Copyediting, then, is an accepted part of the editor’s job. But at some point in history, probably even before the days of Maxwell Perkins, the editor bridged the chasm between questioning spelling and questioning sense, and began questioning the meaning of the butterflies. Surreptitiously, the content of fiction became the editor’s responsibility.
In Editors on Editing: An Inside View of What Editors Really Do (compiled by Gerald Gross), the editor, bookseller, and author William Trag has this to say about what makes an editor an editor: “A working, qualified editor of books must read. He must have read from the earliest days of his childhood. His reading must be unceasing. The lust for printed matter is a biological thing, a visceral and intellectual necessity; the urge must be in the genes.” In short, an editor must be a reader.
True enough. Editors must assume this function or not edit at all. But can anyone read beyond his personal inclinations? Because to justify intrusions into an author’s virgin text, an editor must surely not be Felix Chuckle who delights in happy endings or Dolores Lachrymose who prefers her endings bitter. The editor must be a sort of platonic idea of a reader; he must embody “readerness;” he must be a Reader with a capital R.
However, can even the ideal Reader help the writer? As every reader knows, literature is an act of shared responsibility. And yet to suppose that this mutual act allows us to know the goal the writer has set herself, a goal that in most cases is not revealed even to the writer, is either simple-minded or fatuously arrogant. To paraphrase another author, a Book is what It is. Whether the writer achieved what she intended, even knew what she intended to achieve, or in fact intended to achieve anything at all except what appears between two covers is a mystery that no one, not even the writer, can answer truthfully. The inappropriateness of the question comes from the richness and ambiguity that are, I believe, the true achievements of literature. “I’m not saying that it isn’t in my book,” confessed the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese in response to a critic who pointed out a metaphysical theme in his work. “I’m only saying that I didn’t put it there.”
When editors try to guess an author’s “intention” (that rhetorical concept invented by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century), when they question the author about the meaning of certain passages or the reason for certain events, they are assuming that a work of literature can be reduced to a set of rules or explained in a précis. This prodding, this reductive exercise is indeed a threat, because the writer may (as Findley did) pay heed and upset the delicate balance of his creation. Older, more experienced, less afraid to alienate his publishers, Findley finally rebelled. In 1986 he revised The Butterfly Plague, deleting the explanation, and the new version (neither better nor worse, simply the original one) was published by Viking Penguin.
The threat, however, is not universal. Editing understood as “a search for the author’s intention” is practiced almost exclusively in the Anglo-Saxon world, and less in the United Kingdom than in North America. In the rest of the world, by and large, editing means only copyediting, a function of publishing, and even this is done with a caution that would send hundreds of editors in Chicago and Toronto in search of more challenging careers. I have worked for publishing companies in Argentina, Spain, France, Italy, and Tahiti, and have visited publishing companies in Brazil, Uruguay, Japan, Germany, and Sweden. Nowhere else is there such a job as intrusive as our North American editors describe, and the literatures of these other countries have, to the best of my knowledge, survived very nicely.
Why is North America the hothouse of editors? I suggest that the answer lies in the mercantile fabric of American society. Because books must be saleable merchandise, experts must be employed to ensure that the products are profitably commercial. At its worst this unifying task produces mass-market romances; at its best it cuts Thomas Wolfe down to size. In Latin America, where books seldom make money, the writer is left to his own devices and a novel is welcome to stretch to whatever lengths without fear of editorial scissors.
Unfortunately, the American influence has begun to spread. In Germany, Spain, and France, for instance, the directeur de collection, who hitherto simply chose the books she wished to publish, now sits with writers and discusses their works in progress. Sometimes the writer digs in his heels and refuses to play along. But few have either the courage or the literary clout of Graham Greene, who, when his American publisher suggested changing the title of his novel Travels with My Aunt, replied with an eight-word telegram: “Easier to change publisher than to change title.”
In some cases, the writers themselves have sought this kind of professional advice, asking an editor to clarify their own craft. The result is a peculiar collaboration. Commenting on what is perhaps the most famous case of editing in modern poetry, Ezra Pound’s reworking of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Borges remarked that “both their names should have appeared on the title page. If an author allows someone else to change his text, he is no longer the author—he is one of the authors, and their collaboration should be recognized as such.”
Among the many lines crossed out by Pound (deletions which Eliot accepted) are these, now forever absent from the poem:
Something which we know must be dawn—
A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,
And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,
A line, a white line, a long white line,
A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.
The Waste Land, published after Pound’s editing, has been called “the greatest poem in the English language,” and yet I miss those lines and wonder whether Eliot would not have left them in had it not been for Pound’s intervention.
Of course, everywhere in the world, Anglo-Saxon or not, writers show their work before it is published (though Nabokov argued that this was like showing samples of your sputum). A gaggle of unprofessional readers—the author’s mother, a neighbor, a friend, a husband or wife—performs the ritual first inspection and offers a handful of doubts or approvals on which the author may choose or not to reflect. This contradictory chorus is not the voice of power and officialdom recommending revision. John Steinbeck would show his wife every new finished chapter on condition that her only comment would be: “This is wonderful, dear!”
The professional editor, on the other hand, even the most subtle and understanding (and I have been blessed with a small number of them), tinges her opinion with the color of authority simply because of her position. The difference between a paid editor and someone close to us is the difference between a doctor who proposes a lobotomy and a devoted aunt recommending a strong cup of tea.
The story has often been told of how Coleridge dreamt his “Kubla Khan” in an intoxication of opium, and of how, upon waking, he sat down to write it and was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” thereby losing forever the conclusion to that extraordinary poem. Persons from Porlock are professionally employed by the publishing companies of the Anglo-Saxon world. A few are wise and ask questions that speed on the writing; a few distract; a few quibble away at the author’s vaporous confidence; a few destroy the work in mid-creation. All interfere, and it is this compulsive tinkering with someone else’s text that I question.
Without editors we are likely to have rambling, incoherent, repetitive, even offensive texts, full of characters whose eyes are green one day and black the next (like Madame Bovary); full of historical errors, like stout Cortez discovering the Pacific (as in Keats’s sonnet); full of badly strung-together episodes (as in Don Quixote); with a badly cobbled-together ending (as in Hamlet) or beginning (as in The Old Curiosity Shop). But with editors — with the constant and now unavoidable presence of editors without whose nihil ob-stat hardly a book can get published—we may perhaps be missing something fabulously new, something as incandescent as a phoenix and unique, something impossible to describe because it has not yet been born but which, if it were, would admit no secret sharers in its creation.