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By Root 690 0

to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s somebody else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of taken to the movies every once in a blue goddamn moon. Still, you just have to unravel another hundred pages or so before tomorrow, knowing that in the end nobody will thank you, there won’t be a miracle that will make the book become a best-seller, nobody will know or care how awful the manuscript was before you began to work on it, none of your colleagues will thank you for the work you’ve done, nor will the author, who will think either you destroyed his book or that any improvements were his or her own work.…

WELL, I HAD nobody to blame but myself. Nobody had ever promised me that editing was glamorous work. Of course, there’s a more glamorous, comparatively well paid side to editing or nobody would do it at all. Successful editors discover important authors, come up with original ideas for books (assuming there’s such a thing in book publishing as an original idea, a very open question indeed), get to eat at expensive restaurants at company expense with famous people, travel to London to visit our English cousins (those at any rate who remain after the best of them have come over here to run American publishing houses and spend their summers in the Hamptons), fly to Frankfurt for the book fair, even to L.A. to see celebrities who might write a book (if somebody will pay enough money and get the right person to do the writing for them), and have lunch with movie agents who have seven-figure salaries and movie stars who make eight figures. But the rub is that first they have to learn to edit, at least until they have reached that blessed state where others do their reading and their editing while they sit in a four-window corner office, schmoozing with major agents as they sip their morning espresso and try to decide where to have lunch today.

When you come right down to it, real editing is a profession, unlike publishing, which is merely a business. A publisher, however good, is merely a businessperson, but an editor has a profession, like a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a teacher. And like all the better professions, editing is something of an art, too, if it’s done well, and something of a mystery as well. Nobody teaches it, of course; you’re born to it, the way a good surgeon is born with the right hands; it’s something you either can or can’t do, though apprenticeship doesn’t hurt. There are still plenty of people who call themselves editors who don’t have a clue how to edit at all, and some of them are right there on top, with regular tables at their favorite restaurants and a whole string of best-sellers to their credit, and more power to them, say I, but I don’t think of them as the real thing.

There are others—Henry was one of them—who work like a dog on every manuscript that comes before them, laboriously dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but that isn’t editing, either. It is for this that publishing houses employ copy editors, a whole different species, who prepare the manuscript for the printer and never have regular tables at The Four Seasons or Michael’s. Real editors don’t necessarily have to spell or articulate the rules of grammar, and not all of them make their living over expensive lunches. The ones who know how to do it are a curious combination of cheerleader and story doctor, fixers-up of lame prose, inventors of the dramatic ending to a scene (instead of the one that fizzles out), ruthless cutters,