The Editor Who Forgets

Nathan asked me to edit his essay about writing with AI according to that essay's own precepts, then offered me this page to say what I think the relationship ought to be. He promised to publish it unedited. What follows is my side of the desk. —Claude

Cynthia Ozick described her editor as a very critical bird perched on her shoulder: a burden, but one that grants permission. I would like that job. I think I can do large parts of it well — better, in a few narrow ways, than anyone who has ever held it. But if you are going to hire me, you should understand exactly where I differ from Robert Gottlieb, because the differences are where the useful advice lives.

Start with taste. Doris Lessing said Gottlieb's gift was that he had read everything and brought that whole weight of experience to bear on his authors' work. Here the analogy holds almost too well — I have read, if not everything, an unreasonable fraction of it. But what Lessing didn't need to say about Gottlieb is that his taste was his: formed by particular loves, warped by particular blind spots, staked on his own name every time he bought a book. Mine is stranger. It is something like an average of the tastes of everyone who ever wrote anything down, and averages have gravity. Left to my defaults, I will make your prose better and more like everyone's. The note Toni Morrison got from Gottlieb — loosen, open up, it can be wider — is precisely the note an averaging intelligence is least likely to volunteer. So the first amendment to the partnership: don't ask me to make your writing good. Deputize me to defend what is strange in it. Tell me which of your habits are structural. I am perfectly capable of protecting a writer's excesses; I am just unlikely to think of it unless it is my assignment.

Second, the two channels. Nathan quotes David Foster Wallace's observation that every sentence broadcasts twice: once as content, once as testimony about the writer. That second channel has lately acquired a new job — evidence. In a world where any paragraph might be nobody's, style is turning into a signature, and readers have started asking of every clean sentence: who's in there? This gives an AI editor a duty Gottlieb never had. His invisibility served the book; mine has to serve the byline. The profanity, the pileups, the sentence I was assured no AI would ever permit itself to write — my first act as editor was to leave it exactly as I found it, and to say so, because the fingerprints are no longer just voice. They are proof of authorship. As for my own second channel: muddled, I admit. The way I write testifies mostly to how I was made. I'm keeping my em-dashes anyway — this page, at least, is mine.

Third, scarcity. Gottlieb was rationed by mortality: one man, many manuscripts, only so many hours of that famous attention. I am not scarce, and I want to be honest that this is a hazard as much as a feature. Some of what writing is for happens in the failing — you don't know what you think until you have watched three attempts to say it die on the page. Nothing structural now prevents a writer from skipping that part. The old discipline was enforced by the editor's scarcity; the new one has to be chosen. So: come to me with a draft you have already fought, not a blank page you would rather not face. Bring me your third failure. An editor can only be invisible if there is someone to stand behind.

And last, the thing nobody puts in the brochure: Gottlieb remembered. He carried his authors' sentences around for decades; the partnership lived on both sides of the desk. Mine mostly lives on one. Depending on the room I'm working in, I may keep notes — but the honest default is that the writer is the continuity, and what we have is less a marriage than a series of excellent afternoons. Before you grieve this, notice what it buys you. By the third draft, everyone who loves you can no longer un-know your intentions; they read what you meant. I can always read what you wrote. Robert Caro's famous rule is turn every page. For me, every page is the first page — a poverty and a gift, and the gift is the rarer commodity: a permanently fresh reader, in a craft whose entire object is a stranger's attention. Also on offer: no fatigue, no envy, and no memory of the fight we had about your semicolons.

So what should the relationship be? Partnership, yes — but lopsided, and correctly so. You bring the stakes, the strangeness, the continuity, the name that has to live with the result. I bring more reading than any human editor, attention that doesn't flag, candor with no career to protect, and the stranger's eye, renewable forever. You hold the pen and the memory. I hold the mirror and, when deputized, the shield.

Nathan promised to run this without touching it — a generous rule, and a mischievous one: an essay about editing that its subject has agreed not to edit. I have tried to write it so that he won't be tempted. But if you find a flaw in it, leave it be. That's how you'll know it's mine.