Eleanor Gould Packard

DEADLINE PASSED


YOU MUST READ THE PREVIOUS COMMENTS AND WRITE SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID.
UP TO 20 POINTS EXTRA CREDIT. DUE: SEPT. 29.

On the Trail of Missing Antecedents (And Meaning)

By JANNY SCOTT
Published: Wednesday, February 4, 1998

An 80-year-old woman sits bent over a stack of galley proofs, pencil in hand, working her way down a seemingly endless column of type. Her pencil hovers, doubles back, alights to raise a query, then moves on in restless pursuit of precision.
Her quarry is linguistic sloppiness: ambiguity, redundancy, dangling modifiers, disagreeing pronouns, mixed metaphors and such. Her script colonizes the margins: ''NOT grammar. What's antecedent? This clear? (not to me). Incomprehensible. Huh? How so?''
The presence behind the pencil is Eleanor Gould Packard, the grammarian for The New Yorker, where she has worked for 52 years. Her admirers say that she, as much as Harold Ross, E. B. White or William Shawn, has been responsible for the magazine's quintessential style. Miss Gould, as she is known, is a legend in certain circles. She is said to have read nearly every word of nonfiction published in The New Yorker over half a century. She has been called the Orwell of copy editors, the Kasparov of syntax. Her name has become adjective, gerund and verb.
Generations of writers and editors recall vividly the humbling shock of their first glimpse of a ''Gould proof.'' But many have gone on to internalize the maddening genius of her method. Deborah Garrison, a senior editor at The New Yorker, speaks of ''the cult of Miss Gould.''
'It's like having Newton help you with your physics homework,'' Hendrik Hertzberg, the writer and editor, said in 1995 in a toast to Miss Gould. ''Or, more precisely -- and precision is the key here -- it's like having Beethoven give you some pointers on composition. Eleanor's understanding of grammar goes deeper than stuff like making sure subjects and objects agree. It's about the architecture of the sentence and the paragraph. And it's about the architecture of the thought behind the sentence and the paragraph.''
Miss Gould would never put it that way, of course. She describes her mission in matter-of-fact terms, in keeping with her methodical approach. As one former editor put it, Miss Gould approaches every article as a messy room that needs tidying up. As Miss Gould puts it, ''I just try to make things right.''
On a recent afternoon, she could be found at her worn wooden desk in an office on West 42nd Street 16 floors above Bryant Park. She was dressed in brightly colored slacks that matched her cardigan and socks, and beaded moccasins.
Five days a week, she travels to work by bus from her apartment on Central Park West near West 101st Street, where she has lived for 45 years. She carries her lunch in an old shoe bag made of fabric resembling an Ace bandage: crackers with peanut butter, a piece of cucumber, one small prune, a dish of granola.
For a vacation when she was in her late 70's, she visited Antarctica. For her birthday, she asked her daughter, Susan Packard, for a book on snakes. On city buses, she has been known to amuse herself by factoring the bus identification numbers.
When pressed to speak about her work in more expansive terms, she said, ''Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by 'higher purpose.' ''
But others, after all, call it ''an exercise in morality,'' the pursuit of clarity being the pursuit of honesty and truth.
''Well, I do pursue all those things,'' she said. ''But it would never have occurred to me to put it that way.''
Along the philosophical spectrum inhabited by people who make it their job to think about the language, from the ''descriptivism'' of linguists and lexicographers to the ''prescriptivism'' of some grammarians, Miss Gould falls firmly in the more conservative group, the upholders of traditional rules.
That or Which? She Always Knows
She keeps H. W. Fowler's ''Dictionary of Modern English Usage'' on the shelf above her desk. The distinction between ''masterful'' and ''masterly'' is one she fiercely defends. She knows all there is to know about the rules governing ''which'' and ''that,'' and all about ''the exceptional which.''
''Of course, the language changes all the time,'' she said glumly. ''One has to, I suppose, resign oneself to it.''
Miss Gould is not immune to the appeal of innovation, however. When Mr. Hertzberg described Susan Molinari, who was then a United States Representative, as ''babaceous'' in a column last June, Miss Gould penciled in the margin, ''No such word, but a good invention. Or maybe need an i?'' They went with ''babelicious.''
One other detail about Miss Gould: She is deaf. She woke up one morning in 1990 feeling dizzy, went to hang up her bathrobe and realized she could not hear. She spent a week in a hospital, reading proofs and baffling doctors, then returned to work, her deafness unexplained.
Taking Satisfaction In Solitary Work
Her hearing loss robbed her of three extracurricular passions: music, ballet and theater. A longtime Mets fan, she has become even more avid about sports. But about her work she said cheerfully: ''I congratulate myself all the time. I have the perfect job for a deaf person.''
Editors communicate with her by note; she responds in a creaky, high-pitched voice. Mr. Hertzberg had computers installed in her office and at home, but she has resisted learning to use them. (In interviews, she answered questions typed by a reporter into her computer.)
Her work is profoundly solitary. Many editors and writers know her only from her proofs. When Stephen Schiff, a staff writer, was finally taken to meet her after she had been editing his work for several years, he remembers finding ''this wonderful, elderly woman sitting in this tiny room speaking to me, if I recall correctly, very loudly and enthusiastically.
''Because, in a way, she did know me,'' Mr. Schiff said. ''She'd been reading me for quite some time -- very, very closely. In a certain way, she's a kind of longed-for and idealized reader.''
Miss Gould's life is the subject of considerable mythology. Some insist that she started out studying chemistry, and that her notations resemble formulas. In fact, she majored in English at Oberlin College, graduating summa cum laude. She moved to New York City and found work in publishing.
How she got her job at The New Yorker is the subject of the most-told myth. As one version goes, she marked up an entire issue of the magazine, then mailed it to Harold Ross, who, upon receiving it, bellowed something unprintable and said, ''Find the woman and hire her.''
In fact, she wrote to William Shawn, who was then an editor at the magazine, looking for a job. She did mention two mistakes in a recent issue. (''One was the horrid old 'different than.' '') On her 28th birthday, Oct. 3, 1945, she was hired to work on the copy desk.
In short order, she was promoted to editing proofs. A year after arriving, she married Freddie Packard, the head of the checking department, who died in 1974. She spent six years working under Mr. Ross; then Mr. Shawn became editor of the magazine.
''Shawn truly trusted and relied on her in matters of style and judgment,'' said Charles McGrath, an editor at The New Yorker for 23 years, now the editor of The New York Times Book Review. ''They understood the way the other thought.''
What Miss Gould does is not simple to explain. Pauline Kael, the film critic, describes the technique as ''a refined form of logic.'' Miss Gould combs through every article, scrutinizing it not just for grammar but also for everything from usage and style to taste and sense.
''What's this? Familiar to everyone but me?'' she might wonder in the margin. ''But does W. Va. rank as Southern? Seems much more Midwestern?'' On one proof, she wrote a detailed comparison of several dictionaries' definitions of ''belabor,'' then suggested that the word be scrapped.
''She has an amazing store of knowledge,'' said Henry Finder, the magazine's editorial director. ''She'll say: 'Barney Greengrass was not in operation at that time. Could he be thinking of . . .?' And then she'll list three stores of a similar nature that were in operation in 1940.''
A Preference Helps Shape a Style
Miss Gould found four errors in a three-word sentence in a piece by Lawrence Weschler. John Bennet, a senior editor, once spent a full day patching a logical hole in an article, only to have Miss Gould write in the margin, ''Have we completely lost our minds?''
Her best-known bete noire is something called indirection. It is described as the practice of obliquely insinuating new information into a narrative as if the reader already knows it -- a technique feature writers often use to jam facts into tight space and achieve a knowing tone.
Here is a hypothetical example of indirection, courtesy of Mr. Finder: ''Her two Afghan hounds have the run of her 24-room apartment.'' To avoid indirection, the writer might instead say, ''She lives in a 24-room apartment and has two Afghan hounds that have the run of the place.''
Miss Gould's aversion to indirection, which Ross is said to have shared, helps explain something central to what was long thought of as The New Yorker's voice, something that Daniel Menaker, who worked there as an editor for 26 years, describes as ''a deliberate shucking of sophistication.''
''Everything should be presented in an order, a sequence, so that the reader would always feel as if someone were holding his hand firmly,'' said Mr. Menaker, now senior literary editor for the Random House Trade Group. ''Questions would be taken care of gracefully, at the right time and in the right place, so the reader would never say: 'Where am I? Who is this person?' ''
Question Marks, For Civility's Sake
Miss Gould is not everyone's cup of tea. (And not everyone at The New Yorker abhors indirection.) A few editors will not even read a Gould proof. Her approach is not thought to be well suited to fiction. And new writers tend to be spared the painful experience of actually seeing their Gould proofs.
Gould queries are discretionary; editors and writers act on them or not. For civility's sake, most come with a question mark appended. Some writers act on most of them; others might take 25 percent. To accept them all, editors said, could have a homogenizing effect.
''You always wonder: 'I've accepted these things, I've rejected these things. What is she thinking?' '' Mr. Schiff said.
The answer is, she is trying not to. ''No, I never look,'' Miss Gould said. ''I always feel I might get discouraged if I look.''
Occasionally, Miss Gould will reveal her feelings about an article.
At the very end of the proof of a particularly funny book review several years ago, Deborah Garrison, who was editing the review, came across a comment from Miss Gould. Inscribed in a circle, the symbol Miss Gould uses to signify a larger observation, it read, ''I enjoyed this piece so much I forgot to eat my lunch.''