My First Acquaintance with Editors

Mention editors or editing on Substack and a torrent of ahistorical blather will come at you from two camps. The first camp, generally those who came up in the traditional magazine and publishing world, will issue breathless testimonials on how they’d be nothing without their editor, how editors are God’s own unsung heroes who live faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs, and how it is through their stern-but-fair red pen that a common pumpkin of an essay is transfigured into a bejeweled coach-and-four. This ignores the fact that while writers have no doubt relied on feedback and collaboration since the days of cuneiform, heavy-handed editorial intervention of the kind practiced by modern magazines is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Montaigne, Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, even a writer as relatively recent as Orwell are none the worse for not having had a William Shawn looming over their shoulder. (“Yet to come across a Substack that didn’t need an editor or didn’t need to be shorter,” sniffs an anonymous source in The Cut’s Book Gossip newsletter. Would you have said as much to Thomas Paine??)

The second camp claims that this exaltation of the editor is a mere status play from the snobs and grade-grubbers still clinging to the rapidly-sinking ship of mainstream media, and that the dynamism and clamor of the individual pamphleteers on Substack is a more valuable product than the inoffensive dithering and to-be-sures found in overly-edited prestige products like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. But of course, most people are not Montaigne or Hazlitt, much writing could be improved through a process of collaboration and revision with an intelligent and sympathetic interlocutor, and the median essay in The New Yorker of The Atlantic is almost certainly better than the median essay on Substack (And anyway, much of this purported dynamism and energy on Substack seems to consist of essays complaining about how the writer has been unfairly rejected by institutions like The New Yorker and The Atlantic.)

Suffice it to say, there is a lot of noise on the subject. So, when Kyle Berlin asked me for a reflection on the process of developing my essay “Little Modernist Magazines” for his magazine Souvenir, I realized I was in a fairly unique position. I had written very little public-facing work before I began writing essays on Substack. When Kyle first contacted me about writing an essay for him on the Anglophone literary magazines of 1920s Paris, I had been edited before—a cut here, a rewritten paragraph there—but never in the intensive, collaborative, rigorous manner that is (or was) the standard at The New Yorker, Esquire, and all my other beloved American midcentury institutions. In fact, I had stuck mostly to book reviews and had little experience with essays in which many sources are synthesized into a coherent narrative. So what follows are some notes on the editorial journey undertaken by myself, Kyle, and fellow editor William Lambert. Did I discover a hitherto-unknown imaginative or prosaic power within myself? Did Kyle and William manage to transform an unlicked cub, an unlettered ruffian, a mere pamphleteer into a smooth and professional Writer?

Over the several months that it took to shape my essay from first draft to final draft, my two interlocutors did all that I expected of them: they had me lay more groundwork for the common reader, add some historical context about the world of French letters prior to the influx of American and British expatriates (which necessitated a great deal of research for about four sentences of background detail), suggested phrases to tighten, details to clarify, and bad jokes to cut. But looking back on the process, the single most valuable service they provided was — though they couched it in kinder terms — exposing me when I was being false, not expressing my true feelings or thinking hard but just joining the dots and saying the expected thing, which is the phenomenon that leads to so much contemporary prose feeling rote and performative. Here, for instance, is the conclusion of the section on the publisher and impresario Robert McAlmon from my first draft:

And indeed, as he lay dying of pneumonia in Palm Springs, aged only 60, he may have cursed fate for making him an attendant lord rather than a main character of modernism. In certain ways his story is a tragedy; he could run in these artistic circles as long as he was willing to pick up bar tabs and printer’s fees, but, ever the acid-tongued outsider, he was unable to form many stable friendships. William Bird remembered him as “the third corner in every triangle…preyed upon by the vultures of the writing world.” But figures like him, though they may not have produced a great masterpiece, were essential to the working of the whole operation; and for those efforts, as well as for Being Geniuses Together, one of the essential memoirs of the period, he deserves to be remembered as more than a hanger-on or a never-was.

Lazy stuff! Here is the final version, in which the bland appeal to some anonymous canon-maker (“deserves to be remembered”: by who, exactly?) is replaced by a more finely detailed character sketch, and in which I let the figures I was writing about have the last word instead of my own big mouth:

And indeed, as he lay dying of pneumonia in Palm Springs, aged only 60, he may have cursed fate for denying him the acclaim that so many of his friends enjoyed. In certain ways his story is a tragedy; he could run in these artistic circles as long as he was willing to pick up bar tabs and printer’s fees, but, ever the acid-tongued outsider, he was unable to form many stable friendships. William Bird remembered him as “the third corner in every triangle . . . preyed on by the vultures of the writing world.” Like the cowboys upon which he modeled his persona, he was a drifter, always moving, always after something he couldn’t quite reach. He claimed to want the literary success and status that his peers enjoyed, but one doubts that it would have made him happy. Those who did manage to form solid friendships with him remembered him fondly, and it is undoubtedly true that he was a key resource for the writers of the period. Perhaps there is something in the peripatetic nature of figures like him that inspires others, something in their eternal dissatisfaction that makes them a good friend to writers who might benefit from the eyes of a skeptical but supportive outsider. “It was a tremendous experience knowing him,” eulogized Glassco in a letter. “He was always so alive and refreshing. And I was very fond of him — even when he became intolerably insulting: somehow, one excused him everything . . . ”

Another major site of revision was the essay’s ending. Endings are particularly difficult for a literary-historical essay, because the topic is generally interesting on its own, and the attempt to spell out a larger contemporary lesson to be taken from it can feel forced. Because I often write about the past, I often find myself wanting to end an essay on a note of optimism about the future, lest I become a tiresome declinist whining that things weren’t as great as they were in 1920 or 1960. And because I am a fairly talented scribbler and man of letters but not a great genius aflame with visionary power, I’m sometimes tempted to argue that the former is just as important as the latter. Yet those choices are not always the right ones. Here is the ending of the first draft of “Little Modernist Magazines.”

Though it is writers and artists who produce the work, it is these humble enterprises, the magazines and small presses, who were and continue to be the keepers of the flame. They are put together under financial pressure and with no expectations of success, out of simple passion and reckless belief. There are casualties: friendships end, jobs are lost, bank accounts are drained. But very occasionally, things break right, and when that happens, as happened in Paris between 1920 and 1930, suddenly the stars fall into alignment, talent finds talent, effort and daring begets effort and daring, and that flame catches, and turns into a great, glorious blaze.

Here is the still stirring, but more circumspect and honest ending of the final version:

When they didn’t produce lasting work of their own, as Pound and Ford did, we tend to lack a category for these scene figures: the impresarios, the organizers, and the editors who took inchoate masses of energy and promise and molded them into storied figures of literary history. One’s impulse in essays such as this one is always to raise them up, to protest that they and their projects — their magazines, their small presses — are just as important as the artists they promoted. This is a comforting thought for those of us not cut out to be a Joyce or a Hemingway. It is also not entirely true: artistic history is unavoidably the history of individual accomplishment, even if those individuals require specific conditions to flourish. One could write an interesting history of baseball through its scouts and managers or of jazz through its club promoters and record executives, but at the end of the day, Babe Ruth had to hit the home runs and Miles Davis had to play his horn. Yet we should, from time to time, spare a thought for the minor characters and background toilers of literary history. They worked out of simple passion and reckless belief, to impress one another and to promote work they believed in. They had no real expectations of success, and more often than not their humble enterprises ended in drained bank accounts, shattered friendships, and artistic disappointment. Yet thanks in no small part to their efforts, for five or seven or 10 years a few shabby neighborhoods on the Left Bank functioned as zones of infinite possibility, and from these zones emerged work that changed forever the way our language is spoken, written, and thought. Were the stars to align in the right way, it is not so impossible that such a thing could happen again.

It was Kyle and William who pushed me to interrogate my true feelings about how literary movements are made, and to admit my limits and doubts rather than tossing off an optimist platitude. Recently, I published an essay on Yeats and the Easter Rising, for which my only editor was myself. I’m proud of that piece and all the research and analysis within, but I agonized over a proper ending for a day or two before giving up and going with my original, which is a rather undergraduate-y point about how the men and women immortalized in Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” are dead but their memory lives on and blah, blah, blah. Not horrible, but not the fresh and unexpected yet perfectly logical ending that separates great essayists from competent ones, the resonant chime that echoes in the head long after reading. If I had been working with Kyle and William, I don’t doubt that one of them could have said something that would have removed the log jam in my mind and taken the ending of that essay to a new and more interesting place.

If I had to put a vulgar number on it, I would say “Little Modernist Magazines” is about 15% better than it would have been without editorial guidance. That is no small thing; as anyone who plays a sport or practices a craft can tell you, the last 20 percent of anything is exponentially more difficult than the first 80, and at the very highest levels, small distinctions—this or that choice of word, this or that detail—begin to make much more of a difference. And that’s where I want to be: at the highest level. Whether as a solo act or part of a magazine, I want to be working at the absolute limits of whatever God-given talent I have, and it is through intelligent and sympathetic editors like Kyle and William that I can learn where those limits lie.

Yet being a common scribbler isn’t the worst thing in the world, either. Those of you who have followed my writing for a while know of my affection for the 20th-century magazine world that produced so much brilliant criticism and reportage, and how often I’ve written of my impossible dream that that world would return. But recently, I’ve also had a growing interest in the 18th and 19th-century men of letters I mentioned in the beginning; the pamphleteers and polemicists and Grub Street hacks and Oxford sages who, though they may have written for magazines, had a very different relationship with them than Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe did. It feels to me as if we are moving into a media ecosystem that resembles the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century more than it resembles the mid-twentieth, and I find that a not entirely dispiriting prospect. The bustle and excitement of a thousand ranting voices does have its charms, even as we may long for the erudition and subtlety of the old black-gowned priests at Partisan Review and The New Yorker.

So I strive to make my way in both worlds, if such things are possible. It is very fulfilling to write for oneself and one’s own audience, untethered to anyone else’s demands or the need to have a contemporary angle, free to indulge in longueurs, digressions, and bad jokes. But I also hope magazines with a robust editorial process and a clearly defined aesthetic vision continue to exist for as long as people still read, and I commend Kyle and Souvenir, as well as my other compatriots at The Metropolitan Review and Magazine Non Grata and The Republic of Letters and all the rest for their efforts to join with like-minded people and create something that no individual writer could achieve.