Edit and Be Damned

Editing must be one of the few professions that require no professional training. Even a plumber needs to learn how to plumb before he’s allowed to attack pipes. An editor, on the other hand, just takes up his spanner and blowtorch and starts editing.

Of course there are a lot of different kinds of editors (and I’ve been most of them at one time or another): line editors (known in England as copy editors), newspaper editors, magazine editors, book editors. The skills involved in each case are distinctive, but they all share this same amateur, self-taught quality. Editing is something that you tend to fall into, though perhaps not entirely by accident. Editors are born, not made. It may be worth stressing this, because editors get a lot of flak from people – especially writers – who cannot accept that anyone should be in a position to turn down a book, or correct their grammar, or in some other way act superior. They are right, nobody should be, except that’s the editor’s job. The truth of the matter is that most editors spend a considerable amount of psychological capital convincing themselves that their judgement is right. The position must necessarily be: I edit, therefore I am an editor. In a realm with absolutely no firm rules against which one’s opinions may be measured, it’s the only thing to do. Thus armed, you have at least a fighting chance of facing the world (or a writer) with confidence. At the most basic level, line editing or copy editing, an editor needs a technique for judging and perhaps improving a piece of writing. My own has always been to read slowly, ‘listening’ for imprecision, wrong words, failure to track properly. This seems to work; a good writer sounds fine, a bad one bumpy or inept. The rhythm is wrong. It is usually pretty simple to identify the rough spots and either fix them or tell the writer to do so. (My predecessor at Life magazine, where I worked many years ago, had a rule of thumb for this – if a caption or a piece of text could be repaired with a pencil, fine; if you had to have recourse to a typewriter to do it, send the piece back to the writer.) But there is no way to avoid the conclusion that the procedure is hopelessly subjective, and to make it work at all you have to keep on telling yourself that your ear is incomparable. On occasion I’ve had my doubts. When Life folded in 1972, I went to work as a book editor for the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. This was a fairly radical change, and I soon found out just how radical. Alistair Cooke, it seemed, was in the process of writing a book to accompany his television series America. The programmes would be broadcast in the autumn; it was then already March. Knopf had paid a staggering (for the time) $400,000 for the rights, and the book simply had to be published at the time of the broadcast. Alistair was still writing madly and not, it has to be said, as carefully as he might. Each week or two another handful of scruffy yellow pages would turn up in the office. Eventually a pile of these were handed to me to edit. Having practised my trade at a place where editing was more likely to be done with a broadaxe than a scalpel, I set to work as I best knew how. I quickly saw that Cooke’s copy was going to need some serious fixing, so I fixed. When I was done I had the whole thing retyped, suspecting that it might be better not to let the great man see what I’d done to his prose, and delivered it to him at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco where he was staying on one of his frequent West Coast jaunts. He barely glanced at it. A week later, the publishing chief at Knopf called me into his office. He had just had a call from Alistair Cooke. Cooke was furious. He had never been edited like this in his life and he wouldn’t stand for it. The book was off. With my heart in my mouth, I decided I had to go see him, at his apartment on Fifth Avenue. Sitting in his library, with his wall of American books arranged geographically (New England at upper right, California at left, next to the window), I listened to him fulminate. He was flushed with anger. Then, gradually, we got into specifics: particular sections, sentences, words. The atmosphere eased. Sometimes he was right – I had made unnecessary changes. But at least as often he admitted that I had improved things, especially by cutting (the text had been much too long). In the end he agreed to go through the manuscript carefully. A great deal of my editing fortunately stood the test, the book (even more fortunately) was a huge bestseller, and I still use the dictionary he later gave me as a gift, signed ‘With affection, Alistair’. In telling this story I don’t mean to brag about my editing skills; I was 20 before I had a clear idea of how to use the word ‘hardly’, and even older before I grasped the difference between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause. Use of the subjunctive following ‘if ’ frequently troubles me even now. I learn, as I have said, by doing. I still regret the fact that after writing seventy-five brilliant pages on the comma, an author of mine named Mary Claire Van Leunen gave up her attempt to produce a modern grammar and went to work in IT instead. That is a book I would have loved to publish. Still, I now know quite a lot about commas. Although a book editor never quite leaves the niceties of line editing behind (especially in the United States, where publishing houses are mostly richer and better staffed, and hence allow more time to be spent on a given title), other activities quickly predominate. When I was hired by Knopf, the first thing I was told was, ‘We don’t need an editor, we need a publisher.’ It took a while to find out that this meant, in essence, finding books that would sell and then doing whatever was necessary to sell them. In practical terms, of course, the process involved a remarkable range of duties, such as understanding contracts, co-opting agents, delivering authoritative statements on libel law and plagiarism, writing copy, comforting sad or disgruntled authors, presenting books at sales conferences, and maybe even doing a little line editing. Nothing, in short, that the average literate graduate oughtn’t to be well-prepared for. If all this strikes you as pretty unromantic stuff, you’re right. The romance of publishing for editors lies in dealing with authors and their books, not in sorting out reversion clauses. We all – American editors, anyway – remember Maxwell Perkins, our blue-pencil saint, the legendary 1930s Scribner’s editor who handled Hemingway and Fitzgerald and created a bestseller out of a mountain of a manuscript by Thomas Wolfe (the Look Homeward Angel Wolfe, that is, not the somewhat less logorrhoeic Bonfire of the Vanities one). To this day, Perkins’s spectre hangs over the publishing scene, justifying an editor’s tendency to speak proprietorially of ‘his’ or ‘her’ authors. The relationship between a writer and an editor is probably mysterious to those who have never experienced it. The best way to think of it may be the relationship between a whale and a pilot fish. Or, more accurately, the relationship between a large, powerful beast like a hippopotamus and the little bird that perches on its head, pecking the insects that would otherwise bother the behemoth. The symbiosis is generally a happy one. If it isn’t, the large creature simply twitches, and finds another publisher. Nevertheless the biggest beast often needs a hand, or a prod. My friend Bob Gottlieb, editor-in-chief of Knopf for many years before taking on the editorship of the New Yorker, succeeded against the odds in getting a finished manuscript out of Bill Clinton, only a year or two late. Then there’s the well-known story of Sonny Mehta (coincidentally Gottlieb’s successor at Knopf ) locking the late Douglas Adams into a hotel room for three weeks to get him to finish So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. (‘I love deadlines,’ Adams once remarked. ‘I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’) In my own experience, seriously dilatory authors have never posed much of a problem, partly because Knopf is not as savage in insisting upon delivery dates as some other houses. Even so, performers like the wonderful P. D. James are rare. She tends to surprise us by coming up with a new book even before we expect it. With most non-fiction contracted for in advance, on the basis of an outline that can be speculative (to put it kindly), delivery schedules may not make much sense anyway. Books change in the writing. On several occasions I have commissioned a single-volume biography that ultimately turned out to be two, and grew from a proposed 150,000 words to a hefty three or four hundred thousand. From a publishing point of view, this is not a happy development; it’s tough to market a second volume five years after the first. But who would claim that Janet Browne’s magisterial biography of Darwin, to mention only one example, should not have been written in that form? Certainly not me. I don’t even begrudge the extra years it took her to write it that way. My favourite long book never achieved the kind of success I thought it deserved. Maybe it really was too long. Noel Mostert’s epic history of the coming together of black and white in South Africa over the course of three hundred years clocked in at 1,355 closely packed pages, every one of them brilliant, scarcely a word superfluous or disposable. I can testify to that, having spent months going carefully through the text in search of places to cut (and seldom finding any). When Mostert began, it was to have been a much smaller book, on a much smaller segment of history, but it rightly grew. I suppose the project might have been aborted; that’s what strong editors are supposed to do, no doubt. But I’m glad I didn’t. I harbour the fixed hope – as I’m sure Mostert does too – that some day it will be recognized for the masterwork it is. Besides, sometimes you win. A case in point is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, which dropped unannounced on my desk somewhere around 1975. Although Kingston had never published a word before (except, she admitted, a piece in a children’s magazine when she was 12), her manuscript struck me as extraordinary, a mesmerizing mixture of autobiography and fantasy set forth in a hard-edged Chinese-influenced English. We took it on and published a few thousand copies. The total in print by now must be in the millions. One of my happiest memories is of Maxine coming to New York in midwinter from Hawaii, where she was then living, to receive a prestigious National Book Critics Circle award. With no warm clothes to her name, she had borrowed a neighbour’s coat and a bobble hat. The problem was that Maxine is about four feet nothing, and the coat was full size. Worse, when she appeared on the podium to respond to the award, she couldn’t see over the lectern, and I was convinced that the whole thing would be an embarrassing disaster. I need not have worried – she spoke with enough poise and eloquence to bring tears to the eyes. Inevitably, an editor’s life has its down moments. Rejecting a commissioned book that a writer has spent years on – something I’ve had to do only once – may be the worst. Attempting to comfort a writer over bad sales is slightly easier, though regrettably common. (It will give you some sense of the pleasant but eccentric atmosphere of the Knopf operation under Gottlieb when I note that we had a running contest to see which book on a given list had the smallest sale. I may be wrong, but I believe that a certain novel that will not be named actually scored in negative numbers, perhaps because of a mix-up calculating returns.) Then there’s the author who is determined to self-destruct, taking his book with him, and nothing you can say or do seems to make any difference. Yet I recall more good moments than bad: David Halberstam, the most fluent writer (and fastest typist) I’ve known, producing a perfect 250-word patch in minutes for a necessary transition; Dr Meyer Friedman, inventor of the concept of Type A Behaviour (and whose book about it we made a bestseller), assuring me that I was Type B and thus guaranteed not to have a heart attack before 80 (so far so good); Robert Hughes drawing a long, apposite and accurate quote completely from memory to buttress a point in The Fatal Shore; Yukio Mishima leading an evening pub crawl through some fairly dark corners of the Tokyo shitamachi. You don’t have to be Maxwell Perkins to feel that in a small way you have been in closer than average touch with modern civilization. So far as I am concerned, that justifies a lot of years spent restoring split infinitives.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Charles Elliott 2006