Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Responsible to a Higher Power

The train driver, the shelf-stacker in the supermarket, the telephone engineer working on the overhead cables. These people are not just anonymous, they are also effectively invisible. We all are aware, at least vaguely, that there are any number of people who mediate our world continuously but go largely unnoticed. In fact the better they do their work, the less notice we take of their existence.

Among these invisibles are the copy editors of commercial publishing. They sit between writers and readers, largely unknown, unrecognised, even derided as obsessive fanatics who interfere with authorial art. Mary Norris is one of these. She has been one of these for most of her adult life. And she has written about it, undoubtedly in the same correct prose she has insisted upon throughout her career.

The title she has chosen is suggestive - ‘Confessions’. There is no irony here; I doubt there is much irony anywhere among copy editors. This is not an exposé of the inner workings of the publishing business; it is an old-fashioned apologia, an explanation of one’s life, directed, like the similarly named book by St. Augustine, to oneself as much as to the world at large. It is a sort of empirically derived theory of a modest, ordinary, unremarkable life, a description of what it’s like to be floating unnoticed in a sea of fame, notoriety and reputation.

The dramas in this invisible world are real but slight, often trivial by external standards - the appropriateness of restrictive or unrestrictive clauses, the irritation of a dangling participle, the use of gender specific pronouns. These are hardly issues to rival the negotiations of international trade agreements or a corporate takeover. Copy editors rarely even meet the famous authors whose work they improve.

Nonetheless, there is something distinctively important in Norris’s memoir of a life devoted to correctness. Grammar and spelling and usage are not merely the equivalent of literary etiquette, how we show respect to each other through small formalities. Language is the core of our everyday existence; yet it is as invisible to most of us as the other things and people who mediate that existence.

Norris’s is a life devoted to that central invisible fact of language. Her concern is its preservation, protection, and its beauty as an object created by human effort but beyond human control. This makes her a ‘nerd’ but in a manner entirely different from that of a computer programmer for whom the ‘language’ they employ is essentially fixed and dead. In contrast, the ‘client’ in Norris’s profession is not the author, nor her employer, nor even the reader; it is language itself, which is alive and has its own agenda.

So Norris is not simply an example of another invisible professional. In a way that is different from the train driver, or the shelf-stacker, or the telephone linesman (or for that matter, the bank president or the national politician), Norris’s professional life is one of true vocation to something that is as close to the divine as human beings are ever likely to get.

Such a life is not to be judged by wealth, advancement or reputation but by the service rendered to an ideal which is vague even to the one who holds it. It is her devotion to an ideal of language which is both expressive and precise that I find remarkable in this short book. It is an ideal which she knows can only be approached but never reached. Language is her higher power, always just beyond her grasp but always calling for, and getting, her attention.

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