The Art of Editing The Art of Editing Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace Tim Groenland BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Tim Groenland, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Material from the Gordon Lish Mss. is reprinted by permission of Gordon Lish. All rights reserved. Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image: Carlos Delgado All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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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.).