rolling column
Moya Costello
(after Elizabeth McCracken on the librarian in The Giant's House) 1
FOR A LONG TIME IT WAS, like writing itself, an amateur
profession. No editor had gone to editing school. There were no
editing schools to go to. Editors invented themselves, and still
do even now when professionally trained. Editors make themselves.
If an editor is born, it is a processional birth. It's not that
an editor was never going to be anything else, or couldn't be,
or hadn't been (or wouldn't be? Editors have made the feature
pages of daily papers, usually as commissioning editors,
transformed as publishers, selectors of books with wild sales
figures). Nowadays trendy editors speak of language environments,
writing consultancies: the editor's place is everywhere.
In a description of the person an editor is, adjectives
accumulate with the speed of mutual attraction; the stereotypes
and clichés mobilise; a glut of abstraction results. People think
editors are unromantic, unimaginative, straight-laced, fixated
perhaps on bowel movements and similar ephemera, disciplinarians
with red pens, sticklers for the right thing, bean counters,
mechanical, officious, obsessive rather than passionate. I was
told by another editor that editors are eccentrics. And as much
as I wish to deny this, I admit it. They harbour the serious
eccentricity of the possessors of passions, of secrets, of small knowledges, the cabalistic and the esoteric. Not many people know what editors do: such knowledge, they think, will not alter their lives. Editing is an occupation taken for granted, like motherhood. A conversation stopper. What does an editor do? How does an editor spend their day? An ophthalmic surgeon almost certainly knows.
Everyone believes they have language skills because they are born with a mouth and their schooling has been full of text. Communication skills, interpersonal skills, these are the common demand of employment. Yet the skilled communicator is rare. And the good writer, just as rare. Not many people know what they do not know. The more unwise among writers think they are not in need of an editor. These writers lack imagination. Their difficulty comes to light when what they write cannot be read. From the muddle, a kind of glug, the editor clears and structures. From this, editors can produce poetry. Editors love good writing: they do not think of the universal standard; what they think of as good writing comes in different guises. It makes their hearts turn. They curve toward the text. Hug. When they think they are on the verge of singing, this is what they think of as good writing.
It is a well-known fact that the text that does not show its editing is well edited. The editor's job is to use strategies to effect but not to draw attention to them. Think of cave paintings, tapestries, cathedrals, guilds of artisans, schools of painters, the work produced by thousands. Who built the pyramids? How were they built? This is the work of editors. An editor's triumph in work is invisibility. Where nothing is noticeable, that's where an editor has been. To give an editor credit in the text for their work is perhaps counter-productive. How can an editor's charms and skills be known abroad when their hallmark is subtlety and invisibility? In a market place that is characterised by brashness, these skills cannot command high wages. (Someone might present a concern with punctuation as a fetishised practice and then get it noticed.) Subtlety works, although it will not be named in doing so.
Editing is not a normal career path. It's not the career of crowds: nursing, teaching, engineering, sales and marketing. Its pleasures are palpable to the practitioner, but they elude, if not defy, description. It is rare for editors to talk about their work. Syntax, grammar are the editor's tools; punctuation; the elements of structure: headings and paragraphs; sound, breath, the body's notes; the language's incantations. If they do talk about their work it is with other editors. And still, rarely. And with caution. They will talk about themselves and their work in curious ways.
They are more than capable of disparaging their own practice. Editors laat their own practice, disown it like St Peters...Judases. In such a complex world as this we live in, how can punctuation be discussed seriously? Who can genuinely believe punctuation is important? Whom can the editor share these things with? (A writer has written of a conversation with other writers, on punctuation, and has noted that they all turned pink with embarrassment.) Editors are embarrassed themselves at their own love of such arcane things. The full stop is the breathing space; the comma: the pause for meaning; the semicolon: half breath, the semiquaver; the colon: the step-through door into the light of explication, of multiplication of some singular entity.
All the time the language lives its own life, like an adolescent, beyond the editor's wishes. In certain forms of electronic practice it is mutating at an exponential rate: new forms of punctuation, minimal capitals, the standardisation of corruptions and slang. The editor has a sense of decorum about rules, but the best eschew pomposity and are flexible, considerate of the living language, knowing it to be socially gregarious, that worldly encounters will only leave it changed. Editing is a practice of modernism-it is transcendental in its concerns-while simultaneously being postmodern in its practice, in its concern with immanence. An editor can see the absolute necessity of the task as few others...no-one else can. Editing is desire incarnate.