SOMERVILLE, Mass. Maggie Turbek gave up on her hope of writing full-time long ago, but that hasn’t stopped her from crushing the dreams of others. “I like to tell my young clients that they have a choice,” she says as she stubs out a non-filter cigarette. “If you like to eat, you’re probably not cut out to be a writer.”
Maggie, channeling her bitterness into sound advice.
Turbek operates on the fringe of literature as a writing coach, following the failure that looked like moderate success to one unfamiliar with the cold reality of the publishing business. “I made $20,000 on my first and only novel,” she says with tempered bitterness. “That may sound like a lot, but the copy jockey at Kinko’s”–the printing store where she had the manuscript copied–“probably made more at the minimum wage.”
Turbek’s message to her students is, don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good, or even the okay. “So many of these kids read James Joyce’s Ulysses and say to themselves late at night–that’s the kind of novel I’d like to write,” she says as she lights another Lucky Strike, causing Lorna Twellman, a recent graduate of Tufts University who is her assistant, to turn up her desk fan. “They wake up in the morning and what seemed like an easily climbable jungle gym of their youth when they were drunk or high is actually an El Capitan”–the sheer rock formation in Yosemite National Park–“and it’ll take hard work to get to the top.”
El Capitan: There is no gift shop at the top.
One way Turbek urges her proteges on is by keeping them out of what she calls “literary food fights” over grammar, usage, spelling and syntax. “The easiest way to feel like you’re a writer when you’re not is to waste your time and energy nitpicking other writers’ work,” she says with a note of disgust. “Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t spell to save his life–should he have called his masterwork The Not-So-Great Gatsby?”
Twellman excuses herself to interrupt our interview and call Turbek’s attention to one of her “little lambs who has gone astray.” “Who is it?” Turbek barks.
“It’s the guy Dwight, the MFA candidate” at Boston University Twellman replies.
Turbek goes to look over the young woman’s shoulder at a comment string below a short story on Wordy, a platform where writers can post their work and receive critiques from others. “For the love of Mike,” Turbek says. “He’s actually going to make an issue out of who/whom?”
“That’s what it looks like,” says Twellman, as she gets up from her chair and lets Turbek take over.
“HEY DWIGHT,” she types in capital letters, signaling her anger with a shot across the bow. “It’s DIALOGUE, not a job application. If the characters says ‘Whom do you think you are?’ he’s going to sound like a butler, not a small-time gangster. Capiche?”
The young man is silent for a moment, then sheepishly replies to the comment. “Got it Maggie–I’ll go work on my own writing.”
“That’s a good boy,” Turbek says, calming down to upper-lower case. “You owe me a second draft by next Wednesday.”
Turbek gets up and allows Twellman to retake her chair, then goes to the window in the room that serves as her den and office to look out on a stand of trees just beginning to turn color. “I wish I didn’t have to be a jerk, but I wouldn’t be earning my keep if I didn’t,” she says before her train of thought is interrupted.
“Maggie?” Twellman says cautiously, fearing an explosion from the momentarily dormant volcano she works for.
“Yes?”
“I have someone questioning the use of ‘me’ as the subject of a sentence.”
“When it isn’t in immediate contact with its verb?”
“Uh, yes,” Twellman replies nervously, not having a ready grasp of the exception to the usual rule that Turbek is citing.
“Okay, be there in a minute,” Turbek says. She takes a deep breath to clear her mind, then jumps into the fray like a football player diving for a loose ball.
“Who is the Little Lord Fauntleroy we’re dealing with?”
Little Lord Fauntleroy
“That guy Craig, at the Iowa Writers Workshop.”
“Nothing like a writers program to kill any talent you might have had,” Turbek says.
The controversy between the two young buck men of letter arises out of the sentence “Me and Mike were both in love with Chloe,” in a college apartment novel that makes “Friends” look like “Madame Bovary.” Craig–who is struggling with a coming-of-age novel about a summer job he had with the U.S. Postal Service, has criticized it as ungrammatical.
“Craigie-boy,” Turbek types below his comments. “Haven’t I told you–a hundred times–that the substitution of the objective case for the nominative is perfectly sound American English when used as a multiple subject of a sentence?”
“But it’s just not right,” the young man replies.
“Do you want to grow up to be a school marm or a gun-slinger?” Turbek asks sharply, referring obliquely to the Gary Cooper-Grace Kelly dyad in the movie High Noon.
Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly in High Noon.
“Uh, I don’t want to be a school marm–I don’t think,” the young man says uncertainly.
“Then read page 456 of the 1937 edition of H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, and stop being such a Mrs. Grundy. ‘Me went to the store’ is obviously wrong, but me and you went to the store is fine. Just remember the old songs: Me and Bobby McGee, Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.”
“I don’t know those songs, but okay,” the young man says as he logs off, thoroughly confused by a second allusion to a priggish person that went over his head.
“Do you want to order lunch?” Turbek says, adding “my treat” as she knows Twellman is actively looking for more remunerative work than her present job.
“Sure,” Twellman says, “but before we break you may want to ‘take a gander'” (said in imitation of her boss with “air quotes”) at one more.”
“It depends,” Turbek says. “What is it?”
Twellman gulps, then says “subjunctive mood” nervously.
“Can’t a woman get a moment’s peace?” Turbek snaps, then gives her assistant a bump that nearly knocks her off her chair. “Where is it?” she asks.
“Here,” Twellman says, pointing at a back-and-forth between Marge Chiercy, an English major at the University of Southwestern New Hampshire, and Allison Feingold, an adjunct professor at Norfolk College in Massachusetts.
“Who’s who?” Turbek asks.
“Feingold is the one who claims the sentence should read ‘If it were raining yesterday, he would have ruined his new leather jacket.”
“Will no one rid me of these subjunctive grammar Nazis?” Turbek moans, echoing the complaint of King Henry II that led to the assassination of Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“Do you want pizza or Chinese?” Twellman asks.
“Order what you want, this will only take a second,” Turbek replies before separating the two distaff combatants with an icy blast of common sense. “Alison, dear, you don’t have to use the subjunctive just because the word ‘if’ shows up in the neighborhood.”
“You don’t?” the young woman replies directly underneath the comment.
“The character’s a detective. He’s talking about something that already happened, it’s not hypothetical.”
Thomas a Becket: “But I checked Strunk & White!”
“Oh,” the young woman–who is used to lording it over her students with the life-and-death power that grading confers–replies sheepishly. “I thought it was a hard-and-fast rule.”
“Rule followers rarely get things written,” Turbek types. “And what’s worse, they usually get the rules wrong.”
This makes me feel better. Grammar rules are like a law library: There’s no way you can remember everything.