volumes could be reviewed each week.

So it fell to the U.S. Postal Service to carry my pleas. As in Wilmington, I felt like a suitor wooing from afar. Three-sentence notes wouldn't do, either. In the beginning, when I was still new, I'd compose long letters introducing myself as inheritor of the distinguished legacy of the previous book editors, then allowing as how they had spoken so highly of the recipient of the letter, and it was with high hopes on behalf of the
eager readers of the Chicago
Daily News
that I proposed he review the latest book by so-and-so. Much of it must have been nauseating and all of it transparent. Enough of it, however, was sufficiently amusing so that perhaps 25 percent of the prospects said yes.

When they said no, I had to scramble to find another prospect in time to get the book to him and the review back, to get into print just as finished copies of the volume arrived in the stores. After all, there were two other competing book sections in town, at the
Sun-Times
and the
Tribune
, and this was the city celebrated in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play
The Front Page
, in which reporters commit all but mayhem to get the story before the competition. Even book editors hate to get beaten.

When time was truly pressing, I'd ask the editorial assistants to make those quick phone calls and hope for the best. Often I'd take the calls home to Debby and explain the situation to her so that she could make them. She never complained and used her best honeyed tones to sweet-talk the reviewers into doing my bidding, and more often than not was successful. However, I always hated to ask her to make these calls. Relying on other people to do my work has always frayed my ego, and it still does. Taking my work home for my wife to do was especially troubling. Deaf people, by and large, dislike being what they consider bothersome to others and will walk an extra ten miles to avoid it. But for me there was no other choice if the job was to be done.

In practical terms, all this fuss about soliciting reviews meant less time for me to do the other tasks of a book editor: writing weekly reviews and occasional long profiles of authors. To make matters worse, I am a slow writer at the best of times. In the 1970s, when we still used typewriters, it would take all day for me to turn out a simple 8oo-word book review on the enormous old Underwood upright I inherited from my predecessor, Bill Newman.

Bill, who has written Pulitzer Prize-worthy prose as an urban affairs specialist for more than half a century, shares with his brother Edwin, the television commentator, the family's saturnine eyebrows and love of heroic puns. For a review I did of a volume about the painful personal life of the
New Yorker
humorist James Thurber, Bill wrote this headline: “Great Jokes from Little Achings Grow.”

Bill taught me one of the most valuable lessons a journalist can ever
learn: a good writer gets right to the point, says his say, then puts the pencil down and leaves. Newspaper readers have neither the time nor the inclination for self-conscious literary confection. When he edited my first author profile, he held the copy between two fingers and announced with disdain, “This story needs to be shaken by the scruff of its neck.” He killed its first ten paragraphs, most of which lyrically described the sun-dappled autumn leaves on the lawn of Jack Conroy, the great old proletarian novelist of the 1930s, in Moberly, Missouri. Then, with a deftly written opening sentence, Bill sat me down in Conroy's living room, the first question on my lips. The piece was much praised and even has been anthologized, but the prose was mostly Newman's. And like all great editors, he let me take the credit for it.

Unlike Bill, I am not a savant who can compose an entire piece in his mind, then sit down and unburden himself cleanly and clearly on a few sheets of paper, without a single typographical error or wasted word. I have trouble assembling thoughts on the blackboard of my brain. I must commit them to paper before I can perceive how they are related to one another. I sometimes wonder whether this inability to manipulate abstractions wholly in the mind is directly related to my deafness, to how I learned to use language all those years ago with Doris Mirrielees' methods. Perhaps pushing cardboard strips of sentences and words around the table with her “Chart Work” technique became so deeply ingrained in my psyche that to this day I need the help of visual supports in order to arrange my thoughts.

That may just be a silly rationalization, for many distinguished hearing authors have complained that they can't think without paper and pencil, either. The English novelist E. M. Forster, for instance, always refused face-to-face interviews with the press, because he worried about his ability to answer questions clearly and coherently. He would do so only in writing, so that he could work out his ideas on paper. “How do I know what I think,” he argued, “unless I can see what I say?”

And so my working technique was to create a paragraph, rip the sheet from the typewriter, and fuss over it with a pencil, tucking bedraggled sentences under the covers and smoothing the pillows until everything looked fresh and rested. Then I'd roll a new sheet of paper into the typewriter and retype the paragraph. Invariably there was another word to be changed,
another phrase to be recast—on a clean new page, of course. Only when the paragraph was perfect could I go on to the next one, and if more than two paragraphs occupied a page, I'd have to retype the whole thing to get the second one right. At the end of the day I'd be afloat in a sea of wadded-up paper; it must have taken the better part of a ream of copy paper for me to produce a single five-page, double-spaced book review.

Call it obsessive-compulsive neatness or a yen for perfection, this phenomenon is hardly rare among writers, and I am certain that a psychologist who plowed through the stuffed wastebaskets of my psyche would find the cause in a childhood event as simple and mundane as my toilet training. And when others display this quirk, I respect it. I cherish writers who take the time and expense to make a long-distance phone call to change a single word in their reviews for the sake of precision. They
care
, and that's all too rare in a profession such as newspapering, in which “good enough” has begun to edge out “as best as one can” as a criterion of craftsmanship.

One of the watersheds of my life occurred when the
Daily News
(and its sister paper, the morning
Sun-Times)
converted to computerized phototypesetting in 1977. Overnight our typewriters disappeared, replaced by video display terminals wired to an enormous mainframe computer deep in the bowels of the building. There was some grumbling among reporters and editors over being dragged into the Computer Age, but soon “bleeders” like me realized that the coming of the VDT enabled us to toss off the bloody shackles of struggling over every paragraph. On a video monitor we could make changes instantaneously, pulling, twisting, and tying the loose ends of our prose into neat knots, making minute changes quickly and easily without having to retype entire pages. What had taken me eight hours to create now required ninety minutes—less if I was under deadline pressure.

The VDT allowed me for the first time to function as a genuine literary critic as well as a book review editor, reading a book and producing a column on it every weekend as well as assembling a book section. Writing author profiles, another important part of the book editor's job, also became easier. A 5,000-word profile of a novelist no longer took all week to write; the VDT cut the time to a day or two.