Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (60 page)

I happened to know Sylvia Plath and her husband and had been interviewed by nearly everyone who wanted to write about her life, but it was not until twenty-four years after her death that I was approached by Olwyn Hughes, agent for the estate, to edit a biography of Plath by Anne Stevenson, a poet and critic whose work I much admired, then and now. The biographer created version after version in order to fulfill the estate’s requirements for correctness (and self-defense), and finally reached an impasse. At this stage all parties decided to surrender the manuscript to me to create a text, coherent with the author’s views and style, that would pass the strict construction of the estate. This meant rewriting the book, page by page, reconciling Stevenson’s version of Plath’s life and poetry with that of the people who had been left by chance in charge of her poetry, and who were not only fiduciaries of the estate but characters in the book. My version, while hewing to biographical integrity, had to satisfy both the creative dignity of the biographer and the self-interest—and, to be fair, the deep involvement—of Plath’s husband and sister-in-law. It was the most harrowing editorial task I have ever undertaken, because the estate had the legal right to do what it wished, and the author had the moral right to speak her mind. The editorial process lasted two years after the book’s first draft was concluded. Essential to the endless negotiations were the careful ministrations
of a gifted attorney at Houghton Mifflin Company. Despite all these hurdles,
Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath
is still, to those of us who knew her, the most penetrating and eloquent life of the woman who was, at her reckless heart, a superb poet while attempting in her life to be everything else as well—novelist, mother, journalist, housewife, cook, intellectual, amoureuse, beekeeper, everything but the feminist that her misguided admirers imagined her to be.

As an example of the opposite solution to a similar problem, take
Anne Sexton: A Biography
by Diane Middlebrook. This biography, of another suicidal poet, took ten years from its commission to its publication and ran through four editors before it saw print. Jonathan Galassi, with Anne Sexton’s elder daughter, who was also her literary executor, found Stanford University’s Professor Middlebrook and offered her a Houghton Mifflin contract to write the book; and, with the assistance of foundation grants and private funds, Middlebrook was able to weave her fabric of interviews, research, and documentation for over five years. Only then did Sexton’s primary psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, come forward and agree to cooperate with the biographer, even offering her the audiotapes of some three hundred hours of psychiatric interviews. Middlebrook, who had by this time already drafted much of her text, first asked the literary executor whether she might hear and use the material in this most private of documents. With the estate’s concurrence, she set aside her keyboard and spent most of a year listening to and annotating the interviews, and then rewrote her book with the sound of the analysand’s voice in her ears, discovering as she advanced how closely Anne Sexton’s poetry was related to the psychiatric interaction. By this time I had become the fourth and final editor of the book. The first editor helped find the right author for the book; the second contributed patience and moral support; the third guided the author through the complex of libel, invasion of privacy, and defamation that threatened to hedge in the tale of a woman who had loved many men, who had persisted in a most unorthodox marriage, who had given much love to many friends, and who had sacrificed a lacerated life for a career that preserved her tottering sanity.

My job, as the editor who finally saw the book into print, was—with the advice of the same attorney who had so admirably helped
Bitter Fame
into print, and with the scrupulous cooperation and support of Anne Sexton’s daughter and her lawyer husband—to advise Diane Middlebrook on the creation of the final text. Every word was Diane Middlebrook’s own, but it had to avoid giving offense to family and friends while telling the searing truth about Sexton’s life. The direct quotations from her letters and poetry—and from letters to her from friends and lovers—had to be cleared with husband, children, every friend, every lover, every colleague. The
scrupulousness and professionalism with which Middlebrook carried out her biographical duties were staggering. My principal contribution, aside from line-by-line examination of her splendid text, and advice as to how to keep the length of the book within tolerable limits, was, from my personal knowledge of Sexton’s surroundings, to steer Middlebrook to certain acquaintances of Sexton’s who might have more to tell or who might grant permission if approached this way rather than that.

After three years on the editorial job, I was proud to see Middlebrook’s work at an end—only to find, to my astonishment, that the very first advance review, in
Publishers Weekly
, had solicited the opinion of an expert on the ethics of psychiatry, who, without reading a word of the book, condemned the morality of the biographer’s use of the psychiatric tapes. The next thing we knew, to our complete surprise, was that we had a controversy on our hands, with articles in the London papers, on the front page of the daily
New York Times
, and throughout the press—all this three months before our biography actually saw publication. We had expected controversy over Anne Sexton’s life, and even over her psychiatric history (a second psychiatrist had in fact conducted a two-year affair with his patient, writing her love poems as he collected his professional fees; but the psychiatric profession preferred to avoid mention of this peccadillo). The result, thanks to wonderful reviews and a brilliant publicity campaign orchestrated by the publisher and doughtily carried out by the author, was a best-seller as well as a literary triumph.

In short, the biography of the lately dead, especially literary figures, presents challenges that do not apply to subjects who have been off the scene long enough for their printed works to be out of copyright, though the law still requires the approval of the estate of a dead person to quote unpublished letters and other documents written by the protagonist, unless those are the public papers of a public person. Even now the courts, in the wake of the famous
Salinger
case, in which J. D. Salinger prevented Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters, or even paraphrasing them, are still wrangling over this subject. The editor of biographies has work to do in keeping up with the case law on the subject—or in keeping up with an attorney who knows.

It is for this reason that the editor of biographies needs to pay especial attention to the dreary particulars of permissions to quote, to releases from persons depicted and quoted, to finding and arranging permission to reproduce the best photographs. In such wastelands as these the vulture of libel is always hovering overhead. Yes, the publisher’s contract sets such duties in the hands of the author, but today, when the publisher is asked to insure the author against damages, the publisher has to bear much of the load. An experienced editor, who has been involved with more biographies than most
biographers, will not do his or her duty unless she lends a hand to make sure that the particulars are taken care of. The life of biography is in the details.

If there were a perfect biographer, he or she would have the following abilities: to be a real writer, one who understands how to construct and recount a flexible and sensuous narrative; to be a master of research, both of documents and interviews; to be tactful in dealings with relatives, librarians, lovers, executors, children, parents, and editors; to be so cannily devoted to the personality of the subject of the biography as to pursue every true lead and abandon every false one; to care so deeply about the precision of the text as to check every fact again and again, every document, every photograph, every rumor. But, beyond the conscientious practice of these mere skills, the biographer’s genius lies in having the sympathy and imagination to create the story of a life of which the subject would say, if he or she could, “That’s as close to me as anybody else could be expected to know.” The biographer’s worst temptation is to transform the subject into someone preferable to the original.

Anne Stevenson, as she wrote her life of Sylvia Plath, deepened in understanding of her subject and came to sympathize with Plath more deeply at the end than at the outset, perhaps more deeply than Plath’s own family. Diane Middlebrook learned more about her subject than she had ever dreamed possible, and came to admire the way in which Sexton shored her poetry against the ruins of her life. Ronald Steel, in writing his biography of Walter Lippmann (“Walter Lippmann,” he began, “was brought up to be a gentleman”), began to find himself losing accord with Lippmann’s temperament, with Lippmann’s attitude toward his own and other people’s Judaism, and with other aspects of Lippmann’s life. Steel’s editor was the late, great Edward Weeks, who had himself been a close friend of Lippmann’s and had edited many of Lippmann’s books. Steel cast about, seeking perhaps to find a newer, younger editor under the publisher’s roof who would show more sympathy to him and less to Lippmann, and as he did so the years passed until the book had exceeded its delivery date by a dozen years. Weeks exercised the most potent weapon an editor can wield: patience. Little, Brown, especially the sales department, grew restive: Lippmann was by this time long dead (though he had been alive and even vigorous when the task was begun), and the sales department could not imagine who would any longer be interested in reading his life. The editorial moral here is not always to listen too carefully to the lamentations of sales departments, for as it turned out every first-class reviewer in America chose to give close and admiring attention to
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
when it was published in 1980; it sold fifty thousand copies, won the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

…

The agony of identification between biographer and subject had been worth the years of struggle, as it had been for Diane Middlebrook. The story of Anne Stevenson and Sylvia Plath does not have quite so happy an ending. Her life of Plath did not make its entrance until after two prior books, one deeply inaccurate and the other simply obtuse, and after Plath had, for very peculiar reasons, been elevated posthumously into an illusory icon of the feminist movement. Stevenson’s laboriously truthful book was attacked, misinterpreted, and harangued by ideologue critics and relatively ignored by the American public, though in England, where the critics had attacked with even sharper vitriol, the public bought more copies. Of the three books I have just described, only
Bitter Fame
did not become a best-seller.

Editorial lesson: It is important for the sake of truth and history to have written the best biography of your subject; but it can be more lucrative to be first on the scene. John Malcolm Brinnin’s agonized and agonizing personal memoir,
Dylan Thomas in America
, the first portrait, has outsold the half-dozen full-scale biographies of Dylan Thomas published since, for example Constantine FitzGibbon’s solid
Life
, authorized by the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas a decade later. Brinnin’s book was also made into a play that has showered both the author and the Trustees with royalties. If a legend is to be created, try to do it quickly.

Most lamentable of all is the case of Robert Frost, who had the misfortune to choose his own biographer, a Princeton librarian named Lawrance Thompson, and to outlive the appointment by twenty-five years, by which time Thompson had not only gathered up all the materials for a three-volume biography (which even he did not live to finish unaided), but had developed an antipathy for his subject that may prove as poisonous to the reputation of Robert Frost as Rufus Griswold’s disapproving life of Edgar Allan Poe was to Poe’s. No major American figure more desperately needs a rehabilitative biography than Robert Frost, and none is less likely to get his deserts until the executors are all dead and the interested parties disinterested. The “friends of Marse Robert,” as Allen Tate once called them, gathered around the poet’s posthumous reputation like Myrmidons surrounding the body of Patroclus, in their attempt to preserve the vulgar yet conventional image of the hayseed sage. The only American poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration, whose image appears on postage stamps, and who produced a body of the most beautiful, witty, and heartbreaking poetry in our literary history, is least likely to receive an adequate biography because he lived too long, authorized his own biographer, the wrong one, too early, and for whatever reason earned the biographer’s secret enmity. For this fate no editor has a remedy.

Toni Burbank

T
ONI
B
URBANK
joined Bantam Books as an assistant editor in the school and college department more than twenty years ago and is currently vice-president and executive editor. She has edited early works of the women’s movement, maternity and child-care titles, and books on New Age psychology, health and healing, recovery, and mental health. Among authors with whom she has worked are Susan Forward, John Bradshaw, and Deepak Chopra. Other, non-self-help authors include Robert Pirsig, Alvin Toffler, and Natalie Goldberg
.

“
At their best … popular psychology and self-help books are part of the huge democratization of knowledge. (At their worst, they imply that no one has the common sense to come in out of the rain.) … They also seem to me distinctively American—a reminder of our old faith in self-improvement, self-reliance, and human perfectability, married to the can-do temperament of management: just find the right technique, and you can make life work for you!
”

So writes Toni Burbank in her crisp, instructive essay on the essential components of writing and editing these books. She points out that “self-help books are topic driven. Unlike best-selling novelists, previously best-selling self-help writers can fail dramatically if their next topic does not speak directly to their readers’ needs
.”