Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (5 page)

Monitoring morals involved more than just selecting authors and supervising plots. During the nineteenth century, language inspired some heated controversies. Conflicts over proper usage, vocabulary, and spelling were fought out in the development and sales of new dictionaries, grammar books, and especially translations of the Bible. At issue were the claims of tradition (say, the King James Bible) against those of academic experts (who had duller but more accurate translations to offer), the language of the street versus the language of society, but also how, and toward what ends, language would be shaped in America. What kind of society should America be? An ordered one in which language follows tradition and so, it is hoped, do people’s lives? Or an open-ended society in which language and
behavior change from year to year? Similar conflicts came up in the 1960s as people raised the claims of Black English and debated which four-letter words should be included in dictionaries. We still have some traces of these imbroglios in discussions about gender and language. But the earlier debate was front-page news and had a direct impact on publishing houses, which had to choose who their readers, advisers, editors, and authors would be. Surprisingly, many houses chose the liberal academics or their allies over the elitist traditionalists.

By Hitchcock’s day one last wrinkle had been added to the editorial mix. New magazines, financed by an explosion of consumer advertising, built their readership to record levels by publishing authors who employed a more “realistic” prose style. Some book editors who had been trained as journalists went after the same market. These new editors were more like corporate middle managers than moral monitors. They wanted American authors and they followed the latest fashions in public taste. These editors paid for authors who could deliver hard-hitting, lively prose on deadline. Turn-of-the-century writers’ magazines recognized this trend and started to print articles on how to write to sell, and to issue profiles of leading editors and what they would buy. Authors complained that editors would take only well-known authors, how-to pieces, or human interest stories, while editors rejoined that they would be happy to publish great literature if only someone would write it. Between morals and market, people began to develop the idea that a house needed editors as well as publishers and that editing was a craft that could contribute to the success of a book. According to some publishers, like Alfred A. Knopf, this was a terrible mistake and led directly to the decline of publishing.

…

Max Perkins arrived at Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1910 to work in the advertising department. William Crary Brownell, the literary adviser to the house, wrote books with titles like
Criticism, Standards
, and
Victorian Prose Masters
and was one of the fifty Americans who are periodically elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in recognition of their cultural prominence. Authors felt that approaching him was like entering a church, and Brownell saw editing as a form of cultural mission as well as a hard-headed business. Perkins shared Brownell’s sense of the importance of books but made a major shift by decreeing that “the book belongs to the author.” The young editor believed that editing involved a sort of compact to uncover and shape an author’s talent, no matter what that took. This tireless, even heroic, devotion to the author and to the book was the hallmark of elite editing from the twenties to the forties.

Starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first novel he acquired over
Brownell’s objection, Perkins worked with a memorable sequence of important authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Taylor Caldwell, and, especially, Thomas Wolfe. There is no more resonant image of American editing than the story of how Perkins crafted
Of Time and the River
out of the four-hundred-thousand-word tangle of unnumbered pages packed into three cartons that Wolfe submitted to him. Wolfe acknowledged his help in the book’s dedication to “a great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair.” Perkins was not eager for the publicity, but his role in editing Wolfe’s books became so well known that critics began to question how much Wolfe had actually written. Bernard De Voto accused “Mr. Perkins and the assembly line at Scribner’s” of essentially creating Wolfe’s books. Wolfe himself helped to shape the Perkins legend by turning the editor into Foxhall Edwards, a character in
You Can’t Go Home Again
.

Perkins, and other “heroic” editors like Pascal Covici and Saxe Commins, pushed editing to (or even past) the line where it became necessary to an author’s success. Did they go too far? These editors took on mammoth editing chores single-handedly while conducting intense, even melodramatic friendships with their brilliant but often self-destructive authors. And, all the while, they had to try to make the books commercial successes. In the mix of what we might now call genius and alcoholism, absolute devotion and codependency, hard work and burnout some of America’s greatest fiction was published. But the editors did at times become too attached to their own importance, altering works without the author’s permission and distorting the writer’s text.

In the thirties, editing was expanded in other ways by women, many of whom were agents. Elizabeth Nowell, for example, did as much for Wolfe’s magazine pieces as Perkins did for his novels—or even more: she selected, cut, and revised sections of his sprawling manuscripts to fit magazine word limits, negotiated fees, and even advised him on contraception so that he wouldn’t have to worry about getting his lovers pregnant. Simon & Schuster was notorious for hiring secretaries on the basis of their appearance, but women became crucial to the industry as a result of their (often unacknowledged) intellectual merits. Female “executive assistants” often did much of the copy editing and detail work for their better-known bosses. Women also began to carve out a territory of their own as in-house editors of children’s books. The most dramatic expansion of the editing pool, though, had to do with religion, not gender.

Starting in the teens, a series of new publishing houses appeared founded by young Jewish men, most of whom had graduated from Columbia University. These included houses that were founded as, or later became, Alfred
A. Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Viking, and Farrar, Straus, Giroux. The new Jewish houses moved editing in two directions: toward an expansion of free speech and toward a wider public that had been disdained or ignored by the Protestant elite. The new houses were not likely to sign up the stalwarts of mainstream America, who were already aligned with older houses like Appleton, Harper, or Scribner’s. Instead, they looked to Europe and to the radicals of Greenwich Village for authors. This led to a series of censorship battles, including one turning point in 1923, when the New York State Assembly actually passed a censorship law only to have the Senate defeat it, and another in 1933, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
.

Other houses found new books by expanding their lists. The first books that S & S issued (albeit under a dummy name) were crossword puzzle books. Though tax guides had first appeared during the Civil War, and how-to manuals have existed in various forms since colonial days, S & S transformed that category of publishing with all-time best-sellers like
How to Win Friends and Influence People
. The company’s approach was summarized in its motto, “Give the Reader a Break.” While for some houses editing for morals was giving way to a search for avant-garde authors, for others the old sense of cultural mission was being supplanted by a well-organized effort to address more pragmatic needs. Either way, the new houses brought new editing styles to the industry.

…

Max Perkins died in 1947; while the myth of the heroic editor persisted, it no longer described the day-to-day reality of trade publishing. Perkins himself had grown discouraged, feeling that materialism was ruling America and that some book people were choosing expediency over literary values. Others sensed this as well. According to one character in Dawn Powell’s 1942 novel,
A Time to Be Born
(reissued in 1991 by Yarrow Press), “the test of a publishing genius … is the ability to keep ahead of the times, to change your whole set of standards, overnight, if needs be.” If we can believe this savvy, if cynical, author, the real values of the old-line houses and the herculean efforts of the great editors were also being mimicked by clever hypocrites with their eyes on the market. While Perkins remained the model for eager young entry-level editors until very close to the present day, a whole new brand of publishing began before he died that more frankly courted sales and changed the rules of the game entirely: paperbacks.

Paperbacks had been a part of American publishing at least since the 1840s, but the houses that issued them were disdained and fiercely opposed by the hardcover houses. “Story papers,” dime novels, and “pirate” reprints were never treated as mainstream books. It took a more widespread
acceptance of “middlebrow” culture, as well as the persistence and market research of Robert Fair de Graff, to make possible the advent of modern paperbacks in 1939. While changes in American society helped to give a new respectability to cheap books, the houses themselves made room for a new type of editor. Frankly seeking a mass readership, some houses hired editors from lower-class backgrounds, and even a few who had not gone to college. Market wisdom began to compete with the old school tie as a reason for hiring an editor.

At first these paperbacks were cheap reprints of hardcovers that were sold in new locations like drugstores and newsstands. Genre fiction, such as detective stories, westerns, romances, and later science fiction, was a natural for paperback since it could be put out cheaply in large numbers with relatively predictable sales. By the early fifties, though, NAL’s Mentor list, Penguin, and most famously the Anchor list Jason Epstein founded at Doubleday added trade paperback lines that were sold through regular bookstores and included more “serious” titles. In all cases, paperback houses had to play by hardcover rules, stressing their literary interests, their respect for the main and original publisher, and their deep concern for an author’s welfare. Paperback editing involved knowing who was publishing what and how they could be approached.

In the sixties, NAL moved publishing another step when it started to commission books with built-in movie tie-ins, but editors were already well aware of other media. As early as 1944 S & S was bought by Marshall Field, who also owned television and radio stations. Editors first realized the importance of author appearances on television in 1958, when Alexander King’s monologues on Jack Paar’s
Tonight
show made two of his books number one best-sellers. By the early sixties a hardcover editor had to be concerned not only with the merits of an author’s work but with the other lives it might lead: would it go into paperback, could it be made into a movie, might the author (or, in the case of Bennett Cerf, the publisher) appear on television? Mass-market paperback editors began not only to buy books from hardcover houses but also to invent entirely new kinds of fiction, like gothic mystery and romance and later bodice rippers, that might never appear in hardcover.

In some houses the income from these new paperbacks helped to support smaller sellers, allowing upscale editors to concentrate their attention on literary value. Trade paperback editors were especially favored by this trade-off. In the fifties, for example, NAL was very proud that it could call Erskine Caldwell, and later Mickey Spillane, “the world’s best-selling author,” but it also gave a forum to new black writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. This balance, however, went only so far. At one point, Victor Weybright, copublisher of NAL, regretfully informed
the house literary adviser that he could not publish a book unless it would have a minimum sale of 75,000 copies.

According to Ted Solotaroff, who worked there at the time, NAL still balanced trade and mass market successfully in the mid-sixties. If this was so, part of the credit must go to the mood of the much-maligned sixties. Great Society spending on libraries, as well as the entry of the baby boomers into high school and then college, increased the market for serious and challenging works. The counterculture may have been a product of television news and rock records, but every self-respecting radical had a shelf full of well-thumbed paperbacks including everyone from Herbert Marcuse and Eldridge Cleaver to Carlos Castaneda and Wilhelm Reich. The editor who acquired and published radicals had risked court challenges in the 1920s; by the 1960s he or she had a good chance of buying a best-seller.

Civil rights even entered publishing itself in the sixties and seventies as houses made their first, short-lived efforts to hire nonwhite editors. However, because editing requires a college education yet offers very low entry-level salaries, most intelligent, motivated people from low-income backgrounds wisely pursued more lucrative professions. To this day editing remains one of America’s least integrated professions. On the other hand, women have come near to, or have even broken through, the very highest glass ceilings in publishing. Not only are many, perhaps most editors female, but women are frequently in very senior roles, such as editors-in-chief or publishers. While this is particularly true in children’s books, publishing is one of the few industries in which the profile of the typical customer (for fiction, a college-educated, middle-class woman from the Midwest) matches that of a typical manager. You might say that, in publishing, women have come close to controlling the means of production of their own reading. In that sense, editors may be more in touch with the sensibilities of their readers today than they have ever been.

…

The very success of paperbacks in the sixties and seventies, along with the increased visibility of all forms of media, made publishing houses attractive to Wall Street. Many prestigious hardcover houses, faced with the power of paperbacks and the overtures of potential buyers, had to find new money to stay independent, merge with other houses, or go out of business. As a wave of takeovers washed over publishing, the lifetime job security that old-line houses had offered to editors and authors gave way to a free market in which both jumped from house to house seeking a better deal. Agents, recognizing that houses needed bankable names, became more adroit at using the old technique of an auction to get top dollar for their authors. Big advances, which often did not earn out, only increased the financial pressures
on publishing houses, which were now often small units in large, cost-conscious organizations. “Return on investment” went from being an unfamiliar term in a book, which an editor might query, to being the crucial fiscal marker that could determine whether he or she even had a job.