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July 21, 2004
TT: Made manifest
Life is going by too fast today. I went to Lincoln Center last night to see a press preview of The Frogs, the new Nathan Lane-Stephen Sondheim musical. This morning I lashed myself to the mast and wrote my Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday in a single sitting. After that I filled out yet another National Council on the Arts-related form, this one for the Senate, then ran around in the noonday sun getting it notarized, making photocopies of various personal documents, and shipping the results off to Washington, D.C., via Federal Express. (The NEA warned me to FedEx everything--their incoming snail mail is irradiated and often delayed as a result, sometimes forever.) Tonight I return to Lincoln Center, this time to see Complicité's production of The Elephant Vanishes, and in between I should have spent at least an hour or two hacking away at my Commentary essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer. But I didn't. Instead, I knocked off for an hour and took my first look at the page proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which arrived this morning and have been sitting on my kitchen table ever since.No one who hasn't written a book can know what it feels like to see it set up in type for the first time. Your own manuscript, however neatly printed it may be, simply isn't the real thing. It's homemade, and looks that way. You can edit it as painstakingly as you like, but you still don't know what your words will sound like in your inner ear until you see the thing itself. It's unnerving, half scary and half thrilling, to pull the proofs out of their package and start riffling through them, pretending to look for typos (and sometimes finding them) but mostly just gazing raptly at each page, feeling your half-forgotten sentences and paragraphs quiver to life.
In Newspaper Days, H.L. Mencken wrote a wonderful description (quoted in my Mencken biography) of the day that he received the page proofs of his very first full-length book. He was twenty-five years old and an up-and-coming young man at the Baltimore Herald, edited by Lynn Meekins. As he recalled years later,
I was so enchanted that I could not resist taking the proofs to the office and showing them to Meekins--on the pretense, as I recall, of consulting him about a doubtful passage. He seemed almost as happy about it as I was. "If you live to be two hundred years old," he said, "you will never forget this day. It is one of the great days of your life, and maybe the greatest. You will write other books, but none of them will ever give you half the thrill of this one. Go to your office, lock the door, and sit down to read your proofs. Nothing going on in the office can be as important. Take the whole day off, and enjoy yourself." I naturally protested, saying that this or that had to be looked to. "Nonsense!" replied Meekins. "Let all those things take care of themselves. I order you to do nothing whatsoever until you have finished with the proofs. If anything pops up I'll have it sent to me." So I locked myself in as he commanded, and had a shining day indeed, and I can still remember its unparalleled glow after all these years.
Meekins was right--it only feels that way once--but even after you've written a half-dozen books, you never, ever take your first look at a new set of page proofs for granted. I just finished reading mine, and as I glanced at the first chapter, my eyes grew moist. It seemed impossible that I'd written all those words mere months ago. I simply couldn't think my way back into the fearfully intense state of arousal with which I'd raced against the clock to finish the manuscript and ship it off to Harcourt. I felt oddly detached from the thick stack of photocopied pages I held in my hand, detached and proud at the same time, the way one might feel while watching a child graduate from college. Had I really written this book? Could it possibly be as good as it looked?
I glanced at the living-room clock: five p.m. Time to jump in the shower, get dressed, and head downtown to meet a friend for a quick pre-theater dinner. The spell was broken, the moment over. Life had begun again.
Posted July 21, 2004 5:25 AM
