Behind the Scenes at the Romanic Review

My first real-world job was as the graduate student secretary in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia. After the first year, the staff's job descriptions were reshuffled, and one of my new duties was to assist the general editor of the Romanic Review. Initially, I wasn't thrilled about this. In addition to dealing with unhappy Romanic submitters who, having received the standard rejection letter, would call the department to express their astonishment, my direct supervisor would be the General Editor of the Romanic Review, University Professor Michael Riffaterre. Professor Riffaterre was incredibly intimidating. He bad actually yelled at me over the phone on my first day at Columbia, making me wonder if it were possible that I wouldn't survive my first day of work in the "real world." Professor Riffaterre walked purposefully, chest out, wearing jackets with suede elbow patches, and he spoke English in a low voice with a heavy French accent, barely moving his lips. As far as I could tell, he did not make mistakes and did not tolerate those who did. I could never predict when Professor Riffaterre would summon me to work on the Romanic, so I always had to be prepared and organized at a moment's notice. Professor Riffaterre would come into the front office and announce that he was ready to work. I dodged around students and gathered my careful piles: submissions that needed to be reviewed (in order of date received or number of annoying phone calls from impatient authors), reviewers' comments on submissions, and accepted articles not yet assigned to an issue. Professor Riffaterre did not concern himself with Romanic technicalities, such as how much the publisher charged, the new subscription database in the works, or the number of subscribers. His focus was firmly on the articles. New submissions were sent to faculty reviewers chosen by Professor Riffaterre. Upon their return with the reviewers' comments, they were carefully read by Professor Riffaterre, which meant a crooked finger running down the middle of the page at impossible speed. I then had to keep track of the accepted and rejected articles and print out their respective form letters, signing a vain approximation of Professor Riffaterre's irreproducible signature at the bottom. Anything involving a rewrite meant an individual letter to the author, dictated to me, exposing my speed writing as miles behind his speed-reading. My hand would cramp towards the bottom of the legal pad. Every word spoken by Professor Riffaterre accrued to perfectly complete sentences and the sentences to a perfectly constructed letter. Sometimes he would say, "Go back to the sentence where I say..." and then quote verbatim a sentence at the beginning of the letter. The entire letter was in his head and I absorbed nothing in my haste to write it down. He never looked my way to see if I was keeping up or lost. Or perhaps he did, but if I was lost, there was no way I was looking up to see if he noticed. It was expected that I transcribe everything precisely. When it was time to create a new issue of the Romanic Review, I would present Professor Riffaterre with the pile of approved submissions and he would decide which articles would appear in the next issue. The choice involved including articles across different centuries, a balance of articles in English and other languages, a connection between the topics, and a supplement of book reviews. The articles would be rubber-banded in their deliberate order, and I would cradle the bundle in my arms, delivering it to the managing editor of the Romanic Review with a table of contents for the next step towards publication. …