A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

The secret sharer
Books as business

“You might make a joke on that,” said the little voice close to her ear: “something about ’you would if you could,’ you know.”

“Don’t tease so,” said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came from. “If you’re so anxious to have a joke made, why don’t you make one yourself?”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 3

IN 1969, TIMOTHY FINDLEY traveled to New York to work with his American editor on the galleys of his second novel, The Butterfly Plague. Canadian publishers were still not impressed by the efforts of this actor-turned-writer, but the illustrious American publishing company Viking had expressed interest in this budding author. The editor assigned to Findley’s book was Cor-lies M. Smith, known as “Cork,” who was also the editor of the letters of James Joyce. Smith read The Butterfly Plague, the chronicle of a declining Hollywood family set against the background of Nazi Germany, and although he liked the book very much, he wasn’t satisfied with one aspect of it: he wanted to know the “meaning” of the butterflies in the story and strongly advised Findley to make it clear. Findley was young, inexperienced, and afraid to upset the publisher he so much wanted, and bowed to Smith’s suggestion. He reworked the book in order to explain the butterflies, and the novel duly appeared under the Viking imprint.

The extraordinary point of this anecdote is that most North American readers would not see it as extraordinary. Even the most inexperienced writers of fiction know that if they are to be published at all, their manuscripts must pass through the hands of professionals known as “editors,” employed by publishing companies to read the books under consideration and recommend changes they think appropriate. (This paragraph you are now reading will not be the paragraph I originally wrote, since it will have to undergo the inquisition of an editor; in fact, when an earlier version of this essay was published in Saturday Night magazine, this sentence was cut out completely.)

Writers, notoriously wary about their craft, are reluctant to speak about this obligatory help except in general terms or off the record. Contemporary literature abounds in examples of both malpractice and redemption, but writers prefer to keep these interventions secret — and rightly so. In the end a work of fiction is the writer’s own, and should be seen as such. Writers (and their editors agree) need not make public the seams and patches of their collaboration. Writers want to be sole begetters.

However, underlying this coyness is a paradox. The writer who knows himself to be the single author of a text, wondering a little at its very existence and puzzled more than a little by the mysteries it contains, also knows that before the text is published it will be professionally questioned, and that answers will have to be provided or suggestions accepted; he thereby relinquishes, at least in part, the writer’s single-handed authorship. Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America (and most of the British Commonwealth) acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver.

Recognition of the profession of editor is not so ancient or widespread as the Anglo-Saxon public might suppose. In the rest of the world it is virtually unknown: even in England it appeared almost two centuries and a half after the introduction of the printing press. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1712 as the earliest date for the mention of editor with the meaning “one who prepares the literary work of another,” used by Joseph Addison in The Spectator to specify someone working on material the author had either finished or left incomplete. Perhaps this was the meaning William Hazlitt, intent on reaffirming the writer’s sole responsibility in a text, had in mind when he remarked, “It is utterly impossible to persuade an Editor that he is nobody.” The editor, understood as “one who works with the author in the fashioning of a work of fiction,” didn’t come into history until much later, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Before that there were only scattered references to editorial advice: Erasmus giving Thomas More suggestions regarding Utopia, Charles Dickens, as the editor of Household Words, counseling Wilkie Collins on a plot, etc.

To find a full-fledged editor in the contemporary sense we have to wait until the 1920s, when a now legendary figure appeared in New York: Maxwell Perkins, editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe. By all accounts, Perkins was a generous editor, keen to respect what he thought were the author’s intentions — though his Samaritan urge has prevented us from knowing what Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts were like before Perkins pared them down to publishable form. With Perkins, editors acquired respectability and a patron saint. (Some might say that the patron saint of editors should be the Greek robber Procrustes, who placed his visitors on an iron bed and stretched them or cut off the overhanging parts until they fitted exactly to his liking.)

To the common reader, the precise task of an editor is something of a mystery. In a small pamphlet signed by several hands, Author and Editor: A Working Guide (1983), Rick Archbold, a distinguished Canadian freelance editor, attempted to elucidate: “Editors have several functions,” he writes, “which vary in number according to the size and complexity of the publishing house. They may include acquiring rights to publish book projects; selling subsidiary rights; developing plans for promotion and marketing; writing copy for book jackets; … overseeing production; and proofreading. And, of course, editing.” This is not much help. Leaving aside specialized areas of publishing such as textbooks, magazines, and technical nonfiction, what exactly do editors do when they say that they are “editing”?

At least one part of an editor’s job, sometimes performed by a “copy editor,” involves simply checking facts, spelling, grammar, compliance with the publishing company’s preferred style of punctuation, etc., and asking com-monsense questions: Are you aware that your character is fifteen years old on page 21 and eighteen on page 34? Whatever salary an editor receives, it is probably not enough to compensate for all this thankless checking and double-checking.

Still, even this workaday aspect of editing, however necessary it may seem, has a pernicious potential. The writer who knows that his text will be inspected by an editor may see fit to leave the finer tuning unattended, because an editor will in any case try to tune the text to what sounds right to his or her own professional ear. Thomas Wolfe, submitting to Perkins’s editing, would simply throw his uncorrected manuscript pages on the floor as he finished them, for the typist to collect and type out and his editor to cut and paste. Gradually the writer runs the danger of seeing himself not so much as carrying his work to where he believes he can go no farther (not finishing but “abandoning” his text, in Valéry’s brave phrase) as carrying his text only to the threshold of the classroom where the teacher will check spelling and grammar for him.

Copyediting, then, is an accepted part of the editor’s job. But at some point in history, probably even before the days of Maxwell Perkins, the editor bridged the chasm between questioning spelling and questioning sense, and began questioning the meaning of the butterflies. Surreptitiously, the content of fiction became the editor’s responsibility.

In Editors on Editing: An Inside View of What Editors Really Do (compiled by Gerald Gross), the editor, bookseller, and author William Trag has this to say about what makes an editor an editor: “A working, qualified editor of books must read. He must have read from the earliest days of his childhood. His reading must be unceasing. The lust for printed matter is a biological thing, a visceral and intellectual necessity; the urge must be in the genes.” In short, an editor must be a reader.

True enough. Editors must assume this function or not edit at all. But can anyone read beyond his personal inclinations? Because to justify intrusions into an author’s virgin text, an editor must surely not be Felix Chuckle who delights in happy endings or Dolores Lachrymose who prefers her endings bitter. The editor must be a sort of platonic idea of a reader; he must embody “readerness;” he must be a Reader with a capital R.

However, can even the ideal Reader help the writer? As every reader knows, literature is an act of shared responsibility. And yet to suppose that this mutual act allows us to know the goal the writer has set herself, a goal that in most cases is not revealed even to the writer, is either simple-minded or fatuously arrogant. To paraphrase another author, a Book is what It is. Whether the writer achieved what she intended, even knew what she intended to achieve, or in fact intended to achieve anything at all except what appears between two covers is a mystery that no one, not even the writer, can answer truthfully. The inappropriateness of the question comes from the richness and ambiguity that are, I believe, the true achievements of literature. “I’m not saying that it isn’t in my book,” confessed the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese in response to a critic who pointed out a metaphysical theme in his work. “I’m only saying that I didn’t put it there.”

When editors try to guess an author’s “intention” (that rhetorical concept invented by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century), when they question the author about the meaning of certain passages or the reason for certain events, they are assuming that a work of literature can be reduced to a set of rules or explained in a précis. This prodding, this reductive exercise is indeed a threat, because the writer may (as Findley did) pay heed and upset the delicate balance of his creation. Older, more experienced, less afraid to alienate his publishers, Findley finally rebelled. In 1986 he revised The Butterfly Plague, deleting the explanation, and the new version (neither better nor worse, simply the original one) was published by Viking Penguin.

The threat, however, is not universal. Editing understood as “a search for the author’s intention” is practiced almost exclusively in the Anglo-Saxon world, and less in the United Kingdom than in North America. In the rest of the world, by and large, editing means only copyediting, a function of publishing, and even this is done with a caution that would send hundreds of editors in Chicago and Toronto in search of more challenging careers. I have worked for publishing companies in Argentina, Spain, France, Italy, and Tahiti, and have visited publishing companies in Brazil, Uruguay, Japan, Germany, and Sweden. Nowhere else is there such a job as intrusive as our North American editors describe, and the literatures of these other countries have, to the best of my knowledge, survived very nicely.

Why is North America the hothouse of editors? I suggest that the answer lies in the mercantile fabric of American society. Because books must be saleable merchandise, experts must be employed to ensure that the products are profitably commercial. At its worst this unifying task produces mass-market romances; at its best it cuts Thomas Wolfe down to size. In Latin America, where books seldom make money, the writer is left to his own devices and a novel is welcome to stretch to whatever lengths without fear of editorial scissors.

Unfortunately, the American influence has begun to spread. In Germany, Spain, and France, for instance, the directeur de collection, who hitherto simply chose the books she wished to publish, now sits with writers and discusses their works in progress. Sometimes the writer digs in his heels and refuses to play along. But few have either the courage or the literary clout of Graham Greene, who, when his American publisher suggested changing the title of his novel Travels with My Aunt, replied with an eight-word telegram: “Easier to change publisher than to change title.”

In some cases, the writers themselves have sought this kind of professional advice, asking an editor to clarify their own craft. The result is a peculiar collaboration. Commenting on what is perhaps the most famous case of editing in modern poetry, Ezra Pound’s reworking of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Borges remarked that “both their names should have appeared on the title page. If an author allows someone else to change his text, he is no longer the author—he is one of the authors, and their collaboration should be recognized as such.”

Among the many lines crossed out by Pound (deletions which Eliot accepted) are these, now forever absent from the poem:

Something which we know must be dawn—

A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,

And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,

A line, a white line, a long white line,

A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.

The Waste Land, published after Pound’s editing, has been called “the greatest poem in the English language,” and yet I miss those lines and wonder whether Eliot would not have left them in had it not been for Pound’s intervention.

Of course, everywhere in the world, Anglo-Saxon or not, writers show their work before it is published (though Nabokov argued that this was like showing samples of your sputum). A gaggle of unprofessional readers—the author’s mother, a neighbor, a friend, a husband or wife—performs the ritual first inspection and offers a handful of doubts or approvals on which the author may choose or not to reflect. This contradictory chorus is not the voice of power and officialdom recommending revision. John Steinbeck would show his wife every new finished chapter on condition that her only comment would be: “This is wonderful, dear!”

The professional editor, on the other hand, even the most subtle and understanding (and I have been blessed with a small number of them), tinges her opinion with the color of authority simply because of her position. The difference between a paid editor and someone close to us is the difference between a doctor who proposes a lobotomy and a devoted aunt recommending a strong cup of tea.

The story has often been told of how Coleridge dreamt his “Kubla Khan” in an intoxication of opium, and of how, upon waking, he sat down to write it and was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” thereby losing forever the conclusion to that extraordinary poem. Persons from Porlock are professionally employed by the publishing companies of the Anglo-Saxon world. A few are wise and ask questions that speed on the writing; a few distract; a few quibble away at the author’s vaporous confidence; a few destroy the work in mid-creation. All interfere, and it is this compulsive tinkering with someone else’s text that I question.

Without editors we are likely to have rambling, incoherent, repetitive, even offensive texts, full of characters whose eyes are green one day and black the next (like Madame Bovary); full of historical errors, like stout Cortez discovering the Pacific (as in Keats’s sonnet); full of badly strung-together episodes (as in Don Quixote); with a badly cobbled-together ending (as in Hamlet) or beginning (as in The Old Curiosity Shop). But with editors — with the constant and now unavoidable presence of editors without whose nihil ob-stat hardly a book can get published—we may perhaps be missing something fabulously new, something as incandescent as a phoenix and unique, something impossible to describe because it has not yet been born but which, if it were, would admit no secret sharers in its creation.