In Tribute

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on March 8, 2007 Sign up now!

-- Publishers Weekly, 3/8/2007

I’m Allyn Johnston, editor in chief of Harcourt Children’s Books.

I had read and re-read The Cay and the Teetoncey trilogy a zillion times when I was a girl. So in 1988, when it happened that I was to be Theodore Taylor’s editor for Sniper, his first Harcourt book, I was more than a little intimidated. I mean, he was a childhood hero! It didn’t help that when he met me, he told our publisher he really didn’t think he could be edited by a person who appeared to be 12 years old. But I did win his trust—thank god—and our editorial relationship began.

One of the best things about working with Ted was his impy, irreverent, and often-self-effacing humor. As in this letter he wrote in 1990, asking me to nominate him for a prestigious children’s literature prize, the Kerlan Award: “Dear Allyn Marie, I have no ego at all, as I’m sure you know and have told everyone, but I’d like to be nominated for the Kerlan Award, nonetheless, and I’ve heard that an editor needs to do the nominating. So considering our special relationship, one of mutual adoption, I’ve selected you to be my nominator, the effort needed to do that being only a fragment of your valuable time and consisting of writing Dr. Karen Nelson Hoyle, Curator, the Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota. You do not need to say how wonderful I am, because everyone knows that, including Dr. Karen Nelson Hoyle.”

He liked to tease—and be teased. Our publisher, Louise Pelan, came across the following quote in an article one day in 1995: “It’s been a wonderful experience,” Mr. Taylor said of his long writing career. “If you can go most of your life without having a boss—God, that’s heaven.”Louise cut the piece out and faxed it to Ted with a note: “What do you mean—no boss??What about me?” He responded immediately: “There I go again. I can’t get through a week or a month without mistakes. I should have said, “without a having a male boss….” I’ve had female bosses since I was a child. First my mother and four sisters, then two wives, now Louise Pelan, Allyn Johnston, a daughter, and my female dog.”

Ted loved and respected women, but he also wasn’t uncomfortable veering toward the inappropriate when describing the bodies of the female characters in his books. We had several memorable exchanges on that topic after I’d attempted to rein him in. He liked to say I was an uptight dud. Here he is on the subject:

“Dear Allyn:

Editor A put her hand on my right knee at the Edgar Awards banquet last week, causing minor palpitations. Editor B does not write me or touch me. She calls me. She wants to take me to lunch. It took her five years to edit and publish the last book we did together. Neither one of us can afford five years for a book anymore. So she’s not a threat. Editor C has invited me to visit her at her booth at the conference and have cookies. She said she wanted to make ‘contact.’ She’s a very nice lady, so we’ll make ‘contact.’ As for you, if I can only make you a little more unsquare so that you don’t flinch when I mention body parts, I think we can continue a meaningful relationship.”

In the end, Ted remained convinced I was a total square, but despite that, we did 10 books together, and though we clearly trusted and respected each other a great deal, the road we traveled wasn’t always exactly… smooth.

Ted was passionate and intense. He liked to be edited, and he wanted to be pushed, but he had strong views about the way things should be done, and he did not suffer fools gladly. Some of his most pithy outbursts have become the stuff of Harcourt legend. Like the time we were doing a revised edition of his nonfiction book, Air Raid—Pearl Harbor!, and the assistant editor who was working with me queried what appeared to her to be a potentially incendiary overuse of the term “Japs.” I can still hear his words as he shouted, “Jesus Christ, they weren’t there to sell Toyotas!” Or when another young editor who was working with me on Ted’s Arctic adventure novel, Ice Drift, queried the accuracy of his representation of Inuit culture in the 1860s: “How would you know?” he responded. “You’ve never had to eat your parka!”

These were challenging moments indeed, and kind of scary, but we could quickly laugh together about them (as long as we came up with a compromise that Ted agreed with, of course). His outrageous responses to our supposed stupidity were in fact part of the fun for him. As he wrote to Louise when he finished Timothy of the Cay, “It’s a wrap. AMJ did a fine job, as usual. We didn’t have a fight, something I miss. I really like to get into the mud.”

But occasionally he’d fire off—usually through his trusty fax machine—some of the most incredible diatribes any of us had ever read.

He was always the first to apologize after a dust-up, though. As he wrote to our marketing director in 1991, “I take a deep and abiding interest in the promotion of any book I write. Do all that I possibly can to push the title. That will never change. Perhaps I’m too demanding at times. Yet I think that is sinning on the positive side. I carry the baggage of being a former movie press agent, for good or bad. My personal make-up is that I don’t stew over things for long. I take out the shotgun and fire. I’m wrong as much as I’m right. Forgive the hair trigger of a rock-throwing old man—but always wear your flak jacket.”

Or as he wrote to me after a particularly painful episode, “I’m not a phone person, as you know, and I should really destroy my fax machine for communication and maybe resort to telepathy. But I’m sorry if I hurt you during this ordeal, sincerely sorry. Age is supposed to make you wiser. That’s a lot of crap.”

After his heart attack and near death in October 2001, Ted’s recuperation was slow, but he never gave up. Not Ted. In November, he sent a card: “Another week and I’ll be walking on my own. The sun is brighter, the air fresher, the sky bluer, and I’m appreciating every hour.” Then, in June, 2002, right after his 81st birthday, he wrote, “We had a two-day celebration here with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I had a terrible hangover yesterday. I got very drunk Saturday night, against all rules concerning recovering heart patients. BUT I’M STILL ALIVE! Obviously.”

I wish I could say Ted and I never had a tough time together after that. But unfortunately, in 2005, we had our worst misunderstanding ever, regarding my less-than-timely handling of an adult book he’d written, and he literally stopped speaking to me. After 17 years of being friends and colleagues, in touch often, for better or worse, I was bereft. His wit, wisdom, love, intensity, zest for the world, lack-of-political-correctness, and yes, occasional absolute cantankerosity had been a part of my editorial life for nearly my whole career, and to have it gone was terrible. At last I sent a card with an olive branch on the front, trying one more time to get him to accept my apology. And then in June of last year, four months before his death, he wrote this note:

“Dear Allyn,

You’d think that after serving in two shoot ’em up wars, I’d know the difference between peace and conflict. I guess age might have twisted my senses, made my triggers cannonade against good judgment. Please forgive me. Peace is much better. How’s your six-foot son? Am I still writing? Yes. Yes! Love and kisses, TLT.”

Well, TLT may no longer be at his desk here in Laguna writing, with Flora nearby and a dog at his feet, but his spirit will live on in all of us, and—what would probably be even more important to Ted—his books will be part of the lives of children for as long as there are still children around to read them.