the career of David Irving The Based on the memoirs of David Irving
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