Linda Bridges, for whom a Sung Mass of the Resurrection was held this morning at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin at 145, West 46th Street in New York City and whose ashes were committed to the Lady Chapel after Mass, was one of the most valuable members of National Review’s editorial staff from the 1970s until illness forced her from regular work only a few months ago. Though Linda was a modest and unassuming woman who would have scoffed at comparisons between herself and such colleagues as James Burnham, Jeffrey Hart, Ernest van den Haag, Russell Kirk, Rick Brookhiser, Rich Lowry, and the present writer, they and we all relied on her hard work, editorial vigilance, and occasional scolding for the fact that our words appeared in print on time and in decent English (or occasionally Latin). We realized that; she seemed not to notice her importance.
Linda wore two hats at National Review. She was the lady who ensured that the trains ran on time and the next issue actually made it to the printers. It was often touch-and-go in the days when the final edited copy had to be hand-carried to catch a train or plane in the midst of unexpected storms. But the fortnightly miracle always occurred. On occasions, however, Linda would come close to stopping the trains running on time because she felt that the carriages needed another round of cleaning or the engine a fresh polish. For her second hat — that of house grammarian — signified a stern duty to stop typos, grammatical errors, logical howlers, infelicities of style, and simple bad writing from making it into the issue. She took her second duty at least as seriously as her first — and she took that very seriously indeed.
In the phrase we all used, Linda had “swallowed Fowler’s” — that is “Fowler’s English Usage,” the Bible of scrupulous line editors, and she could nail a hanging participle at 50 paces. What she hadn’t imbibed from Fowler’s she had learned during her long and fruitful apprenticeship under Priscilla Buckley. Those sub-editing skills made her essential in an editorial room crowded with intellectuals and ideologues for whom the Big Picture is sometimes worth a misplaced semi-colon or a slightly mis-remembered quote. When Homer nodded, she corrected him.
That should have made her popular — she saved us all from many a public humiliation. If only Mike Kinsley had had her at his elbow, she would have told him what “courtesan” meant before he published a headline attaching the word to Clare Booth Luce. Oddly enough, though, some writers don’t like being corrected, and Linda played no favorites when it came to the rules. Eminence never saved anyone from her editorial blue-pencil. Thus, she and the great Florence King were among several editorial pairings that failed to see eye to eye about grammar and syntax.
Cowardice prompted me never to edit Florence’s copy personally, and we remained friends. So when she complained to me about Linda (and over the years about every other editor too), I was able to say quite truthfully that Linda edited Bill Buckley’s columns far more stringently. That soothed Florence, temporarily at least, and it also acknowledged Bill’s and NR’s unknown debt to Linda.
Bill was greatly admired for being able to write a column in 20 minutes on the run between speeches, writing books, and a crowded social life. Occasionally, though, a column written in that way had rough edges. In such cases Linda went carefully over it, cleaning up the grammar, and Bill’s other devoted assistant (and my dear friend), the late Dorothy McCartney, NR’s research director, checked that Bill’s memory of the facts was accurate. The results, as is well-known, won prizes. Bill relied on both women more than on anyone else in NR except for his sister Priscilla, and he was correspondingly devoted to them. They were at the heart of the magazine for many of its 60 years.
Because Linda was on the masthead of NR for so long, she knew where both the bodies and landmines were buried and had survived many of its conflicts. As the years passed and new writers and editors replaced NR’s first and then second generation, she became its living memory. She knew whose obituaries needed to be brought up to date, which new conservative book had to be reviewed, and who could NOT be asked to review it. She maintained NR’s links with the wider conservative movement, especially with the Philadelphia Society. With Bill’s two successors, Rich Lowry and me, she enjoyed something like a constitutional monarch’s power to advise, encourage, and warn if storm signals were visible. She did so rarely, but always discreetly. She had enough material in her memory and her office to be a dangerous gossip if she had so wished, but I never heard her say a single malicious thing. When it was necessary to discuss some past scandal or instance of human frailty among conservatives, she did so with an understanding chuckle that was almost French.
Linda had a life outside National Review. She was a theatergoer, a traveler, an enthusiast for different (mainly European) cuisines. She wrote several books, growing out of her editorial work at NR — The Art of Persuasion with Bill Rickenbacker, Athwart History with John R. Coyne — all nicely and engagingly done. She had faults; her office was the Old Curiosity Shop in a horror movie. But she was a gentle, kind, and helpful woman with her feet planted firmly in the great mid-century Anglo-American middlebrow culture of the well-made play, the classic detective story, light verse, crossword puzzles, “My Word,” Scrabble, Christmas cheer, the Proms, Dickens novels, and of course the Transogram. I assumed she would spend a long and largely contented retirement pottering about in second-hand book stores and favorite tea shops with occasional side-trips to the Shakespeare and Shaw festivals in Canada.
It was not to be. She lived and died as a pillar of National Review and as a skilled wordsmith who wrote some very fine words of her own but who excelled mainly at making the words of her colleagues sparkle and shine and persuade. And now she has gone home to where the Word began.
— John O’Sullivan is an editor-at-large of National Review.
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