A Reader on Reading

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.

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.