Robert Gottlieb: The Art of Editing (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Central Park (Photo by Catherine Adams)
Robert (Bob) Gottlieb has been editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, publisher and editor-in-chief at Knopf, and editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. This interview was taken in 1994.
Finding this essay amongst the other interviews was pure joy. Editing is one of those backstage jobs. As Gottlieb notes in the interview, "[T]he editor's relationship to a book should be an invisible one. The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre would want to know, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames." Still, despite all the secrecy and invisibility, I find a great deal of enjoyment and purpose in this backstage work, and it pleased me to see this discussed in words I would readily echo.
The art of editing = the art of reading:
Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification. Because you could have all the editorial tools, but if you're not a responsive reader you won't sense where the problems lie. I am a reader. My life is reading. In fact, I was about forty years old when I had an amazing revelation -- this is going to sound dumb -- it suddenly came to me that not every person is the world assumed, without thinking abou it, that reading was the most important thing in life. I hadn't known that. I hadn't even known that I had thought it, it was so basic to me.
The art of editing = the art of reading the writer:
If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different. To some writers you say things you couldn't say to others, either because they'd be angry or because it would be too devastating to them. You can't have only one way of doing things; on some instinctual level you have to respond not just to the words of the writer but to the temperament of the writer.
Yin and Yang:
Your job as an editor is to figure out what the book needs, but the writer has to provide it. You can't be the one who says, Send him to Hong Kong at this point, let him have a love affair with a cocker spaniel. Rather, you say, This book needs something at this point: it needs opening up, it needs a direction, it needs excitement. When people say to me, Oh you're so creative, I try to explain that I'm not creative. I simply have certain other qualities that are necessary for my kind of work. It has liberated me, being happy being what I am. There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren't writers. I can write perfectly well -- anybody who's educated can write perfectly well. But I dislike writing: it's very, very hard, and I just don't like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.
"Some marriages are not made in heaven":
One writer I worked with -- I don't remember who it was -- got absolutely nothing out of the one meeting we had. Some time afterwards he wrote an article for a magazine and, referring to this encounter (without using my name), he wrote something like: He told me to let it breathe. What does that mean? A completely useless, stupid remark. Now I knew exactly what I meant, and another writer would have known exactly what I meant, but the comment was useless to him. It wasn't a bad thing for me to say, nor was he being stupid or resistant -- it was just that my ways of communicating were never going to work with him. It was not a proper marriage, and luckily we got a quick divorce.
"I want it to be good":
Share on FacebookWhat is it that impels this act of editing? I know that in my case it's not merely about words. Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good -- whether it's what you're wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what's going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop. I don't want to interfere with it or control it, exactly -- I want it to work, I want it to be happy, I want it to come out right. If I hadn't gone into publishing, I might have been a psychoanalyst; I might have been, I think, a rabbi, if I'd been at all religious. My impulse to make things good, and to make good things better, is almost ungovernable. I suppose it's lucky I found a wholesome outlet for it.
