It is possible to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s somebody else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of taken to the movies every once in a blue goddamn moon. Still, you just have to unravel another hundred pages or so before tomorrow, knowing that in the end nobody will thank you, there won’t be a miracle that will make the book become a best-seller, nobody will know or care how awful the manuscript was before you began to work on it, none of your colleagues will thank you for the work you’ve done, nor will the author, who will think either you destroyed his book or that any improvements were his or her own work.…
WELL, I HAD nobody to blame but myself. Nobody had ever promised me that editing was glamorous work. Of course, there’s a more glamorous, comparatively well paid side to editing or nobody would do it at all. Successful editors discover important authors, come up with original ideas for books (assuming there’s such a thing in book publishing as an original idea, a very open question indeed), get to eat at expensive restaurants at company expense with famous people, travel to London to visit our English cousins (those at any rate who remain after the best of them have come over here to run American publishing houses and spend their summers in the Hamptons), fly to Frankfurt for the book fair, even to L.A. to see celebrities who might write a book (if somebody will pay enough money and get the right person to do the writing for them), and have lunch with movie agents who have seven-figure salaries and movie stars who make eight figures. But the rub is that first they have to learn to edit, at least until they have reached that blessed state where others do their reading and their editing while they sit in a four-window corner office, schmoozing with major agents as they sip their morning espresso and try to decide where to have lunch today.
When you come right down to it, real editing is a profession, unlike publishing, which is merely a business. A publisher, however good, is merely a businessperson, but an editor has a profession, like a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a teacher. And like all the better professions, editing is something of an art, too, if it’s done well, and something of a mystery as well. Nobody teaches it, of course; you’re born to it, the way a good surgeon is born with the right hands; it’s something you either can or can’t do, though apprenticeship doesn’t hurt. There are still plenty of people who call themselves editors who don’t have a clue how to edit at all, and some of them are right there on top, with regular tables at their favorite restaurants and a whole string of best-sellers to their credit, and more power to them, say I, but I don’t think of them as the real thing.
There are others—Henry was one of them—who work like a dog on every manuscript that comes before them, laboriously dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but that isn’t editing, either. It is for this that publishing houses employ copy editors, a whole different species, who prepare the manuscript for the printer and never have regular tables at The Four Seasons or Michael’s. Real editors don’t necessarily have to spell or articulate the rules of grammar, and not all of them make their living over expensive lunches. The ones who know how to do it are a curious combination of cheerleader and story doctor, fixers-up of lame prose, inventors of the dramatic ending to a scene (instead of the one that fizzles out), ruthless cutters, the kind of people who don’t hesitate to challenge everything the author has done in the attempt to make the book work the way it could, or the way it was supposed to, and who can sometimes guess what the author was trying to do and show him or her how to get there.
To a real editor, cutting a manuscript from seven hundred pages to four hundred, inventing a new title, reshuffling the chapters to give the book a drop-dead beginning and a surprise ending, is all in a day’s work, a bravado challenge, like a difficult operation for a surgeon. Real editors, if they’re any good, also know—more important still—when to leave well enough alone. “If it’s good, don’t touch it” might be the first rule of our oath, if we had one.
Because it’s a long, painstaking job, largely unrewarded as compared to acquiring the right book or the right author by good luck or shrewdness, real editors are rare and getting rarer still. A certain amount of ego is involved, as well as the skill—the necessary belief that you know what will work—and the energy to do it. The best editors slash, cut, change, and rewrite boldly, in ink.
Right from the start, to Henry’s shock and indignation, I used ink. Bold self-confidence was the trick, I surmised, watching Bob Gottlieb work. He used a thick, black, felt-tip pen, leaving no possibility for second thoughts or doubts. Between them, Bob and Nina Bourne not only edited in great, slashing strokes, but they also put whole pages of manuscript through their own typewriters, rewriting them completely, and used scissors and Scotch tape to cut pages into ribbons and paste the sentences back together in a different order. The manuscript of Catch-22, endlessly retyped, looked at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as they labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do the same.
NEEDLESS TO say, Will and Ariel Durant did not lend themselves to this kind of slash-and-burn approach. Every one of their words was precious to them, and they did not give up a single one without a longdistance struggle. In any event, their prose, while rather more serviceable than inspiring or stylish, did not require major surgery. I clashed with them from time to time over their interpretation of historical facts. The Durants were masters of that old-fashioned form of history that centers on “great men,” and like H. G. Wells they presumed that life is getting better and better with every scientific and philosophical advance. They seemed to have ended their study of how to write world history with Thomas Macaulay, which is just where most modern historians begin, but I was in no position to enlighten them and incurred a good deal of ill will by my marginal notes.
Fate, however, soon brought me better material on which to try out my skills. At some point, Max Schuster had given a contract to William L. Laurence to write a history of the atomic bomb, for Max dearly loved to publish books by major reporters from The New York Times, whether they could write or had anything to say or not, the latter being all too frequently the case. Laurence had once been the Times’s science reporter and in that capacity had written the first account of the atomic bomb to appear in the paper and had actually seen the Nagasaki bomb explode from one of the chase planes. Now retired and considerably aged, Laurence had waited too long to tell his story, which was sufficiently well known to appear in school textbooks. His manuscript, Men and Atoms, suffered from other problems more serious than being ten years too late: He had absolutely no interesting recollections or anecdotes and was unable to write English at all. It turned out that Laurence was a Polish Jew who was self-schooled in science and came to the Times in the twenties when science reporting was very small beer indeed. Since most scientific discoveries in those days were made by people who spoke German, Polish, or Hungarian, Laurence’s ability to talk to them was more important than his inability to write English, so layers of Times copy editors struggled to turn his prose into something approaching the English language as it is understood at the Times.
Alas, in his retirement, the Times’s famous copyediting desk was no longer at his disposal, and much of his manuscript made hardly any sense. Working with such raw material was a pleasure in its way, particularly since Laurence didn’t appear to mind or even notice that I was rewriting his book from stem to stern. The fact was that I had at last found s
omething I could do at least as well as anybody else, and maybe better, even if it was something nobody else really wanted to do at all. Besides, I was taking the first stumbling steps toward becoming a writer. What I was doing was perhaps the lowest form of writing—or at least the most unremunerative—but I still felt a sort of dim creative pride, a foretaste of writing my own material.
Editors, of course, are not supposed to become writers, or at any rate they’re not supposed to practice both professions at once, thus crossing over the invisible but very distinct barrier that separates the two. There had been exceptions, but most editors with a yen to write traditionally retired to do so, as Justin Kaplan, Ed Doctorow, Cass Canfield, and Richard Kluger, among others, did, with varying degrees of success.
My next task was to Simonize the prose of a much tougher nut than Bill Laurence: none other than Robert Moses, New York’s “master builder” and one of those with whom Max claimed a close friendship—one not, so far as I could tell, reciprocated by Moses himself, who was then at the height of his power as New York City’s parks commissioner and head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which he ruled like a czar, only more so.
Moses had written—or caused to have written for him by his minions—a slim biography of Governor Alfred E. Smith, his mentor in public service. Thanks to years of begging the great man to write a book and promises to publish it, Max Schuster was stuck with it when Moses sent it to him. Of course, what Max had been hoping for was an autobiography, not what amounted to a monograph on a man whose memory (and reputation) FDR had all but eclipsed, but Moses was shrewd enough to take Max up on his promises, and poor Max was too deeply committed to them to object. This particular hot potato was a good learning experience, if only because it taught me that pursuing the great, the near great, or the once great is fraught with peril, the worst of it being the possibility that they will actually deliver a book. Most presidential memoirs—and virtually the entire lists of certain publishers—can be explained this way.
As I was soon to discover, the real difficulty of dealing with Robert Moses was not his vast ego, nor even his abrasive manner, but the fact that his staff had ghosted the book for him, which Moses couldn’t bring himself to admit. It was hard enough to deal with the ordinary author’s ego, but dealing with the ego of a man who hadn’t even written the prose he was defending was a new experience (though one that was to eventually pay dividends when it came to dealing with the memoirs of presidents and CEOs).
Accustomed to dealing with the world as if he were a potentate and responsible to nobody but himself—though his wings were shortly to be clipped—Moses responded to even the smallest editorial question as if it were a challenge to his authority, and he frequently complained about me to Max. Max was a master at soothing hurt feelings, though Moses was no more easily soothed than his patriarchal namesake. At one point, he actually wrote Moses a fulsome letter apologizing for my rewriting the great man’s prose and wrote at the top of the copy he sent me: “MVK—Pray pay no attention to this at all. Proverbs, 15:1. Go on with the good work. MLS.”
I looked up the reference and it read, “A soft answer turneth away wrath,” which was actually as good a formula for a publisher’s letter to an irate author as I know and the kind of note that made it hard not to like Max. Max was well aware that Leon Shimkin suspected that he was running something of a vanity press for his friends and that Robert Moses’s book was a perfect example, since it was being published only to satisfy the author’s ego and could not possibly earn its way. Max, however, deftly persuaded Moses to buy copies for the New York City Parks Department and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to give away to important politicians. To Shimkin’s dismay, no doubt, the book thus earned a tidy profit.
Shimkin was always on the prowl for ways of proving that Max was playing fast and loose with his money, and he frequently took editors out for lunch to grill them on the subject—even editors as junior as myself. Fortunately, Shimkin was only dangerous as an inquisitor until he had downed the last of his first vodka martini of the lunch. After that, he was voluble, indiscreet, and easily misled. The trick was to avoid seeing him before noon, when his mind was still focused.
Of course, a lot of people suffered from the same problem in those days. Book publishing and drinking had gone hand in hand ever since Horace Liveright kept an open bar in his offices during Prohibition and put a good part of his profits, not to speak of his authors’ royalties, into the pockets of bootleggers. Writers have always been notorious drinkers, and those who want to be their editors all too often learn to drink with them.
But it was not just writers and editors who drank. Publishers drank, advertising people drank, in the Christmas season a flood of liquor poured into the production and art departments from grateful printers and suppliers, the sales reps drank (which made the twice-a-year sales conferences of most publishing houses seem like drunken bacchanals), and office parties were occasions of awesome drunken revels. The whole industry sometimes seemed to be kept afloat on a sea of booze.
AS MY first year at S&S came to an end, I felt a certain sense of achievement. I had edited two complete books for Max, however boring they might be, and several for Henry, I was attending editorial board meetings, and I felt myself, at last, to be part of something, as if S&S were my home. I had actually, after a good many false starts, been permitted to buy a couple of books myself—a serious rite de passage for any editor, since you can only go so far by working on other people’s books.
The first I owed to Bob Gottlieb, who taught me the value of buying contemporary French novels as a way of getting started. In the first place, nobody at S&S except Bob and me read French, so there was no objective way in which his claims or mine for a French book could be put to the test; in the second, French books could be bought cheaply, since hardly anybody else in American publishing read the language or took even the slightest interest in the French literary world, which was in any case then at its most hermetic, as if intentionally repelling any possible American interest. As a sideline to his career as a teacher of French literature at NYU, Georges Borchardt acted as the agent for most of the French publishers. He worked out of the living room of his apartment on Sixth Avenue, and since most of his wares were returned to him unread, he was happy to add me to his mailing list. Bob had already bought a series of avant-garde French detective mysteries and an intriguing novel by Michel Butor, then all the rage in Paris, in which the pages, packed in a box instead of bound, were printed on one side only and without page numbers, so that the reader could shuffle the pages like cards and read a novel with a different narrative every time, though the characters stayed the same.
Once Bob had introduced me to Borchardt, I managed to buy a slim, elegant novella by a Spanish nobleman about the Spanish Civil War that had been published in Paris to acclaim. Like most French fiction, it failed over here, but in the meantime I had edited and published a novel of my own, and with that I was content. Success in terms of sales would hopefully come in its own sweet time. In the meantime, I felt myself to be an editor in the full meaning of the word.
I also succeeded in buying a more conventional book, for one of my old friends from Oxford, Colin M. Turnbull, had turned up in New York having spent a couple of years in the Ituri Forest of Rwanda-Burundi, living with the Pygmies. Colin, a tall, handsome, and engaging young man who reminded many people of T. E. Lawrence, had already created something of a stir in anthropological circles as the first white man to have lived with these small, secretive people. He had emerged from his stay with them convinced that they had a richer culture than the surrounding tribespeople who had always despised them and passed these attitudes on to the white colonialists. On the basis of a few articles Colin had written for Natural History, I persuaded S&S to give him a book contract for $5,000 and started to work with him on an account of his experiences that we eventually called The Forest People and which is still in print as of this writing, nearly forty years later.
CHAPTER 7
Editing is a skilled profession, but it is not one that publishers have ever particularly respected or well rewarded. Ultimately, the big money goes to those who bring in big books. Even if they can’t edit worth a damn, somebody can always be found to do the editorial donkeywork needed to make the book publishable. In extreme cases, a freelance editor can be brought in to get the manuscript in shape, and it is not an accident that most of them are thin, pale, and wear thick spectacles, since the only jobs in the publishing industry that require more education, absorb more hours of painstaking drudgery, and pay less well are copyediting and indexing.
To buy books it is necessary to cultivate agents, but that is easier said than done. Relationships with agents are treasured and closely guarded by senior editors, particularly when it comes to the agents with major clients and a track record of commercial success. It is not that agents themselves are inaccessible—for the most part they are willing to be taken to lunch by just about anyone—it’s just that no sensible junior editor wants to step on his superior’s toes by poaching. Editor/agent relationships have often been forged by years of friendship and mutually shared success, so it’s hard for a young and ambitious editor to get to the major agents without giving deep offense to the very people who decide on his or her raise.
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