Table Of ContentThe Art of Editing
The Art of Editing
Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace
Tim Groenland
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xvi
1 ‘Stuff that editors do’ 1
‘Why not just have the editor write the book?’: Random House versus Joan
Collins 1
‘Imagining what a text can be’: Understanding the editor’s role 4
‘The workings of the work’: Behind the stable text 9
Posthumous editing and the question of audience 16
Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace: From Minimalism
to maximalism 19
Beyond the Minimal Mambo: The return of maximalism 25
‘An artist, not a minimalist’: Wallace on Carver 27
2 ‘My only fear is that it is too thin’: The roots of the Carver
controversy 37
‘Spare, austere, stately’: The beginnings of Carver and Lish’s collaboration 40
‘A milestone, a turning point’: The development of ‘Neighbors’ 43
‘The instant you offer an explanation is the instant you have
sentimentality’: Lish’s changes to Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? 48
Compression and consecution: ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?’ 54
‘The dark of the American heart’: Defining Carver’s vision 56
3 Minimalism in action: Making What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love 61
‘My very sanity is on the line here’: The textual history 63
Staying inside the house: From ‘Beginners’ to ‘What We Talk About When
We Talk About Love’ 66
Little human connections: From ‘A Small, Good Thing’ to ‘The Bath’ 71
‘Too abrupt?’: Rewriting ‘Friendship’ 79
‘A total rewrite’: Human connection in ‘If It Please You’ 83
‘Low-rent tragedies’: The critical legacy 85
vi Contents
4 ‘It is his world and no other’: Gordon Lish, authorship
and Minimalism 89
Declaring literary independence: Cathedral 91
‘Winner’s history’: Coming to terms with Carver’s texts 98
A different kind of bleeding: Lish and Minimalism 104
‘He took what he needed’: Carver and Gallagher 112
5 ‘Your devoted editee’: David Foster Wallace and Michael Pietsch 115
‘Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it’: Editing Wallace 117
‘My gut tells me you can help me’: Wallace’s work with Pietsch 122
‘Playful combat’: The editing of Infinite Jest 125
‘I feel like I know him, and I trust him, and that’s priceless’: After Infinite Jest 137
6 Consider the editor: Assembling The Pale King 143
‘No kind of order’: Assembling The Pale King 146
‘Fragmentco Unltd’: ‘Cede’ and The Pale King 151
Fragments and variants: The Pale King’s multiple editions 163
Dead ends and reroutings: Understanding Wallace’s fluid text 169
7 ‘Magical compression’: Wallace’s return to Minimalism 175
‘Clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity’: The value of compression 177
‘Not another word’: Reticence and reserve 184
‘The monk’s cell and the hermit’s cave’: Wallace’s ‘Via Negativa’ 194
8 The anxiety of editorial influence 203
‘The handwriting business’: Carver’s editorial anxiety 206
‘What if this book just isn’t supposed to be all that long?’: Editing and
anxiety in The Pale King 216
Conclusion 227
Bibliography 233
Index 263
Preface
Editors rarely speak about their craft in detail. On the rare occasions that they
do, it becomes apparent that their position within literary culture is a somewhat
paradoxical one. In 1994, for example, Robert Gottlieb, former editor-in-
chief at Simon & Schuster and Knopf and editor of Catch-22 and Beloved, was
interviewed about his life’s work by the Paris Review in a feature that ran under
the heading ‘The Art of Editing’. Gottlieb’s responses displayed a degree of
ambivalence towards the position in which he found himself. On the one hand,
he openly discussed his collaborations with writers like Toni Morrison, John Le
Carré and Cynthia Ozick and went into detail on particular occasions – like his
success in persuading Joseph Heller to cut a particular chapter from his debut
novel – when he had made notable contributions to seminal works of twentieth-
century literature. On the other hand, he asserted confidently that ‘the editor’s
relationship to a book should be an invisible one’ (Gottlieb 1994, 186).
This ambivalence about editing is also, we might suggest, reflected in the
timing and form of the interview itself. This was the first time that the magazine
had made an editor the subject of one of its celebrated interviews with major
literary figures. Since the Review’s feature on E. M. Forster in its inaugural issue
in 1953, these interviews have focused overwhelmingly on authors of fiction
and poetry; it was not until the fifth decade of its existence that an editor was
chosen as an interviewee.1 At the time of writing, there have been 241 ‘Art of
Fiction’ features compared with only three interviews with editors of fiction. The
very existence of the ‘Art of Editing’ series, therefore, illustrates the ambiguous
status of the editor in literary culture: it is generally agreed that editing is integral
to literary production and that its practice constitutes an ‘art’, and yet detailed
studies of its practitioners are difficult to come by. American literary history, as
Jack Stillinger shows in his Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius
(1991), is notable for its many examples of strong editorial intervention, but
the critical attention given to these examples has primarily focused on earlier
1 The first time that ‘Fiction’ was replaced in the ‘Art of . . .’ format was in issue 21 (1959) when T. S.
Eliot gave the first ‘Art of Poetry’ interview.
viii Preface
figures such as Max Perkins (Stillinger 1991, 139–62).2 Book-length treatments
of editorial figures, such as A. Scott Berg’s biography of Perkins or Helen Smith’s
of Edward Garnett, are extremely rare (Berg 2013; Smith 2017).3
As the most celebrated editor in the history of US fiction, Perkins exemplifies
some of the tensions and opposing demands central to an understanding of the
editor’s art. His legendary editing of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe makes
him an illustrious archetype for the role, and Berg’s biography – ambiguously
subtitled ‘Editor of Genius’ and recently adapted for cinema under the pithier
title Genius (2016) – has contributed towards making him a touchstone for
discussions of editing practice.4 One agent and former editor, indeed, claims that
every single writer she has met harbours what she terms ‘the Maxwell Perkins
fantasy’: namely, the dream of ‘the editor who will pluck you from obscurity’ and,
through a combination of editorial brilliance and empathetic support, ensure
that the writer is read ‘decades from now’ (Lerner 2017, 70). Perkins’s example,
however (enshrined in the prestige economy of contemporary publishing in the
form of the Center for Fiction’s Maxwell E. Perkins Award for achievement as an
editor, publisher or agent, awarded annually since 2005), illustrates the obvious
tension between the power inherent in editorial practice – the potential to affect
and determine crucial aspects of a literary work – and the way it places the editor
in ‘a position of subordination and even service’ (MacDonald and Sherman
2002, 1). Stillinger, for example, describes what he terms Perkins’s ‘pathological’
self-effacement, noting that the editor maintained a lifelong insistence on the
primacy of the author’s role and consistently minimized his own contribution,
2 Several of the essays collected in Editors on Editing, for example – a handbook aimed primarily at
writers that appeared in three editions, the most recent of which was published in 1993 – focus on
Perkins as an exemplar of the craft; one contributor notes that ‘trying to define the role of the book
editor in American without mentioning [Perkins] [. . .] can be likened to writing a short history of
aviation without the Wright brothers’ (Williams 1993, 8).
3 While studies of the work of particular literary editors do exist, these tend to appear within studies
with a more general focus such as Stillinger’s (1991), Daniel Robert King’s Cormac McCarthy’s
Literary Evolution (2016), or Evan Brier’s A Novel Marketplace (2009), or critical editions that focus
on a single work (such as the 1971 facsimile edition of The Waste Land that illustrated Ezra Pound’s
editorial changes to the poem). Evidence of the details of editorial activity is often recoverable only
through archival study, published editorial correspondence or testimonies such as those provided
in the published recollections of major editors such as Jason Epstein, Diana Athill and, most
recently, Gottlieb (Athill 2011; Epstein 2002; Gottlieb 2016; Maxwell and O’Connor 1996; Perkins
1991). The tradition of critical editing has, of course, furnished much self-reflective consideration
of editorial practice: James L. West’s reflections on his editing of Fitzgerald, Dreiser and others, to
take one example, were collected in his Making the Archives Talk (2011). In Chapter 1, I consider
the distinction between commercial and critical editing and examine the practical and conceptual
history of contemporary editorial practice.
4 Michael Pietsch, in fact, references Berg’s biography as a formative influence, describing it as ‘the best
book I’ve ever read about editing’ (Pietsch 2017c).
Preface ix
even when his influence was manifestly crucial (as it was in the case of Wolfe’s
novels) to the success of the published work (Stillinger 1991, 154–5; Berg 2013,
130–3).5 Even when a powerful editor has played a significant role in shaping a
writer’s work, this fact has tended to be revealed only in retrospect.
Perkins’s example also demonstrates the importance of the human element
in editing relationships, since the textual relationship is determined in part
by the idiosyncratic meeting of different personality types. At one level, this
simply involves an acknowledgement that the working methods of writers vary
dramatically and that the editor’s role will vary accordingly. Perkins’s textual work
with Fitzgerald, for example, primarily appears to have involved offering advice
on aspects of plot and character.6 With Wolfe, he selected material, wrote plot
outlines and assembled sections of narrative, taking on functions more generally
understood to be authorial ones (Berg 2013, 121–30). Perkins’s example also shows
the frequent inseparability of an editorial relationship from one of friendship. His
role appears often to have been a holistic one involving practical assistance and
elements of pastoral care: Berg notes that Fitzgerald referred to the editor as one
of his ‘closest friends’, that Perkins often acted ‘in loco parentis’ for the author,
and reports that in 1927, when Fitzgerald was looking for a quiet place to write
in seclusion, the editor ‘house-hunted for him’ (Berg 2013, 79–80, 106–7).7 The
interconnection of professional and personal relationships – an expected factor
in long-term working relationships – cannot, therefore, be easily separated from
the textual exchange, a problem that will become very clear in the subsequent
chapters. I note at the outset of this study, then, the way that the specificity and
particularity of each editorial exchange resists the critic’s generalizing impulse.
We can see the inherent paradoxes that the role of fiction editor contains: it
is necessary but invisible, powerful but subservient, professional and personal,
inherently collaborative but embedded in a context in which any editorial agency,
no matter how extensive, will tend to be subsumed at the point of presentation
into a paradigm of solitary authorship. Former New Yorker editor William
Maxwell suggests that a successful editorial performance makes a degree of
5 Berg quotes Perkins’ colleague John Hall Wheelock on the editor’s famed humility: ‘although I’m
aware of no book [Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929)] that had ever been edited so extensively
up to that point, Max felt that what he had done was neither more nor less than duty required’ (Berg
2013, 130).
6 Famously, he requested more details on Gatsby’s character, to which an impressed Fitzgerald replied
that he himself had not known ‘what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in’ (Berg 2013, 60–3).
7 An unusual contemporary example of such pastoral care came in Jonathan Franzen’s recent revelation
that his editor at the New Yorker, Henry Finder, had been responsible for dissuading him from his
plan to adopt an Iraqi war orphan (Franzen 2015, n.p.).
