Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd

Author:Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780679604723
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-14T14:00:00+00:00

* * *

*I read the first paragraph and flung the magazine across the room, and picked it up again about twenty years later. —TK

6

THE PROBLEM OF STYLE

H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage belongs on every writer’s shelf, and there it was on mine, but the book became a real presence in my life only when William Whitworth took over as the eleventh editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Whitworth had no connection with New England. He grew up in Arkansas and still had the soft accent of the region, and he had previously worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, but in a way he was more Boston than Boston itself, proper and punctilious. Before Whitworth, most of the editors concentrated on politics, foreign affairs, literary trends, and long lunches, not always in that order. The finer points of grammar and punctuation were handled on another floor. But under Whitworth, commas became everybody’s business. He quickly became known for his acute, if sometimes demoralizing, marginal comments on proofs. He wrote with a mechanical pencil in a tiny but astonishingly legible hand. Most maddening of all was his occasional apology—“I’m reading fast”—appended to an observation that most editors could not have made if they had taken all day. His comments often concerned subtle grammatical violations, and after noting one, such as “a possessive can’t be an antecedent,” he might add, “See Fowler.” “See Fowler” became a popular sotto voce mutter among the temporarily traumatized staff. We had not thought ourselves in need of reform, but a reformer was upon us.

Kidder ran afoul of Whitworth’s pencil more than once. He (that is, Kidder: a possessive can’t be an antecedent, remember?) submitted his first manuscript of the new regime on “corrasable bond,” the thin paper that once made life easy for erring typists. “Never again this paper, please,” said the tiny handwriting, darker and more emphatic than usual and suggestive of strong feeling. Kidder, no doubt encouraged by my grumblings, had already formed a low opinion of the interloper who was threatening the clubhouse good spirits of the magazine where we had both been trying to make our mark. Kidder did not take this rebuff well.

The Atlantic was to publish an excerpt, actually a condensation, of his forthcoming book, The Soul of a New Machine. This was logical—not only was it an Atlantic Monthly Press book, but it had virtually been written in the offices of the magazine—and it was also good news for the book’s prospects. By this time, the book had been copyedited, but it still had to go through the magazine’s own routine. Kidder’s galleys now faced Whitworth’s scrutiny.

A number of issues came up, but the one I remember best had to do with an indelicate quote. A computer engineer was quoted as saying of the new machine he was designing that it would go “as fast as a raped ape.” Whitworth struck the line on grounds that it was vulgar, which, of course, it was. But was that

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