I. INTRODUCTION
THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES
The Author-Editor Relationship
For an author, the act of writing a book-length manuscript and watching it progress through the publishing processes may be, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, the best of times, and the worst of times. It is the best of times, of course, because a creative intellect brought forth the book; the project; the germ of individuality. It may be the worst of times because any number of actual or imagined tragedies may befall the project during the editing and design and publishing stages; the book, even after being completed in manuscript, may not ever reach the book-buying public at all. The author may feel that he is at the whim of a merciless editor and publisher. Even if the manuscript is accepted for publication by a reputable company, the manuscript may be edited by a reputable editor away from the direction the author wished it to take.
The author too, may think that the design of the book itself, the printing, publication, distribution and attendant advertising and promotion may cause the book to fail rather than to succeed; he may believe that the editor and publisher are conspiring to hinder, rather than help him. For some authors, the act of publishing, whether in fiction or non-fiction, may be the worst of times, either in actual fact or in their imagination.
Publishing never has been a process which can be calculated precisely, either in terms of sales of various titles, or in terms of successful author-publisher-public relationships.
Yet one of the indefinable relationships most crucial to the success of the work and the success of the author is the author-editor bond. This bond-acceptance by the editor of the author's work and acceptance by the author of the editor's judgment-is an ethereal one at best. The author-editor relationship has existed in a variety of successful and unsuccessful forms and styles during the course of recent American publishing. One need only suggest some of the major American writers and novelists, to indicate "the best of times" and "the worst of times."
Edna St. Vincent Millay worked successfully with editor Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers; Millay and Canfield reached an understanding of mutual admiration. Canfield was especially impressed with Millay's professionalism during her career with Harper's.
Max Perkins, legendary editor at Charles Scribner's Sons worked most closely with Tom Wolfe; their relationship has been documented. Many critics suggest that without Perkins's help, Wolfe may never have been able to hack his novels out of the enormous manuscripts he brought to Scribner's. For several years, their relationship was one of mutual admiration, understanding and affection, yet eventually Wolfe grew disenchanted and distrustful of Perkins; Wolfe took his last manuscripts to the firm of Harper and to different editors, yet Maxwell Perkins was named in Wolfe's will as his literary executor.
Similarly, Perkins's relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald was very nearly as intimate at Perkins's relationship with Wolfe. Fitzgerald was originally discovered by Perkins and published by Scribner's; Perkins and Fitzgerald remained steadfastly loyal to each other until Fitzgerald's death. Perkins once told Fitzgerald that Scribner's was "backing you for a long race." Perkins edited Fitzgerald's novels, acted as arbiter between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, created a revolving fund with the Scribners' financial office to allow Fitzgerald to draw against future royalties and unfailingly sustained enthusiasm in Fitzgerald's worth.
Even when Fitzgerald's career had fallen into disarray, Perkins never lost his belief in Fitzgerald's talent. Perkins once said that working with Fitzgerald and editing The Great Gatsby was very nearly the most perfect thing he ever did.
Perkins also worked closely with Ernest Hemingway, although not to the extent that he had worked with Fitzgerald and Wolfe. Hemingway seemed not to need Perkins quite so drastically as did Wolfe or Fitzgerald, but Hemingway did hold Perkins in high regard. Perkins, a New England Yankee, seldom took vacations from his work, but he did vacation with Ernest Hemingway in Florida and, as Hemingway's career gained prominence (at approximately the same time Fitzgerald's declined), Hemingway placed greater value in his editor, Perkins.
While Cass Canfield was establishing his career at Harper's, and Perkins at Scribner's, Harold S. Latham was beginning his career at Macmillan. The authors in his coterie eventually included Vachel Lindsay, Richard Llewellyn, H. G. Wells, Edward Arlington Robinson and a Georgian, Mrs. Peggy Marsh.
As Perkins drew the core of material from Tom Wolfe's massive manuscripts, so too did Latham draw the heart from a disjointed manuscript given to him rather reluctantly by Mrs. Marsh. The novel was eventually titled Gone With the Wind and Latham published it under Mrs. Marsh's maiden name, Margaret Mitchell; As Gone With the Wind made her reputation, it also made Latham's reputation in publishing. Latham later deprecated his work by suggesting that any editor worth his salt would have accepted the manuscript. But Latham did; he impressed Mrs. Marsh with his manners and sophistication; he worked the manuscript into publishable form and he engineered the contract. Gone With the Wind is still in print with Macmillan.
And while Latham believed in Margaret Mitchell's success, he also believed in the success of Edward Arlington Robinson, and published book after book of Robinson's poetry, which seldom turned a profit; Latham was as convinced of Robinson's success as Perkins was of Fitzgerald's; Robinson's reputation was eventually confirmed, largely the vision of Harold Latham.
Hiram Haydn's career, as editor, took him from Crown Publishers, to Bobbs-Merrill and finally to Random House, where he spent most of his career. (He eventually helped found the firm of Atheneum Publishers with Simon Michael Bessie and Alfred Knopf, Jr.) He writes that editorial work on a manuscript which an author has completed includes an attempt to grasp what the author has intended in the project; where he might have fallen short of that goal or goals and the "give and take," in Haydn's words, of the revisions necessary for the book.
Haydn believes that editorial judgment and the intent of the author often make the author-editor relationship a strained one;
It is true that an editor can, and sometimes does, meddle with a writer's work. The attempt to grasp another's intent, and help him fulfill it, is often bumbling and presumptuous. How, in such a task, to disentangle the editor's subjective preoccupations and emotional prejudices from his inquiry into the nature of the work at hand?1
That answer, Haydn suggests, lies in the nature of reading; the editor must read to explore and understand the writer's meaning; of what the book does and how it does it.
What kind of personality should an editor be possessed of, to insure success in editorial work? Haydn suggests that his first love is that of exploration-in literary terms-and discovery of the "human experience" in manuscripts which cross his desk:
. day in and year out, his richest excitement and his surest pleasure will be instead to read a script that he finds good: strong in wisdom, illuminating of the human experience, possessed of the gift of style-that sureness with words that dazzles or satisfies through the unusual juxtaposition of the usual. I find the true editor a votary of sorts-his creed that of the word and the book.2
At least in principle "the best of times" occur when author and editor work together for mutual benefit and common purpose. The worst of times, in contemporary publishing history, occurred to two novelists, each published by the same firm and almost at the same time.
Indiana-born Ross Lockridge, Jr. began writing when he was in graduate school in English at Harvard. Lockridge, a compulsive overachiever, ultimately completed a manuscript which was sent to, and accepted by, Houghton Mifflin. Lockridge's work, Raintree County, was based loosely on the experiences and observations of distant relatives in early Indiana.
Published in 1947, it did phenomenally well for a first novel. It was accepted by the Book-of-the-Month Club; the film rights were sold to M.G.M. with a film planned immediately, and "escalator clauses" in Lockridge's contract with M.G.M., which promised larger profit margins for him as sales went up, would reap great checks as the Book-of-the-Month Club and the film spurred sales of the hardcover edition.
Lockridge had been asked to cut 50,000 words from the manuscript before publication, often a normal editing procedure, and it had hurt him terribly. He began a bitter dispute with the Houghton Mifflin editors on the division of profits from the motion picture rights and he began to feel, as the popularity of Raintree County grew and grew, that no one at Houghton Mifflin cared for him; that all they wanted was great sales figures for his work. Plans for a second novel lay incomplete and unappealing to him. Disagreements with Houghton Mifflin remained unsolved; they became an obsession which hindered all other work for him and...
