By Harriet Rubin
USA TODAY 20 July 2004
The story goes that when Bill Clinton signed his rich contract with Knopf, he said to his editor, the legendary Robert Gottlieb, "I'm so glad you're working for me."
Gottlieb responded, "You've got it wrong, Mr. President. You're working for me."
Editors love to correct. But 957 Clintonesque pages later, one wonders what the president did to his "boss." Clinton managed to silence his editor. It should have been the other way around.
This is not good for America. We do not love our editors nearly as much as we should. At the same moment as we bewail Clinton's bloviations, critics pig-pile on Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation. She's the "comma cop," who reminds us of the Zenlike beauty inherent in the appropriate and frequent pause. Editors weren't always so damned.
Consider this: On a spring morning in Paris in 1831, an ink-stained wretch emerged from his garret to deliver a parcel of 1,000 pages bound in string. The destination was the copyist-proofreader he'd hired. The man with the manuscript thought no more of this handoff than someone today would think of shoving soiled clothes across the counter of a dry cleaner.
Even Hugo was cut
But when the writer reclaimed his laundered pages, relieved of repetitions, the story unspotted of the grime of ambiguity, a page had literally been turned in intellectual history. The writer was Victor Hugo. He uttered in amazement over the edited pages of The Hunchback of Notre Dame: "You have brightened the smoke of the genie."
Or as the editor in me wants to tweak: "Thank you for filleting a tulle fog out of a pile of smoke." We need something stronger for our penchant for verbal excess than Truss' neatly placed commas. Poet W.H. Auden said writers love their own handwriting the way they love the smell of their own farts. They also fall in love with their own words in the same way.
The editor's secret weapon, which she may never surrender, is the delete button. I used to tell my authors to go through their copy and take three words out of every sentence. The power you gain when you drop words gives you muscle, shock. You sound new and interesting to yourself. Sculptor Auguste Rodin taught apprentices, "When a sculpture doesn't look right, throw it on the floor and look at what the pieces say."
Instinct from early days
That, too, is editing, and make no mistake: There is an editing instinct in man, who was a hunter before a gatherer. In temples in Asia, a figure called Wisdom guards the entrance. She — this figure is invariably female, like most editors today — holds in one hand a book, and in the other, a knife. The knife is for cutting off words.
What is a perfectly edited sentence? Here is one, long, but without a single flabby word or thought: "On the seventh, it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring." Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct.
When I was a freshly hired editorial assistant at Doubleday in the 1970s, editors were the stars. They worked a text, turning messes into genius prose. The women with the blue pencils had the first and last say. We called them "The Brides of Doubleday." For them, the most important member of the publishing triangle was not the chauffeured publisher or the millionaire author, but the humble reader.
It makes me sad that the economics of modern publishing makes editors relics. The greatest, Gottlieb or Simon & Schuster's Alice Mayhew, have been in the business more than 30 years. A young editor today rises with skills in lunching and procuring. The dessert spoon and lobster fork are now mightier than the knife and the blue pencil. I recommend that we writers become our own editors. Think of President Abe Lincoln confining himself to 272 words in the Gettysburg Address, presidential copy that we still revere today.
As we look for a new Atkins diet, let's eat our own shoots, leave the leaves and develop a stylish new sense of verbal thinness, once called wit.
Harriet Rubin, a founder and former editor of the Doubleday Currency book imprint, is the author of the new book Dante in Love. She's also a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.