I had learned what copy editing consisted of by observing what freelance copy editors had done with the manuscripts I’d handled as an editor. I also bought a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, and read about what copy editors were expected to do, this in the days when everything was on paper, and copy editors made queries on strips of paper taped to the paper manuscript page; Post-its didn’t appear commercially until 1977.
Christie was born on June 19, two days after five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. On June 19, the New York Times had a story about it, but we were otherwise engaged and didn’t see it. Nor did we have any inkling of what that break-in would lead to.
I start freelancing
I was home with my new baby for barely a month before I began to feel itchy for something else besides the baby to put my focus on — and my journals from that period reveal that I was completely obsessed with how often I nursed her, how hard it was to decipher her “cries,” how much sleep she got, how much sleep I got. I was watching the Bobby Fischer–Boris Spassky chess match, which was being followed by Channel 13 with play-by-play, like a sporting event, and learning to play chess with Jack, but I needed something else. Christie was five weeks old when I took her to the office to see about starting to freelance.
The next day two manuscripts arrived for me to write jacket copy for, a book of poetry about Israel, along with a decorating book by an interior designer, Carleton Varney, well-known enough that he now has a Wikipedia entry. As I wrote in my journal then, “I’m actually looking forward to ‘working’ again. Not for any great need to ‘fulfill’ myself or because I’m bored by taking care of Christie, but because something of adult interest which links me to the outside, working world will keep me from feeling only the weight of reponsibility of taking care of Christie. I won’t be so obsessed by whether I’m doing a good job with her because I’ll have some other job to do. It will put her into perspective.”
Over the summer I wrote reader’s reports, jacket copy, and catalog copy for mostly nonmemorable nonfiction books. One book I copyedited was a collection, “Mark Twain and the Three R’s: Race, Religion, Revolution — and Related Matters,” edited by Maxwell Geismer, writings that seemed as timely in 1972 as when first published, and may still be. A reader’s report on a Peter Dale Scott manuscript was negative; I thought it was a “left-wing paranoid’s nightmare (or dream)” — but possibly it was published by Random House a few years later as “The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond — a Guide to Cover-ups and Investigations.” And I confess to having committed the following sentences to jacket copy for a novel: “Here is a parable of our time, of people living together as strangers, and strangers making immediate contact. Of race, and belief, and nemesis.”
What I worked on
In the next two-plus years, I copyedited 20 manuscripts for Bobbs-Merrill, of which I remember, vaguely, only one, a biography of Charlie Finley, owner of the Oakland A’s. Most of the others were very forgettable novels. I also had two proofreading assignments, which were more memorable than the copyediting, primarily because they were such unpleasant tasks. One was a biography of Garibaldi, originally published in Britain. The American publisher was simply going to reproduce the British pages and only wanted to correct egregious errors; they didn’t care about the differences in spelling. I was not that familiar with British spelling, so every time I saw an “honour” or “flavour” or “realise,” my eye stopped and itched to correct. It didn’t help that the book was boring, so I wasn’t swept into the story. The other was “All About Dollhouses,” a DIY for building your own antique dollhouse and all the furnishings within. This meant the instructions were for making very small tables, chairs, beds, etc. I couldn’t help mentally recreating, say, a table, made of four quarter-inch dowels one and a quarter inches long (the legs) glued to a flat piece one and a half inches wide by two inches long. These miniature dimensions made my brain and fingers ache just imagining them, and I lost any desire I might have had to create a dollhouse for my daughter. After this job, I vowed never to do proofreading again; in my journal, I wrote, “I could always be doing something better.”
Writing jacket copy was more lucrative than copyediting, a flat rate of $50 versus $5 an hour for copyediting. Over three years I earned $4,360 from Bobbs-Merrill, the equivalent today of around $24,000.
Lucy Rosenthal, who’d been a reader at Bobbs-Merrill, became an editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club, so she gave me some work writing reader’s reports of published books. I had a couple of interviews for being a freelance reader in June 1975 and did nine of these at $20 a crack, and I think I was lukewarm about most of them. One book was by a psychologist and a psychiatrist, about what makes humor work, but it was not itself humorous.
Other copyediting was done for Pyramid Publishers; I not only don’t remember the work, I don’t remember who I would have known at this publisher, so how did I get the jobs? I was never good at hustling freelance work; I needed to know someone in order to make the phone call.
Of course, I did all my work at home. At first, I worked whenever Christie was taking a nap. As she got older, she played by herself quite easily, and I’d be reading a book nearby. But if I set up to work, she’d immediately get up and toddle over to get in my way. When she was two, I found a neighbor who was taking care of children in her apartment, and Christie stayed with her a couple of afternoons a week. That gave me time to work. There were a couple of other home daycare setups Christie stayed with, until she was three and old enough for the daycare center she started at in June 1975, five days a week.
Vietnam
My journals noted that on April 17, the Khmer Rouge won their war, precipitated by the American invasion, in Cambodia. On April 29, the last Americans left Saigon, and two Marines were killed at the airport. I wrote in my journal: “I wish Henry Kissinger had to personally call the families of those marines to inform them of the deaths and to say that it was his policy which directly caused them to be killed. If the evacuation had taken place before the PRG & North Vietnamese were close enough to attack the city, those men would still be alive.” On May 2, from my journal: “the WAR IS OVER. At first I felt this quiet relief, nothing at all like that vacuum and emptiness two years ago [when Nixon withdrew most American soldiers]. This was real. The war really was over. We weren’t killing people any longer. Then disgust and shame at what this country had been responsible for, for the past twenty-one years. Then anger at all the upper-middle-class rightwing Vietnamese refugees coming here. Fantasy that in fifteen years Christie will fall in love with a Vietnamese refugee, and I will have to refuse him entrance (acually I wouldn’t do that). Also the thought we won’t be able (politically) to go to any of the many Vietnamese restaurants that are certain to open in the next few years. Of course we will go.” Meanwhile, I tried to write some sort of essay about what the previous 12 years of my activism against the war had meant in my life, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of point I wanted to make.
Freelancing continues
At the beginning of 1975, Karen Durbin, who I knew from women’s liberation, was hired as an editor at the Village Voice; the Voice had been bought the year before by Clay Felker, founder of New York Magazine. Karen let me know that the Voice was hiring copy editors, so I called Helena Hacker, the copy chief, and started work as a freelancer two days a week, Monday and Friday, the day before and the day the paper “closed.” I worked there for several weeks before I was told they needed to give work to some workers from the typesetter the Voice had set up, but was now closing down.
While I loved working at the paper I’d been reading since I’d first come to New York City, I continued my freelancing and even looking for full-time jobs elsewhere. In early May I interviewed with Andre Schiffrin at Pantheon. The interview was short and I felt I did badly. Later, Schiffrin explained that he was looking for an assistant, not an editor, and I was way overqualified. (I’ve always hated that “excuse” even if it might be true.) Late in May, another friend called to let me know about a job at Public Opinion Quarterly, which needed a part-time managing editor, i.e., a copyeditor, proofreader, and production person. It was located at Columbia University’s Journalism Building, which was convenient, would be about 10 hours a week, and would pay $750 an issue. But I wondered if they were considering a graduate student who knew statistics, which I didn’t.
Things are about to change
In June I learned that the people from the typesetter wasn’t working out, and was I still available? Absolutely, I said. I was a freelancer there until September, when I was put on staff, still part-time, and initially still two days a week.
Thus began my first really interesting and fun job, initially as a freelancer, which lasted for several years. It’s also where I feel I grew up.
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