Said Robert Gottlieb, quoted in "Robert Gottlieb, Eminent Editor From le Carré to Clinton, Dies at 92/At Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, he polished the work of a who’s who of mid-to-late 20th century writers" (NYT).
Mr. Gottlieb edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess....
He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
ADDED: At The New Yorker, David Remnick writes, "Remembering Robert Gottlieb, Editor Extraordinaire/At Knopf and The New Yorker, Gottlieb was an editor of unexampled accomplishment—someone who seemed to have read everything worth reading and to have published a fair amount of it, too":
[In t]he film, “Turn Every Page”... Caro and Gottlieb sit side by side in an antiseptic office, intently reviewing a manuscript page from Caro’s study of Lyndon Johnson. These two secular Talmudists are hunched over the page, sharing a pencil and arguing about matters of punctuation, syntax, rhythm, and clarity. There is a deep bond between them, a distinctly unsentimental partnership in which everything is about purpose, choices, and decisions, never sloppy praise or even encouragement.
In a Paris Review interview, Caro said, “In all the hours of working on ‘The Power Broker,’ Bob never said one nice thing to me—never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. That was also true of my second book, ‘The Path to Power,’ the first volume of the Johnson biography. But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, ‘Means of Ascent,’ he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, ‘Not bad.’ ”
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19 comments:
I don't know about feeling guilty, but most editors are frustrated writers. I have a couple novels floating around in the back of my brain, and have for decades. I'm a good writer, but my real talent is making other people's writing better. So that's where I make my money.
This is sad. I wonder why hardly any mention of Caro's Johnson biography ? This may mean that the volume 5 might never appear which would be a shame.
Analogous to the juxtaposition of professionals and teachers. Both branches offer a value proposition to society.
Editors can be good or bad. Max Perkins was almost the co-writer of Thomas wolfe's novels, and his suggestions to Hemingway usually made his books better.
But some editors are just gatekeepers and censors. If Gottlieb made Caro cut down his books, that's a good thing. Although I'm skeptical he added much to SF writers like Ray Bradbury.
Never really understood editing someone else's fiction. Newspaper articles, non-fiction works; I get that. But it seems strange to modify someone else's fiction. I guess publishers demand it?
A truly great editor takes a good text and makes it sing.
He is right, writing is easy. I can rip out a 1,000 - 1,500 word article in less than an hour.
The hard, really hard sometimes, part of writing is the idea of what to write about. That is what makes good writing.
Editing is critical. I may sometimes spend 2 hours editing and polishing for an hour writing. My editor adds her 2 cents but usually a pretty light touch.
It is the idea behind the writing that is the creative "art". The writing and editing is more of a craft than art.
My latest article, published Tuesday is here
https://www.packagingdigest.com/pharmaceutical-packaging/reshore-pharmaceutical-manufacturing-puerto-rico
I do not mean to denigrate editors in iny way. They can turn good writing into great writing.
I certainly appreciate what mine do for my writing.
John lgb Henry
There should be a sliding-scale percentage acknowledging changes made by editors. I'm an average-below-average-at-best published writer (and more than one editor has inserted grammatical and other errors in my work) but a great editor of other people's work: poetry, non-fiction, editorial, and fiction. And for some of those people, I radically changed more than 50% of what they wrote.
Robert Gottlieb's editing on several of his most famous authors come through strong in the voice of the work. Voice. Fiction and nonfiction.
He deserved far more credit.
Wow. What a life. So many great authors...and writers went through that man.
I love the line, "... anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. This may have once been true. It is no longer.
But now we have AI. Very soon, even the appearance of teaching grammar or writing will be cast aside. Time better spent on things to improve ones self-esteem.
Writing is easy, writing well is very hard.
"I can write perfectly well"
What a legacy -- to leave behind a sentence that a competent editor would brutally blue pencil without a second thought. Physician, heal thyself, eh?
Cut 400,000 words from one million.
He should have tossed the manuscript back to Cato and told him to cut in half.
This sounds like a bullshit story.
I very much doubt John le Carré needed an editor, a proofreader would have been useful, but not an editor. Clinton, on the other hand... It would need Apollo himself and all the Muses on Mount Helicon to wring the cringe out of Billie Boy's hapless screeds.
I've written and edited non-fiction. Like others I can't even imagine editing fiction--a failure on my part I'm sure.
I read a lot of books where I finish thinking that it would have been twice as good if it were half as long.
Caro isn't one of those authors.
I'd love to have a "directors cut" of The Power Broker with those 400,000 extra words.
With Print On Demand and electronic publishing, even if the market is small, there is no reasonnot to do it.
John LGB Henry
Robert Caro should have added a few hundred thousand more words on the deeds of America's Tony Soprano of a president, LBJ.
Editors are the bulwark against mediocrity. My writing would suck otherwise.
I live acros the river from Raymond Carver's birthplace. THis is an editorial relationship to consider.
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