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Based on the memoirs of David Irving

Posted Sunday, December 28, 2008

Thomas B Congdon, editor

 

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

Pamela Congdon

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 Carla Venchiaruttiproduct 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

 

David Irving's Photos | David Irving's Books (free downloads)
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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