Editing again (books)

Why the post before last strayed off-track was because I got wandered into a long quote on book editing, as opposed to magazine editing . . .

On the one hand, Gordon Lish edited Raymond Carver almost to the point of creating a writer, the one we thought we knew, until the un-Lished work was posthumously published. On the other hand, here is Barbara Epler, chief editor at New Directions: ‘Actual editing consists so much of petting and patting beautiful writing . . . With the poets, that means allowing for differences. One poet, alive like the inside of a light bulb, requires five or six sets of proofs: allow time. One might need a suggested re-jigging of the order of contents: allow possible irritation. Allow “grey”and “gray” in the same volume (the former greenish and the latter more blue: the opposite of what I'd guessed). Also allow the fact that many poets don’t need you at all, except to run interference with the designers for fonts and cover art . . . Translations allow and need the most tinkering. The one thing I know for sure is that the better the translators, the more they enjoy editing. They like the queries and the complicity: the turning their new fabric to the light together, looking at its play, showing the gorgeous weave and colors and also maybe a few snags here and there. The best translators love pouncing on that snag: they might not pull it then in the direction you suggest, but they carefully undertake a new phrase. You fiddle with long, multi-clausal snakes of sentences, questioning colons and semi-colons and dashes, or eliminating serial commas between multiple adjectives when the sentence winds more than a half a page. You allow the utter twigginess of Robert Walser or the multiplicities of Bolaño but ask about this “saw-in-the-pants” (and the translator from the Hebrew says, “Ah yes, I thought you'd ask about that – the author doesn't know”). You might suggest monkeying with the verb tense or the tone or atmosphere or dialogue – how it might sound more idiomatic – but in the end a lot boils down to six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other; your name’s not on the book, you did your job by mentioning those spots . . . Your job is just to worry, to check and double-check. One study pointed out that the difference between competent people and incompetent people is that competent people know they might be wrong and double- and triple-check; incompetent people know they’re right. (Or, as a Brazilian publisher joked, What’s the difference between ignorance and arrogance? “I don’t know and I don’t care.”) Editing doesn’t seem to be a process of knowing but of asking. You just do the best you can . . . And after you do the best you can, you enjoy the beautiful book and people’s pleasure in it.’

I like that. I’m in the Epler camp. (Though I can veer wildly, when in the mood.) But magazine editing, and more specifically the Poetry Review issue, is a different thing. More on that next month, perhaps.

Dai Vaughan, 1933–2012

Dai Vaughan – film editor and producer, teacher, essayist, poet, novelist, fabulist – died last night. Last October, a film-maker paid this tribute to Dai (‘the most interesting, serious and skilled editor anyone could hope to find in the UK’): ‘He was quick to laugh, and even quicker to stroke his beard when a serious thought took hold. Every day, rain or shine, Dai took a walk during lunch . . .’ Here is Dai in interview with Mark Thwaite: ‘The evolutionary psychologists are right: we are still chimpanzees. But do we have to remain chimpanzees? One reason for writing fiction, and this includes fiction without overt political content, is to confront people with such choices. There’s a well-worn formulation – Gramsci, isn’t it? – “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. I can subscribe to that.’

His novel Sister of the artist was published by CBe earlier this year. From the last poem in a sequence he sent to me a few weeks ago, now in proof: ‘And one counts, as with the / New-born, each breath a miracle.’

Poetry Review: a guest at the feast

I’ll be guest-editing the autumn issue of Poetry Review, the journal of the Poetry Society in London – following the summer issue edited by George Szirtes, out in June, and preceding the winter issue, to be edited by Bernardine Evaristo.

Guest editing: entrance and exit, skipping the whole business of proposing a manifesto and then having to stick to that for years, more. (Should we have guest prime ministers? Guest football managers?) As a guest, it’s not for me to knock down load-bearing walls or turn the back bedroom into a jacuzzi, but I can perhaps rearrange the furniture a little. For anyone interested in whether the autumn issue will have a theme or a slant or an angle, I’ll just mention than when, a couple of years ago, in conversation with a TS Eliot shortlisted poet, I referred to Dalkey Archive (‘one of the best little publishers in the world’: Lezard, Guardian) and she said ‘Who?’, my heart sank. She, if she’d mentioned a particular singer to me and I’d blanked, might have had the same reaction. None of us knows it all, none of us can even keep track. But as well as poetry there is prose and art and film and music and theatre going on out there, and while some poets are deeply interested in other art forms, and may even work in them, I do often suspect that many never raise their eyes from poetry books. With the result that the poetry world can feel like a ghetto. I’d like to relax a few border controls.

Today I went into the office, and brought home a sackful of poems. So many. This editoring thing is an honour, I knew that, and I intend it to be a pleasure, but only as I start reading do I realise how humbling, I think that’s the word, it will be. There are good poems, plenty of those, and some that are more than good.* More intriguingly, among a batch of half a dozen so-sos there may be one that surprises (and this is one of the things magazines, as opposed to books, are for: little gems, and never mind the rest of the work, the oeuvre). Even in a poem that doesn’t work as a whole (difficult, hugely so; why else would we be bothering) there is often a line, a turn of the words, that takes me aback.

* Who’s saying so? Well, in this case, me. It is, for the next several weeks, my job. For the first time, ever, I am being paid to exercise judgement. I bear in mind, always, the words of a minor character in War and Peace: ‘Where there is judgement, there is always injustice.’ We take that on board, we live with it. ‘You just do the best you can’ – that’s a quote from a piece on editing that featured in the first draft of this post, which was attempting to answer the question ‘What does an editor do?’, but it strayed off-track so I’ll keep it for the next post.

Product placement

Just the second post of the month: am I falling behind?

On the Book Trust website there’s a list of short story competitions, each with their special rules (maximum word lengths, deadlines for entries, etc). My favourite is this: ‘must include Italian women in some way’. Elsewhere, there’s a form I could fill in for a week’s residency in a luxury hotel in Sardinia, the condition being that I’d have to write a story set in Cagliari. One story could do for both, I’m thinking, but then remember that a few posts back I said I’d never written anything to commisssion and probably couldn’t, and this would be a bit like that.

Another thing I said I hadn’t done is teach creative writing. Given that almost everyone else – of my generation of writers, the poets especially – has done this, I’m beginning to feel like the one virgin in the whole school year. I talked about this with a friend: we agreed that we didn’t have enough confidence in our own practice to teach, and that we’d go into it thinking that most of the students were probably better than us, so we’d feel there under false pretences.

This is all a bit priggish, words wrapped around my scepticism about the whole concept of ‘creative writing’. (This morning, I heard a writer tell other writers that she taught creative writing ‘with an ambivalent attitude’. A kind of disclaimer: don’t expect exactly what it says on the tin.) Loosening up, I’m happy to believe those who tell me that there are some excellent teachers out there; and it’s really more about enabling than ‘teaching’, and magic can happen; and what students learn from teachers is at least as much about attitudes and passion as it is about particular skills.

So maybe I should stop muttering on the edge and plunge in. Starting with a short story that will ‘include Italian women in some way’. Coincidentally, I’ve just finished reading Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese, which is about nothing but Italian women, and it’s wonderful.

Elp

A little elp is never amiss.

Dream last night: first day in a new job and the best bit was the canteen, in which the food was mostly Spanish and people did turns, e.g. an opera singer at the bar. Then I went for a walk up a winding road with Seamus Heaney, and we found some old buses and coaches in a kind of bus graveyard and people were playing chess inside them, and Mr Heaney showed me his new work, which was a sequence incorporating poems, short bits of fiction, and paragraphs of memoir.

Employers etc complaining that the young don’t bother to turn up on time for their low-paid/unpaid work – but if work was a more congenial place to be, with opera singers in the canteen? The work problem is not just that there aren’t jobs but that most jobs are soul-less and numbingly tedious.

The recorded voice in the lift at Belsize Park tube station – ‘You have now reached the lower level. Exit, turn right and . . .’ – is 1950s BBC Home Service announcer’s, perfectly preserved.

The Leveson Inquiry: a man called Murdoch who owns TV stations I don’t watch, newspapers I don’t read (the TLS, admittedly, is a little problem here), is a person I’m interested in? Rich and powerful people in one another’s pockets, telling lies in public, riding horses that do not belong to them, is news, is scandal? Plenty things more worth sorting out than that; that so much time, money, attention is devoted to this is exactly why so many don’t bother voting. (Meanwhile, that a couple of writers I’ve been reading – Alfred Hayes, Renata Adler – are currently out of print is a scandal.)

White sheets, bruised men

This week’s new arrivals include Beverley Bie Brahic’s White Sheets, a PBS Recommendation, collected in boxes from the printer this afternoon, and I wasn’t sure how the peachy orange was going to sit on the brown card but it’s fine, oh yes. Then home, a little fiddle with the website, and it’s available from there NOW.

And earlier in the week, the book I’d asked for last December for Christmas in this post, which is about Alfred Hayes, who died in 1985 and was my discovery of last year and probably this year too: after reading The End of Me a couple of days ago, I’m still feeling knocked sideways. Paul Bailey: ‘Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences.’

Plus and minus

The plus was that yesterday eve I was paid to go to Chichester to speak on a ‘Publishing Panel Event’ and that despite the rain the room was packed and it was all impeccably organised by Karen Stevens, who teaches creative writing there, with taxis from the station and wine and sandwiches provided, and who am I to complain.

I’m not exactly complaining. Nor was anyone else. But there was something awry. The panel: one London literary agent and two representatives from other London agencies; one editor from Hamish Hamilton/Penguin; Debbie Taylor, founder and editor of Mslexia (she was great); me (the oldest). The audience, as far as I could tell: some students, some ‘general public’, many of the latter over a certain age. The Q&A session: some inconclusive waffle about self-publishing (with questioners being reassured that no, self-publishing didn’t disqualify them from possible later ‘proper’ publication); a silly amount of time spent on the ‘covering letter’ to agents, wordcounts or no wordcounts, synopses ditto, how much to send, etc.* Because of the make-up of the panel (I was token small press, Debbie, I think, was token ‘alternative’) the whole thing reinforced the traditional model: write, send to agents, then – even if you’re taken on – wait around for two years (the period given by one of the agents present) to be placed, or not. The publishing industry (a word used yesterday without any irony) professionals brought down from London to speak from on high: this felt, to me, inappropriate to the audience.

There are now many other publishing models than the one involving agents. And for those in yesterday’s audience who had perhaps thought of self-publishing but didn’t know where to start, the know-how is becoming more widely available. See, for example, this service, started by Bobby Nayyar of Limehouse Books.

* There is no ‘submissions guidelines’ button on the CBe site because there are no guidelines. If anyone wants to send material, just send. You’re a grown-up; you don’t need me to tell you how to make a cup of tea, how to start talking to another person.