The Art of Editing

Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace

Tim Groenland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501338281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The place of the editor in literary production is an ambiguous and often invisible one, requiring close attention to publishing history and (often inaccessible) archival resources to bring it into focus. In The Art of Editing, Tim Groenland shows that the critical tendency to overlook the activities of editors and to focus on the solitary author figure neglects important elements of how literary works are acquired, developed and disseminated. Focusing on selected works of fiction by Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, authors who represent stylistic touchstones for US fiction of recent decades, Groenland presents two case studies of editorial collaboration. Carver's early stories were integral to the emergence of the Minimalist movement in the 1980s, while Wallace's novels marked a generational shift towards a more expansive, maximal mode of narrative. The role of their respective editors, however, is often overlooked. Gordon Lish's part in shaping the form of Carver's early stories remains under-explored; analyses of Wallace's fiction, meanwhile, tend to minimise Michael Pietsch's role from the creation of Infinite Jest during the mid-1990s until the present day. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with editors and collaborators, Groenland illuminates the complex and often conflicting forms of agency involved in the genesis of these influential works. The energies and tensions of the editing process emerge as essential factors in the creation of fictions more commonly understood within the paradigm of solitary authorship. The mediating role of the editor is, Groenland argues, inseparable from the development, form, and reception of these works.

1

‘Stuff that editors do’

‘Why not just have the editor write the book?’: Random House versus Joan Collins

In February of 1996, Joan Collins spent several days in a Manhattan courtroom defending a lawsuit brought by her publisher Random House. In 1990 the publishing house had agreed a $4 million, two-book deal with the actress and author, but their relationship had broken down in the intervening years, culminating in the rejection of the manuscripts of the two novels in question – A Ruling Passion and Hell Hath No Fury – on the basis that both were below the required standard. Random House sued for the return of the $1.3 million advance; Collins responded by countersuing on the basis that she was owed the balance of the $4 million.

The case centred on the question of whether the author had turned in a ‘complete’ manuscript, as per the terms of her contract. Collins’s agent, the New York Times noted, had persuaded the publisher ‘to delete from their contract the customary requirement that the author turn in a “satisfactory performance” ’ (Goodman 1996, n.p.). In her later account of the trial, Collins would note that this clause was ‘the publishing world’s most powerful weapon’, allowing them ‘not to pay for work they don’t like’ (Collins 1997, 4). The legal arguments thus came to hinge on the question of whether the word ‘complete’ was to be understood in qualitative or quantitative terms. The prosecution argued that despite the fact that Collins had turned in a manuscript of some bulk, its disorganized and incoherent nature meant that it could not be considered ‘complete’. Collins’s editor Joni Evans took to the stand to describe her feelings of ‘alarm’ upon receiving one of the manuscripts, claiming that it had struck her as being ‘primitive, very much off-base’. Asked to elaborate, she described a text that was ‘not in any shape to edit. This was a manuscript that was setting out characters but all over the map, with many themes not quite gelling [. . .] it was jumbled and disjointed. It was alarming.’¹ It did not, she claimed, have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’ and was not yet in an appropriate state for submission to the publication and editing process (Collins 1997, 7). The defence, on the other hand, argued that the manuscripts’ faults were provisional and unexceptional: Collins’s defence lawyer went so far as to imply that ‘a talented, skilful editor, working on a close basis with an author, could have helped [to] find a resolution’ to the problems they contained.

Despite the central issue of the quality of Collins’s manuscripts (‘my literary ability’, she later recalled, ‘was on trial’ (Collins 1997, 7)), the focus of the dispute soon shifted to the question of what exactly the editor’s role entailed. Was Evans justified in refusing to give Collins line-by-line criticism even though previous editors had provided this to the author? Was she correct in her claim that the manuscript needed to be fixed in ‘basic’ ways before such detailed criticism was even possible? The defence called Rosemary Cheetham, who had previously worked as Collins’s editor in the UK: she described an early editorial group meeting, hinting that Evans’s editorial advice to the author on the plot had been misguided. Asked whether she herself would, as editor, have been capable of turning the manuscript into a successful work of commercial fiction, she replied in the affirmative, noting that this would have required detailed suggestions and page-by-page notes: the manuscript was, she argued, ‘complete but not ready for press’. The defence then heard from expert witness Lucianne Goldberg, who had previously worked as a ghostwriter and editor, to provide an unambiguous verdict: ‘Is it fixable? Absolutely.’ When the prosecuting lawyer selected examples from the manuscript to demonstrate the fragmented, chaotic nature of its plot (e.g. instances in which one character’s drug problem disappears inexplicably from the narrative and another character’s life-saving heart operation is apparently alluded to as an afterthought), Goldberg waved her hand and replied, ‘all of this is stuff that editors do’. Upon being asked whether Collins’s manuscripts were in fact publishable, she replied, ‘Absolutely. All they needed was some cutting and moving things around. All the stuff editors get well paid for.’ Collins later approvingly quoted Goldberg’s statement to the court that ‘Putting raw material right is what editors are supposed to do. They just use their blue pencil’ (Collins 1997, 8–9, emphasis in original). When called to the stand herself, the author offered a paean to the importance of the editor’s input:

You neglect editors at your peril. They are 50% of the partnership after you’ve done the best that you possibly can with your manuscript. You go up to a point and then you can no longer do it anymore [. . .] there are some authors who can self-edit, but I am not one of them. I need an editor, and I am the first to admit it.

One report on the case neatly summarized the defence’s position: ‘writers write; editors “fix” ’ (Sjoerdsma 1996, n.p.).

In summing up the prosecution’s case, Random House’s counsel Robert Callagy rejected the idea that editors should have to do all this ‘stuff’, appealing to the jury’s intuition as he asked them to preserve a distinction between the functions of author and editor:

What the defence amounts to is that Joan Collins wanted Joni Evans to do Miss Collins’ job for her. But if it was the editor’s job to execute the plots and subplots and to develop the characters, write the descriptive passages and structure the drama, why would you ever need a writer? Why would anyone who could do that, be an editor instead of a writer? Why not just have the editor write the book? That’s not the way it works. You know that, and I know that.

The jury returned a split decision, meaning that Collins could keep the majority of her advance. The author was ebullient, promising reporters afterwards that this episode would be added to the autobiography she had just finished writing for her English publisher. In this later account she focused on the positive aspects of the judgement, claiming that ‘justice had been served’ and noting that after delivering their verdict, the jury had insisted on meeting her, their faith in her literary prowess seemingly undimmed: ‘each juror’, she claims, ‘requested I sign their copies of the manuscripts’ (Collins 1997, 16).

The Collins case represents a rare moment in which the contradictions and paradoxes of the editor’s role as well as the mechanisms behind the production of commercial fiction were made painfully visible. Different editors of the same author were pitted against one another in an attempt to clarify the acceptable boundaries of the editor’s role, with the result that, as the New York Times noted, ‘the distinction between an aggressive, take-charge editor and an outright ghostwriter became increasingly blurred’ (Hoffman 1996, n.p.). Those on both sides appeared to agree that editing was an indispensable element in the social and cultural processes involved in the production of writing; the case’s inconclusive outcome, though, suggested that neither of the expensively assembled legal teams in action had been able to persuade the jurors towards a consensus on what, exactly, editing was. The jurors, for their part, even after long days of listening to revelations about the surprising amount of ‘stuff’ that Collins’s editors were obliged to do, apparently retained an allegiance to the powerful author-figure and their singular signature.

‘Imagining what a text can be’: Understanding the editor’s role

The legal battle described above concerns an editing and publication process that is, in some ways, very distant from the ones I will be examining. Collins was working within a paradigm of celebrity publishing in which the degree of authorial attribution is expected to be lower than in the case of the serious literary fiction produced by Carver and Wallace. In the case of celebrity fiction, as Donald Laming notes, ‘the author’s name functions not as a guarantee of literary quality, but as a link between the book and pre-existing publicity’, and even Collins’s defence attorney was quick to concede that his client ‘is not, and has not claimed to be, Hemingway or James Joyce or Proust’ (Laming 2003, 100). However, the example illustrates many of the tensions and ambiguities attendant upon the role of the literary editor and serves as a useful background to the cases I will be considering here, both of which involve editorial interventions that go beyond the boundaries of the expected. It is worth noting, too, that these two worlds – that of the celebrity airport novel on the one hand and prestigious literary fiction on the other – are not entirely discrete in the way they are brought to the market. They can overlap in the figure of the editor, who, if he or she works in a major publishing house, is likely to have a diverse portfolio of authors spanning a range of generic and commercial modes.² John B. Thompson, indeed, argues that celebrity publishing is simply an extension of the ‘fundamental dynamic’ of contemporary publishing, in which the author’s ‘platform’ becomes – rather than one factor – the ‘overriding factor’ to be taken into account in the book’s publication (J. Thompson 2012, 204).

I begin, therefore, by considering the reasons for the ambiguous nature of the editor’s role and examining the ideas and practices that have come to define it. As Claire MacDonald and William H. Sherman note, the editor ‘is at once a key player in the creation and transmission of culture and an elusive – often invisible – figure’ (MacDonald and Sherman 2002, 1). Perhaps the first general characteristic to be noted about editing – at least insofar as it takes place in a commercial context – is its liminal, and hence ‘elusive’, status: as MacDonald and Sherman point out, the designation is, of necessity, a ‘mediating term’ (1). In what he calls a ‘fundamental definition’, Paul Eggert (2009, 156) highlights this act of mediation and usefully points towards a point of future publication as an inescapable aspect of the editing transaction: ‘an editor’, in his formulation, ‘mediates, according to defined or undefined standards or conventions, between the text or texts of documents made or orally transmitted by another and the audience of the anticipated publication’ (Eggert 2009, 156). An editor mediates, therefore, both materially and temporally: Pietsch has noted that he worked ‘at the professional interface between [Wallace] and his readers’, an explanation that highlights the way in which the editor’s position is one that necessarily involves functioning as an intermediary in the service of the creation of a future textual product (Pietsch 2010, 11). Susan Greenberg formulates the editor’s goal in more abstract terms as ‘imagining what a text can be’ (Greenberg 2010, 19).

The variety of practical tasks involved in this act of mediation, though, can be significant. As the Collins case demonstrates, the term ‘editing’ can refer to a range of activities and can be understood differently within different spheres of publishing. Identifying principles and methods in modern commercial editing is difficult, since standardization has traditionally been lacking and practices vary between individuals and between publishing houses. Both Thomas McCormack and Leslie Sharpe, in their respective guides to editing practice, bemoan the lack of professionalization of the editing industry and the absence of any common statements of theory or systematic instruction (Sharpe 1994, 4; McCormack 2006, 84). Peter Ginna points out that ‘almost no American publishing house has any formalized instruction program’, observing that most publishing skills are acquired through what is in effect ‘a classic apprenticeship system’ (Ginna 2017a, 4). As Collins discovered, editors may share identical job titles while understanding their function very differently; Matthew Philpotts argues that the role in fact requires ‘a diverse range of often conflicting dispositions’ including ‘intellectual and literary’, ‘economic and managerial’, and ‘social and personal’ (Philpotts 2012, 61). Gerald Howard, vice president and executive editor of Doubleday (who has previously edited both Wallace, as we shall see, and Lish),³ provides a disconcertingly vivid image of the editor’s idiosyncratic art in his claim that ‘nobody really knows how an editor works besides his or her authors and possibly his or her assistant’ (Howard 2016, 195).⁴ The English language itself is unhelpful in allowing for distinctions between different aspects of the practice: within the tradition of the commercial publication of fiction, ‘editing’, as Sharpe observes, generally connotes a number of activities including reviewing, revising, redacting, refining, emending and correcting (Sharpe 1994, 1). These activities, or ‘patterns of revision’ will, as John Bryant observes, tend to be grouped as part of a single design or ‘set of strategies’ (Bryant 2002, 108) serving to act in a manner similar to that outlined by Foucault’s author function, namely as a principle of specificity upon the text. An editor will typically be expected to ‘bring out the author’s voice in the strongest way possible’ (Marek 1994, viii) and to display ‘empathy with the author’s vision’ (Sharpe 1994, 131).⁵ In the preparation of a fictional text for publication, an editor will inevitably bring his or her own aesthetic pref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘Stuff that editors do’
• 2 ‘My only fear is that it is too thin’: The roots of the Carver controversy
• 3 Minimalism in action: Making What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• 4 ‘It is his world and no other’: Gordon Lish, authorship and Minimalism
• 5 ‘Your devoted editee’: David Foster Wallace and Michael Pietsch
• 6 Consider the editor: Assembling The Pale King
• 7 ‘Magical compression’: Wallace’s return to Minimalism
• 8 The anxiety of editorial influence
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page