It should, it must, suffice.
The Secret Sharer
“You might make a joke on that,” said the little voice close to her ear: “something about ‘you would if you could,’ you know.”
“Don’t tease so,” said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came from. “If you’re so anxious to have a joke made, why don’t you make one yourself?”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 3
IN 1969, TIMOTHY FINDLEY traveled to New York to work with his American editor on the galleys of his second novel, The Butterfly Plague. Canadian publishers were still not impressed by the efforts of this actor-turned-writer, but the illustrious American publishing company Viking had expressed interest in this budding author. The editor assigned to Findley’s book was Cor-lies M. Smith, known as “Cork,” who was also the editor of the letters of James Joyce. Smith read The Butterfly Plague, the chronicle of a declining Hollywood family set against the background of Nazi Germany, and although he liked the book very much, he wasn’t satisfied with one aspect of it: he wanted to know the “meaning” of the butterflies in the story and strongly advised Findley to make it clear. Findley was young, inexperienced, and afraid to upset the publisher he so much wanted, and bowed to Smith’s suggestion. He reworked the book in order to explain the butterflies, and the novel duly appeared under the Viking imprint.
The extraordinary point of this anecdote is that most North American readers would not see it as extraordinary. Even the most inexperienced writers of fiction know that if they are to be published at all, their manuscripts must pass through the hands of professionals known as “editors,” employed by publishing companies to read the books under consideration and recommend changes they think appropriate. (This paragraph you are now reading will not be the paragraph I originally wrote, since it will have to undergo the inquisition of an editor; in fact, when an earlier version of this essay was published in Saturday Night magazine, this sentence was cut out completely.)
Writers, notoriously wary about their craft, are reluctant to speak about this obligatory help except in general terms or off the record. Contemporary literature abounds in examples of both malpractice and redemption, but writers prefer to keep these interventions secret — and rightly so. In the end a work of fiction is the writer’s own, and should be seen as such. Writers (and their editors agree) need not make public the seams and patches of their collaboration. Writers want to be sole begetters.
However, underlying this coyness is a paradox. The writer who knows himself to be the single author of a text, wondering a little at its very existence and puzzled more than a little by the mysteries it contains, also knows that before the text is published it will be professionally questioned, and that answers will have to be provided or suggestions accepted; he thereby relinquishes, at least in part, the writer’s single-handed authorship. Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America (and most of the British Commonwealth) acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver.
Recognition of the profession of editor is not so ancient or widespread as the Anglo-Saxon public might suppose. In the rest of the world it is virtually unknown: even in England it appeared almost two centuries and a half after the introduction of the printing press. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1712 as the earliest date for the mention of editor with the meaning “one who prepares the literary work of another,” used by Joseph Addison in The Spectator to specify someone working on material the author had either finished or left incomplete. Perhaps this was the meaning William Hazlitt, intent on reaffirming the writer’s sole responsibility in a text, had in mind when he remarked, “It is utterly impossible to persuade an Editor that he is nobody.” The editor, understood as “one who works with the author in the fashioning of a work of fiction,” didn’t come into history until much later, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Before that there were only scattered references to editorial advice: Erasmus giving Thomas More suggestions regarding Utopia, Charles Dickens, as the editor of Household Words, counseling Wilkie Collins on a plot, etc.
To find a full-fledged editor in the contemporary sense we have to wait until the 1920s, when a now legendary figure appeared in New York: Maxwell Perkins, editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe. By all accounts, Perkins was a generous editor, keen to respect what he thought were the author’s intentions — though his Samaritan urge has prevented us from knowing what Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts were like before Perkins pared them down to publishable form. With Perkins, editors acquired respectability and a patron saint. (Some might say that the patron saint of editors should be the Greek robber Procrustes, who placed his visitors on an iron bed and stretched them or cut off the overhanging parts until they fitted exactly to his liking.)
To the common reader, the precise task of an editor is something of a mystery. In a small pamphlet signed by several hands, Author and Editor: A Working Guide (1983), Rick Archbold, a distinguished Canadian freelance editor, attempted to elucidate: “Editors have several functions,” he writes, “which vary in number according to the size and complexity of the publishing house. They may include acquiring rights to publish book projects; selling subsidiary rights; developing plans for promotion and marketing; writing copy for book jackets; … overseeing production; and proofreading. And, of course, editing.” This is not much help. Leaving aside specialized areas of publishing such as textbooks, magazines, and technical nonfiction, what exactly do editors do when they say that they are “editing”?
At least one part of an editor’s job, sometimes performed by a “copy editor,” involves simply checking facts, spelling, grammar, compliance with the publishing company’s preferred style of punctuation, etc., and asking com-monsense questions: Are you aware that your character is fifteen years old on page 21 and eighteen on page 34? Whatever salary an editor receives, it is probably not enough to compensate for all this thankless checking and double-checking.
Still, even this workaday aspect of editing, however necessary it may seem, has a pernicious potential. The writer who knows that his text will be inspected by an editor may see fit to leave the finer tuning unattended, because an editor will in any case try to tune the text to what sounds right to his or her own professional ear. Thomas Wolfe, submitting to Perkins’s editing, would simply throw his uncorrected manuscript pages on the floor as he finished them, for the typist to collect and type out and his editor to cut and paste. Gradually the writer runs the danger of seeing himself not so much as carrying his work to where he believes he can go no farther (not finishing but “abandoning” his text, in Valéry’s brave phrase) as carrying his text only to the threshold of the classroom where the teacher will check spelling and grammar for him.