A Reader on Reading

In some cases, the writers themselves have sought this kind of professional advice, asking an editor to clarify their own craft. The result is a peculiar collaboration. Commenting on what is perhaps the most famous case of editing in modern poetry, Ezra Pound’s reworking of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Borges remarked that “both their names should have appeared on the title page. If an author allows someone else to change his text, he is no longer the author—he is one of the authors, and their collaboration should be recognized as such.”

Among the many lines crossed out by Pound (deletions which Eliot accepted) are these, now forever absent from the poem:

Something which we know must be dawn—

A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,

And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,

A line, a white line, a long white line,

A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.

The Waste Land, published after Pound’s editing, has been called “the greatest poem in the English language,” and yet I miss those lines and wonder whether Eliot would not have left them in had it not been for Pound’s intervention.

Of course, everywhere in the world, Anglo-Saxon or not, writers show their work before it is published (though Nabokov argued that this was like showing samples of your sputum). A gaggle of unprofessional readers—the author’s mother, a neighbor, a friend, a husband or wife—performs the ritual first inspection and offers a handful of doubts or approvals on which the author may choose or not to reflect. This contradictory chorus is not the voice of power and officialdom recommending revision. John Steinbeck would show his wife every new finished chapter on condition that her only comment would be: “This is wonderful, dear!”

The professional editor, on the other hand, even the most subtle and understanding (and I have been blessed with a small number of them), tinges her opinion with the color of authority simply because of her position. The difference between a paid editor and someone close to us is the difference between a doctor who proposes a lobotomy and a devoted aunt recommending a strong cup of tea.

The story has often been told of how Coleridge dreamt his “Kubla Khan” in an intoxication of opium, and of how, upon waking, he sat down to write it and was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” thereby losing forever the conclusion to that extraordinary poem. Persons from Porlock are professionally employed by the publishing companies of the Anglo-Saxon world. A few are wise and ask questions that speed on the writing; a few distract; a few quibble away at the author’s vaporous confidence; a few destroy the work in mid-creation. All interfere, and it is this compulsive tinkering with someone else’s text that I question.

Without editors we are likely to have rambling, incoherent, repetitive, even offensive texts, full of characters whose eyes are green one day and black the next (like Madame Bovary); full of historical errors, like stout Cortez discovering the Pacific (as in Keats’s sonnet); full of badly strung-together episodes (as in Don Quixote); with a badly cobbled-together ending (as in Hamlet) or beginning (as in The Old Curiosity Shop). But with editors — with the constant and now unavoidable presence of editors without whose nihil ob-stat hardly a book can get published—we may perhaps be missing something fabulously new, something as incandescent as a phoenix and unique, something impossible to describe because it has not yet been born but which, if it were, would admit no secret sharers in its creation.

Honoring Enoch Soames

At last the Dodo said: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 3

ON 3 JUNE 1997, A GROUP OF literary aficionados gathered in the Reading Room of the British Library in London to welcome Enoch Soames, the poet. Perhaps not unexpectedly, he didn’t materialize. What prompted the gathering was this: a century earlier, Soames, having sold only three copies of his book of poems, Fungoids, had made a pact with the Devil. In exchange for his ambitious soul, he had asked to be allowed to visit the Reading Room a hundred years hence to see how posterity had judged him. Unfortunately for Soames, posterity had not judged him at all; posterity had merely ignored him. There was no record of his work in the library’s voluminous catalogue, and in a history of the literature of his period the only mention of his name was in a note that described him as an imaginary character, invented by the English humorist Max Beerbohm. It can only be assumed that for his future readers even his ghost was invisible. So much for the fruits of ambition.