Posted
Sunday, December 28, 2008 
Tom
Congdon (1931-2008) by his
author, David Irving TO a published
author, his editor is the other important person in
his life -- more important even than his wife
sometimes; the editor helps to bring the money in,
and the wife helps to shell it out. FOR TWELVE years my editor
was Tom Congdon, who died at his home in
Nantucket, Massachusetts last Tuesday December 23,
2008 aged 77, of Parkinson's disease and congestive
heart failure. Born in Connecticut in 1931, he had
become a senior editor in 1968, and when I was
first assigned to him he was editor in chief with
E. P. Dutton, Inc. He shortly moved to the New York
publishing house William Morrow Inc.  Above:
David Irving with Tom Congdon at
Heathrow in May 1977
TOM
CONGDON'S FAMILY | 
Above:
Thomas B Congdon's daughter Pammie in May
1977 - now Mrs Pamela Lemle Congdon
Walker, of Milton, Mass. In addition to
her, Tom is survived by his daughter
Elizabeth Caffey Congdon Pinto ("Lizzie",
below, center), of Jamestown, R.I.,
and by Constance, his wife of fifty years;
as well as by a brother, William Hanes
Caffey Congdon, of Santa Fe, N.M.; a
sister, Mary Lou Congdon Price of
Columbia, S.C.; and three
granddaughters. 
Photos
by David Irving |
He became a good and
easy-going friend -- his wife Constance was more
difficult, a real southern belle, and very
conscious of her WASP
origins. He lived on the Upper West
Side in a narrow brownstone home on several floors
with a drawing room that ran from front to back.
His two daughters Pammie and Lizzie were precocious
teenagers and just about the purdiest thengs I'd
ever set eyes upon when I stayed with the Congdons
in 1976; they teased me mercilessly, as only
teenagers can. Their mother Connie,
beautiful and snooty  product
of an elegant Southern family, was as said more
difficult. When Pilar phoned one afternoon from
London, Connie made sure to mention that I was here
in New York with my infinitely desirable Italian
assistant (but no less infinitely untouchable)
Carla Venchiarutti. The word "Italian " had
evidently not registered with Pilar as possibly
being a female. Tom kept a large pet swarm
of bees in an upstairs room; they reached the rest
of Manhattan through a four-inch pipe running
through the wall. What more need be said
about him? Well, he was a demanding hands-on line
editor. [On which also read Christopher
Buckley's obituary piece].
It was the first time I had had an editor who was a
would-be writer himself. He had previously edited a
book for the greenhorn writer Peter
Benchley, who wanted to write about a fish that
terrorized a New England village; the idea had been
turned down by several other leading publishers,
but Tom read the submission letter, saw the
prospects, paid for a sample chapter, and sat at
Benchley's elbow teaching him how to write. The
result, published in 1974, was the global
best-seller Jaws, and Jaws was
largely Tom's creation. For the twelve years I
worked with him, he trowelled around in three of my
typescripts, demolishing and rebuilding like an
experienced bricklayer. I would laboriously
generate three feet of typescript, and his red felt
pen ruthlessly drew a single vertical line through
the middle two-and-a -half, to speed things up.
When I first saw the social
weaverbird at work in a Johannesburg garden a few
years later, I suddenly remembered Tom and his red
pen. The bird toils for weeks to build a nest,
which is suspended on a single strand of straw.
Then his partner, the female bird, comes to
inspect, and if she finds his work to be a less
than desirable des. res., she snips that
strand with one bite, and he has to start all over
again. TOM's first project with me
was my
Rommel biography, The Trail of the
Fox. In it, I
introduced some experimental literary devices: for
example, I used the present tense (and italic type)
to describe the hunt for the Rommel legend, and the
past tense to tell the story itself. The various
devices seem to have worked, but it was Tom who
taught me all over again, how to write clean prose.
Mostly, Tom was right. Use
the active voice, he said, never the passive. Write
things in the sequence that they occur -- not, "He
sat down at his desk after entering the office,"
but he entered and sat down. It all sounds so
simple. Do not use Latinate words, but Anglo-Saxon.
Use rare descriptive verbs. Not, the
field-marshal's troops arrived at the Mareth Line,
but his army "slammed into" the Mareth Line. Always
give a person's first name at his first mention;
start each chapter with an opening theme-paragraph,
and each paragraph with a theme-sentence. Here was
I, an established English bestseller author, rather
arrogant and smug, being lectured all over again on
how to write by an American. Don't "pre-figure" (we
all know that the field marshal ended own his life,
but don't start scattering early clues.) I
squirmed, but I always told myself that this was
the editor who "made" Jaws, and I more or
less willingly obeyed. He could be very rough (a
typical theme-sentence, that). The happiest moment
in an author's life comes when he has just
completed a book. He sweeps the files aside, puts
things away, sees his desktop again for the first
time in years. He can sign new contracts. That was
the way I felt when I completed the Rommel
manuscript in 1976, parcelled it up and sent it off
to New York, and cleared my desk of all the stacks
of paper that accompany the writing of such books.
 Three
weeks later, Tom Congdon wrote me: "That is the
finest first draft I ever read." And, would I now
please re-type it all again?
Few letters are seared
deeper into my memory. First draft, Tom?
That package was it: the book. So one half of my
brain screamed at the other. I sucked back the
words, and did as Tom had told me -- retyped the
whole manuscript, cutting, chopping, smoothing,
planing, and polishing, until it was closer to the
great best seller that under Tom's hands it became.
I retyped it, and did not merely edit it by
keystrokes on a screen; I did it the old-fashioned
way, hammering keys, and slamming type-bars onto
paper and carbon-paper. Modern word-processed books
pass more often than not straight from the eyeballs
to the finger-tips, without having been touched by
human brain at all. My Rommel went through
my brain and Tom's, not just once but several
times. ONE day, as he edited
Rommel, he complained about the monotonous
desert-battle scenes, the to and fro, that swept
the German and Italian divisions now east, now
west, back and forth, along the North African coast
from 1941 to 1943. He was right; they were,
frankly, tedious. One battle was much like the
next. "That's how they were,
Tom," I defended myself. "Even the Afrika Korps
knew that. The veterans sang a song, Es geht
alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei. Es geht
rückwärts im Winter, und vorwärts im
Mai." Tom pressed the point.
"Give the reader a bit of colour. He's parched for
it. Tell him about the heat, the flies, and the
thirst. Give him a couple of pages about life
inside a battle tank." I choked. I had taken my
oldest daughter Josephine inside a World War II
U-boat at Kiel, in Germany; and with Paloma and
Beatrice I had crawled through a US Navy submarine
at Pearl Harbor. I have never been inside a tank,
and I told Tom so. "Then work it out!" he
cried, as if it were obvious. I did just that -- I
imagined the sticky heat, the cramped quarters, the
claustrophobia, the rattle of the used shell
casings, the bumps and bruises, the smell of hot
oil and gasoline, the tight leather clothing, the
hellish noise, the uncertainty, the ever-present
fear of being "brewed" - burned alive by a direct
hit. It is not a passage in the Rommel biography of
which I am particularly proud, and I am not allowed
to forget those lines. Tank men from all over the
world, veterans of whichever army, write me
tear-stained letters of congratulation about how I
brought it all back to them. Eventually there was an
even worse humiliation. The Oxford University
Schools Examinations Board asked for permission to
reproduce two or three paragraphs from my Rommel
biography for an English prose examination which
they were setting for foreign students: it was my
account of life inside a tank; my mythical tank, a
tank in which I had never once set foot. It has
rattled around my conscience like one of those
empty shell casings ever since.  AFTER
Rommel, I wrote The
War Between the Generals.
I wrote it for Tom Congdon's own new publishing
house Congdon & Lattès. It had offices
near the top of the Empire State
building.
One day (it must have been
about 1980) when Tom was sitting with me in my
study off Grosvenor Square, editing this new
typescript, he cast a quizzical eye at Colin, my
secretary, who was typing something political in a
corner of the room, and mildly chided me, "I hope
you are not getting involved in politics."
I had barely reassured him
to the contrary, when there was a loud crash at the
far end of the apartment. "What the hell is that!"
exclaimed Tom, and I said it sounded like a car
crashing through our front door. Wheels can't climb stairs;
but feet can, and the owners of those feet, two
heavily built men carrying sledge hammers, were
standing in our front hall, having literally
smashed our front door off its hinges. They had
evidently pressed our doorbell, which never worked.
I was not only in, but clad in my running gear, and
I gave chase out into the street, finally losing
them in the traffic at Oxford Street. Rym
Belkhodja, a friendly Tunisian who worked for
me later in 1982, told me that she met men from a
Leftist east London commune who had plotted the
raid. So my suspicions were not
ill-founded. I wrote this new book in
the middle of a matrimonial battle. It became very
ugly, between the two sides' lawyers, though not,
oddly enough, between my wife and myself. Tom found
himself in the thick of it when he came to stay as
our guest in London. Summoned to court at one
hour's notice for yet another committal hearing
instituted by Pilar's lawyers (she had no idea what
that phrase involved), my aghast American editor
accompanied me to the High Court, hoping to give
evidence on how important my uninterrupted writing
was to his fledgling publishing firm. I prevailed
on that day, as I did every other such hearing; but
to our joint consternation, the High Court judge
ordered him -- my editor -- out of our guest room!
He was baffled, and so was
I. As I walked down Oxford Street toward Marble
Arch to find a hotel for him, he retailed to me a
story told at a New York dinner a few nights
earlier -- about one Joseph, a farmer on the slopes
of Mount St Helens, who had built thereon a
farmstead, and each year suffered fresh
misfortunes, rebuilding his life each time until
finally the great volcano erupted and destroyed his
existence once again. Joseph shook his hand at the
skies and cried, "Why me, O Lord! Why me!" "The
clouds rolled apart," said Tom with a cruel laugh.
"There was a great stillness in the air, and the
voice of God came down with a thunderous reply.
Why you, Joseph? Why you? Because you piss me
off, Joseph, that's why!" I transferred a few days
later with him to New York City for two months to
finish the book in time for its deadline. I had
been retyping the manuscript in London onto a Xerox
850 word processor, a real cutting-edge machine
that cost some £15,000 in 1980 ("Buy now,
because in December the price is changing": it did,
it dropped by five thousand). Tom found an
identical machine in Wall Street for me to work on,
but it was available only at nights. I brought over
the soup-plate sized Xerox discs to New York and
reworked the typescript night after night. I rode
the subway or a cab back to his apartment at five
or six each morning. I remember driving past the
Dakota Building on Central Park one morning and
seeing cameras, television lights, and reporters
clustered around the entrance: it was the night of
December 8, 1980 and John Lennon had just
been shot. When the job was finished I
returned to the U.K. My book was one of the first
to be published under his own imprint, and it was
make or break for his company -- and break them it
did when it was published in March 1981. The New
York Times's Hungarian-born reviewer John
Lukàcs stabbed the book in the back
in
a review sneeringly entitled "An Amateur Historian"
published on March 8,
a few days before publication date. He had never
liked me. Years later, researching in John
Toland's papers in the Roosevelt archives,
I
discovered that Lukàcs had a bone to pick
with me ever since 1972 over his own failed
attempts to find a publisher for his planned Hitler
biography, and he blamed me.
Now, reviewing the new book, Lukàcs went so
far as to claim that I had invented documents and
quotations; they were unfamiliar to him:
Mr.
Irving's factual errors are beyond belief. He
says that "forty per cent of the prisoners"
[taken in August 1944] in southern
France "turned out to be Russians who had
volunteered to fight for Germany against
Stalin." In fact the quotation was
from the telegram General Jacob Devers sent
to Dwight D Eisenhower, which I found in the
latter's papers at Abilene; and it is a true
statistic. The same morning that
The New York Times featured his scathing
review, the NBC television program "Today" pulled
the interview which they had pre-recorded with me
about the book -- they just took it off their
broadcast schedule. It took six months for The
New York Times to print a letter in which I
shot down all the lies that Lukàcs had
written. Robbed of this commercial success,
Congdon's publishing house foundered in the
horrific internecine wars of Madison Avenue, and he
went out of business.  He
edited one more book for me, my biography of the
Reichsmarschall, Hermann Göring.
It was published in 1989.
As I left Key West one Sunday a few weeks later to
fly back to England, in fact on the last day of
April, I
picked up The Miami Herald, and stubbed my
toe on one of the finest reviews I ever
gained: "Hermann
Göring remains easily the most fascinating,"
wrote Alyn Brodsky, "[as] David
Irving demonstrates in this brilliant study. . .
This brilliant, compelling, page-turner of a book."
It was the first of an
avalanche of such wonderful reviews. The real
credit for these reviews was of course mostly Tom
Congdon's, not mine. As though he sensed it would
be our last ever collaboration, he had in fact
asked me to dedicate this work to him, and I did so
on its title page, though in willing puzzlement, if
I may put it like that -- I really did owe so much
of my success to him. ©
2008 Copyright David Irving / Focal Point
Publications 
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R
V Jones refers in his memoirs to how Mr Irving
held the secret-
Christopher
Buckley: Remembering
the man who brought Jaws and me to the
shelves
-
Thomas
B. Congdon, Editor of Best Sellers Like 'Jaws,'
Dies at 77
-
-
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2008
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