A Reader on Reading

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.”