The Decline of Editing

By R. Z. Sheppard

Or why are people asking whom's minding the store?

The book was No. 1--in everything but prose. Thy Neighbor's Wife may appeal to the prurient, the innocent and the curious, but it dismays anyone devoted to English. It hardly corrupts the reader's morals, as some critics have charged, but it may help corrupt his language. The work, eight years in the making, publicized like a space shot, high on the charts, frequently reads as if translated from the Albanian: "This was when Jim Buckley met Al Goldstein, whose spy piece he helped to edit, and whose expressed frustrations he not only identified with but saw as the compatible essence of a viable partnership--or at least some hedge against the probability that neither of them could ever make it alone."

The book is littered with grammatical outrage and wrong usage. "After completing high school in 1949, his sister wrote that she had arranged for him an appointment to Annapolis." It is of course the brother, not the sister, who completed high school in 1949. The same type of mistake sprouts throughout the text; one must finally conclude that the author does not know what a dangling modifier is.

Talese writes that

"Bullaro would sometimes peddle alone for fifteen miles." But Bullaro is not selling something; he is a man pedaling a bicycle. The author repeats himself, achieving a sort of tautologous stammer: "What would prove to be decisive in her decision," or the "hearing would not be heard for at least another hour." Plurals and singulars confound him: "Men who noticed that their wives aroused other men became in many cases aroused by her themselves." He confuses foreboding with forbearance, uses interfaith for the opposite, intrafaith, and misapplies who, whom, which and that with abandon.

All this is particularly odd because, unlike many writers who make the talk-show circuit, Talese is an old pro. He earned his reputation with cleanly written magazine articles and The Kingdom and the Power, a bestselling dissection of the New York Times. His wife Nan Talese, a highly respected senior editor at

Simon & Schuster, went over the manuscript before it was sent to Betty Prashker, a top editor at Doubleday, which publishes Talese. Prashker says that Talese was not thin-skinned about taking editorial advice, but adds enigmatically: "Grammar is not etched in marble." Perhaps not; neither should it be polymorphously perverse.

The anything-goes school of writing is exemplified by other recent bestsellers: Judith Krantz's Princess Daisy, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave or Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's The Brethren. Like Talese, Woodward and Armstrong are not only verbose but fond of dangling their modifiers and splitting their infinitives. Toffler specializes in hyperbolic jargon: "Vast changes in the techno-sphere and the info-sphere have converged to change the way we make goods. We are moving rapidly beyond traditional mass production to a sophisticated mix of mass and demassified products ... made with wholistic, continuous-flow processes." Krantz goes for grand howlers: "Thank heaven they'd all be in their staterooms, intently adjusting their resort dinner clothes, caparisoned for the delectation of each other."

Not only the bestsellers offer lessons on how not to write. John Simon, sardonic critic and author of Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, notes that grammatical blunders are showing up more frequently even in the scholarly books of university presses. Most readers are sophisticated enough to know that the best writers suffer lapses. But readers are beginning to wonder why so many mistakes remain, like chiggers, in the texts. Who--definitely not whom--is minding the storehouse of language?

The answer: editors, who are, after authors, the most important figures in the literary world. They are also the most anonymous. Thirty-three years after his death, at 62, the most famous book editor remains Maxwell Perkins, the legendary guide of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Today there are a handful of editorial celebrities: Knopfs Robert Gottlieb, an outstanding bookman, put the title Catch-22 on Joseph Heller's first novel. Today he enjoys a recognition rarely found in publishing.

Readers across the country know Michael Korda as the author of Power and Charmed Lives although few outside the business recognize him as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster. But the vast majority of editors are unknown and not very well paid. Editorial assistants usually start at about $200 a week, and a senior editor earns $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

Bookmen do not entirely agree on the current state of editing, but most concede there has been a decline in standards.

Little, Brown's Genevieve Young theorizes:

"Something really happened in the 1960s. People forgot how to spell, didn't recognize run-on sentences. I gather it was considered elitist to teach proper English in some places." Agrees Maron Waxman of Macmillan: "You get people coming out of top-rated schools who don't know how to put a sentence together. That's got to affect copy editing." Knopfs Gottlieb takes a more defensive view: "There has always been garbage. There happens to be a spate of it at the moment, but I don't know if you can blame editors in particular."

This cup of responsibility passes over desktops, lunch tables and beach blankets at the Hamptons, literary Manhattan's summer capital. The most frequently mentioned culprit is financial pressure. Business was rosy during the '60s, when the Federal Government poured money into textbooks, which indirectly supported publishers' general lists. The counterculture, the civil rights and antiwar movements produced dozens of new writers, whose books were eagerly snapped up by affluent armchair guerrillas. Attracted by profit potential, conglomerates bought most of the major publishing houses, giving them much needed capital and managers who could read the bottom line.

Today the bottom line is in danger, and the harsh facts of economic life have become the rude facts of literary life. Inflation pushes up the cost of paper, printing and distribution; recession makes buyers think twice about purchasing a book for $12.95, almost three times the cost ten years ago. Adult trade book orders were down in 1979 to $831.1 million, from $940.5 million in 1978.

Critics of conglomerates argue, without conclusive evidence, that it is now harder to get serious, noncommercial books published. Yet excellent work is still published by conglomerate-owned houses, notably Knopf, a subsidiary of Random House, which in turn is owned by Newhouse Publications; badly written, poorly edited work still pours forth from privately owned houses --Doubleday, for example. A more justified complaint is that the huge bookstore chains, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, give limited shelf space to titles with less than mass appeal.

The traditional view of publishing as a leisurely life, carried on in mahogany offices and posh restaurants, has been replaced by the harrowing vision of a rat race on a roulette table. With the literary agent acting as croupier, editors must frantically get their bets down on potential bestsellers. Says Viking's Alan Williams: "If Maxwell Perkins were around today, he wouldn't have time to be Maxwell Perkins. He would not be able to sit at Scribner's and have wonderful authors turn up in the morning mail. He would be out grubbing with the rest of us, cozening agents and trying to get onto books earlier and wondering how much money to bid." Adds Georges Borchardt, an agent whose clients include John Gardner, Stanley Elkin and Kate Millett: "The facilities offered by publishers to the artists have declined. Editors who would be capable of editing are not allowed to. They have people breathing down their backs, asking, 'Where is the new bestseller?' and 'Why are you spending so much time on this poor-selling author?' even though he may in time become another James Joyce."

There are, of course, various types of editors in the game. At one extreme are the acquisition editors--"belly editors," in trade jargon--who do their most important work at lunch. There the menu and the contract may get a more careful reading than the manuscript. Then there are the creative editors, who see their task as the finding and overall shaping of a manuscript. Finally, there are the pencil editors, who work line by line on messy or complex manuscripts (although that chore is often left to copyreaders).

All these tasks usually overlap. Most acquisition editors must be adept with the pencil as well as the fork. And they must not only coax a blocked author into action, but also negotiate with copyreaders, handle the details of jacket design and flap copy, and send galleys out to well-known writers in the hope they will respond with enthusiastic blurbs. Once such jobs are completed, editors must become in-house cheerleaders, urging their publicity, advertising and sales departments to make an extra effort on behalf of their books. The average editor is doing all this on at least a dozen books at a time. These are busy operatives with a built-in dilemma. Houghton Mifflin's Jonathan Galassi sees the editor as a double agent. "With the writer, he is collaborator, psychiatrist, confessor and amanuensis; in the publishing house, he must be politician, diplomat, mediator."

The pressure on the publishing assembly line is increasing. Trendy books on jogging, herbal medicine and biofeedback must be out by the cash register before the next craze sends them to the remaindered pile. Novels with big advances behind them have to be whizzed through so the publisher can get back his investment. The results are faster production deadlines and more work for fewer people. Says Putnam Editor Faith Sale: "Books on tight schedules are proofread in hunks by different people, and in some cases copy editing is done the same way." This may not affect grammar and spelling, but it can create inconsistencies: a character who enters a room wearing a blue dress and leaves wearing a red one.

In such a frenzied atmosphere, the word book may give way in favor of project, package, hot property and blockbuster. Even editors of noncommercial novels and belles-lettres feel the pressures to score with a Merv missile, a work that will get its author on a TV talk show, the most powerful selling medium of all. Smaller implements, like sharp blue pencils, are often disregarded.

Devotees of Strunk's Elements of Style may still keep the faith that good prose is not only clear but also concise. The trouble is that prolixity pays. Publishers can charge more for fat books. Says Journalist John McPhee, whose work has the finish of fine carpentry: "There are a lot of books around that smell of the tape recorder.

Writing is so difficult that if a writer is looking at words on paper, say the transcript of a tape recording, it's damn difficult to resist them. So a lot of books go on too long because he recorded too much."

For this sin, as for other literary offenses, writers should bear the most blame. Editors who are criticized for poor books frequently reply, "You should have seen the first draft." Sometimes untold hours are spent just to make the semiliterate printable. Editors may hold back because cutting an author's prose means nicking a famous ego.

It is a matter of author awe. Confesses Little, Brown's Young: "There is more hesitation about messing around with prose when you have a writer like Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Herman Wouk, or a great man in another field like Henry Kissinger. I have a tendency to suggest things mildly, and if he doesn't listen I let it go." TIME asked a sampling of writers, editors and agents to name recent books that needed more editing. High on their lists were William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Mailer's Executioner's Song, Heller's Good as Gold, David Halberstam's The Powers That Be and, of course, Talese's book.

Self-regard can be even more rampant among newly successful writers who view their own crudities as an inviolate form of personal expression. But veteran best-selling Novelist Irving Wallace says: "Publishing houses bid now for books at auctions, and they often spend $1 million or $2 million for a book. The result is often unfortunate: words an author has written tend to become frozen on the tablet. I have heard friends say, 'Why should I change anything in my book? Look what they paid for it; it must be good!' "

Despite all these pressures, not every editor is too harried, and not every author is resistant to suggestions and demands. Here are two stories of good editors whose efforts resulted in good books:

Jonathan Coleman, 28, is the youngest senior editor at Simon & Schuster. The newly published Changing of the Guard is his project. He arrived at the firm three years ago, after working at Knopf as a $220-a-week publicist. During that time, he had met David Broder, the Washington Post journalist.

Coleman's interest began after he read a newspaper series that Broder had written about Congressmen who had been elected for the first time after Watergate.

The editor got the columnist to talk about how these new faces in Washington differed in background and interests from their older colleagues. The more Broder talked, the more Coleman was convinced he had the makings of a book.

Simon & Schuster's editorial board thought so too. They gave Broder a $40,000 advance on the basis of an eight-page outline covered by a rousing memo from Coleman. The editor's immediate problems: the book had to be ready for the 1980 presidential elections, and Broder had to meet the deadline while holding his time-consuming job as a journalist. Coleman kept the pressure on with phone calls every week. Chapters and suggestions circulated through the mails, and an entire draft was completed just after Labor Day, 1979. Coleman read it and a few weeks later checked into Washington's Jefferson Hotel, where for a week of 18-hour days he and Broder went over the manuscript line by line. "His fingerprints are on every damn sentence," says the columnist with appreciation. "This book is as much Jonathan Coleman's as it is mine."

The less visible prints on the 884-page manuscript belong to Lynn Chalmers, one of twelve staff copy editors at Simon & Schuster. It normally takes about a month to copyread a book, but Chalmers completed the job in two weeks. She corrected punctuation, broke long segments into paragraphs, and checked facts. Inconsistencies were flagged on strips of pink paper and attached to the offending pages.

Michael di Capua, 42, is among the most respected literary editors in the business. For the past 14 years he has been with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the last major independent houses in New York, where things do not appear to be as rushed as at other firms. Its authors include Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag. Di Capua has edited such acclaimed writers as Larry Woiwode and Michael Arlen. A major project now is the result of one man's highly unusual childhood. Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany is a forthcoming memoir by Joel Agee, son of the late film critic and novelist James Agee. In 1941, Agee and his wife Alma divorced. She took Joel, then a year old, to live in

Mexico, where she met and married Bodo Uhse, a Communist novelist and fugitive from Nazism. After the war the family went to East Germany, where Joel lived for twelve years.

Di Capua's acquisition technique was quite different from Coleman's go-go methods. In 1975, the Farrar, Straus editor read Agee's article-length account of his East German childhood in The New Yorker. Recalls Di Capua: "I thought, 'I've got to do something about this.' I tore it out and put it in a pile of things to do. But all editors are overworked and I never got to it."

Agent Claire Smith of the Harold Ober agency rekindled Di Capua's interest about a year later. He received a fast O.K. from his editorial board and a $5,000 advance for his new author. Says the editor: "We don't write memos. Who has time? Basically we say to each other, 'I've got this and I think it's great,' or 'I've got this thing by a big name but I think it's awful, and I'm going to turn it down unless someone objects.' "

Agee went off to write at his own pace.

When the manuscript arrived last summer, the editor began his real work. He and Agee sat down and went over every paragraph. Explains Di Capua: "My method is to read a book over and over again at every stage until there is nothing that bothers me and I can read it through without stopping." For Agee, the experience marked that point where the craft of editing becomes an art: "Di Capua felt himself into my intentions. At no point did I have the feeling that he was imposing himself into the work."

Examples like these are heartening, but there are still too many books that prompt people like Di Capua to wonder what ever happened to good writing. Literacy continues in its parlous state. Standards decline as the difference between the formalities of written language and the informalities of the spoken word blur. Schools neglect the rigors of grammar, and the last generation that can parse a sentence is dying off.

The world is full of tempting distractions: travel, entertainments, sports, the pervasive din of popular music. People read less decent prose and watch and listen to more TV. When Howard Cosell says commentation for comment, he is heard by millions of Americans who may not know the difference. The word could become a neologism, like profitability and futurability, and seep into the language. The fight against the misuse of "hopefully" (for "I hope") is just about lost, and even otherwise literate people keep speaking of the "media" in the singular.

Linguists may argue that English has grown in just this way. Purists grumble about pollution of the mother tongue. The dispute has raged ever since Shakespeare's pedant Holofernes railed against the "rackers of orthography" in Love's Labour's Lost. Dr. Johnson's and Mr. Webster's dictionaries have spurred sharp debate. But the disputants have usually known their grammar; they were aware of the necessity for rules. Proper usage matters because writing is thought and clear writing is essential for clear thinking.

Editors must keep this faith even though few will appreciate their efforts. As Critic Dwight Macdonald wrote nearly 20 years ago: "If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States, including a recent President, were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point." --ByR.Z. Sheppard. Reported by John M. Scott and Janice C Simpson/New York

With reporting by John M. Scott, JANICE C. SIMPSON

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