Poetics

Lasting Impressions: The Functions and Limits of Editing

by Paul Hunter

[From a talk given at the 2000 Seattle BookFest, October 21, 2000.]

Today when every young writer puts together a book in the first year or two practicing the craft, thanks to the computer toolkit, and self-publishes with ease, one might be forgiven for thinking of editing as no more than hitting Spell-check and Grammar-check. And surely there was a qualitative change in editing with the introduction of the typewriter a century back, reinforced by the computer, in that it allowed every writer the luxury of instantly seeing his or her words as if in print, divorced from the intimate dance of pen and pencil, the loops and whorls we all know in some mysterious way suggest personality, and so hate and love — these new machines allowing us to see what we say as it might appear to a stranger. Which is the starting and ending point of editing — to see our work stand apart from the life it has sprung from, divorced from those tics and tickles of the private personality, to see and hopefully adjust to that imagined stranger looking out through our eyes, who might pick up a book on a whim, and follow the language trail to some real and startling contact.

So let's begin by defining editing, in the realm of literary publication, as a species of midwifery — or if you prefer, marriage brokering. Part of the act of publication, helping something to be born, helping make some connection. The editor dances attendance at a possible union, or giving birth. Now not all artists would agree that one needs an editor, as a flesh and blood person, but most good ones would accept that even if you do it yourself, squatting behind a bush, editing needs to be part of the job of ushering a written work into the larger world. Not just spell-check and grammar-check, which are in essence laundry, but questioning and probing every assumption, every utterance, confirming what works, and making the best deal we can with the lapses, the soft spots.

How does editing work? I am reminded of Tennessee Williams, talking about rewriting: "You have to murder all your little darlin's." In the interest of the whole, you have to be willing and able to cut even the parts you love, and at best assume a godlike indifference to those creatures caught in the toils of your language. In his midwife role, an editor mediates between the private assumptions and utterances of the artist, and the public world where strangers will see the work without knowing the back-story of its author, often not even knowing what she or he looks and sounds like. (We might parenthetically note that books are still most often sold at readings, where those other extra-textual qualities come into play. We might also mention John Berryman's remark to the young Philip Levine, that he was ugly enough to be a great poet. Maybe it takes one to know one.)

So editing is part of the function of publishing--which since the Middle Ages has meant literally to make known publicly. It's not just printing, not just inky fingers, stacks of pages, it's that whirl of solicitation and publicity, hawking and plain old ushering to get the work in front of people who didn't just know and love the author all along. Beyond her family. Which is a tall order. But to get back to editing, let's consider a few special cases, that may give us a feel for the issues involved. Take Emily Dickinson.

Never mind the white dress and her father, Emily Dickinson is a special case — seven poems in print in her lifetime, so edited that to her they were offensive, unrecognizable. Each poem was given a title, regular punctuation, and, here and there, rewording to conform to contemporary grammatical standards of poetic diction. Gone were her trademark dashes and quirky appositives, her deft, often ungrammatical forays and sorties. In her case she did one of the daring things a writer can do in the face of misunderstanding, which is to retreat and shelter oneself, to continue to write but hoard the work in bundles in the wainscoting, and never allow the potential abuse of public misunderstanding again. In effect she bottled and shelved her talent, to await possible discovery beyond the grave.

Which could be considered pretty daring, or entirely desperate, depending on your viewpoint. We can only say from our perspective that Dickinson did the right thing, to preserve those wonderful poems with their quirks intact. The best of them continue to seem fresh and not just private in their originality — so the right kinds of editing were done.

Nineteenth century sexual politics aside, there is an instructive alternative in her contemporary Walt Whitman, who was easily as quirky and obscure to current literary tastes. Almost as soon as he found his voice, Walt went to work setting his own poems in type, printing them in a friend's shop, and hawking the first editions of Leaves of Grass door to door. So at least initially he took the triad of vital roles upon himself: as editor, printer, and publisher.

I have always especially loved the works Whitman added to Leaves of Grass after the 1855 first edition, between then and the outbreak of the war in 1860. And I think the reason why is because following his first baffling successes (which included some sound condemnations), Walt underwent the feedback of his audience, which allowed him in effect to take the final step of editing. Seeing the book out there in the hands of strangers, sensing their reactions, he discovered that all the works he wrote were in effect one work, and that the work could roam further afield, to include a wider geography (Passage to India!) and even reach through time to discover readers yet unborn (Crossing Brooklyn Ferry!). It is a daring set of conclusions he came to: to keep expanding and refining that one book, to forever feature the bold first steps of this original voice. 

So editing isn't just blue-penciling--cutting the clumsy and wayward and secretive and obsessional parts of our work, both soapbox and stumble--it can include confirming a chosen course, sensing the perennially fresh alongside the fresh frozen that will quickly turn once thawed in living hands.

Speaking of which, Ezra Pound is an example of a brand of literary midwifery that is not quite editing. Simple recognition of an unknown but fresh new talent can be enough. A scout ahead in the underbrush occasionally shouting "Hey, take a look at this Frost guy!" Every good reader can help in this work, every reader who doesn't wait to be told by the New York Times Book Review or APR or the Pulitzer and National Book Awards committees who and what to like.

Let's briefly consider a couple of more recently notorious examples of editing right or wrong. The enduring but by now empty squabble over what Maxwell Perkins did or did not do with the unkempt likes of Thomas Wolfe. And still more recently, the dicey legacy of Raymond Carver at the hands of Gordon Lish.

The image I was given as a young reader was that Wolfe showed up with bushel baskets or wheelbarrows of manuscript, (depending which conveyance you prefer) that was then pruned into manageable form by the intrepid Perkins. This kind of story does neither worker justice, and the exaggeration seems to smack of someone trying to undermine another's literary rep. We should remember that such extra-literary gossip is part of the infighting that some authors have always undertaken, and seem to enjoy more than the harder work among words. Recent scholarship suggests that there was pruning on the order of say a fifth to an eighth of the total bulk. What is more important is to recognize a working relationship that should not denigrate either, and may be a credit to both. A collaboration, whether or not both names make the title page. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Not just does it read well in the moment, but does it wear well over time? Or does the adjustment to the audience of the moment begin to seem dated in its turn? We can look to those seven poems of Dickinson's, for counsel, alongside the deathless ones.

In the case of Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, Carver initially allowed the changes Lish imposed, in order to be published at all. But a few years later, amid critical acclaim, Carver politely rebelled at what he saw as excessive cutting and rewriting all along. I would suggest a test: do the changes in those early stories make them sound more like Lish than Carver? Though Carver undoubtedly learned some things about seeing his work from the outside, I think Lish went too far, wanting those pieces to mirror his tone and choices, perhaps subconsciously wishing them his.

There is always that danger for the editor who is also a writer, though there can be a great release in the notion that one does not have to write everything, that one can welcome and help others with voices and skills and pathways different from one's own.

At this point maybe we can start to round up the requisites any decent editor could use: a keen and honest eye (what Hemingway called that built-in crap detector), a measure of diplomacy (after all, you're telling people what they don't want to hear, that their little darling may be deformed), a broad and eclectic taste, and no axes to grind.

Is this asking too much? I hope not. Because there is more. I think of the editor too as a kind of temporary teaching or coaching position, temporary because good artists don't need the editor's help all the time, or forever, just when the work is going through the travail and tremendous pressure attendant on publication. I have to say nobody likes this travail, any more than the pain of childbirth, to which it is distantly and faintly related. But the wise parent, like the wise writer, steels herself to embrace and weather this passage.

Perhaps we should end by taking up the larger question of publication, that should inform every act of preparation, from typing the manuscript to designing and printing the book. What is publishing anyway, but the completed act of mediation between author and public, ushering the one before the other, and making the contact as free of peripheral explanations and special pleading as possible. Helping the work find and stand on its own sturdy legs.

Let's face it, most of what is published (until recently only a tiny subset of what was written, though now a burst of technological narcissism seems to insist that everything written be published) — most of what is published does not swim out there in the vast anonymous seas of human culture, it sinks without a bubble. Most. And that is as it should be. To be published is not to be granted immortality, it is only to be offered the chance at that longer-term public. The chance to charm and cajole and touch an endless series of strangers, and thereby join the immortals of one's culture, to shine in memory. Which is to live beyond this generation, this moment in time and place, the limitations of one's life.

To that end, I have elected to use traditional tools and methods that reek of permanence. Letterpress, lead type, wood blocks. In part I'm hoping to attract the right kind of writers, ones with an enduring ambition, for whom the work is not something tossed off in passing, not part of a throwaway culture. Writers who want to create works that are "keepers," richly articulate, memorable, that can stand to be reread. Writers who will take heart at nudges and pleas to make it better, writers who will rise to the occasion, rather than retreating behind some reverence for a private muse, some unassailable aesthetic or agenda. And of course I seek to attract readers who value and accept such transactions, the best reader in all of us. But in part too I have been hoping to learn from these very tools and methods, learn from my enjoyment of the deliberate pacing and care in the labor they enforce, how to do deeply while I can what I most love.

All of us writers want to hear "That's perfect! That's wonderful. Don't change a thing!"  We crave unequivocal approval, unconditional love. At the same time despite occasionally insufferable egos we know we're not perfect, nor are the works we create. Once past that initial shudder at what must feel like rejection, the call to change can be bracing, because it is the road to better, more communicative art. The great writer is one who has internalized a great reader, swallowed that outsider whole. From then on he is tireless to present a page that will calm objections and silence distractions, that will stand forth and sing in its own clear voice.