While motoring along nicely in Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way, I was stopped when I read, on page 186, apropos of C. K. Scott Montcrieff’s translation of Remembrance of Things Past, that “many critics, myself included, pointed out annoying bloomers and occasional excesses of style.” Looking up from the page, I thought, Ah, yes, those bloomers, God, they can be annoying, and felt a surge of fellow suffering with Professor Shattuck, whose proofreaders, if he had any, left him sadly exposed. By bloomers, of course, he intended bloopers, a word that includes the weird and wonderful world of typographical screw-ups, of which Roger Shattuck could not know that he would suffer a beaut. But this is our world now. In publishing a book, every writer becomes, potentially, his own H. W. Howler.
Howlers divide into those one causes on one’s own and those causes by copy editors, proofreaders, and mysterious forces perhaps best not investigated too closely. The worst howlers are those that one can’t really blame on anyone else. I once misquoted the lyrics from “The Lady is A Tramp,” so that, in my version, the lady “hates California, it’s cold and it’s dark,” instead of “it’s damp.” This brought me many new pen pals, none of whom seemed impressed with my suggestion that, with my change in mind, the song could now be retitled as “The Lady is a Narc.”
People exist whose idea of a swell time is informing writers about typographical and other errors in their work. I once gave one of my books to an academic, who called to thank me, adding, in his Mittel-European accent, with a really rolling R, that the book was “bristling with typos.” I thanked him, and made a mental note never to give him another. A professor of engineering at Purdue took to calling me, usually in the evening, to report, in a morose voice, that he had found one or another kind of error in one of my books. I had finally to tell him that I didn’t welcome his calls. (Perhaps he thought his discoveries of error would be set aright in later editions of my books, being unaware that, in my oeuvre, the rare books are the second editions.) May these gentlemen, as the Jews used to say of the tsar, live and be well, but not too close to me.
On page 241 of How We Got Here, David Frum’s excellent study of the influence of the decade of the 1970s, one finds an odd bracket in a sentence that, in part, reads: ” . . . well, it would have seemed like a throwback to the worst days of imperialism, [the hat, not the hairpiece!] when topee-wearing sahibs sipped gin on the verandah while talking condescendingly of the ‘Asiastics.'” The origin of that bracket is a less than tip-top copy editor who wondered if by “topee” he didn’t mean “toupe.” When corrected, the copy editor, clever devil, put the correction right into the text, bracket, exclamation mark, and all. I hope he or she one day comes to realize that Mr. Frum’s exclamation mark stands for idiot.
Pages 241 through 256 in Ancestral Houses, Sonya Rudikoff’s book about Virginia Woolf’s snobbery, are pasted into the book upside down and backwards. I’ve heard of books in which the author’s name is misspelled on the title page. Encyclopaedia Britannica some years ago printed a mis-captioned photograph of Turgenev in its article on Tolstoy. Heaven knows, as the man said, anything goes. Typographical errors, once so rare, are now scarcely noteworthy. Several years ago, Tom Wolfe told me that he’d heard there had never been a typo in the National Geographic. If so, I hope it’s still true. I don’t recall any typos in the New Yorker until fairly recently. My own manuscripts, I note, contain more typos than previously. I like to think this is owing to my composing on the computer, which has every virtue except that it doesn’t let one see what one has written with the same clarity as that which one has typed on a sheet of white paper. As for the various spell-check programs, they are, as everyone knows, the greatest of all faux amis.
The great proofreaders of yester-year, selfless men and women of astonishingly active conscience, have for the most part by now gone to their just reward. May their tombstones be free of typos.
Such is the prevalence of typos, that sometimes a writer’s personal behavior will cause one to suspect typos after the fact. In the 1950s, my friend Edward Shils, having learned that E. M. Forster was interested in publishing a diary he had kept from his days in Egypt during World War I, tried to persuade Forster to publish it in the magazine Encounter. Forster said he would certainly consider doing so, but then turned round and published it in Harper’s, where he received a much larger fee. Recounting the story to me, Edward said, “Hmm, Joseph, do you suppose in the epigraph to Howards End, where Forster wrote ‘Only connect,’ he really meant ‘Only collect’?”
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
