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*
As a young man, I briefly entertained the ambition to wield the blue pencil. There have been some fine editors, even of novels, and a handful who are virtually illustrious. Saxe Commins of Random House, whose famous blue staff could strike poetic bubbly from the most prosaic rock. Pascal Covici, midwife and manservant to John Steinbeck. Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, topiarist of the verdant shrubbery of Thomas Wolfe’s imagination. All Americans, you’ll note, adept at bathing themselves in limelight.
But there has never been a famous proofreader. God forbid. If one should ever pretend to an exalted position, treat him with circumspection. He is undoubtedly a charlatan.
I became a proofreader; there was hardly a choice involved. Proofreaders are born, and made, in the back rooms.
As for being a fabulist, nothing was further from my mind. There are more than enough of those. In any event, invention never interested me. I had no wish to add to the great bloated mass of the given; I wished to take something away from it. To be not a contributor, but a subtractor. The impulse was alembical. Possibly even alchemical; over the years, my attention shifted more and more from the perfected product to the parings, the shavings, the dross. In the end, I was only happy when I was up to my elbows in rejectamenta. Mr Crusty was the wrong label; Mr Spare Parts might have suited me. Some people found the idea unpleasant. Merle would not let me rest.
‘You know Aubrey, when I see you sweating over this system of yours, it makes me sad.’
This was a new one. The Records always made her giggle like a schoolgirl.
‘How’s that?’
‘What’s going to become of it? It’s all very well us amusing ourselves with it, but it would be nice if it had some broader application, if more people could somehow … use it.’
For a moment I thought she was going to stoop to that ghastly American ‘utilize’, but ‘use’ was bad enough. Spilkin had said something similar: What are you going to do with it? What is it for? This was rich, coming from the fun-and-games specialists, the hedonists. They were up to something.
‘My Records have a use, thank you very much. I’ve said it a thousand times: it’s a system of exempla. Each of these entries is a stitch in time, my dear.’ Dear was daring.
‘But who’ll be interested in it in this unwieldy form? It’s raw material, really, it’s all odds and sods. You should work it up into something longer, something people could read.’ She was turning some of my clippings over, sizing them up shrewdly, as if imagining ways of tacking them together with a storyline. ‘Paragraphs and things, threaded together. The cobbling would be fun.’
Fun. That more familiar three-letter word warned me what was really behind all this. But a train of thought was already puffing down my one-track mind. I had recognized long before that my exempla needed to be embodied in sentences in order to capture the proofreader’s true function and inculcate his habits of mind. Perhaps I hadn’t gone far enough. If sentences were good, why shouldn’t paragraphs be better? One of the great problems of proofreading was precisely the tension between momentum and inertia. The story was a horse that wished to bolt, and the unwary or unpractised proofreader might find himself thrown and dragged behind its flashing hooves.
But the wicked Bibles and lying dictionaries cautioned me.
‘It’s possible, a story of some kind, with all my corrigenda, my “things to be corrected” woven into it. But where will I put the correct versions, my “things corrected”? Weaving them in too will be an impossible task. It will spoil the story.’
‘Leave them out. Make it more interesting for whoever reads it. That will be the fun of it, as always: inventing order. Not extracting it, mind you, like a lemon-squeezer, but creating it.’
‘Leave them out! What if it falls into the wrong hands? Some story full of contrived errors could wreak havoc among the impressionable.’ A ticklish sensation crept over my skull at the thought: the follicles puckering, trying to make the vanished hair stand on end.
‘Forgive me,’ said Merle, ‘but isn’t this exactly what you spend your life doing — hunting for errors? Why deny others the pleasure?’
‘My corrigenda are accidents of carelessness or ignorance, designated as such, and held up for scrutiny. The perpetrators had no evil intent. What you are proposing would be premeditated. And in such fatal concentrations. It scares me. In any event, I’m a professional.’
‘It won’t be for greenhorns.’ She seized my writing hand, with the pencil still in it, and squeezed it till it hurt. Thankfully it wasn’t my left hand, my thumbing hand as I think of it: the bones of that, and the thumb-bones in particular, have been weakened by a lifetime of thumbing through. ‘It will be for the amateur, in the best sense of the word, for those who are already in the know — or like to think they are. It will preach to the converted and renew their faith. It will be sent to try them. It will be a test of skill for the whole clan of proofreaders — prospective, practising and pensioned-off. It will further the aims of your noble profession.’
And with that, ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ — although I still hadn’t dubbed it that — was born.
*
When I think of those times now (casting some shadows from my mind), they are dappled with daylight sifted through the north-facing windows of the Café Europa. Like gold dust blown in off the dumps. My golden days, caesar salad days, days of whiskey and roses. All in all, a moisturizing season, with the sap rising in dusty veins and the juices in the grey matter trickling.
Four people around a table. A round table. No. 2. We got to know one another a little, and to like one another to the same modest extent. There was not much depth to our association. I acknowledge it freely. I can scarcely recall a conversation now that could not be plumbed with a teaspoon or a swizzlestick, depending on one’s preference. But it was stable, reliable, secure — qualities some of us only came to appreciate fully after we had been overwhelmed by flimsy, crooked things. In my day, solidity was a virtue. Yet all around, the cry goes up for transparency, as if the capacity to be seen through were laudable, as if a house were better made of glass than stone.
The Records grew in leaps and bounds. There were now four people clipping items from newspapers and magazines, jotting down scraps from shop windows or advertising flyers. None of them had my practised eye, of course, but Spilkin came up with some gems. Even Mevrouw Bonsma made some well-meaning contributions from sheet music and knitting patterns — notably that old chestnut, ‘knit one, pearl one’. Soon I was spending half an hour a day cataloguing the new acquisitions.
Every other waking moment was devoted to transforming the System of Records into the Proofreader’s Test.