Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (12 page)

I overstate the situation, of course, but not by much. It may be that since book editors stand at the very center of the publishing process and also mediate between what the culture is offering up and what the firm is putting out, they register crises earlier and more severely, like canaries in coal mines. They certainly operate in highly contested, tremendously tricky terrain. Lionel Trilling famously referred to the “bloody crossroads” where literature and politics meet; the intersection between culture and commerce where editors do their work is no less sanguine a piece of ground. In this essay I’d like to explore the forces that are reshaping the landscape of American publishing, particularly as they affect the function of the book editor, be he the accomplice or the victim (or both) of those forces. This exploration will of necessity touch on matters of taste and judgment in writing that aspires to the status of literature. Indeed, it may illuminate the question of whether such writing is likely to be produced at all in the coming decades, and if so, what form it will take. I hope to be able to demonstrate that, first, matters are more hopeful in this respect than the conventional critics of American publishing are telling us; but, second, for many of the same reasons, things are in a parlous state. Our particular bloody crossroads is especially fertile ground for contradictions and ironies.

…

Most essays on book editing begin by attempting to dispel the mystery surrounding just what it is that a book editor
does
. In the mind of the educated public, the figure of Maxwell Perkins, editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, and Thomas Wolfe, stands forth as the only widely recognized member of the tribe. This is largely a result of an extended fictional portrait of Perkins in Wolfe’s
You Can’t Go Home Again
, Malcolm Cowley’s
New Yorker
profile of him in 1944, and A. Scott Berg’s popular 1978 biography. As any reader of
Editor to Author
, a collation
of Perkins’s superb editorial letters, may attest, Perkins was a giant and a virtuoso of his craft. He was also an eccentric, driven, and somehow
premodern
man in his tastes and working habits, a hero of culture, but one seemingly displaced from the nineteenth century. The equation of Maxwell Perkins with book editing has led to endless misconceptions about the proper function of the book editor, especially in regard to the editor’s role as the writer’s collaborator and literary conscience. Even today most book editors do somewhat the same job as Maxwell Perkins, but in the same sense that most basketball players are doing something similar to what Michael Jordan is doing. Still, it is an interesting thought experiment to imagine Perkins working (or trying to work) in today’s publishing world. It is hard to feature.

Certainly visions of Perkins-esque exploits danced in my head as I prepared to enter my first editorial meeting as a green and poignantly eager and idealistic assistant editor at age twenty-eight. (Nobody above the age of twenty-five should ever care as much about a new job as I did.) Largely by fast talking I had weaseled my way into a position with a very large mass-market paperback publisher, one with a deep and highly profitable backlist of paperback literary classics and highbrow nonfiction works aimed at the high school and college markets. These were the books I was meant to work on and augment. My bookshelves were riddled with books bearing this publisher’s colophon, many of them by real live American authors, and so I anticipated at least some involvement with the hot, steaming literary and intellectual material I read about so eagerly in the
New York Times Book Review
. That anticipation was confirmed when I was given Susan Sontag’s
Illness as Metaphor
and William Gass’s
The World within the Word
, a collection of critical essays, to read for paperback reprint consideration in the week before I was to begin work. I fairly swooned with delight when handed these books, which were by two figures I then regarded as demigods of American criticism. This was even better than I had dared hope. Oh boy oh boy oh boy….

As it happened, the weekly editorial meeting was held on each Monday at 9:30
A.M
. So, with no preparation whatsoever, I was tossed into it in my first hour on the job like an infant into the drink. Suddenly I was in a large room with some fifteen other people around a table, a long log of submissions to be discussed, and barely a clue about the real rules of the proceedings about to take place here. With startling swiftness there began a bewildering discourse, understood intimately by everybody but me, a kind of verbal publishing shorthand compounded of first names and a semitechnical vocabulary (first prints, early look, floor bid, closing date) and a collegial back-room air. Largely absent from the discussion was much reference at all to the actual contents of the books, let alone their cultural
significance, their contributions, if any, to the world of literature and ideas. By the time
Illness as Metaphor
came up for discussion I was thoroughly disoriented, and whatever fine insights I may have mentally prepared myself to deliver had evaporated under an onslaught of anxiety. I stammered out a few jumbled and perfectly ineffective sentences and then, sensing my utter failure to communicate the book’s importance, played what I felt was my only card left: “It will probably be nominated for the National Book Award.” (Her previous book,
On Photography
, had won the award some months earlier.)

The reaction was swift, but not what I had anticipated: an editor on the other side of the table snorted sarcastically, “Well,
that
will sell a lot of books.”

My performance on behalf of Gass’s book was little better. I did say, somewhat apologetically this time, that I thought that it, too, would be nominated for an NBA, a remark that carried the same absence of force in that forum. Needless to say, my employer declined to offer a red cent to reprint either of the books.

There is something to be said for having the stuffing knocked out of you on your first entry into the ring, I suppose. Since that time I’ve attended several hundred editorial meetings and run quite a few myself, and I now know just what I say under the same circumstances. (Gass’s book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and Sontag’s book went nominationless, incidentally, but contrary to my new colleague’s disdainful remark, an astute publisher, hardcover or paperback, can most certainly use the aroma of prestige such a citation imparts as a tool to sell books.) But I had not fallen into a pit of philistinism; I had simply encountered the world of commercial publishing as a quiveringly unprepared naïf. The shorthand did not necessarily imply disdain for content; it was just a way of cutting to the business heart of the matter. What I heard at that big paperback house did not differ radically from what I have later encountered at the editorial meetings of two distinguished hardcover imprints. That the publishing process can very well chill the blood of the uninitiated does not imply an absence of seriousness on the part of the participants, editors emphatically included. To paraphrase Bismarck’s
mot
about the law, it is with books as it is with sausage: if you like the stuff, it’s best not to watch it being made.

The point I wish to make is that book editing is not now and never has been a pursuit that permits a narrow purism. F. Scott Fitzgerald characterizes his film producer hero Monroe Stahr in
The Last Tycoon
as one of the few people who can hold the whole complex equation of filmmaking in his head at once; it might be said that good editors do something similar with the publishing equation. Their ministrations extend equally to the narrow
compass of the page of text where the reader will experience the book and the wide cultural and commercial arena where the book itself must find its way; their fealty is equally to the spiritual, emotional, and financial well-being of the authors they publish and the firms that employ them. One might say that the effective editor is on comfortable terms with God and with Mammon. The great Max Perkins also published Taylor Caldwell and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Probably the most remunerative book ever published by Alfred A. Knopf was Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
(over eight million copies sold in this country alone, and climbing still), and the ultra-prestigious firm that bears Knopf’s name is known in the book trade for its top-of-the-culinary-line cookbooks and for the commercial éclat with which it publishes glossy show business memoirs. The firm of Farrar, Straus, Giroux, publisher of several Nobel Prize winners and generally regarded as the most purely literary house in the country, pulled itself out of the red in 1950 after four financially lackluster years by publishing Gayelord Hauser’s best-selling
Look Younger, Live Longer;
it is currently happily awash in the incredible revenues generated by Scott Turow’s
Presumed Innocent
and Tom Wolfe’s
Bonfire of the Vanities
. I could cite dozens of similar examples with ease.

I perhaps overemphasize the point about book editing, even at the highest level of practice, having a lot to do with money and promotion and gamesmanship and overall business sense because these are the aspects of the craft that the public least understands or cares to recognize. The other part, the priesthood-of-literature aspect, well, that certainly exists; that is the star by which the serious editor sets his course, but it is also something primary and largely irreducible and unsusceptible to explanation. The code is simple, really. Be loyal to your authors. Nurture the best that is in them and give them the best that is in you—including sticking by them in lean times. Publish the best writing that you can find or that finds you. Don’t send books to the printer that you know can be made better. Be proud of the firm and give it books that the firm can be proud to publish. If you have to or want to publish some junk or sheer product (it happens), don’t represent your dross as gold. Honor the past while remaining alert to what is new and interesting and valuable and maybe upsetting to conventional taste—and have the guts to publish it. Don’t fall into the all-too-available smugness about who and what will sell—and about your own infallibility. Strive to be the kind of editor your younger, hopelessly literary self wanted to be. Book editing, like politics, at its most fulfilling engages the participant at a very deep, test-of-character level, and that is what makes it worth doing.

On the good days (and for me most of them are good), I believe all that. On the bad days, I feel like a self-victimizing chump for believing it. On the
bad days, the days when another venerable American house is neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate that enfolded it, or a Big Name in the Lit Biz has deserted his longtime publisher for a big fat check from Long Green and Gotrocks, or an agent has slammed the wind out of me with a punishing demand for money on a book my soul cries out to publish, on those days I decide that literature is the very last thing that publishing is about. I decide that publishing is about power and money and ego and sharp practice and staying ahead of the unearned advances while fanning the flames of memory under your successes. On the bad days I seriously ask myself why I should care so much about a totally uncodified and thoroughly outmoded set of standards and ethics when so many others appear to be doing so well without them—and all of it in the service of a form of cultural transmission unlikely to be in existence much beyond my lifespan. As Bugs Bunny says, What a maroon.

I usually get over it fairly quickly. A sense of humor helps. There are, however, more and more of those bad days for editors to get over. The shape of the publishing landscape changes, sometimes drastically, almost every week. The players change partners with the frequency of a square dance; the houses change ownership with the indignity of a bankruptcy sale. The prevailing atmosphere is very much one of high capitalism characteristic of the late Reagan era: all of a sudden there seems to be this incredible amount of money around, sales are going up and up, but nobody feels secure because it all might go bust tomorrow, because we might very well all be living beyond our means. You know, that homeless-in-Trump Tower feeling. The precious basics of the editor’s craft—time, security, loyalty, a shared understanding of literary and intellectual values and financial
value
—become less and less dependably available as stronger and stronger gusts of change sweep through the business. The forward march of culture begins to feel like a rear-guard action, and purely literary values begin to look entirely beside the point of a larger, colder, scarily expensive game. When one reaches the point, as I have on numerous occasions, of having to decide during an auction whether the paperback rights to a first collection of short stories or a first novel are worth many, many tens or several hundreds of thousands of dollars, one’s fine discriminations tend to feel awfully fussy and irrelevant. But then, when a van Gogh or Monet or Gauguin is going right through the roof at Sotheby’s, the curator doesn’t interrupt the proceedings to remind the crowd that the work in question is not from the artist’s strongest period.

I’ve spent a good deal of time brooding over the possible reasons why things seem so badly out of whack—why, to put it bluntly, publishers are behaving so stupidly and self-destructively in some instances, and so peculiarly shortsightedly overall. There is no one primal cause for the transformations
all have witnessed and many question and deplore (it suits others just fine, of course), any more than one can explain simply why mergers and acquisitions became the major-league sport of Wall Street. World historical forces are clearly at work. From my point of view down in the editorial trenches, however, I think I can isolate a few broad developments, all working in concert to reinforce one another, that have caused huge distortions and discontinuities in the way publishers in general and editors in particular go about their business.

Pride of place must of course go to the by-now almost exclusively
corporate
nature of American publishing (I exclude from this discussion the university presses and the hundreds of small presses, whose nature, influence, and problems require a totally separate inquiry). Not very long ago, publishing houses tended to be family-owned and family-run businesses, with the founder or the founder’s descendants at the helm. Scribner’s was run by a Scribner, Putnam’s by a Putnam, Doubleday by a Doubleday, Simon & Schuster by a Simon and a Schuster. Even where a specifically family connection to management no longer existed, as in the case of Little, Brown, Harper & Row, and Houghton Mifflin, the houses remained closely held entities, and trade publishing itself formed something of a peculiar archipelago off the continent of corporate America, subject to the same economic weather but governed by its own insular rules. Do not imagine this island nation as paradise, by any means, only as a reasonably stable confederation where change came slowly and business proceeded at a comparatively stately pace.