**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** The Vidal manuscript — second pass **Sent:** Mon 6 May, 10:14
Joao,
I've done the second pass on the Vidal. Marginalia attached. A few structural notes you'll want before the editorial meeting on Thursday:
1. The middle section (ch. 7–11) is doing two books' worth of work and needs to choose. 2. The narrator's voice slips into the third person twice in ch. 9 — almost certainly deliberate but I'd ask her about it. 3. The sex scene in ch. 12 is the best writing in the book and the worst-positioned. It belongs earlier. Possibly much earlier.
Happy to walk through any of this. I'll be in the office most of Wednesday.
Best, Alex
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**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** RE: The Vidal manuscript — second pass **Sent:** Mon 6 May, 17:42
Alex,
Thank you — this is exactly the read I needed and exactly the read I was afraid of.
On (3): I agree, and I have been avoiding agreeing for about a week. If we move it earlier we lose the catharsis at the end, but we gain a book that is honest about what it is. I think she'll fight us on it. I think she'll be right to.
A question, off the record. You wrote in the margin of p. 184 that the scene "declines to be looked at directly." I have read that note seven times. Can you tell me what you meant? I think I understand and I want to be sure.
Joao
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**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** RE: RE: The Vidal manuscript — second pass **Sent:** Tue 7 May, 08:09
Joao,
I meant: the scene is written from the side. The camera, if there were one, is in the next room. We hear the chair move. We hear the small sound she makes when he undoes the second button and not the first. We do not see them. Vidal trusts the reader to be in the next room with her, which is a generous and slightly cruel thing for a writer to do.
Most writers, when they get to a scene like that, turn the lights on. Vidal turns them off and lets us listen.
I think that is why the scene is the best thing in the book. It refuses to be consumed. It insists on being overheard.
I hope that answers it. If not, ask again.
Alex
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**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** RE: RE: RE: The Vidal manuscript — second pass **Sent:** Tue 7 May, 22:51
Alex,
I am writing this from home, which I realise is the wrong address to be using, and I will switch to my personal account if you would prefer. Say the word.
Your note answered it and also did not answer it. You described the scene more precisely than Vidal does. I have been thinking about your phrase — *the small sound she makes when he undoes the second button and not the first* — and I want to point out, gently, that that detail is not in the manuscript. You put it there. You overheard something Vidal did not actually write.
I am not accusing you of anything. I am observing that you read the scene the way the scene asks to be read, which is to say: as a participant. I did the same thing. I think most good readers do. It is what the scene is for.
I notice you signed the last one with your first name. I notice I am noticing. The brief was for a professional opinion and I have delivered something else, I think, in the margins.
It is very late here. I should not send this. I am going to send this.
Joao
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**From:** [email protected] **To:** [email protected] **Subject:** (no subject) **Sent:** Wed 8 May, 00:34
Joao,
The second button. Not the first. You're right — I put it there. I have been sitting with the fact that I put it there for about an hour now.
I'm going to say something and I'm going to say it once, here, on this address, and then we can both decide in the morning whether it was said.
I have been reading manuscripts for you for two years. I have written you, in that time, approximately four hundred professional emails. I have, in every one of them, chosen my sentences with more care than the job required. I told myself it was because you are a careful reader and I did not want to embarrass myself. That was true and it was not the whole truth.
The whole truth is the kind of thing one writes in the margin of someone else's book because one cannot yet write it in one's own.
Thursday's meeting is at ten. I will be there. I will have opinions about chapter twelve. I will not, in the meeting, look at you the way I am looking at this screen.