About 25 years ago I had a summer internship at a magazine and lived in fear of making mistakes. One morning, while proofreading a profile scheduled for an upcoming issue, I was laid low by flatulence. To be specific, the writer had noted that whenever the subject of his profile walked, the man’s shoes “squawked like a fart.” I read this and paused — a mistake! — then circled “fart” on the proof and drew a line from the offending “fart” to the margin, where I wrote, with great satisfaction, “fot.” Because it was undoubtedly “fot.” I had a New England accent and a high school diploma and was absolutely certain, phonetically speaking, the word was spelled “fot.” Or if you were fancy, “faht.” Either way, definitely not “fart.”
I inserted a mistake.
Which, on the list of mistakes a copy editor can make, is near the top. Last month, when I asked Mary Norris about the severity of inserting a mistake into The New Yorker, where she has worked as a librarian and then a copy editor since 1978, she said: “Oh, it’s really bad. Like grounds-for-being-run-off-the-property bad.”
But Norris is also a self-deprecating, reassuring sort, impatient with humorlessness. You would have to be, at The New Yorker: Every publication has its style — for punctuation, spellings, etc. — and The New Yorker’s is famously antiquated, quirky and, at times, unusual. Norris’ first book, the new usage guide/memoir “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,” digs at the dash in “Moby-Dick,” The New Yorker’s insistence on doubling the “L” in “travellers” and why she mostly approves of the use of profanity in the magazine.
When we met, she explained that a good copy editor is only trying to improve, that “ignorance should be forgiven,” and that she once botched a spelling in the magazine and “created a fourth Karamazov brother. It was mortifying, and kept me up. But only one night. Like any humiliation, get through one night and the next day is not so bad.”
Another reassurance was the clutter of New Yorker stories on her desk that had not escaped her pencil.
She grabbed the proof of a recent story about New York’s Metropolitan Opera and pointed to a sentence: “The season’s opening night, on September 23rd, featured a new production of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ by Richard Eyre.” She said: “My impulse was to put a comma after ‘Figaro,’ but ‘Figaro’ is from Mozart and this particular production was directed by Eyre. So I’ve been warding off that comma all week.” (The phrase “by Richard Eyre” is so intrinsic to the opera it modifies that it does not want to be distanced with a comma.)
She worked her pencil down the page: “This name was misspelled … There’s an extra quote mark here … That needs a hyphen … This colon wants to be a period … But this word, ‘reflect,’ in ‘the material would reflect sound,’ I queried (the writer and staff) five times. I think of ‘reflect’ as a visual word. I don’t think it’s (used) right here. I’ve suggested ‘resonate,’ ‘bounce,’ but I’m getting ignored. There’s no perfect fix, so it’s ‘reflect.'”
Norris does not win every debate.
Nor does she try.
“She’s never making a suggestion based on anything other than a rigorous reading of the text, and in the interest of betterment,” said short-story writer George Saunders, who grew up on the South Side and whose work frequently appears in The New Yorker. “The edits are sort of ego-free — she’s never making an edit to assert herself or establish power or for vague reasons.”
Said longtime staff writer Ian Frazier: “The big person in her department at The New Yorker (when she started) was Miss (Eleanor) Gould, head copy editor, who was so obsessive and brilliant and sometimes myopic that writers were not shown what was referred to as ‘the Gould proof,’ for fear of upsetting them. I admired Miss Gould as I admire righteousness, but I now see Mary as the more down-to-earth of the two.”
Norris is 63, white-haired, grandmotherly at a glance, with a folksy air.
“But she has kicked my ass, and I am proud of that,” said David Remnick, the magazine’s chief editor. “And she sure as hell hasn’t stopped. A good writer will see what she is doing. I was at The Washington Post for 10 years, and you would sit next to an editor who wasn’t hyperattentive to detail and hope like hell that some copy editor would catch egregious things. So when I got (to The New Yorker), the level of attention was funny. It spoke to a fanatical attention. I can’t remember if it was Mary or Ann (Goldstein, current head of the copy desk), but they were working on an Updike piece and they called him about a word. They said he had already used this word once. He said ‘No, I didn’t.’ They said, ‘Yes, you used that word in the previous story you wrote.'”
Norris’ office is stuffed with so many language-usage books that I lost count. There are at least a dozen editions of different dictionaries. There is a Webster’s so large and ancient it appears to have been handed down by Moses; it rests open on a rickety table that lost a leg and is held together now with masking tape. There are a lot of pencils and a vintage Boston Ranger 55 pencil sharpener. (Norris is a pencil aficionado, and at the end of her book pays a tribute to the humble pencil, eraser and sharpener.)
What she doesn’t have is a window.
In the winter the magazine moved from Times Square to One World Trade Center, and just after we met, Norris muttered about her windowless office.
But what does a copy editor need with a window when she has, ahem, a New Yorker stylebook, the last (in-house) word on all things copy-related at the magazine? Norris lifted hers from beneath a landfill’s worth of proofs: “It’s big, black, a relic, in a trapper. I don’t think it’s fine leather. There are a lot of funny, old-fashioned preferences in it, of course. Only Fifth Avenue gets a capital ‘A,’ for instance. A lot of British-isms. We use diereses (marks placed over the second of two consecutive vowels in a word to indicate a separate syllable), which David hates: When he came to the magazine (as editor), he suggested to Ann we could do without diereses. She gave him a glare. He slunk off. Our style is to make ‘percent’ two words. I just got a letter from a reader: ‘In my lifetime, will you ever close up “percent”?’ I wrote back ‘Probably not.’ She wrote back disappointed.
“And we won’t change it. We do it because it’s tradition. It’s not a religion, it’s style. We revere the (editors) who said to do it that way. We get a lot of letters for spelling ‘insure,’ in both instances, with ‘I.’ I don’t know why we do that but it looks funny now with an ‘E.’ That said, I made ‘dumpster’ lowercase — all on my own.”
Norris is from Cleveland. She still thinks of herself as a Midwesterner. “When I first went east, at 18 in 1970, people asked where I was from and I would say Ohio because the Cuyahoga River had recently caught fire and I was kind of ashamed of Cleveland. My mother was a housewife but clever, with a gift for gab and talent for doggerel poetry. My father was a fireman, and kind of against education, in a way. His goal for me was I would be an accountant or hairdresser because there was always demand. He refused to let me take Latin because he didn’t want me to be an egghead or a nun. But he was surprised and proud when I got this job.”
She started during the legendary reign of editor William Shawn, whose eccentricities and tastes often defined the magazine: He hated profanity and any mention of bodily fluids, but also wigs, twins, short people and fishhooks.
“But back then there was also a sense that we were producing a perfect thing, each week,” Norris said.
Four editors — Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, Remnick — and 37 years later, Norris knows better. The copy desk is about 20 full- and part-time staffers deep, but when she hears from fans of the magazine that it’s pristine, never sullied with a stray mark, “I smile and say zip, because (mistakes) are there.” She’s come to recognize that the “best writers want feedback, and defensive ones are overprotective of something in the copy.” Also, younger staffers are becoming “slaves to the dictionary, and it’s hard to get people to see I’m not arrogant — it’s just the dictionary has it wrong occasionally!” And sometimes, stylewise, grammarwise: “You bend rules when there is a human element in copy you don’t want to iron out.”
Goldstein, Norris’ boss, remains the ultimate decider at the copy desk; she said creating a perfect thing every week is still an ideal, though one “that’s become a lot harder when everything is simply going faster.”
But it’s Norris — whose post (“In Defense of ‘Nutty’ Commas”) on the magazine’s website led to regular posts on language, which led to a book deal — who is fast becoming an authority.
“I think every copy editor has a style within The New Yorker style,” Goldstein said, “and Mary’s style is to be particularly sensitive to the writer’s point of view. Partly because she is a writer. She is good at not overdoing her queries (about questionable copy), though that doesn’t mean she hesitates to query, either.” For example, when Remnick became editor in 1998, The New Yorker had for the first time in its now 90-year history an editor who regularly writes for its pages. Which puts a copy editor in an awkward situation.
“I think some people here were scared to query him,” Norris said. “But I’m not. And I’m not harder on him than anyone else. But I think he’s gotten more queries from me than he expected — I will cut him no slack.”
A proof slid under her door.
She lifted herself out of her chair, retrieved it, then stopped and smiled and said: “It’s because I have an affinity and respect for language. I don’t think I became a copy editor because I like to find fault in people.”
Twitter @borrelli
