My Mistake (27 page)

Dan—

I've made a few extra changes + condensed the man-talk, also did a bit more, as you suggested, to “characterize” Lottar. Hope you can read all this mess. I'd really like to see it when all the changes are made. Call me if there's anything I've done that you wonder about.

—A

 

Isn't this a dandy for the checkers?

Albania!

Montenegro!

Joe Hill!

Perkin
Warbeck!

 

Munro, one of the two greatest English-language short-story writers of our time (the other is William Trevor), matched and sometimes out-bowed an editor's deferential posture with a deferential approach of her own:

“Do you think ‘Around the Horn' might work as a title? It's not quite accurate, but neither is ‘Dorrie.'”

“I've added a few sentences here and there, just opening things out a little where I thought necessary. Do you think that OK?”

“I've done [this revision] in the handwriting + proofs way. Does anybody else do that? Please excuse—”

And she was always a complete delight to work with:

Funny: “The apartment is so
clean.
I go around picking up bits of lint off the carpet. A good contrast to Clinton, where we live in an old house with a fair amount of debris
+
the occasional squirrel in the attic, rat in the cellar. I bought white dishes and red place mats +
now
it's kind of elderly yuppiedom. But mountains, Douglas firs, etc.”

Flirty: At a BEA (BookExpo America) meeting in Chicago, she said to me, “My daughter thinks you're handsome.”

Tables-turning, in the kind of comforting praise that usually flows from editor to writer: “P.S. You really are a great help and comfort to me.”

 

There are hundreds of other letters and notes and galleys and high-school report cards and college papers and pay stubs and journal entries and my M.A. thesis (on
Catch-22
—a kind of valedictory nose-thumbing at graduate school) and opinion sheets and memos from
The New Yorker
and Random House and HarperCollins and then Random House again. To say nothing of thousands of computer-archived emails and family photographs and documents and letters from my childhood, including notes written by my mother to her mother when she was a freshman at Bryn Mawr. They lie around on the desk, are jammed into flash drives, cover the raised platform in the maid's room of my apartment where my son's mattress used to be, sit on the kitchen-renovation-leftover Corfam slab spanning two two-drawer filing cabinets in the back bedroom in the country, shut away in those filing cabinets, boxed and shoved into closets, packed chaotically into three drawers of an old chest, along with backgammon boards and antique letter-dice games and their small leather canisters and poker-chip caddies and music boxes and Scrabble tiles so ancient that someone had to resort to a black marker to restore their legibility, maybe in particular for my purblind spinster-schoolteacher cousin Sophie Menaker, who, well into her eighties, would try to secrete two or three of her superfluousity of vowels back into the tile bag and steal what she hoped were X, Q, J, or Z replacements, with my uncle Enge yelling, “I saw that, Sophie—put them back!,” yelling because Sophie was nearly deaf, and she would reply, “What?,” in response to which my uncle would mutter, “She heard me,” three discarded TV remotes, a four-by-eight-inch autograph book called “Golden Floral Album,” decorated with slightly raised images of three gold, orange, and brown pansies on a dark-brown background, and once the property of Lulu George, of Lunenberg, Massachusetts, containing the exquisite flower- illustrations-punctuated Palmer-method inscriptions of what one assumes were Ms. George's classmates and friends, and which include, for example, the following:

 

Friend Lulu, Lulu,

  When you are bending o'er the tub

  Think of me before you rub.

  If the water is too hot,

  Cool it and forget me not.

Carrie Linville

September 29, 1886

 

And:

Your Friend,

Fred W. Osgood

Lunenberg Mass.

May 6, 1890.

 

The floral autograph book looks like something Alice Munro would use as the starting point for one of her stories. She might take one of the names or inscriptions and use it as a prop in or the centerpiece of a narrative that would, as always with her work, dramatize the emotional anarchy that dwells in the human heart and so often bests our reason. Coincidentally, before I run across this ancient keepsake book, I have written to Munro for permission to use the quotes from her letters. And, more coincidentally yet, I get an email from Lisa Dickler Awano, who is more or less Munro's Boswell. She sends me a link to a piece she has written for the
New Haven Review
called “Kindling the Creative Fire: Two Versions of Alice Munro's ‘Wood.'” I edited “Wood” when it appeared in
The New Yorker,
in 1980. It's about a man named Roy, a craftsman who likes to go out into the forest in Ontario and chop down trees that loggers have left behind. He uses the wood for the work he does. Both versions concern, centrally, an accident that Roy has which almost costs him his life. But the second version, which Munro published in a recent collection,
Too Much Happiness,
presents subtle variations in details and psychology, and Awano does a masterly job of analyzing these revisions and showing how both versions involve themes and symbols that pervade all of this author's work. And at one critical point, Awano says, Munro has said that she aims to “get as close as [she] can” in her writing to “what [she] see[s] as reality—the shifting complex reality of human experience.” Whenever the protagonist or reader lands on what seems a conclusive point of view in a Munro story, it is soon challenged by an equal and opposite perspective. Characters confound their own, each other's, and the reader's expectations, setting up psychological complications and narrative tensions that feel authentic.

This is exactly what all my recollections, and now this domestic archeology, have established about myself—my formation, my education, my profession, my writing, my character. I daresay, like many if not most of us, I've been honest, conscientious, lazy, dishonest, direct, faithful, unfaithful, stoic, self-pitying, open, limited, wise, ignorant, confident, vindictive, forgiving, cowardly, brave, generous, selfish, “and et cetera,” as my son used to say.

Still, if we give our lives any thought, especially when we're drawing nearer the end of them, we try to marry the opposites into a coherent whole. A life story that comprehends and supersedes its contradictions and says
Ecce Homo,
or maybe
Echhh Homo
—almost certainly both.

Finally, I give up on the idea of any sort of thorough archival research—at the Library or here in these drawers and closets and file cabinets and boxes. Facts and more facts lurk in them numerously, but in enterprises like this, facts have as much and (more important) as little bearing on the truth as memory does.

 

On the strength of a note that William Shawn wrote to me on his dying day and that his son Wallace Shawn found among his parents' effects three or four years ago and sent to me, I finally ask Wallace if he will have lunch with me and talk about his father. This is what the note said (Shawn must have been ill, and I must have written to him):

 

Dear Mr. Menaker:

Thank you for your kind and friendly letter. As you might guess, it was extremely pleasant to hear from you. I hope you can work out a happy arrangement with the new people. I hope, too, that you will play an important part in shaping the magazine's future.

Warm regards,

William Shawn

 

Wallace told me in an email that he remains fascinated by his father. As do many of us who lived during Shawn's long—overlong—
New Yorker
reign. Someone needs to write a book about such commanding figures and their after-effects on those of us who fall under their spell, evil and/or otherwise—the long-term bosses who work their way into our limbic systems, causing postmortem dreams, fantasies, grudges, and gratitude for the rest of our lives. Especially dreams. Someone I know, who at one point was Shawn's designated successor—one of five or six of Shawn's jukes in the direction of stepping down—has told me recently, in a moment of uncharacteristic emotional self-revelation and vulnerability, “I hate Shawn. I still dream about him.”

Wallace and I meet at a good Greek restaurant on Seventh Avenue and 55th Street. We conversationally circle around his father for half an hour, talking about what we have been up to recently, his acting, my time at Random House, and then we get to the point. I tell Wallace what he already knows, that his father and I didn't get along, and that the note he sent to me at almost literally the last minute struck me as a wonderful gesture of conciliation, especially since I had learned so much about editing and writing under his father's influence. “His main example was to read like a child—very curiously and carefully,” I say. “But with the full intellectual sophistication of a brilliant adult. He asked questions that sort of nagged at the back of your mind but never came forward until he asked them. Like the way kids will ask, ‘But
why
did Hansel and Gretel's father marry such a horrible woman after his wife died?'”

“With you,” Wallace said, “I think he just wanted to make something right, and that's why he wrote to you. I think he felt that he had made a mistake. That's something he almost never admitted. And he needed to set it right. But he didn't send it, because he died soon afterward.”

“I'm glad you found it, and thank you for sending it to me,” I say.

Then I say, “I've always had some trouble with authority, except for a few people—William Maxwell—”

“Oh! Mr. Maxwell!” Wallace says.

I tell Wallace about calling his father at home one evening and his mother talking me into reading to her the risqué passage in one of Pauline Kael's columns—Mrs. Shawn's saying that it was OK to read the passage to her, now that I was married.

Wallace smiles. We go on for a while—the lunch lasts more than two hours. It has knit—unpicked—some bones. Maybe for both of us.

 

Seventy and a half

 

I am sitting at my desk in our house in the country on a gray October day amid the atmosphere and physical artifacts of what, I realize more and more fully as I work on this book, is a rich and strange family history. And in turn the work on this book has grown more urgent after the diagnosis, last spring, of recurrent lung cancer. I have to decide, soon, after five sessions of chemotherapy, about further treatment. Radiological treatment versus more surgery.

The Workmen's Circle cup bestowed on my grandfather by that organization for running his textile factory in New Jersey on Socialist principles presides over the dining room, on top of a piano. An antique squeeze-box that Uncle Enge played sits on a dresser in one of the bedrooms. With a bigger accordion, he called those square dances in the lodge of the camp he ran down on the lake, where I spent my summers as a kid and then, as a teenager, waited on tables. The tables—long, plain, sturdy—were on a porch overlooking the lake, Lake Buel, named after Samuel Buel, who in the nineteenth century saved a drowning man there. My handsome brother smiles at me from a black-and-white photograph—above a small bookcase near this computer I'm working on—taken for his graduation from Dartmouth, in 1959. In the bookcase, between an anthology of
New Yorker
short fiction about New York City, which I published at Random House, and a paperback edition of Don DeLillo's
Underworld
stand a first edition of John O'Hara's
A Rage to Live,
also published by Random House, in 1949, and a pamphlet called “Hard Hats and Hard Facts,” by the head of the Communist Party in the Fifties and Sixties, Gus Hall. On a table near the front door is a stereopticon with a box of double-image stereographs—of the Grand Canyon, of the Amazon, of steam locomotives—that go along with it. Mexican
barro negro
(“black clay”) pottery, from my uncle's winter trips to Mexico, fills the shelves of the sideboard in the dining room. (He and my father, who traveled in “Souse” America for business and some kind of low-grade Communist espionage, taught me a lot of Spanish.) A photograph of my grandfather Solomon, as a young man with burning, Revolutionary eyes, is propped on the wall on top of a picture of my six uncles as strapping young men standing in front of a hay wagon, looking like Young Soviet Farmers. Old books of home remedies for cancer—their provenance no doubt being Mr. Downs—gather dust in bookshelves next to urns straight out of Poe containing ashes of divers relatives who I imagine are silently judging what goes on here. A chest of drawers on the balcony above the kitchen holds 78 rpm albums, and hundreds of photographs, including one I have just found of my father and mother standing in front of an old station wagon, with me and my brother in front of them, and Timmy, my uncle's dog, in front of us. Sheet music from the Twenties and Thirties with Art Nouveau illustrations in a wooden box, along with old issues of
Sing Out!,
the folk-music journal from fifty, sixty years ago.

Just down the road, on the land once occupied by my uncle's boys' camp, lies a development called To-Ho-Ne Shores, after my uncle's camp. The developer named the road that loops through it Peter Menaker Road. (“You're
proud
of that?” a Southern country musician once asked me. “Hell, around here we're so inbred that it would be embarrassin'.”) And just today I took Maxwell for a walk on that road, all but deserted now that the summer is over. We ran into a couple walking their dog, a black Lab puppy, and she and Maxwell tore up and down the road and across the lawns of now empty houses, and the couple wanted to know all about my family—the history of the place where they live.