My Mistake (18 page)

The phone rings. It's my friend and former Fiction Department colleague Chip McGrath, moved up to Deputy Editor of
The New Yorker
under Gottlieb. Chip says, “Newhouse has fired Bob and appointed Tina Brown.” Tina Brown has been running
Vanity Fair
for some years and has evidently worked her way into Newhouse's favor.

“You called that one,” I say. (Whenever I complained about Gottlieb, Chip would say, “Be grateful it isn't a lot worse. It's probably going to be.”) “When is she arriving?”

He tells me.

I say, “You and I will be gone in two years.”

 

Shortly after Tina Brown arrives at
The New Yorker,
she takes me to lunch in a newly renovated hotel, the Royalton, with its newly renovated restaurant, very moderne in a random and pointless way: rhinoceros-horn-shaped lights in the lounge, a men's room with an eternally flushing water wall, and sinks that look like salad bowls. The restaurant is called 44, because the hotel's address is Whatever West 44th Street, about a block north of
The New Yorker.
Still, as usual, and despite this proximity and despite Tina's having become a habitué of the place, the route confounds her and I have to be her guide. “We turn left here, Tina.”

“What should I do, Dan?” she asks me after we sit down. It's a little closer to “Dahn.” “Tell me about the Fiction Department. What do you think—how should it work?”

I can remember only one detail of the conversation that followed, no doubt because I had very little new or enlightening to say, the old and unenlightening no doubt being: The quality and range of
The New Yorker
's fiction distinguishes it from every other magazine in America. We receive more than two hundred unsolicited stories every week. I think the Editor of the whole magazine—namely, you—should continue to make the final decision about what stories to accept and publish. And so on. Oh, maybe I gave my opinion about some other editors. But the one specific moment I recall is what I said about Roger Angell: “It seems presumptuous of me to even talk about him this way, but Roger is just crucial to the history of this magazine—by family, by his own writing, by his work with fiction writers, by writing the Christmas Poem, and in many other ways. If I were you, I'd be very careful to preserve and even enhance his place at
The New Yorker.
He can be cranky sometimes, but his goodwill toward you is really essential, I think.”

This conversation is a new experience for me. Unlike my friend Chip—a formerly Designated Successor, and Deputy Editor to Gottlieb and Brown—I have almost never been privy to any highest-level discussions about
The New Yorker
's personnel, editorial direction (except in fiction), hiring, firing, art, “look,” assignments, and so on. Not under Brown, not under Gottlieb, and certainly not under William Shawn. I mightily wish I had been. So as an insider I still feel like an outsider. (As I often do elsewhere in my life, after Mike's death.) This position affords me some perspective on what I do know about
The New Yorker,
but it also has excluded me from its innermost workings. So I am not “defending” Roger. Tina has asked me what I think she should do. I have told her. It would have been more than presumptuous—indeed absurd—for me to think that Roger could in any way depend on any kind of endorsement from me.

 

Some months later, Tina takes me to lunch at the new Royalton Hotel again, across 44th Street from the fabled Algonquin. “Dan, what do you think of Bill Buford?” She says “Booford.” Buford is the Editor and one of the founders of
Granta,
a very good literary quarterly published in England.

“There goes my job,” I say.

“Don't be ridiculous. I'm not going to hire him.”

“Oh, you probably are. You may not know it yourself—I realize that.”

“Well, you're a chippy sod.”

“I think
Granta
is terrific,” I say. I used to try to get Gottlieb to go after Redmond O'Hanlon, one of
Granta
's best writers. “But from what I know of how it runs, or doesn't, I don't think Bill Buford would do well at a weekly magazine. I mean, it's a quarterly, but sometimes it manages only three issues a year.”

 

Fifty-three

 

“Dan, Dan—what great fiction do we have on the bank?” Tina asked me near the start of her reign.

“There's a terrific long story by Alice Munro called ‘The Albanian Virgin.'”

“Great! I'll read it this evening.”

“Tina, did you read the Munro?” I asked her the next day.

“I mean, it's awfully long, isn't it? And it really does drag.”

“Well, I don't think so. But we can just keep it for a while if you'd rather not make room for it now.”

“Yes, let's wait and see. Let's look for something else for now.”

 

“Fabbelis!” Tina is saying now. My Fiction Department assistant, Jay Fielden (who will go on to be Editor in Chief of
Men's Vogue
and other prominent magazines), and I have been presenting some of our ideas for
The New Yorker
's first Fiction Issue (my idea, and for once not my mistake) to a group of editors. We're in Tina's huge, glistering-white office. Big windows face south over Bryant Park and the main branch of the New York Public Library. Jay and I had been looking through the archives there the previous week.

“And we found a lot of wonderful correspondence to and from William Maxwell,” I say. “Notes, routing slips, edited galleys, letters from O'Hara, Cheever, Mavis Gallant. I thought maybe a tribute to Maxwell would be a good idea.” I show copies of some of what we found. It looks good.

“Fantastic!” Tina says.

But there is a chill in the air. What is happening?

“Here's a great note to Updike,” I say. I pass the slip of paper around. Roger Angell hands it along without looking at it. His face is set like a mask. Well, that's where the chill is coming from. But why?

“And do we have a good long story for the center of the issue?” Tina says.

“Well, I hesitate to mention it, but we have had that Alice Munro story on the bank for months now,” I say.

“I
love
Alice Munro,” Tina says.

“Well, maybe you could take another look at the story,” I say.

She appears to have no idea what I'm talking about. “What's the title?” she says.

“‘The Albanian Virgin,'” I say.

“I'll look at it tonight.”

It is now psychologically as cold as a meat locker in her office. Has no one else noticed?

After the meeting, three or four of us are walking back toward the Fiction Department's offices, Roger stalking in the lead. He turns right at the end of the hall, walks a few steps into his big corner office, and slams the door like I've never heard a door slam before. The latch click sounds like an ignition switch followed instantly by the detonation of the whole door violently arrested by its frame.

I go into Jay's small office. “What is going
on?
” I say.

“I don't know,” Jay says. “But he sure is steamed about something.”

“Did you feel it in Tina's office?”

“Yes, but no one else seemed to.”

I go into my own office, narrow but nice enough. Ten minutes later, I get up my nerve and go out and knock on Roger's door. “I think you're angry at me,” I say when I go in and stand in front of his desk. “But I don't know why.”

“I'm just furious, Dan.” He is glaring down at his desk.

“But why? What did I do?”

“First of all, you didn't tell me anything about these ideas.”

“Jay and I didn't tell anyone,” I say. “We thought it would be a pleasant surprise. You know—fun.”

“Never mind. Forget about it. Forget about it. Just leave me alone.”

I am shaken and bewildered. Back in my office, after a few minutes, I begin to wonder what was second of all, and third.

The next day, I run into Tina in the hall. “Dan, Dan—I read ‘The Albanian Virgin' last night,” she says. “It's
astonishing!
Perfect for the main story in the issue.”

 

Harold Evans, the Publisher of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of the Random House Corporation, calls me at
The New Yorker.
“I'd like to have a word with you,” he says. “Can we have coffee sometime, perhaps?”

“What's this about?” I ask.

Evans and I have met at parties given by his wife, who happens to be Tina Brown. He once asked me if I played squash, and when I said yes, he found an old squash racquet of his and proudly showed it to me. “That's a real vintage item,” I said. “Are you making a remark about my age?” he asked, brandishing the racquet at me. (At that same party he asked a friend of mine, “Did you read History at university?” and my friend, not knowing the British academic locution, said, “No—who's the author?”)

On the phone Evans answers me: “You'll see. When can we meet?”

“How about today?” I figure he is going to ask me to co-write or ghost-write a book, or offer me a job. The second possibility doesn't fully register with me.

“Let me check with my assistant,” Evans says. A minute or so later, he says, “Well, yes—can you come up right now?” The vowels, in his Beatles-esque accent, make the words sound a little like “coom oop.”

At the elevator bank of
The New Yorker,
I run into Nancy Franklin, later to become the TV critic for the magazine. We have known each other and worked together for years. We call each other “Nosy,” for “Nosy Parker”—the British slang term for a snoop. “Where are you going at this time of day, Nosy?” Nancy says.

“To see Harry Evans,” I say.

“What about?”

“I don't know. Maybe he's going to offer me a book contract. Or a job.”

“Oh, no!” she says. And it is at this point, with a version of that old cold, sick feeling, that I realize what's going on. It's my strong suspicion that Tina now actively wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.

 

“See here, I want you to come to Random House and lose some money for us with literary books,” Harry says to me half an hour later. “I'll pay you considerably more than you earn at
The New Yorker.
” He says “Random House” this way: “Random
House,
” the way my friends from Philadelphia say “cottage
cheese.
”

He goes on: “I know it will be hard to leave
The New Yorker.
I mean, you've been there for quite a while. Five or six years, is it?”

“Twenty-six,” I say.

A cloud of embarrassment crosses his face. “But that can't be,” he says. “You moost have started work there when you were fifteen.”

“Twenty-seven,” I say. “I'm fifty-three.” To myself I say, “Nice save. Nice
try
at a save, anyway.”

Another cloud scuds by, this one of not-quite-concealed consternation. What has his wife gotten him into?

The next day, I go to see Tina. I say to her, “As you certainly know, Harry has offered me a job.”

“Yes, I know, Dan. Of course we'd hate to lose you,” she says, far too quickly. “But I won't bar the door.”

No kidding, I think.

“You see, Harry and I have this policy, if we want to hire someone who works for the other person,” Tina continues. “We have to wait at least a year before . . .” She goes on with an account of this spousal-professional pact meant to convince me of her husband's active quest to retain my services for Random House—to keep me from thinking she said to him the night before, “Harry, will you take this fellow Dan Menaker off my hands? He might work out, you know.”

“Well, you could keep me if you wanted to,” I say.

“I'm afraid we couldn't get close enough to the salary Random House is offering.”

“You could make me officially head of the Fiction Department,” I say. “I do all that work anyway—watch the bank, do the nominations for awards, watch the slush pile, do the scheduling.”

“I wish I could but I can't. Roger would be too upset. He has complained to me about the situation down there from time to time.”

“He has? What situation?”

“But the Random House job is a great opportunity,” Tina says.

(You doubt my doubt about Harry Evans's yearning for me at Random House? A little paranoid, maybe? OK, well, a little while into my tenure at RH, Harry will ask me, through someone else, what I think of the idea of hiring another
New Yorker
editor—someone who I know is just not working out at the magazine. For the first and last time in my life, I threaten to quit a job. For one thing, in my opinion, the person in question would not make a good book editor. More important, I'm afraid the hire would substantiate in the eyes of those few who watch such matters the suspicion that Tina was using Random House as a sort of small recycling facility for her own refuse. Me. The other person isn't hired.)

Only two people advise me not to take the job. Betsey Schmidt, who works as an assistant to Alice Quinn, the poetry editor, says I should stay. She bases this advice on the experience of her father, Benno Schmidt, who was Dean of the law school at Columbia when he accepted the Presidency of Yale. Betsey thought he shouldn't have made that move—that if he had remained at Columbia he might have been appointed to the Supreme Court. A bathetic comparison—him to me, I mean—if ever there was one.

The other skeptic is John Sterling, a publisher who has also been an agent and a writer. He tells me at lunch, “You do realize that what you will be doing is essentially a sales job. If seventy-five per cent of what you do now is editing and reading and writing opinions about fiction and twenty-five per cent is office stuff and meetings and so on, that percentage will be reversed.”