Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (4 page)

The third function—editor as Janus, or two-face—occupies most of the working editor’s office hours. (All serious reading and editing is done off premises, much of it nights and weekends; again, you have to love it to do it.) Unceasing reports, correspondence, phoning, meetings, business breakfasts, lunches, dinners, in- and out-of-office appointments leave active editors feeling like rapidly revolving doors as they attempt to explicate author and house to one another.

An editor is naturally the author’s first and leading advocate in dealing with his or her publisher. It begins with the editor’s initial enthusiasm for the project or novel and continues through acceptance by the house, negotiation of a contract, actual editing (where whatever real deepening of the relationship there will be tends to take place), and the publishing process itself, from copy editing, proofs, and production to sales and publicity. Throughout, the editor is usually attempting to bring as many relevant colleagues into the picture as possible, with the double purpose of interesting them in the book and author at hand, and of demonstrating to the author that a team of dedicated professionals, not just the editor, is devoted to the cause. Also, in this imperfect world, when late delivery, financial emergency, unexpected complexities of all kinds, intervene to prevent perfect fulfillment of a contract, it is the convinced editor who will argue the author’s case.

Authors should, and usually do, appreciate the fact that one of the editor’s most crucial challenges is to be able to articulate, clearly and appealingly, the signal virtues of a given book. From editorial reports on through catalog copy, jacket flaps, and publicity releases, it is the editor’s initial core descriptions that implicitly explain why the book has been
chosen in the first place and explicitly set the tone for how a book will be perceived both in and out of the house. Writing this copy is for most editors a true sweat—it is so much more pleasurable to skewer bad writing than to attempt, against all odds, to find fresh ways to lay credible encomia on the newest addition to fifty-five thousand annual U.S. titles. A related trial is the sales conference two or three times a year wherein the enthusiastic editor must stand and deliver to a skeptical audience of sales representatives a pear-shaped oration on the virtues of the titles he or she sponsors. It is the agony of the schoolroom book report magnified a hundredfold.

As for explicating the house to the author, this is often Janus’s more minatory side. Economics does indeed seem a dismal science when the editor must repeatedly explain why a full-page ad in the
Times Book Review
, color illustrations, a coast-to-coast tour, or whatever is unwarranted and/or unaffordable and why even some of the more modest requests cannot be met. The sotto voce diplomatic drumbeat beneath all this is that there’s one partner (the publisher) on one side, and many (all the authors) on the other, and that time, energy, and resources must be allocated accordingly. Like polygamy, it’s not equitable, but a fact of a certain kind of life. At the same time, when some extra effort is made on a book or author’s behalf—midnight oil burned by a copy editor, an imaginative publicity break or unexpected special market ferreted out—it is up to the editor to be sure the author knows about it.

Trying to define the role of the book editor in America without mentioning Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947) of Scribner’s can be likened to writing a short history of aviation without the Wright brothers, so pervasive is the image of the man who edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and so many others. Where is his like today? is the invariable echoing lament whenever his name comes up. There is justice in this, for few would compare themselves to Perkins, but it could be speculated, at the risk of sounding defensive, that if he were alive today, he would be spending far more time than he wanted cozening agents, working up competitive bids, scouting afar, and generally being distracted from the manuscripts at hand. He would thus have a much harder time
being
Maxwell Perkins, so to speak.

Be that as it may, Perkins still remains the beau ideal of his trade. Nobody remotely interested in the role of editors or their relationship to writers should fail to read
Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell Perkins
, edited by John Hall Wheelock. With their warmth, eloquence, total empathy with authors, and gentle but keenly persuasive suggestions, these letters stand alone as lasting beacons to those who would follow. In writing of Thomas Wolfe and Perkins, the English critic Cyril Connolly, talking about editors, generously found it “unnecessary to point out that American publishers are a dedicated group: they are loyal, generous and infinitely painstaking; they
live for their authors and not for social climbing, or the books they want to write themselves; they know how to be confessors, solicitors, auditors and witch doctors….”
*
So be it.

The future, as Mort Sahl says, lies ahead, and the role of editors, like everything else, is bound to change. Corporate pressures for economies in overhead and benefits are likely to lead to more outside free-lance editing and diminished house staffs. It’s a toss-up question as to whether more or less editing in general will be needed. On the one hand, entropic degeneration of the language, diminished devotion to accuracy, and word processor bloat all cry out for increased editorial ministrations. On the other hand, the legions crying “Who cares?” show no signs of fading away either.

Technology, ever the burr under the saddle of stasis, is bound to invade the editorial sanctum, a process long overdue according to recent jeremiads by Jonathan Yardley, Jacob Weisberg, and others who cannot see why editors have not turned en masse to the computer. The trouble is that so long as editing remains a suggestive rather than a coercive procedure, editing
must always leave its clear tracks
. The word processor itself is an inarguable blessing when it comes to writing or rewriting one’s own copy, but when someone else’s is on the operating table, seamless alteration would both insult and confuse. In that sense, until economical and user-friendly hardware and software for marginal comment, visible deletions, and the like are invented, the Post-it will remain a more significant aid to working editors than the computer. And editors themselves will remain subject to the “joy, fulfillment, grief, and frustration” of their craft, hoping that their ultimately invisible labors will make a real and positive difference.

Marc Aronson

M
ARC
A
RONSON
is a senior editor at Henry Holt’s Books for Young Readers. As an editor of “multicultural” nonfiction for middle graders and young adults, he has specialized in introducing adult trade authors to children’s book publishing. He is also writing a New York University history dissertation on William Crary Brownell and turn-of-the-century publishing. Mr. Aronson created and teaches a course in the history of publishing at NYU’s Publishing Institute. Among the authors he has worked with are Bruce Brooks, Coretta Scott King, and Kyoko Mori
.

An examination of the social, cultural, and economic influences on American editors and editing, Marc Aronson’s informative, entertaining, often provocative essay takes you from when editing as we know it began—the structural changes editor Ripley Hitchcock made in Edward Noyes Westcott’s novel
David Harum
(1898)—to a surprising and fascinating look at the innovative ways in which editors will work with writers as the new century approaches. “Editing … will enter the twenty-first [century] with an electronic bazaar…. We will all be editors when we choose to be, and, I’ll bet, that will make us appreciate all the more those teams of hackers, pencil pushers, and typists who take the first crack at shaping our info-glut: the masters of multimedia, the captains of the cyberstream, the editors of the future.”

Editing in America began with an auction. Agents were changing the rules of publishing around 1898 when Edward Noyes Westcott’s
David Harum
was published; but the auction that transformed publishing was not
for
that book but
in
it. Westcott, a banker from upstate New York, had written a novel about a shrewd local named David Harum. Cracker-barrel philosophy written in dialect (think of Joel Chandler Harris’s
Uncle Remus)
was very popular, and Westcott had every reason to believe he would find a publisher. But he had no luck until his manuscript came across the desk of Ripley Hitchcock at Appleton. Hitchcock, an authority on etchings and the author of a series of popular histories, was an editor who was willing to take a risk. He recognized that the horse swap in
chapter 6
of the manuscript was really the first chapter of the book. The editor moved it, transferring five chapters in the process, and made cuts and stylistic revisions throughout. His editing worked miracles.
David Harum
was the number one best-seller for 1899. In March and April of that year up to 1,000 copies a day left bookstore shelves. The book reached a total sale of 727,000 hardcover copies by 1904 and 1,190,000 by 1946, with another 241,000 out in paperback.

The work Hitchcock actually did on the manuscript was not unusual—other editors had also made suggestions for radical cuts and had turned rejected manuscripts into hot sellers—but there were two crucial differences this time: the book sold at a record-breaking pace, and people found out what the editor had done. Hitchcock became known as the man who had “made”
David Harum
, and the book transformed his career. The editor and his wife adapted the book for the stage and shared profits with the house (Westcott died before the book was published); it was then turned into two movies, one of which starred Will Rogers. Forty years after publication, the
New York Times Magazine
was still running features on the book and the editor who was responsible for it. In his long career Hitchcock also edited Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, but his reputation, and modern American editing, turned on
David Harum
.

Following the success of
David Harum
the editor began to become a public personality, and by the 1930s a cultural mythology had formed around editing: the editor as savior, finding the soul of a manuscript; the editor as alchemist, turning lead into gold; the editor as seer, recognizing
what others had missed. Another image of the editor was already in place in Hitchcock’s day: the editor as friend. Taken together, editor as miner-magician and editor as boon companion, we have the classic image of the “editor of genius” that crystallized around an editor of the twenties, thirties, and forties, William Maxwell Evarts Perkins. But to really understand Perkins we have to start earlier, at least one hundred years earlier.

The first American authors to write best-sellers, men like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, broke through in the 1820s. Though New York was not yet the publishing mecca it would become, a few proto-agents set up shop in the city and groups of publishers, authors, and critics gathered around bookstores, beer halls, and restaurants to swap ideas and invent books. By the 1830s, recognizable publishing had taken shape in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Hartford (home of subscription publishing), and print was available in many formats, from cheap reprints to morocco leather. Twenty years later, in the 1850s, the United States had the largest literate public in history, and publishers put out books that ranged from sentimental love stories and children’s textbooks, which sold in the hundreds of thousands, to fiction from sure money losers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and (after he stopped writing sea adventures) Herman Melville.

Publishing was growing into an important industry and was contributing to American culture, but there were no editors in the modern sense. In part, this was because, until 1891, British imports had no legal copyright protection. Established houses followed “the courtesy of the trade” and paid English writers a royalty, but many new houses got their start with cheap reprints of Dickens and Thackeray, which required no editorial intervention. At Harper, free-lance house readers helped out on acceptance and rejection. Those called “editors” sometimes steered writers toward more lucrative themes and subjects, but they spent more energy on promoting authors than shaping texts. Robert Bonner, owner and editor of the
New York Ledger
, was a brilliant publicist who paid top dollar for the works of popular female novelists. Bonner’s most extravagant move was to decorate a railroad parlor car with a gold wreath emblazoned with the name of one his best-selling authors. The Fanny Fern car rolled across America spreading the author’s name far and wide, even after she died. Editors were also expected to write “puff pieces” that would run in the press as objective criticism.

Many houses were small enough that the author and the publisher, whose family name ran on the letterhead, communicated directly on projects. During the Civil War, for example, James T. Fields, editor of
Atlantic Monthly
and a partner in Ticknor & Fields, was forced to suggest that one of his authors make a radical change in an article. “Ticknor and I both
think,” Fields chided Nathaniel Hawthorne, “it will be politic to alter your phrases with reference to the President, to leave out the description of his awkwardness and general uncouth aspect. England is reading the magazine now and will gloat over the monkey figure of ‘Uncle Abe.’” In the heated Civil War debates it fell to the editor/publisher to tell an author not to call the president a monkey. After the failure of
Moby Dick
, Melville wrote a novel about publishing. In
Pierre
, it is the firm of Wonder & Wen that writes to an affluent popular author asking for his next book, and the firm of Steel, Flint & Asbestos that takes up the matter when the author becomes disreputable.

An author’s reputation was very important to publishers throughout the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth. Publishers felt it was their duty to ensure that American fiction would be unimpeachably moral in content, tone, and expression. Editing for morals can seem very different from Hitchcock’s editing for market, but actually the two were related. American readers wanted moral books; those are the ones that sold. There was no surer way to kill a book than for it to be deemed “objectionable.” The editor who could monitor an author’s moral tone was also protecting the author’s market share. Since many books were serialized in magazines owned by publishing houses before they came out as books, editors used what they presumed to be the virginal sensibility of the typical teenage girl as the gauge for their publications. Like network television a century later, if the magazine couldn’t sit out on the coffee table to be enjoyed by the whole family, it could not be published. Houses had two ways of getting this kind of moral imprimatur, by hiring editors in-house who held those values, or by engaging a wide network of free-lance readers who were in touch with the sensibilities of many different groups of tastemakers. Charles Scribner’s Sons followed the first approach and eventually made a home for Max Perkins; Macmillan used the second and gave a lot of editorial assignments to well-read or socially prominent women. In both cases these editors remained largely invisible to the general public.