LITMIR.BIZ

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out any libel or copyright problems, write the blurb and publicity material, choose and caption any photographs, deal with the jacket and jacket copy, correct the proofs and liaise with the sales and publicity departments, while at the same time reading new books on offer to the firm, keeping up to date with developments in the trade at large, attending meetings, most of them unnecessary, going out for long lunches and the occasional publishing party, and somehow finding time to read and edit A’s new book while at the same time writing Advance Information Sheets for B’s, C’s and E’s, hosing down F after he’d received a drubbing in the Sunday papers, and collating G’s corrections to his proofs with those of our outside reader. The obvious answer was to work in the evenings or at weekends, but somehow I never had the time or the inclination; and it may well be that the overall standard of editing in small firms like Chatto wasn’t as high as it was in firms like Cape, where the commissioning editor would discuss and suggest strategic cuts or changes with the author before passing the approved typescript on to the copy-editors, while such matters as vetting contracts or writing blurbs were hived off to specialist departments.

      All of us live in periods of transition, and the forty-odd years I’ve spent in and around the book trade have been more fast-moving than most: it seems a long haul from the days when some books were still bound in cloth and printed in hot metal to print-on-demand, e-books and blogging on the internet. New technologies have affected the ways in which editors go about their business, in that books are now delivered by email, edited on screen, and, in effect, typeset by their authors; and with well over 100,000 new titles being published every year, authors are more numerous and more varied than they were in the past, while assumptions of a common culture can no longer be taken for granted. Editors in even the most literary firms may find themselves heavily editing, or even rewriting, works written, or ghostwritten, by celebrities, sportsmen, spin doctors, chefs, politicians and tycoons, many of whom are barely literate: all of which makes the editor’s work a good deal more demanding and time-consuming than it was in those halcyon days when most books were written by scholars or professional writers, and eagle-eyed typesetters were there to save us from ourselves. American publishers have traditionally dismissed English editors as indolent, lightweight and insufficiently professional, while those in London claimed that their equivalents in New York were intrusive, prescriptive, over-reliant on fact-checkers and style books, and immune to the finer shades of irony, ambivalence and acceptable hyperbole. Given the changing nature of both writers and readers, British editors have become closer to their American contemporaries than they were in the past, in that they positively rework books rather than looking out for the occasional spelling mistake or wrong date before passing them on to the printer.

      The collapse of a common culture, of shared knowledge and assumptions taken for granted by author, publisher and reader, is reflected in the competitive world of classics publishing. E.V. Rieu started the Penguin Classics list in 1946. Each book came equipped with a brief introduction and no more, and so it remained throughout my time at school and university. It was assumed that readers knew about names, places or subjects mentioned in the text, and that reference notes – printed at the back, and referred to in the text via an asterisk or numeral – were intrusive and unnecessary. Over the years I’ve greatly enjoyed writing introductions to paperback reissues, starting with Bulldog Drummond and E.W. Hornung’s Raffles stories for Everyman paperbacks and moving on to Three Men in a Boat, The Diary of a Nobody, The Prisoner of Zenda, Love and Mr Lewisham and Surtees’s Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds: it’s rather like writing obituaries, in that one becomes an instant expert on the life and times of one’s chosen author, and forgets every word of it within a matter of weeks. Twenty-five years ago one was expected to write an introduction and no more, but before long we introducers had to provide, in addition, a chronology setting the author’s career in the context of contemporary events, a bibliography, and increasingly detailed reference notes. My reference notes to the Penguin Classics Three Men in a Boat, for instance, explain the value of a guinea, give a pair of dates and a potted c.v. to Ethelred the Unready, provide an etymology for a ‘scold’s bridle’, and account for the introduction of the banjo into this country, as well as explaining the siting and history of Runnymede, Hampton Court and Moulsey Lock. The retired colonel in me wonders why readers can’t look these things up for themselves, as I had just done, but I’m told that university students expect this kind of service, and that we mustn’t forget the all-important export market, for which Anglo-Saxon monarchs or the geography of the Thames Valley are a closed book. I don’t imagine Three Men in a Boat or Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds often feature as set books, or are widely read overseas, but it’s the thought that counts.

      After I’d delivered my introduction and notes to a Penguin Classics reissue of Smollett’s last novel, Humphry Clinker, my then editor asked me (in vain) to refer to Fanny Burney as Frances Burney, and queried the word ‘Hottentot’ as pejorative and racially offensive: I had to explain that, apart from anything else, I was quoting Smollett himself, and that to censor him all these years later wasn’t on even in an age of retroactive guilt. And yet, for all its absurdities, the editorial baggage has its uses, and becomes curiously addictive: reading a selection of D.H. Lawrence’s letters published by Penguin in the 1950s, I was irritated by the complete absence of explanatory notes, and found myself thinking what an idle and incompetent piece of work it seemed by modern standards – reluctantly so, given my admiration for Allen Lane, an exemplary publisher who prided himself on making the best available to the many without any element of condescension or dumbing down.

      Some authors, of course, are amenable to editing; others resist even the removal of a comma, and none more so than Iris Murdoch. Dennis Enright was her editor when I arrived at Chatto, and although he liked her very much in person, as we all did, he found her later novels implausible and over-long. Petra and I first met her at a dinner party given by Brian and Margaret Aldiss. These were, invariably, convivial and hard-drinking affairs, and the wine was never in short supply, but every time our host and hostess left the room to clear away a course or bring in the next, Iris’s husband, John Bayley, would spring from his chair, rush to the sideboard, seize a bottle and replenish our already brimming glasses, while Iris, spluttering with laughter, would mutter, ‘Really, John, it’s too bad.’

      Iris had been Norah Smallwood’s great discovery, back in the early 1950s, when her novels were short, made sense and needed no editing. Dennis and I may have grumbled about them behind the scenes, but she continued to get far better reviews than we thought she deserved, was revered by the literary world at large, and was, by the time I went to work at Chatto, far and away the most famous and esteemed writer on the list. She also made the firm a great deal of money, still more so after The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978, and the fact that other publishers would happily have lured her away put her in a very strong position. I always felt that Chatto had done her a great disservice by not insisting on editing her later books, but by then it was too late. Her novels were treated as Holy Writ; a reverential hush would fall over the Chatto building when we learned that a new novel had been delivered, handwritten in blue ink and ready for the typist. As Dennis soon discovered, she was not prepared to be edited in any way. He used to tell us how, feeling he ought to earn his keep, he pointed out that a word used in her latest novel didn’t appear to exist, in that it couldn’t be located in The Complete Oxford Dictionary. ‘It does now, Dennis,’ Iris shot back – very reasonably, it seemed to me. When Dennis retired, I took over the ‘editing’ of Iris’s books. My contributions were purely topographical. She was poor on the geography of London, so I would write to point out that the Circle Line doesn’t call at Hyde Park Corner, or that Charlotte Street runs north-south rather than east-west. ‘Thank you so much for all your help. I’m most grateful,’ Iris would reply in navy blue ink on a sheet of royal blue Basildon Bond. My editorial labours were over, and I could turn to other things.

       FIVE A Cautionary Tale

      One of the minor irritations of being a writer is the widespread assumption that writing is an easy business, to be undertaken if and when the prospective author has nothing better to do. All writers must be familiar with the bluff, red-faced man at a party who says, ‘So you write books, do you?

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