THE ITALIC WAR
or How I Almost Fought A War Over Spanish
I recently published a short story, my first in years, which got me thinking about -- of all things -- italics. So a small reflection on an italic incident, with, naturally, italics.
1
Coming up I never read The New Yorker. At all. Even when I started submitting short stories to magazines in my writing youth I never sent them to The New Yorker, like many of my fellow MFA classmates did. Not that I was unaware of magazine hierarchies (after all, I tried The Atlantic a few times and never got anything accepted), but for whatever reason The New Yorker was just not on my list. Probably seemed like a bridge too far.
It was my genius agent who got my first story accepted in The New Yorker, back in 1995. This was after my MFA, when I was living in a shabby Brooklyn walk-up so cold in winter we had to watch to tv in coats, gloves and boots. I was making photocopies for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals 40 hours a week, a temp job that paid my rent, my subway tokens, my share of utilities, and allowed me to eat 2 meals a day, most of it pasta, typical post-college shit that occasionally echoed my childhood, especially when an unexpected cost blew up my budget. (I still recall with dread, forty plus years later, my mother, short on cash, announcing to us kids: Tomorrow the boys don’t eat.)
That New Yorker money, when it finally came in, was a very big deal indeed.
Getting published in the magazine also helped bolster my first book, DROWN, which I doubt would have gotten any attention if not for The New Yorker. But attention and reviews are one thing, and sales quite another. DROWN did about what you would expect for a sorta-novel (in stories) about morose Dominicans living in NJ. Which is to say: it sold nothing. Two years later I was able to buy boxes of remainders for a few dollars.
Point being, if it wasn't for the stories I was publishing in The New Yorker, I would not have had much of a career. The novels I was working on were bombing like crazy and I had already defaulted on my book contract twice and wouldn’t stop defaulting for a decade. Most of the time I felt like a fraud numero uno.
And so The New Yorker was important to me. I mean it would have been important to almost any writer, but you get the idea.
2
So I had The New Yorker (and for the record my editor there was amazing, he elevated what he took and rejected what he didn’t with such delicadeza you barely felt the knife). It should have been perfect, would have been perfect, but there was one thing that drove me bananas about the magazine (there’s always something): their policy on italicizing dique foreign words. All my stories included a lot of Spanish and a lot of Dominican slang and none of those were ever italicized in manuscript. Mine was a code-switched translanguage literary universe. My narrators didn’t think or speak in italics emphatically and that was what set them apart from other literary latines, Dominican or otherwise. No-italic was an important part of how I constructed my narrators and their worlds and a response to the prevailing “Hispanic” literature at the time.
And besides if Cormac McCarthy didn’t italicize his Spanish, why should I?
But like most literary magazines, The New Yorker always put all Spanish and its derivatives into italics, which both ruined the translanguage effect of my fiction and made my work look (to me) old-fashioned, corny.
Each time I asked for an exception, they explained that it was not possible. Italics for Spanish was the house style. House style for The New Yorker was like the Three Laws for Asimov’s robots or communism for the PRC – that which could not be broken.
Please believe, my non-novel-writing ass was super grateful to have my stories published in The New Yorker, to bask in the magazine’s reflected glory, but the Spanish in italics rule always rankled. It was a small thing, in truth, but at the time it felt quite big. Both aesthetically and politically, it felt like I was betraying the community I was writing about and betraying my art and my politics.
And in those youthful days, I took my art, my community, and my politics very seriously indeed.
But it was The New Yorker, and I wasn’t nearly as strong as I should have been (the Capitalist Vampire Squid within) so I let it go…for a while.
3
Three stories in four years, and that was when I decided that enough was enough. I vowed that if I had another story accepted in The New Yorker (always a big If) I would pull it if they didn’t stop with the italics. Given what was going on with my non-novel, you would think I had bigger things to worry about -- or that I might have proceeded with caution, given that this was my one literary lifeline -- but nope, I had decided that this was the hill I was going to live or die on, fukit to.
In 1999 I wrote a story called OtraVida, OtraVez, and I got lucky: The New Yorker accepted it. I was ready for the showdown and damn the consequences (though I could already hear my incredulous and extremely non-literary friends – you lost The New Yorker over italics?) when my editor informed me that they intended to include me and my story in a special issue titled The Future of American Fiction. I was to be one of the 20 writers under 40 that The New Yorker was going to laurel. The list included George Saunders, Rick Moody, A.M. Holmes, Allegra Goodman, Chang-rae Lee, William Vollmann, Antonya Nelson, Michael Chabon, Sherman Alexie, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace, Matt Klam etc.
A toyo of emotions. On the one hand I was fucking elated. To be put in the same category as Edwidge Danticat and Michael Chabon and William Vollmann and Chang-rae Lee was beyond imagining, a dream come true. These were my fucking heroes and the capitalist vampire squid within was doing Cthulhu convulsions at the possibility of future status and remuneration.
But that non-squid part of me that cherished my work and cared about my politics was adamant, didn’t give two fucks about The Future of American Fiction or about status, or book sales. If The New Yorker didn’t leave my Spanish alone, didn’t respect the fact that English and Spanish could not be segregated in my work — not because I was so cool with both of them, but quite the opposite, because I no longer had a natural language, because both languages were foreign to me and therefore both languages would need italics if I was going to accurately represent what was going on—I would walk.
I still remember my agent asking me Are you sure?
And me saying I was.
The shit we do when we are young! I’m so much more cautious, more timid, than I was 24 years ago, perhaps all too aware of how easy it is to lose important things over a trifle or a bad turn, and how difficult it is to rebuild what is burnt down, regain what is lost. That me of 24 years ago seems a stranger now. I can feel his passion, his intensity, but I don’t know him anymore. Not really.
How I sweated the next two days. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t much eat. Even my hair loss seemed to accelerate.
A couple days later the agent called.
You’re good to go, she said. No more italics.
I’m sure my editor had a lot to do with this (thanks Bill) and a pack of other writers as well. All of us pushing together.
And because of that convite, it’s been no more italics ever since, anywhere I publish. I hear that other writers at The New Yorker have availed themselves of this exception in the house style.
4
I still think about that war with italics – especially when I publish in The New Yorker—and wonder would I really have done it—would I have pulled my story and myself from one of the magazine’s biggest issues?
Over italics?
(And would my agent really have allowed me to do it? Another story altogether.)
My boys from that time – who are still my boys – are like, of course you would have.
The bald back-pain-having 54-year-old I’ve become is not so sure.
Big or small, one never knows with courage. No matter what the comic books say, courage don’t come when you most need it. Courage is one of these virtues that cannot be inherited and that acknowledges no precedence, prerogative, or pretense.
And yet we all need courage.
Writers especially -– courage to stand up for yourself and your work, courage to write against silence and power, courage to defy the bullshit from all political corners that seeks to bind tongues, courage to defy the capitalist vampire squid that squalls inside all of us.
James C. Scott recommends daily anarchist calisthenics for better living1 – but artists need daily courage calisthenics to stay true in a world that would sooner privatize our souls than give us healthcare.
In our current moment, a story about italics barely seems worth mentioning. These days people boycott in a NY second—sometimes over real shit, sometimes over nonsense—and turn down better glow-ups than The New Yorker on picque or principle. Even in the context of my boring-ass life, it was not a big deal. I’ve wrestled with an armed New York cop at a protest (something I’ll never willingly do again) and traveled to the DR after Dominican ultra-nationalists threatened to shoot me at the airport -- and both of these moves seem a lot more courageous in retrospect (or very dumb).
But it’s unpredictable what sticks with us, what madeleines endure, and there are days, like this one, that I still wonder about those italics and the decision I never had to make.
I wonder about that younger me who was so committed, who seemed so willing to throw it all away for the sake of his art. I wonder if he’s still with me. I wonder if he’s alright.
If you have the bandwidth check out Harris’ critique of Scott: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/anarchish-james-c-scotts-two-cheers-for-anarchism/
And they *won’t* italicize a damn book title! (Or admit that an excerpt from a novel is actually an excerpt from a novel.) (BTW mine, I was told at the time ((1987)) was the first printed instance of the word “fuck” in the magazine. Had to get special permission from “Mr. Shawn.”)
No idea. Really sorry.