I think of the image from Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part 1. “I present the 15…” then a thunderbolt strikes, “10, 10 commandments.” Editing comes from everywhere. We have our own internal superegos checking the excesses of our ids. I like to say that there is an id my name, which is also a near anagram for DIVA, but the id has help along the way. Our expectations of our audiences are a kind of check, too. Years ago, I brought Luke Menand to a creative nonfiction seminar I was teaching, and he said that when he thinks of his reader, he thinks of a biology professor. I said I thought of my editor. He said he also thought of his editor, but then thought that his editor was thinking of the biology professor.
I say this because, after years of writing for editors, here in this newsletter, I suddenly find myself in a wild west of the mind. My first brush with professional editing was when I was a 20-year-old Village Voice intern, and I already knew how to write, but not yet how to conform to house style or, really, how to be a pro. I owed much to Joe Levy, the music editor, who paired me with the legendary jazz critic Gary Giddins, who would give me early assignments in his jazz supplements and, when I was 23, a shot at regular work when he went on sabbatical to work on his Bing Crosby biography. Bob Christgau, who was said to be one of the finest editors in New York, was not only the Dean of Music Critics but the doyenne of house style in the Voice music section. Everything was hip, attitude, figural, riffy, where everything reminded you of everything. And here I was, an undergrad, breaking into the Voice music suction but suddenly feeling weirdly earnest and uncool, even though my life had already been saved by rock and roll. I had a copy of Christgau’s Record Guide as bedside reading when I was in 6th Grade. (Times film critic A.O. Scott told me had the same experience at the same age.) When I was a Voice intern, the editors were like professors. I wanted to please them and live up to their standards.
I kept at it, through the rejected pitches, kill fees, and the pieces that landed, not really to my satisfaction for a while. I made a breakthrough at 25 when I wrote a review of a Louis Armstrong biography for the great John Leonard at The Nation. It was one of the first assignments I landed outside my Voice playground. I adored Leonard’s writing—brimming with passion and never pretentious erudition. As a teenager, I loved Whitman, and I loved the way Tom Wolfe would, in Whitmanian fashion, pile up those paragraphs, New Journalism pioneer. It was what I wanted to be when I sat in front of the Atex terminal at the Voice, lump in my throat, wondering why I needed to have my review completely unwritten and rewritten for being tragically unhip. When I first discovered Leonard, I liked him even better than Wolfe. Now, just two years later, knowing I was writing for this reviewer I had adored uncorked something, and he didn’t touch it. It was all me, and it was going into a publication where Henry James had panned Whitman. Leonard apologized for the lousy pay, explaining that The Nation had been losing money since 1865. But he held it up and said, “This will look nice on a Xerox.”
The path could still be rocky, but I never had that undergrad in the cubicle feeling ever again. My editors would become my friends and my peers, and the feeling became lateral. Every time, I wrote a book, I came back to articles seeing them more clearly, the maximum making the minimum more lucid. I had looked at life from both, sides, now. Once in a while, someone still comes along to make me nervous, and a wave of nostalgia comes over me like a high school reunion.
I have realized that many successful writers had been editors, too, and having their version of Both Sides, Now, they knew the rhythms of the profession. They know that there is one of them and there are maybe 30 of you, and it was easy to become overwhelmed. Bob Christgau once told me about a tough time he had being edited himself, and I thought, oh, now I see the figure behind the curtain.
So what you are reading is not exactly unedited. Between the sentences, between the paragraphs, much has been rethought and revised internally. It is grandiose to invoke the name Mozart, but it was said that he did not strike a quill on anything he wrote. But imagine the strife in his head before it turned into Don Giovanni. “Stet,” the Latin word for “let it stand,” is the universal language of a writer undoing an edit and standing one’s ground. But we never really get to the Stet time of life. Hemingway said that a writer needs a good bullshit detector. That bullshit detector was in Papa Hem’s head. If you’re doing it right, that is the editor who never leaves you alone.