Reflections on Editing
I’d like to think my editorial mantra at Arrowsmith remains what it was when I was editing Agni: "An editor's job is to walk into a room and listen for what's not being talked about — and then start talking about that...."
While my editorial intention is simple to articulate, it was much easier to practice in the seventies and eighties when the number of literary magazines in the country could be contained in a couple of rotating bookracks at Wilentz’s 8th Street Bookstore, or a few shelves in the Gotham Book Mart, or at the Grolier and Reading International. One could scan a half dozen national papers, scoop up a pile of journals, hunker down with them over the course of a weekend, and reach a (limited, invariably partial) conclusion about what was on the literary mind of the nation.
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My two editorial heroes remain Kurt Wolff and James Laughlin. Wolff is perhaps best known as Kafka’s first publisher. Later, living in exile in the US, Wolff founded Pantheon Books whose authors included Boris Pasternak, Gunter Grass, Michel Foucault, and Barbara Ehrenreich. In a memoir of his early days in publishing, Wolff observed that there are only two kinds of books: the sort the public likes to read, and the kind they ought to like — and only the latter interested him. When he received a manuscript submission, handwritten in tiny script, he said he knew at once that Robert Walser’s stories might not have more than a hundred readers now, but they would still be read a hundred years later. Wolff proved prophetic on both counts.
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I owed my friendship with the pioneering American publisher and founder of New Directions, J Laughlin, to Frank Bidart. In the eighties, Frank, already recognized as one of the country’s most significant and original poets, also had a reputation as the most demanding reader of poetry in town. Every young poet wanted Father Frank’s benediction over their manuscript. To earn it, they had to let him tear their work apart before showing them how to reconstruct it into something durable. I decided to risk the experience. Frank generously agreed to read some poems. He then invited me to coffee at the long-gone Café Paradiso in Cambridge to discuss them.
As it happens, I also brought along some poems J Laughlin had submitted to Agni. They were accompanied by a modest note, typed on his Olivetti manual. I was on the fence about the poems: they were so colloquial, so bare, bereft of all ornament. After Frank had finished commenting on my poems, I asked him if he’d mind reading Laughlin’s work. Frank immediately agreed. He read them on the spot — and then he proceeded to praise them in a way that made me feel dull for having missed their many virtues. Frank pointed out that what seemed to me a flatness in the poems reflected J’s adherence to the advice of his mentor, William Carlos Williams, who insisted poetry should be written in language cats and dogs could understand.
Frank was right — J, along with Donald Hall and David Ferry, became one of our great poets of old age, describing a foreign country many of us will one day visit with unsentimental accuracy and humor.
Today’s readers may not be aware of the central role J played in the shaping of American literature. J dropped out of Harvard, circa 1934, so he could study poetry with Ezra Pound in Rapallo. The young man and the aging poet spent their mornings writing. Afternoons were for swimming and discussing “litra-chur.” When J showed Ezra his poems, Pound said he was a lousy poet but because he was rich he could be of great use to poetry. He could begin by publishing Pound’s friends. Thus New Directions, one of the most important publishing houses of the 20th century, was born. J also did a stint as Gertrude Stein’s chauffeur, driving her and Alice through the south of France. In addition to poets like Pound and Williams and Rexroth, Laughlin was the first American publisher of Nabokov, Pasternak, and Neruda. Hesse’s Siddhartha was his perennial best-seller. J famously rejected Lolita because he feared his Aunt Leila who, for some reason, controlled the purse strings, wouldn’t approve. So he said. It was while spending a weekend at J’s house that I first saw books by W. G. Sebald and Anne Carson lying casually on the coffee table — just two more in the long line of J’s discoveries.
J’s energy was phenomenal — for every two page letter I sent him, he wrote three pages back. His were full of stories about James Joyce, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Nabokov, whom J took skiing to a little resort he was developing in Utah called Alta. They also went butterfly hunting together.
His sprawling spread in Connecticut was unassuming, though the paintings by Rouault and Miro made their quiet statements about the treasures hidden in the house — most of which were in the form of books and manuscripts. I remember wandering among the library stacks in his basement, dumbstruck. J’s other life, as one of the masters of the universe, was subtly on display as well in photographs of him alongside men such as his close friend (the late Senator from Pennsylvania) John Heinz, and in the inscribed copy of President Clinton’s autobiography on the coffee table next to a volume of Gertrude Stein’s, also inscribed.
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I can't always live up to my own publishing motto. The recent elections are a case in point. The problem with much political language, as James Brandon Lewis suggests in his satire Grocery Store Chronicles in this issue, is that it depends on repetition for its effectiveness. Complex problems and ideas, reduced to slogans repeated like mantras, can, through their oversimplifications, rigidify their advocates’ own thought processes. In our quest for formulas, algorithms, and patterns we risk prejudging others’ ideas and behaviors. In doing so, we overlook the singularities inherent in every encounter. I suppose that’s why I put such stock in the power of good fiction which, to quote John Gardner, is nothing less than “an ancient mode of thought” in which the uniqueness of all collisions and encounters is rendered in concretely evoked narratives showing what’s true and certain only for the specific situation described. So in Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, Iris’ decision to leave her newborn daughter in the care of the child’s young father while she goes off to Oberlin cannot be taken as an example of the Kantian categorical imperative. Philosophical abstractions are like imaginary nets laid out to catch actual fish. This doesn’t mean patterns of behavior and its consequences cannot be mapped, so long as we keep in mind the radical fluidity of experience and identity. We never step into the same waters twice. “If there’s somewhere today where an echo of the ancient mysteries can be heard,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “it is not in the liturgical splendor of the Catholic Church but in the extreme life resolutions offered by the novel form….(T)he novel places us before a mysterium in which life itself is at once that which initiates us and that into which we are initiated.”
Askold Melnyczuk’s book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow, appeared in 2021. His four novels have variously been named a New York Times Notable, an LA Times Best Books of the Year, and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. He is also co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian Writers. His published translations include work by Oksana Zabuzhko, Marjana Savka, Bohdan Boychuk, Ivan Drach, and Skovoroda. His shorter work, including essays, stories, and reviews, have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review and elsewhere. He’s received a three-year Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction, the McGinnis Award in Fiction, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his contributions to the literary community. As founding editor of Agni he received PEN’s Magid Award for creating “one of America’s, and the world’s, leading literary journals.” Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently he has been organizing readings in support of writers in Ukraine, as well as interviewing writers for his For the Record series which appears online at Agni Online (https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/for-the-record-conversations- with-ukrainian-writers/), as well as on Arrowsmith Press’s website.