Behind the Blue Pencil: Censorship or Creeping Creativity? (1985)
The editor is the “anonymous co-author brought in after the author has said his last word.”
“The spread of specialized knowledge, coupled with that of
half-education, created a new class of authors—people who knew things of value
but wrote badly.”
“That some additions to the script on its way to the
compositor…are needed can be granted at once. … But out of the need for this
intervention has grown a practice which latterly has been changing the very
idea of authorship.”
“[Editors] have begun
to challenge and change in written work whatever deviates from their own norm.
This raises a question which is rather important for the art of prose: who is
this editor and where has he or she picked up that norm?”
“[A]ll copy editors show a common bias: vigilance breeds
suspicion, and the suspect is the writer. What he has set down is ipso facto questionable and incomplete;
anything not utterly usual is eccentric and reprehensible; what the editor
would prefer is preferable.”
“Meanwhile the ancient question occurs: Quis custodiet, etc.—‘Who will cuss the custodians?’”
“When such a person does have the ambition to write, the
situation is very likely worse. For the creative urge, which already makes for
gratuitous tampering at ordinary times, now knows no bounds and produces a
virtual rewriting.”
“Even worse, a misplaced sense of fair play comes over the
writer when he is put on the defensive: from weighing the changes and arguing
his case step by step, he or she comes to think: ‘After all, should I have it
my own way all the time? Let’s give the laborious mole a chance to score as
often as we decently can.’ This is absurd.”
From: Jacques Barzun, “Behind the Blue Pencil: Censorship or Creeping
Creativity?” in On Writing, Editing, and Publishing: Essays,
Explicative and Hortatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), pp. 103-112.
