Annotations for ""The Editor and The Author""

Item	Time	Annotation	Layer
August 5, Evening Part One	28:00	I'm not going to read all of this formal documentation, just a piece of it. I got to this assembly only a little over 24 hours ago, and I must say that they have been a fruitful 24 hours for me.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	28:17	I think I've been compelled to re-examine, in one fashion or another, almost all of the operating precepts by which I think I live and work and also a picture of myself, which every man forms as he goes through this world.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	28:38	What follows is a somewhat modified version of what I was going to say when I came up here. I believe myself to be a publishing editor as well as a publisher-- more important to be an editor perhaps in certain ways than to be a publisher.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	28:57	But I have heard a view of the patterns of modern writing expressed--	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	29:13	All right. Can you hear this?	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	29:18	OK. I've heard a lot of opinions expressed about the structure and nature of the modern novel in the last 24 hours, and this is merely a report from somebody who has been a midwife to a few of them, sometimes under rather grueling circumstances, including snowstorms and bankruptcy.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	29:47	Modern novels have to be published. Otherwise, they don't get read. Somebody has to publish them. The publisher, at least in publishing a novel, does not intend it as an act of introspection on the part of the author.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	30:04	He is not concerned, basically, with how the author feels when he reads his own printed pages silently over to himself after the printer has delivered the finished copy. He is indeed interested in how everybody else feels, including the critics, but most of all, the people with a certain sum of money in their pockets who intend to part with the money in exchange for the novel.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	30:36	Now, it's no secret that very large numbers of people in this country write. I mean, surely there must be quite a few people in this audience who are even now writing something. I am, and I'm sure that many of you must be.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	30:51	And a process is required by which to select from all that is written that which is to be said. In terms of a word which I've heard often here in the last 24 hours, in terms of society, somebody has to make this decision.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	31:08	Basically, the editor of the initial publishing house makes this decision, and it's a little bit about him and how he makes this decision and why he makes this decision that I want to talk tonight. It is, to give you, really, the theme of this, at the editor's desk that the future reader and the writer first meet each other.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	31:40	Unfortunately for the best principles of business management, nobody in the book industry has been able to invent a way of rearranging and reorganizing it so that the editor is not the central factor in the process of publishing. There is every inducement to reorganize our industry so that editors would not be the central fact in it. I will come to the reasons why this is economically desirable later.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	32:13	The editor is generally considered by writers to be everything from adult to the authentic mouthpiece of God. And his words are either treasured or excoriated, and every shade of opinion in between. A man doesn't have to be an editor very long to be nervously aware of the fact that he is going to play as many roles in the course of his life as there are writers who submit material to him.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	32:46	However, back in the 19th century, which to a certain extent-- at least I think Mr. O'Connor correctly perceives to have been one of the golden ages of fiction publishing as well as fiction writing, the situation is rather different from the way it is now. Publishing was a much smaller operation.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	33:07	And in general, the central editor of a publishing house was also its owner, or at least he controlled it. He could set the tone of voice. He could set the quality, caliber, and character of the operation in which he was interested. He was, in a sense, a very cultivated and civilized member of society to begin with, but he was also very powerful.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	33:35	The book itself in those days enjoyed a relatively more central status than it does now-- again, using a word I've heard here over and over again-- than it does now in our society, the analysis of which I believe could perhaps better be left to sociologists.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	33:54	In any event, the book editor enjoyed an enormous prestige, and he was almost always the president of the company. People like Mr. Henry Holt-- later, contemporary perhaps, George H. Doran many, many, many others. These men were their houses. What they thought about writing, publishing was what the house thought about it, and authors were not compelled to go there or not to go there but at least their houses were themselves.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	34:27	Nowadays, in all but very small houses the editor, even the central editor, is essentially an employee. And thus, you have a situation in which the decisions about what is to be said and not said in our time is divided between a man who advises another man that this or that ought to be said, and the other man who says, I will or won't find the money to do this depending on how persuasive you are about the necessity for this matter. Now, this is a complex matter but except as I say for small houses almost all large publishers are headed by businessmen, and almost all important editors are employees.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	35:22	During the period in which this transition was taking place, a certain group of very distinguished editors lived and worked in the United States, and I intend to quote from one of them both favorably and adversely in a minute, who occupied in a sense a very dominant position. They could really force their houses to follow their publishing bent even if they didn't own them, and even if they weren't on the board of directors or a corporate officer.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	35:58	However, this situation is increasingly less common in American publishing today. To this reason, I still feel and believe deeply that it is important that as many small publishers as possible should survive the fortunes of our time because in them reposes a certain freedom and integrity of action which is impossible in a large corporate structure.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	36:27	Now, I thought before I came up here how to explain what it is that distinguishes an editor from, let us say, the head of the bookkeeping department of a publishing house or the head of the sales department perhaps even. And finally, I hit upon a word. If I don't make this plain, I hope you'll all ask questions later. This word is interest. The one distinguishing common characteristic of every effective editor that I have ever known or of which there is any written record is his capacity to be interested.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	37:09	Now, almost 10 years ago I was associated in another publishing house with a friend of mine, a woman named Helen Taylor. And the two of us became quite enamored of what you might call the folklore of our craft, and we wrote a series of advertisements about what we thought publishing was all about. And Miss Taylor wrote an advertisement for the Saturday Review of Literature on what an editor is. And in a decade with one exception, which I will also present to you, I haven't heard anything any better than this.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	37:56	"We have been reflecting on the work of some important people on our staff. One of them just went by the door with a bulging briefcase, probably going home to get two days' work done in one night. We'll tell you the whole truth if we can about what an editor in a publishing house is and what he does.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	38:16	An editor is a man with a finger to the wind. He reads all important periodicals and newspapers, and when he thinks a book on a certain subject is needed, he tries to find the best person to write it. This might entail anything from a telephone call to a series of investigations resembling the work of the FBI. An editor is a man who likes to read and a good thing too. He must be on speaking terms with all notable and all best-selling books currently published. He can read only a few hundred of these books a year. Therefore, he scans all book review sections carefully.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	38:55	An editor is a man of hope he reads from 10 to 50 manuscripts in a week. Less than 1% of them is ever published by his house. He is also courageous and tactful, for he must reject the rest of those manuscripts often face-to-face with the author, and try to give the honest reasons.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	39:14	An editor is a man with a gregarious mind and a tender regard for human nature. He works sympathetically with any number of his firm's authors. No two alike, writers being more individualistic than most people.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	39:28	An editor is a friend to all literary talent and thereby leads a hunted life, for his friend's friends, and all their merest acquaintances besiege him with mistaken ideas of their own creative powers. But that doesn't stop him, let him get his hands on a manuscript with promise or a great manuscript--" see this is the day before I got the word great out of everything-- "and he is a humble and happy man. He will wrack his brain to help a writer out of a dilemma with a character or a situation. He will style it for the printer with great care or he will throw all style to the winds if the situation demands it.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	40:08	An editor is a plastic surgeon to books by unprofessional writers. Book writing these days, unlike a century ago, isn't limited to people trained in literary matters. Let someone devise a new way of erecting chicken houses or let him live six months in a Persian village and the result is a book, full of facts, true but not always too well written.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	40:30	That's where the editor comes in. It is he who cuts thousands of words of dead wood, organizes, tightens, reshapes sentences, puts in grammar and punctuation, and still retains the author's style. It's still the author's book too, though the author often doubts it while the process is going on.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	40:49	An editor is a businessman, he arranges contracts with authors and authors' agents. He has a sharp eye for second serial and reprint possibilities for his firm's books. He wrestles with Hollywood for a good price. He has to predict sales of books too. And when he is off by the thousands as he often is, people accuse him of being a visionary or a liar and not a good businessman.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	41:11	An editor is a gambling man, he will recommend that his firm publish the first, the second, and even the third book by an author, knowing full well that they will lose money. The editor is putting his chips on the books his author will write a decade or more hence, and you couldn't get any side bets in Wall Street on a proposition like that. The editor must also steel himself for the author's disappointment, whatever form of reviling or despair it may take, he must comfort and encourage him."	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	41:43	And she goes on to say that "the editor is also a denizen of the reference room, he has got to be a legal man, he has got to be a man of detail."	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	41:53	? Andrew Tisement ? wound up with these words, "Editors have their compensations, when our friend, the manufacturing man, comes upstairs with the first copy of a book that is just off the press, he always goes to the editor whose baby it is and says, how do you like it? The editor reaches for it with a glint in his eye and says, let's see it. And they stand there both of them admiring it like a couple of fools."	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	42:31	Yeah. There is another statement about the business of the editor in the world of books, and this is written by a man whom I admire very much, John Hall Wheelock, who is the senior editor at Scribner's, and who contributed the preface to a book which I imagine some of you have read, which is The Collected Letters of Max Perkins. And I intend to do a slightly unfair thing in order to make a point, I want to quote a little bit from Mr. Wheelock, a little bit for Mr. Perkins, the former with approbation, the latter in spite of the fact that he was a friendly acquaintance of mine, with the opposite.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	43:14	Mr. Wheelock says, "The job of editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating, and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world. Most writers are in a state of gloom a good deal of the time, they need perpetual reassurance. When a writer has written his masterpiece he will often be certain that the whole thing is worthless." Incidentally, this happens less and less frequently as time passes.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	43:43	"The perpetrator of the dimmest literary effort, on the other hand, is apt to be invincibly cocksure and combative about it. No book gets enough advertising, the old superstition regarding its magic power still persists, or it is the wrong kind.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	43:59	And obviously, almost every writer needs money and needs it before not after delivery of the goods. There is the writer whose manuscript proves that Shakespeare's plays are merely an elaborate system of political code. Another has written a book to demonstrate that the Earth is round but that we are living on the inside of it. Still, another has completed the novel in five volumes entitled God. Probably if not vocally expressed, the most consistent ejaculation in the editor's mind that I know of."	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	44:38	He then goes on to comment on Mr. Perkins' grasp of the editorial function which is beyond dispute. And says, that "Mr. Perkins had a very fine conception of the function of a publisher, he frequently stresses the fact that fiction is not mere entertainment but at its best a serious interpretation of reality." These are very nice, clean, clear words, perhaps they should have been read earlier.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	45:10	"Comprehending within its scope the evil and the ugly side of things as well as the good and the beautiful, and subject to such limitations only as are imposed by the conscience of art. Where ideas are concerned, a publisher as such must not be partisan but should offer to any honest and fresh viewpoint worthily presented a chance to take its place in the free commonwealth of thought.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	45:36	Is it of interest to the public? If so the public is entitled to know about it and to pass upon it. If so the public is entitled to know about it and to pass upon it. The public, not the publisher is the judge."	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	45:57	Now, even a man who is perhaps the greatest editor of my time is capable like Homer of nodding, and I wouldn't want any author in the audience here to think that I'm not very well aware of the fact that the editorial function frequently results in something a little short of perfection. So unless you are all overcome by a good side of the editorial operation, I have selected from Mr. Perkins' letters to a contemporary writer something which I regard as balderdash. And in reading it I must tell you that unfortunately, this kind of horse liniment is altogether too viable. And I myself writing similar passages have never been called once for doing this.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	46:51	This is a letter by Mr. Perkins, who certainly was as good as any editor of our time, to a writer named Nancy Hale, whose work I'm sure some of you at least have read. "Dear, Nancy. You cannot worry me about your novel. I remember so well the quality of all that I saw of it and I know that you have a rich and sensitive mind and memory. In fact, I would be much more concerned if you did not have to go through periods of despair and anxiety, and dissatisfaction. It is true that a good many novelists do not but I think the best ones truly do. And I don't see how it could be otherwise. It is awfully hard work, writing of the kind you do.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	47:41	I myself feel certain that it will end very well indeed if you can endure the struggle. The struggle is part of the process. There is no sign that Jane Austen had any trouble at all but I am sure Charlotte Bronte must have had, and almost all of the really good ones except Jane, who is good as gold of course."	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	48:06	As I say even Homer nods, and if I had received a letter like that from an editor I wouldn't have known what to do with the work in question at all except possibly to reread Jane Austen and reflect that it didn't cause her any trouble at all to write what she wrote.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	48:25	Now, I'm not contending in these quotations, and in the course of this talk that I think that any editor is capable of being universally interested but only being catholically interested with a small c. Naturally, anybody is more interested in some things than others. The better the editor, the more things he's interested in, and the more things a man is interested in the better foothold he has on the problem of becoming a good editor.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	48:55	By the same token, no one editor could suffice a whole society. Mark Twain said that it was a difference of opinion that made horse races possible. And it's a difference of opinion on the part of editors that makes modern publishing possible. Otherwise, we'd have one single vertical trust the way they do in Russia. I've watched my contemporaries make a lot of money off books in which I could see but little virtue and turned down, and I have myself from time to time scored some astonishing successes off things which were rejected by better men than I.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	49:29	But from the point of view of management of a publishing house the trouble with editors is twofold. The first trouble is very serious, they spend money. Publishing is not a very profitable process and editors are apt to be quite lavish with money in different ways. They have a bad habit of handing it out to authors and worse than that, they sometimes allow authors to write books in a manner which makes them more expensive to produce many other things. This makes editors unreliable from the management point of view.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	50:04	Equally bad, the editors aren't infallible. In fact, very few of them bat over .300. When they do they seldom if ever get the same salary that Monte Irvin gets for doing the same thing for the New York Giants.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	50:28	I'd like to leave plenty of time for questions. So I'm going to skip over the rest of my points rather rapidly. The modern book editor is required to be a creative type guy. He's supposed to have a lot of book ideas and know who could write them and go out and get them, and all the rest of it, and woe betide if it doesn't sell. Management has a memory longer than an elephant, it never forgets. And the next project he brings up has got two strikes on it.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	50:56	The next place the editor is being subjected to a cruel and unusual form of punishment, if he's as old as I am, he began by planning to be a book editor and finds himself in his middle age being compelled to edit something which no longer is a book but is a property. It is we'll say 2/3 of a ghost or a novel and at this point, the writer has sold it to him and having made the book contract sale, the writer's mind immediately switches to a consideration of what he could do with it in television, radio, first serial, 101 other places all of which pay very much better than the royalty on the book itself. And all he wants from his editor is advice as to how now that I've got you nailed to the cross I can really get the big dough.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	51:45	And this is becoming an increasing matter. It's not only directly with the authors themselves that this tendency is taking place but also interminable meetings, which I myself hold, and I'm sure all other editors do with the author's agents, who are no longer interested in what the Germans used to call a NON-ENGLISH the book is a book, but in the property.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	52:08	And the editor is compelled to be a universal genius, he doesn't produce a good book, he produces a good property, or rather he supervises the production of a good property. And this is very attractive in the rare cases where it works out, everybody makes a lot of money off it but there still are the old fables about the two stools and you know who is between the two bundles of hay.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	52:36	A book is a book, is a book, and my advice as an editor, to any writers in the audience is to write a book. And don't try to become booksellers or TV experts or scenario writers or literary agents or anything of the sort. Just write books. Leave it to the people who have to make their living in these secondary areas to exploit your property for you. If they could they'd probably write themselves. In any event, they're good at what they're good at, stick with what you're good at.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	53:15	I make it sound as if it was pretty rough to be an editor. It isn't but the roughest thing of all is a hard thing to explain to all of you. And here I'm departing from my outline, it's an emotional thing. Nowadays, if you win you don't make any money off it, you don't win except prestige or acclaim, a lot of things. There's practically nothing in it for you. If you lose, boy you really lose. Those are real dollars that you lose. And there aren't very many publishers' yachts, and what yachts there are belong to people who decided to become publishers because they could afford both activities at one and the same time.	William Sloane
August 5, Evening Part One	27:36 - 54:23	"The Editor and The Author"	Program
August 5, Evening Part One	27:37	Thank you, Ms. Livingston. Our next speaker has, as his subject, The Editor and The Author. He is the Editorial Vice President of Funk and Wagnalls, Mr. William Sloane.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Evening Part One	29:05	Bill, this is a very bad hall. It's a fine hall except acoustically, and I think you'll speak a little louder. We've had trouble with this.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Evening Part One	29:14	You don't need to overdo it.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Evening Part One	54:23	I think now we can have a--	Carvel Collins
August 5, Evening Part One	27:52	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Evening Part One	29:16	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Evening Part One	43:40	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Evening Part One	48:22	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Evening Part One	54:08	APPLAUSE	Audience