Miss Gould

By David Remnick

Six decades ago, not long after being hired by Harold Ross as a copy editor at The New Yorker, a shy young woman, an Oberlin graduate, set to work on a manuscript by James Thurber and soon came across the word “raunchy.” She had never heard of the word and thought it was a mistake. “Raunchy” became “paunchy.” Thurber’s displeasure was such that the young woman barely escaped firing. Later, according to his biographer Harrison Kinney, Thurber wrote that “facetiously” was the only word in English that had all six vowels in order. What about “abstemiously”? the copy editor replied. Thurber, who was not easily impressed, was finally compelled to ask, “Who is Eleanor Gould?”

Miss Gould, as she was known to everyone at the magazine, died last week, at the age of eighty-seven. She worked here for fifty-four years, most of them as its Grammarian (a title invented for her), and she earned the affection and gratitude of generations of writers. She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.

Her devotion to what she called her “reading” was as intense as any writer’s to his writing. She never missed a day of work. Fifteen years ago, when she was seventy-two, she discovered, during a conversation with a colleague, that she had gone completely deaf. She came to the office anyway, riding the bus down Central Park West as she always did. Thereafter, writers and other editors wrote notes to her on scraps of paper. She answered in a birdlike voice, high and a little scratchy, like a gull’s.

Miss Gould occupied various offices over the years, including one that Thurber had decorated by drawing on the walls. Her bookshelf held a row of favorite authorities, including a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and Theodore Bernstein’s “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins,” and on a dictionary stand was Webster’s Second Unabridged. Wearing thick glasses and an ever-changing array of bright-colored pants and sweaters, she spent the day, and many nights, hovering over her stack of galley and page proofs. Her attention seemed never to waver. She did not daydream. You were unlikely to pass her office and catch her staring off into the canyons of midtown.

A typical “Gould proof” was filled with the lightly pencilled tracery of her objections, suggestions, and abbreviated queries: “emph?” “ind.,” “mean this?” She confronted the galley proofs of writers as various as Joseph Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, Janet Flanner—well, everyone, really. She did a proof on every nonfiction piece published in the magazine. Even a writer as determinedly vernacular as Pauline Kael, who initially found Miss Gould’s suggestions intrusive, came to accept them—many of them, anyway—with gratitude. Her reading was detached, objective, scientific, as if she somehow believed that a kind of perfection in prose was possible. Like Bobby Fischer’s sense of the chessboard, her feel for English was at a higher level than the rest of us—we editors and writers—could hope to glimpse.

“My list of pet language peeves,” she once told The Key Reporter, the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter, “would certainly include writers’ use of indirection (i.e., slipping new information into a narrative as if the reader already knew it); confusion between restrictive and non-restrictive phrases and clauses (‘that’ goes with restrictive clauses, and, ordinarily, ‘which’ with nonrestrictive); careless repetition; and singular subjects with plural verbs and vice versa.” She was a fiend for problems of sequence and logic. In her presence, modifiers dared not dangle. She could find a solecism in a Stop sign.

Once in a great while, Miss Gould would lose her editorial patience—“No grammar! No sense!” was one exclamation of distress; “Have we completely lost our mind?” she once wrote in the margins of a Talk of the Town galley when the section still used the editorial “we”—but she did not take offense when her suggestions were overruled by another editor or the writer. Miss Gould once found what she believed were four grammatical errors in a three-word sentence. And yet the sentence, by Lawrence Weschler (and, alas, no longer remembered), was published as written.

In some cases, Miss Gould’s suggestions took the ideal of clarity to Monty Python-like extremes. For example, some years ago, she saw the phrase “... and now sat stone still, chewing gum throughout the proceedings” and suggested replacing the last bit with “sat stone still except for his jaw, which chewed gum.” Funny, yes, but the correction planted a red flag. Something was wrong, and needed fixing. Her attentions, imperceptible to the reader, made all the difference. Her effect on a piece of writing could be like that of a master tailor on a suit; what had once seemed slovenly and overwrought was suddenly trig and handsome. The wearer stood taller in his shoes.

Especially in the early years of the magazine, there were many office romances and marriages, and, in 1946, Miss Gould married the head of the fact-checking department, Freddie Packard. The two worked for the magazine for a combined ninety-nine years. (Packard died in 1974.) They had a daughter, Susan, with whom Miss Gould travelled to remote destinations. In her late seventies, after reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World,” Eleanor set off with Susan for the Antarctic.

Miss Gould used to tell her friends at the magazine that she wanted to work until she was a hundred. A stroke, which she suffered at her desk, in 1999, forced her to retire. The title of Grammarian was retired with her. In subsequent years, friends at the magazine would visit or send gifts: books, flowers, a basket of cheeses and fruit. But after a while she found such attentions hard to bear. She missed the work that she could no longer do. To one correspondent she sent a beautiful letter, frank and kind, needlessly grateful, which ended with the sentence “Please forget about me.” Of course, we never could and we never will.