“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental.” Thus spake the venerable Joan Didion in a eulogistic essay about the late Henry Robbins, her editor first at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then at Simon & Schuster. Didion proceeds to clarify her definition: For her, an editor gives the writer “the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enable[s] the writer to sit down alone and do it. This is a tricky undertaking, and requires the editor not only to maintain a faith the writer shares only in intermittent flashes but also to like the writer, which is hard to do.”
That’s about as good a description as any writer or editor has been able to muster. Didion might even be giving editors too much credit. Said Robert Gottlieb, legendary editor and publisher, one of the hallowed deities of the 20th-century literary empire: “You never know what other editors do. Most of them do nothing.” That editors edit, which would seem to go without saying, turns out to be a pretty facile summary of a role whose essential ambiguities make it best suited to confidence men or obsessives. The most we can say is that the editor assists the writer in achieving what he or she has set out to achieve. Passive-aggression is almost built into the job.
