Once, as a beginner, I had an experience that revealed the editor’s lot to me. I was a raw and gauche assistant that you would not inflict on any author, but I was thought of as a good ‘backroom’ boy—someone at whom you could shove eleven hundred pages of chaos and demand, “Fix it!” That was my assignment on a James T. Farrell manuscript. No one had told me the difference between an editor and a rewrite man, so I toiled manically for six weeks, cutting four hundred pages, rearranging sections, rewriting sentences, rendering two hundred straight-narrative pages into scenes because the great man, then in his twilight, had simply forgotten to write dialogue. My boss did not have time to look at what I did in any detail, and the manuscript went straight into copyediting, where it fell under the eye of Frank Riley, veteran checker of scripts. I can see him now: a hundred ten pounds, very pale and gray, riven with tremors, and always seeming to smoke three cigarettes at once. “This is for you,” he said, darting into my hand a memo that he had just written my boss. “In my seventeen years at Doubleday,” it began, “I have never seen such a job as young McCormack has …” If I had had the money, I’d have hired a plane to scatter thousands of copies of the memo over New York. In fact, cross-eyed with pleasure, I promptly lost the thing.

Next came the author. Queasy with doubt, I had to bring the galleys to Farrell at his room in the Beaux Arts Hotel. (My boss decided not to show him the postoperative manuscript; the revision was put directly into type.) Farrell sat me down and went to his desk to address his novel. He read exactly six pages. Then he turned to me. This is it, I felt, and I could see the headline: noted author rubs out snot-nosed tamperer. What he said, in his tough-guy Chicago voice, was, “You’re good, kid.” Not another word about the book, and he never read more. He spent the rest of the aftrnoon telling me about the Black Sox scandal.

I was young and green, but after an hour’s proud elation I saw the moral clear: Except for Frank Riley, no one would ever know what I’d done in my editorial servitude. In this case, not even the author. (And don’t think you now know; underlying everything I say is this unsettling fact: For all you can be sure, I too have the sensibility of a bedpan, and I may have driven a graphite stiletto through the heart of Farrell’s book. Any editor can summon up some self-congratulatory story.) When working at that second part of their general assignment—the editing of the script—editors are always in the ‘backroom.’ And I agree with Perkins: That’s where we should be. I should add that my efforts did not take chaos and turn it into a great book. I never worked harder in my life, but all I managed was to make it publishable. That too is a comment on the editor’s lot.

—Thomas McCormack

Transcribed by me from pages 82–3 of my paperback copy of The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (second edition, revised), ©2006, Paul Dry Books, Inc. (Philadelphia).

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