REMEMBERING VERONICA GENG In late summer 1980 Roger Angell was away from the NYer doing his annual baseball work when my story “Shopgirls” arrived at the magazine. The writer and editor Veronica Geng read the story for Roger and wrote a startlingly genuine hand-scrawled rejection note saying she’d liked the story, though not quite enough to publish it, and would I send more? It sounded more like an invitation than a rejection. “Pool Lights” was the second story I sent Veronica in November 1980. She bought it and it became, in July 1981, my first New Yorker publication. Until then I hadn’t really had the pleasure of being thoroughly and carefully edited, and I must admit I was skeptical about it. I was, after all, the artiste. But working with Veronica was eye-opening. As reader and editor she was the best the New Yorker had. She got everything. Send her a story, and she would not miss one single whisper that was in it. It’s routine for editors to get a good portion of what you put into stories, but it’s unheard of for an editor to miss nothing, to hear every feint, every verbal gesture, every shading, every embedded, even not-quite-understood, suggestion in the work.Every sentence, every line. Every time. Without exception. Working with Veronica Geng over a story was like making love—a delicate, playful, rich, energetic, mutual, and intimate investigation. This was true in the eight years I worked with her at the magazine, and in other editing she did for me as a favor after she’d been forced out at the New Yorker. As an editor she was exquisite and without equal. She more or less gave me a new career by reading my stories as well as they could be read, by adding to them, participating in them, making them sites for our mutual celebration of a world by which we were both stunned and endlessly amused. In those early days in 1980, and in the years that followed, her reading of my work, as well as her love and friendship, which I returned in equal measure, made the career that she made possible worth having. It is more than a little less valuable now that she’s gone.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 23:07:05 +0000
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