I, Editor Author Poem by gershon hepner

ITransposing and retitling and rewriting
are all prerogatives of editors
who spend a lot of energy indicting
their writers, for they are competitors
far more than the collaborators who
the buyers of the authors’ books presume;
but, to be fair, give editors their due
when rescuing a tome from bibliotomb.

Charles McGrath (“I, Editor Author, ” NYT. October 28,2007) writes:

WE are a nation of grad students, or that’s what people in the book business seem to be hoping as they race to sell us not only the finished work of famous authors but also the rough drafts. To compete with Knopf’s new translation of “War and Peace, ” by the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, for example, HarperCollins has brought out a translation, by Andrew Bromfield, of an earlier version of the novel, completed three years before the final text but never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime. This version, which includes more peace than war, eliminates nearly all the conversations in French and allows Prince Andrei to survive the Battle of Borodino. It’s also hundreds of pages shorter than the Knopf doorstopper, which may recommend it to slackers as well as to Tolstoyans. On the other hand, the draft of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” — called “O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life” in the original — published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2000 is some 66,000 words longer than the later version. To bring it out, the editors, Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli, another husband-and-wife team, essentially undid all the work of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner’s editor who toiled for months cutting and reshaping Wolfe’s trunk-size manuscript. Wolfe was grateful at first — as most readers of the book continue to be — but then grew resentful and eventually switched publishers. Something similar happened between Gordon Lish, an editor at Knopf, and the short-story writer Raymond Carver, whose widow, Tess Gallagher, now wants to publish her husband’s 1981 collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” in its original, unedited version. The resulting book would be considerably longer than the published version, because Mr. Lish was a famous slasher who is sometimes said to have created with his red pencil Mr. Carver’s reputation as a minimalist, and it would doubtless provide fodder for a raft of dissertations: “Carver Carved: The Corpus Exhumed, ” for example, and “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘What We Talk About’: The Text as Message.”
The role of Mr. Lish in the creation of Mr. Carver’s reputation has been debated for years, with the editor cast variously as a confidant who was practically a co-author and a Svengali who took advantage of his writer’s trust. At least some of the discussion derives from the popular notion that there is something sacred about a writer’s drafts, the first one especially, and that editors are often lesser, uncomprehending people paid to spoil what was perfect to begin with. Mr. Lish, or Captain Fiction as he used to call himself in his days as an editor at Esquire, had a different view of his calling. In some ways, he is the most Perkins-like of contemporary editors, except that unlike the self-effacing Perkins, who worked with writers as different as Hemingway and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, he has never been shy about taking credit for his editorial contributions and tended to favor a one-size-fits-all style. Even before leaving Knopf he ran a one-man writing program from his apartment, where disciples paid to sit at his feet and listen. They all wound up sounding almost exactly alike. That Mr. Lish was an early and tireless champion of Mr. Carver is beyond doubt, and some of his editing, or what one knows of it, appears to be brilliant. (There are no published scholarly studies of Mr. Lish’s edited manuscripts, which are now owned by the Lilly Library at Indiana University, but Mr. Carver often published his stories in magazines and journals before turning them over to Mr. Lish for collection in hardcover, and by comparing the magazine and book versions it’s possible to infer a fair amount.) Mr. Lish was a macroeditor, ruthless and aggressive, and he sometimes seemed to sense what Mr. Carver was trying to say even more clearly than Mr. Carver. He transposed, he retitled and rewrote (the endings especially) , and most of all, he cut, sometimes reducing a story by 50 percent or more to get at what he felt to be its essence.


10/28/07