In one of the first books I assisted in editing, there is a neat metaphor that sums up a complicated notion. It's something I suggested to the author, who accepted it a bit reluctantly. When the book was published, this magazine quoted my line. I called my mother and pointed it out to her: "That's me! I wrote that." I was delighted. I was delighted again when the next review quoted the same line. But when a few weeks later yet another review summed up the book's premise with my metaphor I started to feel irritated. These reviewers, naturally, credited the author. No one recognized my cleverness.
The craving for credit is a common enough affliction. Anyone who works in an office is susceptible to the lures of tallying up: hours logged, tasks accomplished, battle scars won. There's a perverse satisfaction in documenting one's own masochism—peering over a manuscript late at night, rushing to accomplish tasks for a boss, withstanding outraged phone calls from a recently edited writer—and never asking for credit (but seething at its absence).
It's worse for book editors, whose best work is invisible. No one reads a moving novel or riveting exposé and remarks, "What brilliant editing." In fact, common wisdom holds that editors don't really edit anymore, that the days of Maxwell Perkins, that godfather of American editors who skillfully guided Fitzgerald and Wolfe away from the precipice of overwrought literary doom, are long past. But common wisdom is wrong. I work at a house that publishes primarily nonfiction by people whose expertise is in the subject about which they are writing—not in writing itself. I have witnessed my mentors' efforts to pull something like literature from minds that tends toward statistics. And I have felt pretty ardent about things like grammar and narrative structure myself. But it is occasionally depressing to realize that the better I do my job, the less likely that anyone will notice I've done it at all.
Maybe that's why so much importance is attached to acquisitions. We may not get credit for actually editing books, but kudos (and blame) go to the editor who discovers a new talent or outbids a competitor—this despite the fact that, unlike editing, acquiring a book is never a solitary undertaking. As I began to acquire books of my own I quickly learned that it's always a group endeavor; I doubt that I will ever be the only person standing bravely by an otherwise despised and neglected book. But occasionally I dream of just such a scenario, one that would allow me to claim sole spiritual ownership over a publishing success: "That was me. I saw it, no one else did." How exciting to be among the enlightened few who knew greatness when they saw it. The nostalgia for New Yorker editor William Shawn, who keeps popping up in memoirs, novels and films, stems in part from his genius for recognizing talent that others failed to see.
If you happen to enjoy martyrdom it's an almost pleasurable role: the noble helper, the wise voice of reason, the one who wins all for an author and so tragically little for herself. But in the publishing world this morality play is hindered by one uncomfortable fact: the entire industry is based on taking credit for other people's work. "Literary agents succeed when books they did not write get published. Publicists are promoted when books they did not write find a wide audience. And yes, editors advance when books they did not write are widely recognized for their literary brilliance."
I wish it were more helpful to remember this whenever I hear someone else complimented for my work (for the record, a "well-structured book" is a well-edited book) or when an author neglects to thank me lavishly in the acknowledgements. But it is not. I can only grit my teeth and hope that everyone around me is just as watchful, tallying and credit-obsessed as I.*
*Thanks to David Patterson for reminding me who Maxwell Perkins was; and to Stephen Bottum for the central idea of this essay.
