I also offered the young writers a parable from particle physics, quite possibly the oddest metaphor ever applied to the writing process. The weapons designer Theodore B. Taylor, whose atomic bombs were very small and very large, spent a lot of time worrying about the slow production of plutonium. He thought of a solution to the problem. In my book “The Curve of Binding Energy,” I tried to describe it:
The A.E.C.’s plants at Hanford and Savannah River were literally dripping it out, and Ted thought he saw a way to make a truly enormous amount of plutonium in a short time. He wanted to wrap up an H-bomb in a thick coat of uranium and place it deep in arctic ice. When it was detonated, the explosion would make plutonium-239 by capturing neutrons in uranium-238—exactly what happened in a reactor. The explosion would also turn a considerable amount of ice into a reservoir of water, which could easily be pumped out to a chemical plant on the surface, where the plutonium would be separated out. Why not?
There were those who had an answer to that question, and Ted Taylor’s MICE—megaton ice-contained explosions—would serve only as a message to young writers: No matter what kind of writing you are doing, you want desperately to get it done. You yearn for one great, perfect, and explosive outburst. Impossible. Like a driver reactor, you have to drip it out.
That was the serious finale of my course, but I always had more to impose. Passing out pencils and sheets of paper, I informed the picnicking class that the time had come for their final exam (an event of which they had not previously been aware). O.K., I would say, hoping and failing to shake them up, this is your final exam. Everything rides on it, including the honor system. Write these twenty words and spell them correctly. Moccasin.
I gave them plenty of time to wonder if there were two “c”s and two “s”s or one “c” and two “s”s or two “c”s and one “s.” Next?
Asinine.
Braggadocio.
Rarefy, liquefy, pavilion, vermilion, impostor, accommodate. By now, they were flunking out. Years before I even started to teach, I had clipped the test from Esquire, where T. K. Brown III, compiler of the twenty words, wrote that “impostor” is the most misspelled word in the English language and “accommodate” is the word misspelled in the greatest variety of ways.
Mayonnaise.
Impresario.
Supersede, desiccate, titillate, resuscitate, inoculate, rococo, consensus, sacrilegious, obbligato.
Raise your hand if you spelled all twenty correctly.
No hands.
Nineteen?
In 1975, Nina Gilbert raised her hand.
“Let there be light hors d’œuvres.” Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz Link copied
Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen... Across the years, zero to very few hands would go up until the countdown got into the twelve-to-six range. After six, for humanitarian reasons, I stopped asking for hands. At Nina Gilbert’s level, in five decades, no one else would raise a hand.
Nina Gilbert was a music major. She became an arranger and composer of choral music, ran education programs for the Boston Lyric Opera, and taught sequentially at Hamilton, Lafayette, U.C. Irvine, and the Webb Schools, in Claremont, California.
There was a last and deceptive segment of the final exam. The deceptive aspect was that it seemed simple and wasn’t. There are eleven words in the English language that end in “umble.” What are they?
Pencils flew as the students attacked this easy question. Bumble, crumble, fumble, grumble, humble, jumble, mumble, rumble, stumble, tumble... Ten quick words. The luck stopped there. Erasers were bitten into. Like lamps turning off, success turned into failure. Logoparalysis set in.
One year, after the picnic, I happened to get a call from my daughter Sarah, in Atlanta, and I told her about the eleven words in the English language that end in “umble.” Could she name them?
Sarah said, “Well, let’s see. There’s ‘scumble,’ and...”
The elusive eleventh was Sarah’s first umble. She is an architectural historian, at this writing chair of art history at Emory University. Scumble is a delicate, final layer that painters have used to give their subjects the appearance of being seen through mist. Webster’s Second International defines it as a verb, “to render less brilliant by covering with a thin coat of opaque or semiopaque color applied with a nearly dry brush,” and as a noun, “a softened effect produced by scumbling.” The technique was employed by Titian in the sixteenth century, Rubens and Rembrandt in the seventeenth, J.M.W. Turner in the nineteenth, Claude Monet on into the twentieth—Monet’s scumbled water lilies, the scumbled ambience of his Rouen Cathedral.
As it happens, scumble is what I see all day long, or something much like it. Ninety-two at this writing, I have a stent in each eyeball as a result of advanced glaucoma. My world is brushed with mist. I mentioned scumble to my eye surgeon, Sarah Kuchar. She said she is always looking for ways to describe what her patients see, and she was gratefully adding “scumble” to her vocabulary.
Alfred A. Knopf
The New Yorker I joined in 1965 did not publish profiles of dead people. When I turned in a piece about an old person, William Shawn, the magazine’s one-man constitution, considerately published it soon after I submitted it. I once thought of doing a profile of Alfred A. Knopf, who was born in 1892, but I never did so, in part because of the age factor, and in part, truth be told, because the piece might have been redolent with spite. In college, I had written, as a “creative thesis,” a stillborn novel that was little more than an academic exercise. Whatever life it might have had expired as it was written. But of course, at the time, I did not assess it as such, and I sent it to several New York publishers, who rejected it seriatim—Random House, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Alfred A. Knopf. Dudley Johnson, one of my professors in the English department, competing with me in naïveté, suggested that I write to Alfred Knopf himself, asking for the readers’ reports. From them, said Johnson, I might glean thoughts that would serve me well in future efforts.
Alfred himself wrote back to me, saying that his company never released its readers’ reports, adding, gratuitously, this:
The readers’ reports in the case of your manuscript would not be very helpful, and I think might discourage you completely.
This was the letter that caused my mother to say, “Someone should go in there and k-nock his block off.”
Two decades later, when some of my longer pieces were running in The New Yorker—“Encounters with the Archdruid,” “The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed,” “The Curve of Binding Energy”—I had to commute from my home in New Jersey to the magazine’s offices, at 25 West Forty-third Street, because the technology that would eventually make it possible to close a piece remotely was far off in the future. So I was in the city for weeks at a time, and I often had lunch with AnthonyM. Schulte, an employee at the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., where he was a rising star.
Bob Gottlieb, who worked there with Tony and some years later became the editor of The New Yorker, told the New York Times in 2012, “Tony was a rare fossil—a gentleman publisher.” Tony had drowned in one of the Rangeley Lakes, in Maine. He dove into the lake on his first day there in that 2012 season, and did not come up.
I had known Tony since he was nine years old and I was eight. He would be educated at Yale and the Harvard Business School. His career in publishing began at Simon & Schuster and moved on to Knopf and eventually to Random House, which owned Knopf. We had met at the summer camp Keewaydin, near Middlebury, Vermont, and had proceeded together, through its several age levels, on hiking trips in the Green Mountains and long canoe trips in the Adirondacks, both Maine and Canada being out of range because of gas rationing and other limitations during the Second World War. We made the Honor Trip, in Saranac country, including streams, ponds, and portages west of Upper Saranac Lake. Tony was a boxer. On Saturday evenings at Keewaydin, under overhead lights, he slowly and methodically stalked his opponents, always with a gentle smile, and when the bout ended after three rounds the ref always lifted Tony’s arm. Always. Summer after summer, he was Best Boxer. There was also an award for Best Camper, and, annually, Tony Schulte won that, too.
