Jacques Barzun on Editing

The renowned cultural historian and essayist Jacques Barzun hated editors. One of his editors, John Simon, who was never allowed to actually edit him, called him “the Unedited Man”: “Everything, down to the last comma, had to be left as it was, even where — an admitted rarity — improvement was possible.” When he was 78 years old, Barzun wrote an essay detailing his grievances against editors.  Here are some passages from the essay (Caveat editor! Barzun, otherwise often a subtle thinker, was a blunt instrument on the subject of copy editors, and his vitriol is ugly):

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.

Editorial Correspondence - V.S. Naipaul to Sonny Mehta

A copy of a letter from V.S. Naipaul to Sonny Mehta at Knopf from May 10, 1988. It conveys Naipaul's disgruntlement with the copy-editing of A Turn in the South. 

Interview with Evan Goldstein—March 20, 2014

Evan Goldstein (Photo by Rachel Rosen)

Evan Goldstein has been the managing editor of The Chronicle Review since 2012 and of Arts & Letters Daily since 2011. He has written several profiles and other pieces for the Review (on Michael Ignatieff, Kenneth Hayworth, Daniel Kahneman and others). The interview was conducted in his office at The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, DC on Thursday, March 20, 2014. He talked about his editorial philosophy and vision for the Review, magazines and editors that inspired him, the past and future of A&LD, the "great divide" between editors who track changes and those who don't, what "ideas journalism" can make of our time, the (limited) usefulness of new metrics gauging how a piece is being received, what makes a good publicist, and the role of the Review vis-à-vis the academy, among other themes and "extraneous tangents." To download the interview, click here. 

Quotes from the Interview

Lingua Franca was an astonishing incubator of talent. It took ideas seriously, but it wasn’t self-serious in the prose tone. It managed to prick the pretensions of the academy.

We cover the world of ideas, but I want to focus our energies on where the world of ideas intersects with the academy. I think that’s where we can be uniquely perceptive and powerful and make an impact.

While I pay close attention to the analytics that we get, I can’t say it gives you enough to grab onto in terms of future pieces or editorial direction. You can’t hang too much on a particular piece that found an audience.

If you look at the people who were the academo-stars of the 1990s, it was literary studies. Now so much of the intellectual energy, and probably the financial resources, have moved to the social sciences, economics, and neuroscience, neuroscience, neuroscience. If there’s any trend now that is comparable to the spread of theory through various disciplines, it's the neuro-fication of so many areas and I think an enterprising ideas journalist would trace that.

Pet peeve: Writers who self-reference.

The world of editing is divided between people who track changes and people who don’t: this is the great divide to me. I’m in the not-tracking-changes camp. I’ve been called on it by writers occasionally.

I try to be a minimalist. I really think there are often extraneous wording, extraneous thoughts and tangents… Are tangents inherently extraneous? No, you can have a… well, we’ll table that for now.

What should A&LD ideally be doing? Surfacing hidden gems. I don't link much to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times…I'm anti-New York…No! I just assume that most readers of A&LD are probably seeing that already, so in terms of value-added, I feel so much better when I throw up something like here's this gem of an essay in Dissent. That makes my day. 

Interview with John Ackerman—July 31, 2013

John Ackerman's office in the Cornell University Press
building (Sage House), featuring covers of books
by some of his authors.

John Ackerman is the former Director of Cornell University Press and the Europe and Russia/USSR acquisitions editor there. The interview was conducted in Ithaca, NY on July 31, 2013 for East-Central Europe Past and Present.  To download interview, click here. 

Artifact: John Ackerman's Pencil

This is a #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencil on John Ackerman's desk. Ackerman has been the director of Cornell University Press since 1990, and is also the acquisitions editor for Europe and Russia/USSR. He uses "#2 Ti"s (as they're known among connoisseurs) to do nearly all of his editing (viz. min. 1:36:11 and 1:41:43 of the interview). Many an introduction has been shredded by this pencil, for Ackerman is a famously ruthless editor of introductions. He noted in the interview that Vladimir Nabokov considered "Ticonderoga" to be an especially beautiful word. The passage in question is likely from Pnin (1957), a gorgeous novel about a Russian language instructor teaching at a thinly fictionalized Cornell, where Nabokov was professor of Russian literature at the time:

With the help of the janitor he screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener - that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.

The pencils were never actually manufactured in Ticonderoga (pop. 3,382), but Ackerman was; he grew up there. He describes the atmosphere there today: "Sad. Very sad."