Editors on Editing

Each generation needs its own translations of the classics, to keep them vital.

The loss of heart suffered by many editors is paralleled by a similar decline of faith on the part of the writers that the writing itself will be enough, that the artistic act will suffice, without assiduous attention to literary politics, public presentation, and publishing strategy.

The editor who acquired and published radicals had risked court challenges in the 1920s; by the 1960s he or she had a good chance of buying a best-seller.

Today, I am still recovering from my formal education, even as I learn and relearn fundamentals of reading, writing, and publishing.

The best science fiction and fantasy of the last century, from Wells to Tolkien, from Heinlein to Herbert and LeGuin, from Haldeman to Russ and Delany, has been profoundly about social change, much more so than about the ostensible adventures of any of their characters. In its unreal way, SF is the most political of literatures.

To a smaller house, all its books are equally important; every title must sell well. A smaller house is unlikely to divert its human and financial resources entirely to the aid of a potential best-seller, nor is it likely to concentrate only on one part (say, chain stores) of the book market—the small publisher will chase down every nook and cranny of a book’s potential audience, because it must.

I have found that when intellectuals want to reach a general readership, they sometimes underrate the general reader, so they think they should oversimplify, write down, and to some extent vulgarize. These tactics never work. Readers looking for serious books—and there are lots of them—want new ideas, something to think and talk about. They are prepared to stretch, so long as the writer doesn’t try to confuse them.

As always, the editor’s role is to help the author achieve her aim, not to ensure that the writer is politically correct.

The goal of editing is to make the book better, not different.

The truth of the matter is that serious works of art can be neither propaganda nor public relations efforts, no matter how urgently needed or how well intentioned. It is curious that this is not abundantly clear to everyone today, given the dismal results of the fifty-year literary experiment with socialist realism in the USSR. I mean “Man meets tractor, man falls in love with tractor, man marries tractor” just doesn’t cut the mustard. If we want art—and whether or not we want art has indeed been a serious question to political thinkers since Plato—we must give up this absurd notion that art can provide role models for anyone. It is beyond me how this idea ever achieved currency, since a moment’s reflection blows it away. Homer’s Achilles, whatever else he was, was certainly no role model for the ancient Greeks, as he rejected all counsel of moderation and stormed against the limits of mortality, which for the Greeks defined the human condition. Nor was Madame Bovary intended to be a guide for the lives of provincial French women. This role model theory of literature boils down to a simplistic notion of monkey see, monkey do, which reveals a profound misunderstanding of the relation between literature and life.