Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (14 page)

The itch for the big score, the Faustian willingness to strike a bargain with the devil, does not confine itself to the younger set; it is common as well among older writers, even those who have tried to live by Connolly’s dictate. This is very understandable, for such writers will have seen on the one hand staggering sums paid over to the hacks of the best-seller list, and on the other disproportionate praise and attention (and money) lavished on the upstart of the moment. Meanwhile, they must labor away, it seems, in prestigious obscurity, and it is all very galling. Little wonder, then, that some of these writers decide that writing well is insufficient revenge, that a system so manifestly incapable of matching reward to merit deserves to be subverted and manipulated. I believe that a number of important American writers have made some such conscious internal decision to maneuver cold-bloodedly for the big time, and I cannot say that I blame them. Their publishers are most likely parts of huge corporations, they’ve probably had
too many editors in their careers to depend on them very much, the faith that art can save your soul is a quaint and dying creed, the surrounding literary culture is thin and fragmented and unsustaining—why subsist on such thin gruel as a prestigious literary career? So off these writers go with their work into the open market, a move usually orchestrated by a shrewd and powerful agent (about whom more in a moment), and sure enough, the classy scent these authors give off proves to be a powerful financial aphrodisiac. The rupture, in some cases, of publishing relationships of long standing can seem a small price to pay for such largesse.

Let me be specific. Up until fairly recently, William Gaddis was known to a pretty small circle of cognoscenti as the author of two massive, dense, and demanding masterpieces,
The Recognitions
and
JR
. These works make absolutely no compromise with the reader as they attack the question of authenticity in the modern age, and they have sold over the years in modest numbers at best. Last year, after publication by Viking of a relatively short and, by Gaddis’s standards, accessible novel,
Carpenter’s Gothic
, Gaddis and his agent put on the block a proposal for his next and probably last novel,
The Last Act
, a work about the American legal system—and everything else. I know, because I read it for Viking and offered on it. As reported in
Publishers Weekly
(and much discussed on the Rialto), the work was knocked down to Simon & Schuster for $275,000, an amount that makes no sense whatsoever unless you understand that Simon & Schuster was simply purchasing the prestige of publishing one of the few certifiable geniuses (in my view) in current American fiction. The book that Gaddis will write will, I am quite certain, be brilliant, and Gaddis deserves the money and more. But save for some kind of miracle, Simon & Schuster will be quite deeply in the red at the end of the day. It indicates how thoroughly unmoored ends have become from means in the corporate era of publishing.

Other writers of stature have grasped the essence of celebrity culture, none more egregiously than the novelist Harold Brodkey. He has so adroitly broadcast the unbounded ambition behind his long-awaited and long-undelivered magnum opus,
A Party of Animals
, and the angst of his life and its creation that respected critics proclaim the work a masterpiece and Brodkey a presiding genius of twentieth-century American fiction
before they have even read it
. The mixed reviews that Brodkey’s recent collection,
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
, has received did not deter
New York
and
People
from profiling Brodkey and his unhappy childhood and his peculiar adulthood. Meanwhile,
A Party of Animals
has over its twenty-five-year gestation period accumulated an ever thicker layer of advance payments from various publishers; his current one, Knopf, has sunk
well over half a million dollars into it. Whatever one makes of Brodkey’s talent on the basis of what has already seen print (I find him hard, obsessive going for the most part), a
reductio ad absurdum
of the cult of tortured literary creation has been reached here, possibly the most handsomely rewarded instance of writer’s block in literary history. Brodkey has made his very inability to create a sign of his genius; what he is selling is not literature so much as the
idea
of literature. Here is the notion of artistic struggle retooled for the age of intellectual property. Somewhere out there Andy Warhol is applauding.

Little wonder, then, that, in a situation where the writers are so eager to receive and the publishers so eager to give, the literary agents have moved to the center stage of what Ted Solotaroff calls “the literary-industrial complex.” Only agents intimately familiar with the territory can orchestrate the complex and often expensive courtship dance between writer and publisher. Only agents who have behind them the clout of their own lists of blockbusting authors can hope to counterbalance the immense power of conglomerate publishers on their clients’ behalf. Only agents with a network of well-established connections and years of professional experience can maximize for an author the potentially enormous income to be realized from the complex web of subsidiary rights—foreign, film, dramatic, audiovisual, information retrieval, and so on. Finally, in a culture where the idea of the art object often substitutes for or takes precedence over the object itself, agents serve as the spin doctors of literature, shaping the idea of the book and the author for public consumption. These are the facts, and there is no arguing against them.

For the editor, however, the centrality of the agent in the writer’s life has come in part at his expense. It is the rare agent who will become as intimately involved as the editor in the crafting of the work, and that seems a structural feature of the business. But with the ceaseless movement in the corporate ownership of houses and in editorial staff, the agent becomes by default the still point of the turning world for the writer as well as the source of his financial salvation or triumph. Most writers these days are glad to forgo 10 or 15 percent of their income in exchange for the agent’s going to the mat with the publishers and wrestling out of them the last dollar of advance money. The agents are quite good at this, of course, and it allows the writer and publisher to live within the convenient fiction that the lethal street fight masquerading as a contract negotiation never took place.

What very few people say explicitly is that publishers are scared stiff of the powerful agents—that the million-dollar contracts you read about are paid over with silent screams. Agents are the direct beneficiaries of the decline of understanding among corporate-owned publishers of financial cause and effect, for the checks always clear but the returns and the losses
stay with the publisher. In almost every book negotiation these days is the spoken or unspoken threat that if the terms are not satisfactory, there is some other publisher who would be delighted to pay the asking price—and there usually is. A superb publication of the author’s previous work is often used
against
you: every editor has had the experience of an agent reminding him in a negotiation that “there are a lot of people out there interested in——’s work” when it is the sweat equity and promotional money and publishing smarts you and your firm have applied to——’s last book, as much as the literary quality of the work itself, that created the interest.

The editor occupies a diminishing space in the midst of these developments. The writer may feel great personal loyalty and gratitude for the editor’s intimate understanding and stalwart sponsorship of his work, but such bonds are divisible. The writer’s life is a precarious one, the vagaries of taste and talent and the marketplace impossible to predict. If the writer finds himself in the happy (and still relatively rare) position of being a highly sought-after commodity, well, the agent is there to do the nasty work, with the writer in effect saying, “I’m sorry that things have worked out this way, but I’ll always be grateful for your help.” After all, Thomas Wolfe left Scribner’s and Max Perkins and broke the great man’s heart, but he did write him that nice valentine in
You Can’t Go Home Again
.

This is what it looks like from here, the editor’s uneasy chair. It is damned peculiar out there, and damned Hobbesian—what used to be known as a gentlemen’s profession has been transformed into a war of all against all. It is impossible to imagine that august figure Max Perkins working happily or even successfully in this world, for
his
values—loyalty, honesty, taste, proportion, Olympian standards—are not always negotiable currency these days. They have not disappeared from publishing—after all, Robert Giroux still shows up for work at Farrar, Straus, Giroux on Union Square—but they surely do not mean what they once did. Editors of my generation and younger (I’m thirty-eight) are resigned to and cynically humorous about the departure of a particular sort of grace from our world, intensely grateful when we encounter instances of it, and determined to emulate it to the extent that conditions will allow. We’ve learned the rules of the rough new games being played—or rather, the absence of rules—but a lot of us don’t like the lessons we’re being taught.

The heart of darkness at the center of today’s publishing world is not a jungle. Rather, it is a flashy, disorienting environment, a combination hall of mirrors, MTV video, commodities pit, cocktail party, soap opera, circus, fun house, and three-card monte game. The message one emerges with, stunned and shaken by what one has witnessed, is: “Mistah Perkins—he dead.”

“Mistah Perkins—He Dead” was written in late 1988 and published in the
American Scholar
in the summer of 1989. In rereading it now, three years later, I am struck by its tone of angst, which reflected a certain anguish over what the go-go eighties did to the trade publishing business. We are now well into the nineties, and the giddy, go-for-broke atmosphere has downshifted into a low-grade, we-may-be-broke depression—and not in publishing alone, of course. On September 2, 1991, Roger Cohen, the publishing reporter for the
New York Times
, headlined his
tour d’horizon
of the state of the business “An Ailing, Murky Industry Looks for Signs of Change.” In the midst of a stubborn recession he reported that “Sales are very weak. Even the most die-hard optimists concede that the notion of publishing’s being recession-proof has been shown to be nonsense…. So a profound change, it seems, has taken place. After a decade of rapid sales growth, which fueled a rapid rise in the money that authors were able to command for their books, a period of retrenchment has begun.”

And yet…. Cohen takes note of the inveterately optimistic nature of publishers, a quality reflected in the oversized advances still being paid for the hot property ($6 million for the Norman Schwarzkopf autobiography being an egregious case in point) and the highly desirable prestige item. So right at this moment I’m choosing to accentuate the positive as far as book editing is concerned. Yes, the corporate shenanigans described in my piece still go on, the agents call the tune, the culture is decaying, nobody reads anymore, the universe will eventually suffer heat death…. Meanwhile, the good editor’s task—and there are
plenty
of good editors out there, many of them my friends—
is simply to ignore all this
and go about the business of bringing the best books he or she can to market, at a price that makes turning a profit possible. This may mean any number of personal and business compromises with a commercial culture capable of the most stupefying inanition. But victories, however difficult to win, are the lifeblood of editors, and they come more often than one might expect. And such victories are what make publishing mean infinitely more than the simple sum of
x
thousands of units shipped at
y
cover price with a profit margin of
z
percent. It means that the soul of publishing, and to a certain extent of American literary and intellectual culture, if that’s not too grandiose, resides in the stewardship of editors who care deeply about quality and excellence.

And so we soldier on. And so we’d better.

The Ethical and Moral Dimensions of Editing

James O’Shea Wade

J
AMES
O’S
HEA
W
ADE
graduated from Harvard College in 1962 and initially worked in sales and editorial in college and professional publishing. He switched over to trade in the late sixties as a senior editor at Macmillan. He was subsequently editor-in-chief of World Publishing and then editorial director and vice-president of David McKay. He founded his own publishing operation and then joined forces with Kennett and Eleanor Rawson to form Rawson, Wade Publishers. He is presently executive editor and vice-president of Crown Publishers and editorial director of Orion Books
.

Not only editors but writers, too, can profit greatly from Mr. Wade’s expert advice to editors on how to conduct themselves according to the highest moral and ethical standards of publishing. In a situation where the interests of author and publisher do not coincide, he asks “how one reconciles the obligations of friendship [with an author] with those of an editor who is expected to contribute to the corporate interests of his or her publisher.” His answer is that “the only workable way to reconcile what may seem to be conflicting obligations and interests is to stay with one essential truth: the editor’s primary obligation is to the
book.
If you fail in that you are no friend to the author and you are not doing what a publisher pays you to do.”

Mr. Wade offers illuminating insights into the editor’s moral and ethical role in such areas as censorship, responsibility for the authenticity of a manuscript, the decision to reject a manuscript deemed to be unpublishable, the necessity for honesty between editor and agent, and many other problems and procedures that plague and often perplex the working editor
.