Interesting Emendations: Sallie Tisdale's "In The Northwest"

The world described in Sallie Tisdale’s great “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991) is a world of sensation, seen and described with love and precision:

On sunny days clouds cross the mahogany-colored hills nearby, sliding over the scrubby land like the shadows of huge coasting birds.

The narrow road was a wet black ribbon, like a cooper’s slat, between endless cone-shaped trees.

The bowl of the ladle tingled against my teeth; the water was as cold as ice, and as clear and clean as the high note of a trumpet.

The delicate rose-red lace of the young birch buds hung in halo.

A bridge in a certain light, a glass-walled skyscraper catching sun have a kind of organic virtue, and clear-cuts on a sunny day, from the heights, are warm and brushed to the tender, bare uniformity of suéde.

The Scott was low from a dry winter, the great humped stretches of basalt warm from the sun and smelling of mud and fish.

One of my favorite passages in “In The Northwest” occurs during Tisdale’s vivid recollection of a camping trip that she and three of her friends went on in the Siskiyou Mountains when she was sixteen:

The night leaned in, strong; the firelight was hot and yellow. Outside the flickering dome of light was a soft, sooty dark, and the furry trees were flung in black relief against the sky. We cooked egg noodles in Campbell’s tomato soup and passed a bottle of brandy around. The sweet tomato sauce on the buttery noodles was a feast, the cheap brandy was hot and sharp, and we sang softly what ever came to mind. We huddled under our parkas in the rain, not bothering to crawl into the wet tent, and water fell from our hoods and dropped hissing into the fire. My friends’ faces were shadowed, and their words rose up from under the shelf of coats.

What a limpid, ravishing, sensual piece of writing! I devour it! Interestingly, there is another published version of this passage. You can find it in Tisdale’s book Stepping Westward (1991). It reads as follows:

There were four of us, and the night leaned in, strong; the firelight was hot and yellow and close. Outside the flickering dome of light was a sooty, soft dark. The night was like water to wade through. The furry trees were flung against the sky in black relief. We cooked egg noodles in Campbell’s tomato soup and passed around a bottle of brandy. I remember this now as though I stood outside the light alone watched, and wished I were there, too, by the fire. The sweet tomato sauce on the buttery noodles was our feast, the cheap brandy was hot and sharp, and we sang softly whatever came to mind. We huddled under our hoods in the rain, not bothering to crawl into our moist tents, and water fell off the lids of our hoods and dropped hissing into the fire. My friends’ faces were dark and shadowed, and their words rose from under the shelf of coats.

As you can see, the book’s “the firelight was hot and yellow and close” becomes, in the magazine, “the firelight was hot and yellow”; the book’s “The night was like water to wade through” is deleted from the magazine version; the word order of “sooty, soft dark,” in the book, is changed to “soft, sooty dark” in the magazine; the sentence “The furry trees were flung against the sky in black relief,” in the book, is, in the magazine, joined with the previous sentence and changed to “the furry trees were flung in black relief against the sky”; the word order of “passed around a bottle of brandy,” in the book, is changed, in the magazine, to “passed a bottle of brandy around”; the sentence “I remember this now as though I stood outside the light alone watched, and wished I were there, too, by the fire,” in the book, is deleted from the magazine; “and water fell off the lids of our hoods,” in the book,” is changed to “and water fell from our hoods” in the magazine; “My friends’ faces were dark and shadowed,” in the book, is changed to “My friends’ faces were shadowed,” in the magazine.

I’m assuming the book version was written first, and then edited when it was turned into the magazine article. Tisdale obviously liked her original version well enough to retain it for the book. Both versions are wonderful, but I prefer the more compressed New Yorker piece; it seems more poetic. Comparison of the two versions is a lesson in artful pruning.