“You could use an editor”
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Elias Canetti
11 min read
The author names Canetti alongside Burton as an exemplar that impertinent critics have never read, implying Canetti represents the kind of demanding, unconventional prose style the author values. Canetti's Nobel Prize-winning work on crowds and power offers rich context for understanding literary ambition outside mainstream conventions.
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The New Yorker
14 min read
The author contrasts his raw, unedited style with The New Yorker's famously polished editorial process, mentioning their diaeresis usage and 'glistening lacquered teak table' product. Understanding the magazine's legendary fact-checking and copy-editing traditions provides essential context for the author's critique of editorial culture.
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I can always tell I’m getting a rush of new subscribers when I begin hearing, yet again, a variety of comments that I have trained my veteran readers not to make. Most common among these is the suggestion that I, I, could use an editor.
Long-time readers will know the refrain. They will hear my voice in their head, saying: “Imagine an arrangement in which painters, even the most distinguished of them, were expected to tolerate some guy standing over their shoulder, a ‘painting editor’ let us call him, who constantly butts into the artist’s creative process to say, ‘You could maybe use a bit more ochre here? Perhaps some lighter brushstrokes there?’ That ‘editor’ would soon get a mouth full of Venetian turpentine!” Or perhaps my voice will be imploring them: “Did not Kant himself rouse us to be each our own lawgiver? But who could settle for law alone, when the only true autonomy is that of the stylist who is also his own stylegiver?”
In fact I do understand the legitimate need for editors in many situations. The New Yorker, for example, has earned its reputation by putting out, week after week and year after year, a literally perfect product — polished down, glistening, diaeretically consistent (though tellingly that august publication’s first appearance on Substack also featured what was surely its first-ever misuse of diaeresis, “toö”, intended, evidently, as a nod to the jocular spirit that, as their editorial board must have learned from an intern, enjoys total dominance on the internet). The resulting product is akin to a glistening lacquered teak table.
I myself have enjoyed magazine writing, as for example at Harper’s, where the editorial aim is something rather bumpier and knottier. I have always got on smoothly with my editors there, unlike, at, say, n+1, where for far too long I allowed irreconcilable differences of temperament and sensibility between me and that competent but rather narrow-focused Brooklyn-centric operation to convince me that I lacked the ability to express my thoughts in sufficiently clear language. What a waste of precious time
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