Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [43]
To a real editor, cutting a manuscript from seven hundred pages to four hundred, inventing a new title, reshuffling the chapters to give the book a drop-dead beginning and a surprise ending, is all in a day’s work, a bravado challenge, like a difficult operation for a surgeon. Real editors, if they’re any good, also know—more important still—when to leave well enough alone. “If it’s good, don’t touch it” might be the first rule of our oath, if we had one.
Because it’s a long, painstaking job, largely unrewarded as compared to acquiring the right book or the right author by good luck or shrewdness, real editors are rare and getting rarer still. A certain amount of ego is involved, as well as the skill—the necessary belief that you know what will work—and the energy to do it. The best editors slash, cut, change, and rewrite boldly, in ink.
Right from the start, to Henry’s shock and indignation, I used ink. Bold self-confidence was the trick, I surmised, watching Bob Gottlieb work. He used a thick, black, felt-tip pen, leaving no possibility for second thoughts or doubts. Between them, Bob and Nina Bourne not only edited in great, slashing strokes, but they also put whole pages of manuscript through their own typewriters, rewriting them completely, and used scissors and Scotch tape to cut pages into ribbons and paste the sentences back together in a different order. The manuscript of Catch-22, endlessly retyped, looked at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as they labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do the same.
NEEDLESS TO say, Will and Ariel Durant did not lend themselves to this kind of slash-and-burn approach. Every one of their words was precious to them, and they did not give up a single one without a longdistance struggle. In any event, their prose, while rather more serviceable than inspiring or stylish, did not require major surgery. I clashed with them from time to time over their interpretation of historical facts. The Durants were masters of that old-fashioned form of history that centers on “great men,” and like H. G. Wells they presumed that life is getting better and better with every scientific and philosophical advance. They seemed to have ended their study of how to write world history with Thomas Macaulay, which is just where most modern historians begin, but I was in no position to enlighten them and incurred a good deal of ill will by my marginal notes.
Fate, however, soon brought me better material on which to try out my skills. At some point, Max Schuster had given a contract to William L. Laurence to write a history of the atomic bomb, for Max dearly loved to publish books by major reporters from The New York Times, whether they could write or had anything to say or not, the latter being all too frequently the case. Laurence had once been the Times’s science reporter and in that capacity had written the first account of the atomic bomb to appear in the paper and had actually seen the Nagasaki bomb explode from one of the chase planes. Now retired and considerably aged, Laurence had waited too long to tell his story, which was sufficiently well known to appear in school textbooks. His manuscript, Men and Atoms, suffered from other problems more serious than being ten years too late: He had absolutely no interesting recollections or anecdotes and was unable to write English at all. It turned out that Laurence was a Polish Jew who was self-schooled in science and came to the Times in the twenties when science reporting was very small beer indeed. Since most scientific discoveries in those days were made by people who spoke German, Polish, or Hungarian, Laurence’s ability to talk to them was more important than his inability to write