‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career options in the first section of this odd but charming cross between a memoir and a usage guide. ‘I liked cows: they led a placid yet productive life.’
Instead, she found a productive life — if not always as placid as she might have liked — as a copy editor on the New Yorker magazine. In Between You and Me, she presents the accumulated wisdom and winsome anecdotes of several decades of proof-reading, editorial queries and office arguments, ‘for all of you who want to feel better about your grammar’.
New Yorker memoirs are a genre of their own — no other publication generates such stylish mythology, in such bulk — but Mary Norris has something distinctive to add: a layer of clerical intrigue beneath the famous writers and distinguished editors. There are the gentle eccentrics of the collating and foundry departments. There is the pencil boy, ‘who came around in the morning with a tray of freshly sharpened wooden pencils. And they were nice long ones — no stubs.’ (Not even the New Yorker has a pencil boy any more; nor, I suspect, foundry and collating departments.) Above all, there are two women, Eleanor Gould and Lu Burke.
Gould, a house pedant of bewildering exactitude, has had press before, although Norris adds some excellent stories about her (‘My all-time favourite Eleanor Gould query was on Christmas gifts for children: the writer had repeated the old saw that every Raggedy Ann doll has “I love you” written on her little wooden heart, and Eleanor wrote in the margin that it did not, and she knew, because as a child she had performed open-heart surgery on her rag doll and seen with her own eyes that nothing was written on the heart’).
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