Sir Alfred Munnings

Last Saturday, whilst strolling down Glebe Place in Chelsea en route for Cheyne Walk, I was astonished to come across this blue plaque, which looks to me as if it does not enjoy the sanction of English Heritage but is perhaps home-made. This would partly explain the impressionistic, not to say loose, copy-editing. But wouldn’t you think that someone would let them know, or that they might get around to replacing it with a corrected one, or that some passer-by might possibly even take matters into his own hands by fetching a ladder and inserting the missing “S” à la Lynn Truss? There is an alternative possibility, which is that a person who rejoiced in the name of Alfred Munning did indeed live there, but was in due course understandably confused with the fourteenth President of the Royal Academy of Arts. However, the question would then arise as to whether that lesser known gentleman, if he existed, warrants the blue plaque treatment at all. Either way, it is a problem.

Manuscript 3

The snag with checking a large manuscript (The Finger: A Handbook) is that although you get better at it as you go along, you also start to get rather weary. I think you can see this also in the quality of the writing—and that’s an excellent argument for writing out of sequence, if you can manage or organize it that way. In this case I did, more a result of happenstance than of careful planning, and therefore at least in theory only I definitely know which sections came in those last few months of crazy slog, and which bits benefited (maybe) from several years of exhaustive finessing. On the other hand, I am quite certain that the principal differences between these are not too hard to spot, but let us not be deflected. In the end I was getting up at four o’clock in the morning, and writing until seven thirty, whereupon I went to work. My sustenance in those peaceful hours before dawn was three full pots of double-smoked Lapsang Souchong tea from the nice man at McNulty’s, to whom therefore at least some of the credit must go for dragging me over the line. Several months later, I am having that slightly peculiar experience of re-reading things that I only have a vague recollection of having written. However, the encouraging part is that from time to time you think to yourself, you know, this is actually quite good. Thus far the publishers have been gracious enough not to contradict me. No more body parts, I think. So I am starting to think about life after The Finger: A Handbook; what next?

Manuscript 2

Morning tea, again. I am going through the corrected manuscript of The Finger: A Handbook and am beginning to piece together tiny flecks of detail about my meticulous purple critic and companion. He or she—the gender is unclear at this stage—turns out to be Scottish, alert to the misuse of the word England where Britain should more properly stand. Actually, it’s not always the case that this was an egregious error on my part, unlike that confusion over the sting versus the bite of an ant. Because sometimes I really did mean England, notwithstanding the Act of Union, but somehow it doesn’t really seem worth the effort to explain in jade green pencil what I was originally getting at. The fact that it’s not entirely clear to my copy editor means that it almost certainly won’t be to any general reader, so, that being the case, it’s far better to accept the amendment with good grace. To some extent this is the overriding obligation of the author, and besides: Resistance is futile. My copy editor is also a little sensitive in respect of a small point I made somewhere about how the sensible remarks in respect of infantile thumb-sucking that were made in a letter to the editor of The Times from the doughty Scottish matron of a public school in Wales, are especially charming if you imagine them uttered with an especially strong accent; all I can do is to assure him or her that this was meant as a genuine compliment. I wonder if that will be enough to save that portion of the relevant sentence; perhaps it ought to go. At this stage other people are much better equipped to make the necessary call.

Manuscript

This long weekend I am tackling the manuscript of my next book, The Finger: A Handbook, which has returned from the copy editor with gratifyingly few substantial alterations or corrections. The process is a humbling one, though, because I realize how completely I am still unaware of many of the strictly codified rules of American punctuation—and much else besides. The elegant notations in purple pencil of my invisible but kindly critic draw my attention to the fine distinctions between further and farther, for example, onwards/upwards and onward/upward, and, indeed, between between and among (or vice versa). Just now I am on my morning tea break, and I have decided that life is definitely too short to spend any amount of time sorting out the American way with which and that, or that and which—something an English friend and colleague of mine describes as the great American which hunt—especially when there are patient souls who are prepared to correct me. Because clearly I have developed the ineffable knack of getting it wrong each and every time. My purple critic—with whom I am rapidly developing a sort of bond—evidently has immense learning also, because at one point I refer to the sting of an ant—you’ll have to read my book to find that particular reference. The word sting is struck and replaced with bite. The marginal note reads “O.K?—no sting; it’s the formic acid in the bite that causes the burn.” To which, in the face of a statement at once so gentle but so compellingly authoritative, there can be no response more appropriate from authors, we solitary laborers in the vineyard of prose, than humility, gratitude, and a solemn resolve never again to make the same error. This is not to say that I have not from time to time rebelled. In a section where I remark, in relation to the opposability of the thumb, that this unique capacity has elevated us above all other mortal creatures, my purple companion asks in the margin “Best word?—One could argue, in ecological terms, that we’re actually parasites or a virus, for example.” I suppose it was wrong of me, but late last night I responded to this challenge with my soft jade-green colored pencil: “Speak for yourself!”