MISS GOULD.(The Talk of the Town)(Eleanor Gould)(Obituary)

Six decades ago, not long after being hired by Harold Ross as a copy editor at The New Yorker, a shy young woman, an Oberlin graduate, set to work on a manuscript by James Thurber and soon came across the word "raunchy." She had never heard of the word and thought it was a mistake. "Raunchy" became "paunchy." Thurber's displeasure was such that the young woman barely escaped firing. Later, according to his biographer Harrison Kinney, Thurber wrote that "facetiously" was the only word in English that had all six vowels in order. What about "abstemiously"? the copy editor replied. Thurber, who was not easily impressed, was finally compelled to ask, "Who is Eleanor Gould?"

Miss Gould, as she was known to everyone at the magazine, died last week, at the age of eighty-seven. She worked here for fifty-four years, most of them as its Grammarian (a title invented for her), and she earned the affection and gratitude of generations of writers. She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity--transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.

Her devotion to what she called her "reading" was as intense as any writer's to his writing. She never missed a day of work. Fifteen years ago, when she was seventy-two, she discovered, during a conversation with a colleague, that she had gone completely deaf. She came to the office anyway, riding the bus down Central Park West as she always did. Thereafter, writers and other editors wrote notes to her on scraps of paper. She answered in a birdlike voice, high and a little scratchy, like a gull's.

Miss Gould occupied various offices over the years, including one that Thurber had decorated by drawing on the walls. Her bookshelf held a row of favorite authorities, including a Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and Theodore Bernstein's "Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins," and on a dictionary stand was Webster's Second Unabridged. Wearing thick glasses and an ever-changing array of bright-colored pants and sweaters, she spent the day, and many nights, hovering over her stack of galley and page proofs. Her attention seemed never to waver. She did not daydream. You were unlikely to pass her office and catch her staring off into the canyons of midtown.

A typical "Gould proof" was filled with the lightly pencilled tracery of her objections, suggestions, and abbreviated queries: "emph?" "ind.," "mean this?" She confronted the galley proofs of writers as various as Joseph Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, Janet Flanner--well, everyone, really. She did a proof on every nonfiction piece published in the magazine. Even a writer as determinedly vernacular as Pauline Kael, who initially found Miss Gould's suggestions intrusive, came to accept them--many of them, anyway--with gratitude. Her reading was detached, objective, scientific, as if she somehow believed that a kind of perfection in prose was possible. Like Bobby Fischer's sense of the chessboard, her feel for English was at a higher level than ...