“The music was wonderful,” he said, “just what I’d imagined. So full of feeling and passion and emotion and all the good things of being human. The sound just rolled over me. Everyone was singing and the sound was immense.” It went on for a long time, and then there was quiet. A small woman came to the front of the room. Several people stood up, in no apparent pattern.
Ted’s back was hurting him, so he stood up, too.
He hadn’t understood. All of the people who had stood up were brought to the front of the room.
The woman prayed over them. She prayed for strength and health. Calls of reassurance and encouragement came from all corners of the room. She prayed in front of Ted. And then she knocked him down.
“I could see what was going to happen, because it happened with the other people,” Ted told me. “She stood in front of you, and behind you stood this immense black guy, and she knocked you down, and you had to fall right back. Where the man would catch you. You had to trust her, you see. You had to let yourself go, just completely.”
“And did you?” I asked.
“I did,” said Ted. “I can’t tell you how marvelous I feel.”
Ted finished the novel in March 1995. I was working for the federal government at the time. It arrived in my office on Monday and I took the day off on Thursday and edited it and had it back to him on Saturday.
“Don’t rush,” he had said, wanting not to inconvenience me. “Take your time.”
But I knew we had no time. I read it once, all the way through. I could see the shape. The first time through, I began to understand who the people were. I read it again, slowly, and edited it, page by page, I listened to its sounds, word by word.
I was not young, not then. I was no longer a confused and anxious assistant editor at a New York publishing house. I was no longer a damaged woman who did not know her own heart. I had no questions about who Ted Whittemore was to me; I understood in many ways what was important about his work. I concentrated.
This book was not about espionage. It was about a healer. Ted began the book three months before he got his diagnosis, but still the book was about a healer. And, also, for the first time, Whittemore’s main character was female. Her name was Sister Sally and she was unlike any of his other characters; the man with whom she has a brief love affair, Billy the Kid, however, resembled characters in the earlier books and also resembled Ted.
I wrote that I was going to push him very hard. “I think you have a bit further to travel with Sally and Billy. So let’s go.” I started by telling him that I didn’t think the verb in his first sentence was in the right tense. This was a brutal and ridiculous way to start an editorial letter, but I had no choice. I had to be thorough. I told my dear friend what my thoughts were as I read. I tried to remember where everything was and to see when things worked together and when they did not. I commented, I queried words, I flirted with him, I reminded him of old successes and other moments we’d both loved in other Whittemore books, I cheered, I wondered out loud about the characters so he would see how they appeared to someone else, I suggested, I doubted, I applauded, I reflected, I pushed and pushed and pushed.
Ted told me the letter was helpful. Very helpful. He was excited about getting back to work. I sent a copy of the editorial letter to Tom, who had become Ted’s agent. Tom called me up. He thought my comments were good.
And, in his old-fashioned manner, Tom said, “You know, the letter you wrote — it’s a love letter, in a way.”
A real writer puts his heart and soul and all his intelligence on the page. Any book can be the last one. Every one of the writers words, every small motive, counts. The editor must attend as though nothing else matters.
Ted went out of remission a few weeks after he completed the draft. Although his levels of pain increased and increased in the weeks and months that followed, he was able to do some revisions.
I told him that his revisions were more than I could have hoped for. I came to New York from Washington several times, working on the pages and leaving notes with him, telling him every doubt, but most of all I told him how wonderful the book was, and how each revision made me more convinced that the book was complete and perfect inside of him and our only task was to ask the right questions and bring it all to light.
I called Ted every other day, sometimes every day, until that became too difficult. He told me things about himself, so that in those last months I was allowed to understand more about him and how he’d lived his life.
Combined with my love for Ted was a certain brutality which I tried to keep in check. I tried not to push him too hard. I tried not to let my disappointment show on the phone when he said he was just too tired from the pain, too sick from the drugs, to be able to write.
There was one section in the book that I really wanted him to revise. It was the scene where Sally and Billy fall in love. The woman in this novel was nothing like the women he’d written about before, who quite frankly had always struck me as a little pale. Sally was a real powerhouse, a force, a tragic mess. One day he called me at the office and told me he’d spent three hours writing the day before, and he felt like hell but he’d revised that scene, which was central to the love story, the scene I was sure he had inside him. He told me — but I did not see the pages. I did not see the fix.
Of course, it is dangerous when an editor has a favorite fix. It’s not your book.
Because there was so little time, however, I let myself want it. In part, I just wanted what I wanted, and used the drama of death to cover up my presumptuousness and greed — but in part, I felt unconsciously that my desire for the fix would encourage Ted to fight harder, to slow down the illness for the sake of the writing.
Underneath this I must have believed that writing was more important to Ted than everything else, that he had no more powerful motive for staying alive. Was I crazy?
Meanwhile, he was in and out of the hospital. Annie left to go to Italy, alone, to get some time away from cancer, on a holiday Ted told her she needed to take. Carol came to take care of Ted.
Years back, Carol had been with Ted, longer than anyone else. She had ridden motorcycles all around Crete with Ted. She had been with him the day when, discouraged about ever writing anything worthwhile, he spotted a scarab in a dusty British glass case in the British Museum and the whole idea of the Quartet was born. Carol showed up when things took a turn for the worse. From early until late, she moved hospital beds and nurses in and out of Annie’s house, not sleeping much if at all.
One night, when I hadn’t been able to talk to Ted for ten days — I had been out of the country — I called him from my younger brother’s house, where I was visiting.
Ted told me that he felt, suddenly, he had enough energy to really finish the book. Carol would read it, too, and Ted would mark places to cut, which I would then execute, leaving him the time to write the revisions he wanted to do.
My brother came into his bedroom where I was using the phone. So did my sister-in-law, so I moved out to the unfinished porch out their bedroom, carrying the portable phone, which was taped together with gaffer’s tape from the results of abuse by children. As my brother and his wife lay together, sleeping, preparing for another day of work and family, I stood on the deck in the black night and schemed with Ted.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes you can do it. Yes,” I said. “We’ve had some great breaks already. You finished the draft before you went out of remission. Remember? Now we have another big break.”