Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do by Gerald Gross Page A
Authors: Gerald Gross
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luck.”
…
After he hung up, David sat at his desk, his mind still churning with anger and resentment. He tried to shift his thinking, to find consolation in Martha’s words, which were ones he had often told himself. Why had hestopped believing them? It was as though the premise of the literary vocation had shifted from exploring your imagination to marketing it. It was in the air: the big money, the publicity hunting, the careerism. The brightest of the young writers he taught or met took it for granted and acted accordingly. He remembered a remark of Louis Kronenberger’s some years ago: “It used to be writers sold out at forty. Today they sign on at twenty-five.” But it had affected him too. Like other writers of the middle generation, he saw through the higher commercialism, its wanton conversion of fame (still the “Spur,” as Milton called it) into stupid celebrity; and yet felt left out of the action. He had had his chance after his first book and hadn’t exploited it, and now he was condemned to this third-rate job in Nowheresville and to struggle for nominal advances, a lousy ad, scraps of recognition. He felt like a fool.
A week later Martha sent him a copy of the ad, two clips of short reviews that were six weeks old, and the news that the
Times Book Review
had killed the review of his book. Several fruitless conversations followed with his agent and Martha. The fact that his book had still only netted some 4,300 copies and that returns were already coming in to reduce that figure loomed like a wall that bounced back any suggestions or requests that cost money. Finally, David wrote a long letter to the publisher that wired all of his complaints and grievances to set off the explosive conclusion: “Being published by Concord has proved to be the worst form of rejection: another publisher who had as little interest in the book as you would merely have turned it down; instead you took it on and then through your indifference and incompetence killed it.”
Enraged, Dot summoned Martha and handed her the letter. “Who does this bastard think he is?”
Martha read it through, her own anger, frustration, and sense of betrayal rising finally to match David’s. “He’s a difficult author whose book will sell less than four thousand copies,” she said. “Forget him.”
Mistah Perkins—He Dead
Publishing Today
Gerald Howard
G ERALD H OWARD has worked as an assistant editor in the educational department of New American Library and as a Viking hardcover and Penguin paperback editor at Penguin USA, where he eventually became an executive editor. He is currently an editor in the trade department of W. W. Norton
.
----
Much admired since its appearance in the
American Scholar
in the summer of 1989, and reprinted here with a “Postscript” especially written for this edition of
Editors on Editing,
Mr. Howard’s incisive overview of the state of contemporary editing, writing, and publishing, “Mistah Perkins—He Dead: Publishing Today,” is still discussed and debated with undiminished interest among editors, writers, and publishers
.
Exploring “the forces that are reshaping the landscape of American publishing, particularly as they affect the function of the book editor, be he the accomplice or victim (or both) of these forces…, and matters of taste and judgment in writing that aspires to the status of literature,” Mr. Howard ruminates on how the patron saint of American editors, Maxwell Perkins, would fare in today’s publishing world
.
After a vividly detailed examination of how the pressures of the marketplace, the media, and publishing tend to tempt writer and editor a way from dedication to the highest ideals of their callings, Mr. Howard decides that “it is impossible to imagine that august figure Max Perkins working happily or even successfully in this world, for
his
values—loyalty, honesty, taste, proportion, Olympian standards—are not always negotiable
…
After he hung up, David sat at his desk, his mind still churning with anger and resentment. He tried to shift his thinking, to find consolation in Martha’s words, which were ones he had often told himself. Why had hestopped believing them? It was as though the premise of the literary vocation had shifted from exploring your imagination to marketing it. It was in the air: the big money, the publicity hunting, the careerism. The brightest of the young writers he taught or met took it for granted and acted accordingly. He remembered a remark of Louis Kronenberger’s some years ago: “It used to be writers sold out at forty. Today they sign on at twenty-five.” But it had affected him too. Like other writers of the middle generation, he saw through the higher commercialism, its wanton conversion of fame (still the “Spur,” as Milton called it) into stupid celebrity; and yet felt left out of the action. He had had his chance after his first book and hadn’t exploited it, and now he was condemned to this third-rate job in Nowheresville and to struggle for nominal advances, a lousy ad, scraps of recognition. He felt like a fool.
A week later Martha sent him a copy of the ad, two clips of short reviews that were six weeks old, and the news that the
Times Book Review
had killed the review of his book. Several fruitless conversations followed with his agent and Martha. The fact that his book had still only netted some 4,300 copies and that returns were already coming in to reduce that figure loomed like a wall that bounced back any suggestions or requests that cost money. Finally, David wrote a long letter to the publisher that wired all of his complaints and grievances to set off the explosive conclusion: “Being published by Concord has proved to be the worst form of rejection: another publisher who had as little interest in the book as you would merely have turned it down; instead you took it on and then through your indifference and incompetence killed it.”
Enraged, Dot summoned Martha and handed her the letter. “Who does this bastard think he is?”
Martha read it through, her own anger, frustration, and sense of betrayal rising finally to match David’s. “He’s a difficult author whose book will sell less than four thousand copies,” she said. “Forget him.”
Mistah Perkins—He Dead
Publishing Today
Gerald Howard
G ERALD H OWARD has worked as an assistant editor in the educational department of New American Library and as a Viking hardcover and Penguin paperback editor at Penguin USA, where he eventually became an executive editor. He is currently an editor in the trade department of W. W. Norton
.
----
Much admired since its appearance in the
American Scholar
in the summer of 1989, and reprinted here with a “Postscript” especially written for this edition of
Editors on Editing,
Mr. Howard’s incisive overview of the state of contemporary editing, writing, and publishing, “Mistah Perkins—He Dead: Publishing Today,” is still discussed and debated with undiminished interest among editors, writers, and publishers
.
Exploring “the forces that are reshaping the landscape of American publishing, particularly as they affect the function of the book editor, be he the accomplice or victim (or both) of these forces…, and matters of taste and judgment in writing that aspires to the status of literature,” Mr. Howard ruminates on how the patron saint of American editors, Maxwell Perkins, would fare in today’s publishing world
.
After a vividly detailed examination of how the pressures of the marketplace, the media, and publishing tend to tempt writer and editor a way from dedication to the highest ideals of their callings, Mr. Howard decides that “it is impossible to imagine that august figure Max Perkins working happily or even successfully in this world, for
his
values—loyalty, honesty, taste, proportion, Olympian standards—are not always negotiable
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