Doing the Reinhold Niebuhr Twist

...For a call from Bobby meant, above all, a judgment on the piece I had recently sent him...

...Jeffrey was a great editor and able to get away with it...

...One Saturday morning, he called to ask me what kind of typewriter I used...

...Isn’t it, though,” he said, loosing his fine cackly laugh...

...A number of refugees from World War II, whose first language was German, also wrote for us...

...As a magazine writer and editor, I have been given and myself continue to give any number of false deadlines...

...On the other hand, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as I can vouch from having edited him, is both an important U.S...

...As someone who has worked most of his life simultaneously as an editor and writer, and who has also put in his time as an Anglophile, I can only add, “Just so, Tom...

...senator and an impressive prose writer...

...All he had to do was write me a letter, on USIA stationery, in which he thanked me for my writing and told me that he thought it was a force for change in Latin America...

...If I am still scribbling away at his age—I would estimate early nineties—and some kid in his twenties does that to me, I shall threaten legal action...

...Just now I am quite nuts on the matter of “focus,” a word that shows up in journalism more frequently than Jesse Jackson at the funerals of the famous...

...about editors is that they are frustrated writers...

...But the great editors have had in common, I believe, their own odd, individual aesthetic, the notion of this elegant, this glittering, this lovely thing, a magazine, with every word written as one would like to write oneself: pellucidly, powerfully, penetratingly...

...The first was to create a certain amount of excitement for a book even before it was written...

...I remember, in the late ’60s, reading brilliant articles in Commentary on the civil rights movement by Bayard Rustin, and thinking how extraordinary it was that this man could organize impressive marches on Washington and still find the time to write so beautifully...

...Some magazines edit more heavily than others...

...Yet having these genius editors can be very trying...

...As a writer, I have not missed many, but enough to diminish my own moral authority as an editor able to chastise other writers for missing theirs...

...I want everything restored,” I said...

...The power derives from the opportunity to influence public opinion...

...Kozodoy has a nice sense for the flow of argument in a piece, and he has, in many instances, untwisted my own logic...

...It was an initiation ritual...

...The best part of the assignment was at the very beginning, when I would stand at my desk over his copy, remove my suit jacket, loosen my tie, and sing, ? la Chubby Checker, “C’mon, Reiny, let’s do the twist...

...He gave me all sorts of books to review, at a time when I needed the money...

...I go prowling around other people’s prose, unsplitting those split infinitives, sweeping prepositions from the ends of sentences, removing certain over- and ignorantly used words...

...Each manuscript laid on my desk was a carcass, to be stripped of its fat and gristle and made, somehow, sufficiently presentable for the somewhat less than lustrous showcase in which it would eventually appear...

...it is a job one falls, or slides, or lapses into...

...The notion of a paragraph as both rhythmically and intellectually coherent was completely undone...

...Initially, an author wrote for his bookseller...

...Since at that time—1969—nothing was a force for change in Latin America, I thought this was sufficient praise...

...William C. Brownell, the principal editor at Scribners before Maxwell Perkins, noted: ?gI don?ft believe much in tinkering, and I am not suffisant enough to think the publisher can contribute much by modifications.?h The editor was still nothing like the fellow worker, companion in creation, combination buddy-shrink-critic-toughfatherkindly-mother that is implied in the following dedication of Of Time and the River from Thomas Wolfe to Perkins: [To] a great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair, a work to be known as ?gOf Time and the River?h is dedicated with the hope that all of it may be in some way worthy of the loyal devotion and the patient care which a dauntless and unshaken friend has given to each part of it, and without which none of it could have been done...

...others clearly feel the least show of consideration to be an act of abject weakness...

...What would he, or another Jeffreylike editor, have done, two and a half centuries earlier, with Montaigne, who wrote: “I go out of my way, but rather by licence than carelessness...

...Neal cut that down to 40,000...

...He, of course, would have cut this entire paragraph...

...The same is true in book publishing, where the steadiest editors...

...I edited the copy of the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman and the social critic Irving Kristol, neither of whom, to my mild resentment, had the least need for my ministrations...

...The metaphor of butchery comes to mind...

...Some have praised my work extravagantly...

...There’s something to it, but only in the sense that T.S...

...Apart from collections of essays and stories, I have written only two full-blown books, and in both the help of an editor would have been appreciated, at least at that midway point where one is certain that the whole project has been a very big mistake...

...Only, somehow, from a grapevine Hal Scharlatt had planted...

...I have neglected to add that I think Neal Kozodoy one of the very best editors going, and the one whom, because of my regard for his acumen and his strong anti-crapola radar, it gives me the greatest delight to please...

...I just wrote a piece for a small-circulation magazine from whose editor I have yet to hear anything...

...He never rejected anything that I wrote for him, at least not that I can recall, nor did he go in for much in the way of making changes in my copy, but neither of these facts stood in the way of my being nervous about his acceptance...

...Sometimes I would meet him at his apartment to talk him through a piece on which he felt blocked (in those days, editors made house calls...

...But I was not about to send it back to its author for revisions...

...and once, when he heard from someone else that I was onto financially lean days, he offered to loan me money, which I didn’t take, though I was much touched by the offer...

...I just did it,” he said...

...Kozodoy’s cuts can be more than editorial...

...but then perhaps I shouldn’t have expected to hear, since I wrote the piece without fee...

...Any gracefulness, elegance, wit that the original review might have contained was brutally eliminated...

...All you have to do is tell me you want everything restored, and I’ll do it...

...Yours, sir, is the butcher’s trade,” wrote Henry James to Bruce Richmond, his editor at the Times Literary Supplement, when Richmond wanted to cut a small portion of a James essay...

...Anality, I respond, along with a character in an English novel, my ass...

...I have conducted search-and-destroy campaigns against “lifestyle,” “impact,” “process,” the pretentious “intriguing...

...I am not sure that I need deadlines, but I do think that they have made me more productive, since I am the sort of writer who functions best under those delightful twins of self-laceration, guilt and shame...

...Neal Kozodoy is a big cut-man, a founding member of the less-ismore school, known to many of his clients as “the Butcher of 56th Street,” though I prefer to think of him as “Cleaver,” as in “Leave It to Cleaver,” which I seem frequently to have done by sending him manuscripts longer than he wished them...

...I can’t help myself...

...I have had many handsome injections of Vitamin P and have never come close to overdosing, but the man who used to lay it on most thickly for me, not with a trowel but a bulldozer, was an editor for whom I used to write articles on American writers for the United States Information Agency...

...It?fs not that we don?ft believe in the value of editing.it?fs just that we?fre too tired to do any.?h Editors can also function usefully as goad and conscience, especially to those of us who are used to writing for deadlines.that is to say, for those of us used to missing deadlines...

...It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.” I tend to prefer the idiosyncratic in style to survive and flourish, even at the cost of irregularity and even, on occasion, barbarity...

...Al,” I said, “I think this may be a bit sicker than we want to let things get...

...Eliot Cohen, the founding editor of Commentary, is said to have gone in for heavy editing in a big way, and the tradition of serious editing has continued at that magazine to the present...

...Al was a very psychoanalytic character, and at that time he viewed editing as therapy by other (much less expensive) means...

...It took him a minute to calm me down, and only two more to charm the socks and shin hair off me...

...Sometimes, the shakiness of his life, when it was going badly, was unmistakable: too much drink, trouble with his gentleman friend, difficulties at the office, medical worries, the full catastrophe...

...I was lucky, I now think, to get a job on a magazine called the New Leader, which in those days, the early ’60s, required lots of editing...

...In a short story I once wrote for Commentary, my narrator has written a New Yorker profile of a writer that runs to 60,000 words...

...I mean, where else would the Lord be, in Passaic...

...Nonwriting editors tend to be more selfless...

...I worked for roughly a year as an editor of books and found I had neither the temperament nor the taste for it...

...Prying open the thickly packed New Republic envelope in which I expected to find galley proofs, I found instead my own typescript, with large sections contemptuously rubbed out with a thick and smudge-making pencil...

...The copy would come in, and we would have a go at it...

...In fact, as I subsequently learned, the ideas in the articles were Rustin’s but the sentences in which they were set afloat were those of Norman Podhoretz, the magazine’s editor...

...When I told him, he wanted more details, until it became clear that what he really wanted was for me to take him to buy a new typewriter...

...Although I thought of myself as a back-of-the-book man, interested in books and the arts, the staff on the New Leader wasn’t large enough to allow for such specialization...

...Once I was to meet him in Chicago for lunch, for which he showed up 45 minutes late, just five minutes before I was set to walk out, tear up my contract, look for another editor, publisher, book idea...

...Nowadays the powerful editors have their own imprints, a sign of the editor?fs growing importance to the world of publishing...

...While doing so I longed to write a composition that never had recourse to the words yet, but, still, however, and moreover...

...Don’t worry about it,” he said, “Gilbert [Harrison, the editor-inchief at the time] edited it...

...I also don’t permit ideas, movements, or anything except people in a car to be “driven,” nor anything other than large physical objects to be “massive...

...But my sense is that the notion of an editor getting in there and making serious alterations in books belongs to our century...

...I generally make the real deadline and half-feel I ought to be paid a bonus for making the first deadline...

...I came to like Robert Evett, whom I called Bobby...

...also the phrases to be sure, what is more, and in any event...

...THE OTHER SIDE OF BEING NERVOUS ABOUT ACCEPTANCE IS THAT OF BEING EXCESSIVELY SUSCEPTIBLE TO PRAISE—VITAMIN P, AS MANN CALLED IT...

...From a writer?fs standpoint, steadiness is much valued, and not all that often found, in a book editor...

...Dwight Macdonald used to claim that his review in the New Yorker of Michael Harrington’s book on poverty helped start the anti-poverty program in the United States...

...Yet in practice, I have tended to be an editor of the hands-on sort...

...One cannot be certain if one is reading the writer or the editor...

...In my own case, I knew from a fairly early age I wanted to write...

...It might take me the better part of a day to unravel and then restitch Niebuhr’s words...

...You never sense any rivalrousness in them, or the feeling that they are like frustrated actors, waiting tables and hanging around until they are cast in a good part...

...others have criticized it strongly even when accepting it...

...He was one of the hot young editors of the day, a likable, talented, wildly undependable man who died on a tennis court at the age of 38, in the middle of a set and—the nerve!— in the middle of my second book...

...At the New Republic of those days, I am told, they would give the newest editor the task of calling up a journalist named Gerald Johnson to go over his galley proof, neglecting to tell the young fellow that Johnson was very nearly deaf...

...he made it at under 5...

...In an essay I sent him about the days I lived in Little Rock, I mentioned that someone had sent me a letter saying I was still considered a small legend in that city, to which I responded, ?gAt 5...

...He mentioned this part—the main part, really—of his career to me only in passing...

...I find I can’t bear to have certain words, phrases, even syntax in any magazine I edit...

...While awaiting content, I worked on style, and thought perhaps the best place to do this was on a magazine as an editor...

...The wildest excuse by a writer for missing a deadline that I have ever heard was made by the late Anatole Broyard, and was told to me by Hilton Kramer, who was then briefly working as cultural news editor on the New York Times and was the editor to whom the excuse was given...

...In the 18th century, a bookseller would decide how much to pay a writer, he would decide how many copies to print, and he might have to decide whether to bowdlerize material...

...I have never counted the number of words in the Lord’s Prayer, but it, too, could, I’m sure, be readily cut...

...Anality, you may say...

...The Gettysburg Address is 272 words long...

...It’s a splendid dream, and as an editor I continue to have it myself, usually only to wake, pencil in my hand, ready once more, without Reinhold Niebuhr as my partner, to do perhaps my ten thousandth version of the editorial twist...

...One of the appropriate criticisms of an over-edited magazine is that nearly everything in it reads alike...

...I edited a book for him that he wrote about De Quincey and plagiarism...

...For prose that took on the complexity but none of the style of late rococo, the prize went to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who used the New Leader as a forum to comment on world affairs...

...Perhaps worry is always tapping on the door of the true artist,” wrote Gerald Moore...

...Niebuhr was a genuinely great man, but sometime in the early 1960s he had had a stroke, which deprived him of the use of I don’t know what parts of his body but of the space bar on his typewriter certainly...

...It doesn’t make any sense...

...Where could he have gotten this idea...

...7??, so he has cut not only my manuscripts but my actual height...

...But if book editors are a relatively new phenomenon, the notion of an editor fiddling with magazine copy is older than one may have thought...

...He is also excellent at sniffing out inconsistencies, overwriting, small but key flaws in short stories...

...Sometimes the results of this heavy editing can lead to odd deceptions...

...When it finally came in, it was not, truth to tell, all that great...

...After having published my writing for more than 35 years, I regret to have to confess that I am still nervous about acceptance...

...or, if they do write, they do so only occasionally and probably do not think of themselves primarily as writers...

...I would only add that it’s there for the working writer, too...

...So heavy was his praise that even I, with my swollen writer’s vanity, felt embarrassed by it—which isn’t, please note, quite the same as saying I couldn’t believe it...

...The job felt altogether too much that of a middleman between writer and publisher, and I quickly grew tired of lying to each about the admirable intentions of the other...

...I felt quite as devastated as my review...

...They could produce some fairly gnarled copy...

...Everyone else in the office would sit around, suppressing laughter as the poor guy soon found himself screaming proof changes into the phone...

...with an editor’s help, I’m sure Lincoln could have brought it in at under 200...

...Thirty years later, I haven’t written it yet...

...Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, not only chose the topics and contributors for his distinguished journal but got in there to muck around with their pieces when it pleased him to do so...

...None of this would have worked, of course, if Hal Scharlatt hadn’t been very good at what he did...

...Every sentence seemed a multiple-choice question to which the answer, inevitably, was none of the above...

...its second phrase, “who art in heaven,” is pretty clearly tautological...

...In my experience, many of the best manuscript editors are not themselves writers...

...I regularly rewrote the single-page column of an elderly socialist named William Bohn...

...I didn’t have the patience to await the fruition of long-term projects, and I didn’t have the appetite for simultaneously stroking the egos of writers and stoking the greed of publishers...

...Hal Scharlatt was one of those editors who answered neither letters nor most phone calls...

...Now one can wait for the very last moment.and still miss the deadline...

...Now that?fs editing...

...Solzhenitsyn’s dealings with Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir who determined to print One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was fraught with even greater historical implications— namely, the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union...

...As a writing editor myself, I know whereof I speak...

...Kramer was so flabbergasted by the non-sequitorial quality of this excuse that he said okay and hung up, quite neglecting to ask what the hell Broyard?fs wife?fs menstrual cycle had to do with it...

...We were a threesome, a principal editor and two associate editors...

...I have scores of other tics, quirks, and downright prejudices...

...What he did was two things...

...I have to clean it all up...

...As an editor, I have gone in for some fairly heavy editing myself, even performing what, in the pre-computer age, used to be called a “typewriter job,” which meant putting a fresh piece of paper in one’s typewriter and simply rewriting an entire article...

...On the last piece I wrote for him, I sent him, via e-mail, the following communication: “Dear Neal, Wrote five fine paragraphs of Solzhenitsyn piece yesterday, four of which you should be able to remove easily...

...Many of these men were themselves Russians, and their English prose tended to be Pninish, but without the laughs...

...He never complained...

...Not long after I signed up to write my first book for him, I got a call from a producer at NBC, telling me that he heard I was writing this fascinating book and would I like to come on a prime-time show to discuss my subject...

...We ran lots of material by Kremlinologists, who were dedicated to discerning, usually on the most amazingly slender evidence, what went on behind the thick walls of the Kremlin...

...I once had a piece owed to me at the magazine I edit, the American Scholar, for fully seventeen years...

...Given a choice, I’d rather have an editor who catches me using a dash badly on page 279 and feels that I have not used the word egoist with quite the precision it requires...

...Some have shown the most elegant manners...

...Those written by Englishmen, some of which came in longhand, needed the least work...

...Examples of its having been done, and on a monumental scale, are not wanting...

...Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Elizabeth Sifton.do not generally produce books of their own...

...He was a convert to Catholicism, a homosexual, a man with drinking and pill problems, and, withal, a sweetheart...

...One may talk about an audience for one’s writing as long as one wishes, but the primary audience for just about everything I have ever written has been one or another of the editors I have dealt with over the years—those who have edited my articles for magazines and those who have edited my books...

...Bobby’s true vocation was that of a composer of serious music, for which he received a great many commissions...

...William Shawn of the New Yorker was consummately such an editor...

...GIVEN A CHOICE, I’D RATHER HAVE AN EDITOR WHO CATCHES ME USING A DASH BADLY ON PAGE 279...

...Of all the invitations to write for magazines I have ever received, the most amusing, in connection with editing, came from a man, now dead, named Ronald Sanders, who was then the editor of Midstream...

...I took most pleasure in editing Albert Goldman, who then wrote about jazz and classical music for the New Leader...

...It was not a long review, but Beerbohm, himself so meticulous a craftsman, is a writer I love, and so I took great pains with it...

...I think of deadlines as coming in three kinds: the first deadline, the adult deadline, and the real deadline...

...I just did it...

...No one sets out in life to become an editor...

...I was going to say that I awaited Bobby’s calls with pleasure, but the pleasure was usually admixed, however slightly, with anxiety...

...If this seems a bit fulsome, perhaps you should know that Perkins felt, rightly, he had to cut the dedication back from its original length of three pages...

...Jeffrey was not above laying about with his blue pencil, cleaning up the extravagances and what he felt were the barbarities in the prose of William Hazlitt, writing in paragraphs, even entire pages he felt were wanting in other contributors...

...Mr...

...My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look back at each other, but with a sidelong glance...

...Toward the end of my days at the New Leader, I wrote my first review for the New Republic...

...On this job I learned that I had a small knack for bullying other people’s sentences into presentable shape...

...The other thing Scharlatt was good at was judging the pace of a book-length manuscript...

...The advent of fax, Fed-Ex, email has made the deadline-making aspect of writing even goofier...

...He wrote the letter, but I, alas, have lost it...

...One day I told him that I had come up with a way to eliminate his having to praise my work any further...

...It was about a small-press edition of the verse of Max Beerbohm, written at the request of the journal’s literary editor, Robert Evett...

...One of the saddest lessons any writer has to learn is that anything he writes can be cut and that, worse news, the writing is often—not always but more often than not— better for being briefer...

...I once thought that a magazine is today, I would say it is all the power he deserves...

...His wife died not long ago, so he drinks his lunch, comes back and edits copy, with the results you’ve just seen...

...my only problem was that I hadn’t anything in particular to write about, which didn’t stop me from beginning to publish at the age of 22...

...Yet I’m glad Jeffrey didn’t get his hands on everyone...

...These men and women have run the gamut from old sweet softies to cold sardonic swine...

...I remember sentences that ran along something like the following lines: Whether the Kennedy administration wishes to stage a three-pronged attack on the double revolution of poverty and underdevelopment or instead place the weight of its focus on arms control, with especial attention to underground testing and the attendant so-called “nthcountry problem,” or take a strong stance on the bifurcation inherent in the Commonwealth or Common Market question, all the while refraining from direct confrontation with the civil rights movement in its more militant aspect, remains to be seen...

...GENIUS EDITORS CAN BE VERY TRYING...

...Jeane Kirkpatrick got her job as ambassador to the United Nations owing to an essay in Commentary...

...and as every less-than-bestselling presentday writer will be only too eager to tell you, no contemporary writer would confuse his publisher with a bookseller...

...The great 19th-century Russian exile Alexander Herzen’s The Bell, published in London, is said to have had a strong hand in the breakup of serfdom...

...His instinct in these matters was excellent, and I found myself following his suggestions to good effect...

...I had as an editor for oneanda-half of these books—the reason for the fraction will become clear presently—an extraordinary man named Hal Scharlatt...

...This happened just once more, with the same second act: “I want everything restored...

...The other side of being nervous about acceptance is that of being excessively susceptible to praise, or Vitamin P, as Thomas Mann referred to it...

...He has saved me the embarrassment of many solecisms, factual faux pas, grand blunders of my own devising...

...Broyard called in one day to tell Kramer that he wouldn?ft be able to have his regular book review in on time because his wife was having her period...

...7??, I suppose I am a small legend?h...

...In the strange detours life provides, Goldman went from teaching the Romantics at the School of General Studies at Columbia—“working the lounge at Columbia,” he used to call it—to writing thick books about such popular-culture figures as Lenny Bruce, Elvis, and John Lennon, that last tome causing him to be called “human vermin” by Elton John, an amusing if not entirely enviable accolade...

...Now imagine this sentence with no space between every second or third word...

...He suggested a piece he wanted me to write, then added: ?gI don?ft know whether you get a lot of editing at Commentary, Harper?fs, and other places that you write, but I can promise you that you won?ft have to worry about any editing at Midstream...

...I discovered all the crutches that limping prose needs to get from paragraph to paragraph...

...If you sent him a chunk of manuscript, he might deign to comment on it, but then again he might not...

...As the youngest editor in the office, I was regularly assigned the Niebuhr pieces...

...Long wavy lines connected sentences that, logically, resisted juxtaposition...

...But how, exactly, did book editors come into being at all...

...But in pulling apart and reassembling lesser articles and reviews, I think I discovered a thing or two about how brief compositions—“pieces,” to use the trade term—work, or, more often, don’t...

...Eliot—himself both a writer and an editor—put it: “Most editors are failed writers—but so are most writers...

...A writing career of any length is, in essence, a series of relationships with various editors...

...I don’t think he touched a sentence in the one complete book I wrote for him, but he was able, at various places, to point out that “things seemed to slow down badly at this point—I’d cut the next twenty pages by roughly a third...

...Transitions were eliminated...

...Evett,” I said, “I’m afraid that I can’t let this piece appear in print as it has been edited...

...Hemingway left three wives but never left Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners...

...Most of the pieces in the magazine were about politics, many about politics in foreign countries...

...Spot on...

...his telephone conversations were filled with rich gossip and lots of shared laughter...

...I have received some splendid editing in my day, from the New Yorker, from the Hudson Review, from the New Criterion, but above all from Commentary, where Neal Kozodoy has been my editor...