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1
ALLEYS, THINKS JOHN Lincoln. At least Chicago has alleys. He puts down his pencil and ambles the three steps from his desk to the small, round window—about the size of a medium pizza—in his cell of an office. If he were in New York right now, mounds of garbage piled higher than his head would be crowding pedestrians off the sidewalk. Without alleys, everybody’s business is on the street. One spiteful strike by the sanitation workers and New York is turned into a landscape of dark plastic hills and vile odors, man’s concrete universe overrun by gleeful rats.
Lincoln looks down through his round window at the wall of garbage bags now towering along one side of the alley below. At least in Chicago, people tuck the offal of their lives away, off the main thoroughfares, out of sight. That’s one positive thing he could say about this place. One thing.
He returns to his desk and to the 462-page manuscript he has been fitfully editing for the last four days: 37 Rambles Through the Windy City, by Norman Fleace. Lincoln is on page 226, halfway through the nineteenth ramble. Touched by inspiration, he flips to the title page and draws a sharp line with his pencil over “Rambles Through.” What pretension, Lincoln tells himself. No one has rambled anywhere since Jane Austen was doddering around some Hampshire garden. For a moment, he considers the spare page in front of him and then strikes “37.” What’s with that number, anyway? No one ever uses 37. There’s never 37 of anything. Now he pencils in three alternative words and studies the new title. Walking Tours of the Windy City. Prosaic, but it gets to the point, and cleaning up the verbiage creates alliteration, which will help hold the title in memory. Better.
Lincoln turns back to ramble—now tour—nineteen, a stroll from Clark Street in Lincoln Park twenty-five blocks south to the Loop. Past the site of the garage where somebody—maybe Al Capone’s boys?—rubbed out seven members of the North Side Gang in the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (now an empty lot beside an uninteresting apartment building); past the ornate 1893 structure that once held the Chicago Academy of Sciences (snore); past the intersection where the Weathermen emerged from the park to begin a window-breaking rampage through Old Town during the Days of Rage in 1969 (all evidence was cleaned up within a week); past the Moody Bible Church (does anyone care?), the Chicago History Museum, the Latin School, and then block after block of sixties-era residential towers and forgettable mid-rises, a wall of vapidity that John Lincoln shudders to contemplate, let alone walk past. It’s 2009. Get in your car and drive, he thinks.
In New York twelve years ago, the summer he was an intern at Malcolm House Publishing and living in an apartment on West 115th Street, he used to spend every Saturday walking. Usually the journey was the same: he’d start at Columbia University and head south on Broadway, just taking his time, hoofing it through the Upper West Side, into Times Square, around the Village, past City Hall, all the way down to Battery Park. The Broadway excursion took the whole afternoon. Every block, every step, he found something interesting to look at—a shop, a building, a celebrity. That was a walk. And you could repeat it all over Manhattan, in almost any direction. New York is a great walking town. Chicago, on the other hand...well, you’ve got the lakefront, from Hollywood Avenue to Hyde Park, and that’s pretty lively, at least in summer, and then there are patches of mild interest—hipsterized Wicker Park, the Magnificent Mile of North Michigan Avenue, the old, struggling Loop, with a surviving Louis Sullivan building here and there (sparkling jewels compared to the blocks that have been turned black and somber by Mies). And in between are vast stretches of...vapidity. Close your eyes and you don’t miss a thing. Sitting at his desk, Lincoln closes his eyes.
But try telling that to Professor Fleace, thinks Lincoln. The old coot is so decrepit, it’s probably been decades since he left his University of Chicago office (in the geography department, naturally). The one time Lincoln visited him, the professor never got up from his desk, just sat there, a small clump of moldy clothes in clashing patterns topped by a scraggly white fur ball. But Fleace desperately wanted to bring out an update of his walking book (the 1987 edition offered only twenty-six rambles). And who better to publish him than Pistakee Press, friend of every hack, windbag, and literary aspirant who ever thumbed through a thesaurus?
Eyes open again, back to tour nineteen: “As we advance down the block, we find the imperious red form of the Chicago History Museum, its memorabilia-filled cavernous bulk secreting an imposing Saint-Gaudens statue of our beloved sixteenth president, standing, in a small garden just behind the building.” John Lincoln’s pencil is poised over the word “secreting” when a knock intrudes on his office door.
“Yes,” he calls out irritably.
A compact round head with sandy hair peeks in. “Do you have a second?” asks Byron Duddleston, the owner of Pistakee Press.
“Of course,” says Lincoln, quickly stiffening at the sight of his boss. “Come in, come in. Or ‘Advance!’ as Professor Fleace would say.”
The owner takes a few steps into the small office, then pauses, lifts his chin, and sniffs the air. Given Duddleston’s light brown coloring and taut, sinewy body, Lincoln thinks of a small woodland animal. “I wish they’d settle this damn garbage strike,” Duddleston says. “The smell is starting to seep inside.”
“Right,” says Lincoln, wondering why he hadn’t noticed. “Please, have a seat.”
The two men sit and face each other over Lincoln’s desk, a chaotic landscape of manuscripts, magazines, books, reference materials, and a computer. Duddleston is carrying a thick manuscript bound by a fat rubber band. “How are things going?” he asks.
Something shopworn and familiar about the manuscript in Duddleston’s lap makes Lincoln uneasy. “Fine, fine,” he tells his boss. “I’ve been working on Professor Fleace’s walking book. A nice job, really—I’m just trying to tighten it up a bit.”
&n
bsp; “He’s a beloved figure at the school,” Duddleston interrupts. “In my time, students used to camp out in the halls overnight to be in line to sign up for his class on the geography of Illinois.”
“I always wished I’d taken that course,” Lincoln lies.
“Some teachers—they just have a way of looking at the world that stays with you,” Duddleston muses. “In my time, the U of C was full of men like that. Women, too.” He ticks off a few names, some faintly familiar to Lincoln. “I don’t know if you had that experience there.”
“Right, right.” Lincoln nods eagerly. He wants to volley back the names of a few of his treasured U of C teachers, but his mind is suddenly scoured clean: he can’t think of a single professor he studied under, even though at thirty-three, he’s probably fifteen years younger than his boss.
“Well,” Duddleston says, shifting warily in his chair, getting to the unfortunate point of his visit, “I wanted to talk to you about your editing on Bill Lemke’s book on Wrigley Field.”
“Yes?” Lincoln dreads what’s coming.
“You’re our most experienced editor, the one I rely on for the most delicate and sophisticated jobs.”
Lincoln nods more slowly now. It’s always griped him that Duddleston kept the editor-in-chief title to himself, a little trophy to put alongside his true role, moneybags. Lincoln’s title, executive editor, makes him feel pinstriped and officious.
“Well, Bill came by this morning desperately unhappy,” Duddleston continues. “He got your edit and your memo last week, and he said it depressed him so much he had to put it aside.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lincoln offers, though he is not entirely surprised.
“He showed me your line edits on the manuscript, and ninety percent of them are fine, fine.” Duddleston leans forward to emphasize his sincerity.
“Good.”
“But...” He sits back again. “Look, Bill Lemke has been a writer all his life. He spent more than twenty years at the Sun-Times. I remember looking for his byline myself! And this”—he holds out the manuscript—“some of this is just way, way too harsh.”
“I was trying to be candid,” Lincoln says weakly. “Candid and helpful.”
“But, but...” Duddleston starts leafing clumsily through the manuscript. He pulls out a page, crisscrossed by a giant X. In the margin, Lincoln had written in pencil, “Lose it, Bill. Trust me.” Duddleston waves the page at Lincoln. “This is gratuitous.” Then he digs some more. “And this!” he says, pulling out page 211, looking horrified. Beside one long paragraph, Lincoln had written, “I may vomit.”
“That’s the famous line from the great Kaufman and Hart comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner,” Lincoln explains. “I guess I was getting weary by then and trying to be a bit playful.”
“‘Playful?’ What’s playful about a remark like that?” Now Duddleston pulls eight single-spaced pages off the top of the wad of manuscript. “And your memo on how to fix the book—it’s just way, way too harsh.” He reads, “‘Every page needs a cliché-ectomy.’ You talk to Bill Lemke as if he’s a child or an idiot.”
Lincoln briefly considers pointing out that Lemke got fired from the Sun-Times years ago for being an incompetent drunk, and since then he’s scratched out a living by writing about Chicago’s blind love for its sports teams—the book in question, for example, Wrigley Field: A People’s History. But that way lies more trouble, so instead Lincoln summons his best defense: “I’ve usually found that good writers—writers who really care about the craft and understand it—appreciate candor. They know I just want to help them bring out the best book possible. That’s why I edit in pencil on paper—so the writer can see exactly what I’m doing. I spent two weeks working on that manuscript. That memo has got to be five thousand words long. I’m just trying to help.”
“Writers are sensitive beings,” Duddleston says, quietly, passionately. “They’re fragile, their egos are fragile. They need to be handled delicately.”
Now, Lincoln thinks, he really may vomit. Duddleston majored in English at the U of C, investing his undergraduate life in the dusty canyons of the old Harper Library—by his account, spending entire weekends in a favorite chair reading nineteenth-century English literature. But after graduation, to make a living, Duddleston took a job as a trader and spent the next twenty years in the wheat pit at the Board of Trade, screaming buy and sell orders at other sweaty, panicky men. He was good at it and parlayed his skill into a small fortune, and to his credit, he had the sense to walk away before an artery burst or he made a bad play and lost it all. In his heart, Duddleston always felt like an English major, so he took a chunk of his wealth and founded Pistakee Press, placing himself at the top. And even though small presses are notorious money pits, and the whole book publishing industry is going through a revolution, Duddleston retained enough of his financial acuity to turn the company into a nice little business. But because of that CV, he’s never had to deal with writers as workers, as producers of a commodity that has to fight for success in the marketplace. He’s never had to untangle their sentences (and their thinking), he’s never had to convince them that their first, flatulent drafts are only first drafts and that it will take hours of more reporting and writing (and then many more hours of rewriting by the editor) before the tome can rightfully take its place as that underappreciated and overabundant product, a book.
No, Byron Duddleston still imagines that Tess of the d’Urbervilles sprang fully formed from Thomas Hardy’s head, and if some snippy editor had jostled old Tom at the wrong moment, the whole classic story would have crumbled and blown away like sand.
