On Sunday I read the page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the last time and made my final corrections. (For the record, I added some commas and cut a half-dozen repeated words and phrases.) Today I’ll be sending the proofs back to the Boston office of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I’ll double-check the index as soon as it’s ready, but otherwise the tinkering is over. I’m through with Pops.
How do I feel? Very good–though not, I trust, unreasonably so. I made a point of setting the proofs aside for a couple of weeks in order to let them cool down. Then I read them in a single day-long sitting, hoping to recapture my sense of the book as a whole. I liked what I saw this time around. The narrative is fast-moving, the facts as straight as I could make them, the prose style formal (I don’t like chummy biographers) but not stiff. The design of the book is gorgeous–I love how the photos are integrated into the text. I think that Armstrong’s personality comes through clearly. So, of course, does my own view of the man and his work, but while I took great pains to correct the record whenever necessary, I also went out of my way not to be argumentative. No scores are settled in Pops. This book is about him, not me.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m already planning my next book–perhaps even my next three books–and I also have The Letter on my mind. Tomorrow I’ll hit the road again, and I won’t be back in New York (save for a couple of quick touchdowns) until well after the curtain goes up in Santa Fe. All this means that I won’t have much time to brood about Pops, which is just as it should be. What’s done is done. I hope the reading public is pleased with the results, but even if they’re not, I can’t do anything about it now. The cord is cut. It’s time to move on to the next part of my life.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
