Neither Pallas [Minerva] nor Envy itself could fault that work. The golden-
haired warrior goddess was grieved by its success, and tore the tapestry.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses
To me, the fact that I have never killed an editor is proof that the death penalty deters.
—Thomas Sowell, “Some Thoughts About Writing”
Joan Didion could hardly stand It. More than once, It made Robert Caro wrathful, yelling down the telephone line: because periods had been softened into semicolons, semicolons diminished into commas. Gay Talese, when he was a New York Times reporter, if he thought himself ill-used by It, would call the copy desk and demand that his byline be struck from the offending piece before it could run in the paper’s afternoon edition. John McPhee, dealing with a philistine who dared apply a Procrustean rule to the juicy forty-thousand-word piece on oranges he had blithely filed as his third-ever contribution to The New Yorker, sectioning off 85 percent of the story, fought for five days running to restore as much as possible of his manuscript—enough, in the end, to make a serial feature published in two sequential issues.11xJohn McPhee, “Omission,” The New Yorker, September 7, 2015; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/omission. Published in the print edition of the September 14, 2015, issue. A bane of the top talents and best minds, shortening by God knows how many lost hours their productive working lives—this is what It is and does.
By now, you have surely guessed what It is. I refer of course to editing. There is too much to say on the subject for us to indulge in a too-lengthy preamble (one which, in any event, the editor or editors into whose hands this essay falls would only have abridged). But I might at least attempt a brief demonogony.22xOn comparing demonogony to theogony: Here I am happily following the “ultracrepidarian rule” of David Bentley Hart, which is: “Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say, in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be.” (This is the sort of rule that invariably leads to conflict with editors.) The rule got its name because, Hart says, “an editor once tried unsuccessfully to dissuade me from writing about a certain ‘polemicist who stumbles across unseen disciplinary boundaries in an ultracrepidarian stupor.’ The editor lost that argument because there is absolutely no other word in the English language that so exactly means what I wanted to say.”
An evil of the sort mankind is retroactively pleased to call “necessary,” if only to make life under its ukases bearable, editing lay in wait untold eons at the bottom of Pandora’s box, cheek by jowl with sadness and strife; at the first stroke of sunlight it leapt out, hard on the heels of jealousy, of madness, of disease, of death, and hardly less baleful than its bosom friends—the overshrouding swarm like the gathering swallows or the cloud of gnats descending in Keats’s ode “To Autumn”; or no, let us be more modern: like the unstoppable nanobugs K. Eric Drexler envisioned blowing pollen-like throughout a biosphere they will shortly reduce to dust. So at least, in more dyspeptic moods, I envision it to myself.
I trust that no one will be shocked to learn that Gustave Flaubert could get worked up over le mot juste, or that Cormac McCarthy was particular about his punctuation. But I submit that any really skilled scribe, in any genre, would take umbrage at the sort of officious or faulty or ham-fisted editorial interventions which, in my own unforced peregrinations through and across various forms of essay, biography, autobiography, journalism, fiction, memoir, travel writing, history, theory, and aesthetic analysis, it has often been my misfortune to encounter, like a cupidinous troll under a bridge. If, thus far, I have chosen journalists and essayists and historians for my examples, not canonical novelists, it is because I want to give the other side a fair chance.