The Editor and His Identity Crisis
Can't I just switch from editing to writing without actually changing who I am?
I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about the differences between editing and writing. That’s probably not surprising. I’m a longtime editor who began his career more than 30 years ago as a fiction writer (then poet, then unhinged journal keeper, then ..). Now that I’m on a leave from work to write full time, it makes sense that I’d be occupied with this distinction. I’ve stepped, at least temporarily, from one vocation into another. I’ve been humbled by my lack of experience in this new role. I’m learning by trial and error how to do the work, and how to negotiate this reversal of roles, the transformation of myself from a professional who gives advice into novice who seeks it. As one friend put it recently, “You’ve been knocked back down to private.”
Or have I? Maybe I’ve been promoted. To an irrational five-star general madly pursuing an unjustified war.
One thing I’ve learned so far is patience — not so much with others but with myself. (Maybe this is the same patience I naturally extend to my writers.) I’ve had to let go of my desire to solve every problem or inconsistency in a text the moment it appears. I’m learning to sit with the mess of my own words — their erratic character, their frequent (sometimes intentional) incoherence — and to maintain a sort of persistence in the face of this uncertainty. In short, I’m trying to do the daily work of putting words on the page without freaking out (not as easy as it sounds). To stay with it, even when it seems pointless, for as many hours a day as I can manage, because I know deep down that it’s anything but pointless. Working like this requires something like faith, and faith is a trait one must cultivate at least partly beyond the realm of reason. Enforcing reason, though, is the realm of the editor, and up to this point, it’s what has paid the bills. Writing typically doesn’t.
Not long ago I came upon what I thought was a clever description of the two types or temperaments that might be involved in editing and writing in this stanza from the poem Under Which Lyre by W.H. Auden:
The sons of Hermes love to play And only do their best when they Are told they oughtn't; Apollo's children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important.
The sons of Hermes seemed to me very much like writers (somewhat naughty and childlike explorers, rule breakers), while Apollo’s children (dutiful, quietly satisfied with their dutiful institutional role, rule enforcers) sounded to me a lot like editors. I wasn’t sure that Auden intended any such analogy, so I did a little research and found, among other things, a 2018 column by my Times colleague Ross Douthat on the crisis of the humanities, in which Ross explains:
In the spring of 1946, W.H. Auden came to Harvard to read a poem to the university’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Titled “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” the poem envisioned a postwar world in which, the war-god Ares having quit the field, public life would be dominated by a renewed contest between “the sons of Hermes” and “Apollo’s children” — the motley humanists against the efficient technocrats, the aesthetes and poets and philosophers and theologians against the managers and scientists and financiers and bureaucrats.
I’m no Auden scholar, but it seems I was not so far off, after all.
There’s another level to be considered here, too, because I look at the distinctions (and similarities) between editing and writing not only in terms of the work itself but as a matter of identity. In the Auden passage we have two types from mythology — the children of each god share a number of qualities. Am I more one type than the other? I am an editor by trade, a child of Apollo. I know this is true because I get paid for it. It’s on the stubs. So what, if anything, might have to change for me to become a writer? Can I just temporarily switch roles? Do I need to somehow become a different person? Are these two people, editor and writer, a “team”? Are they two co-dependent parts of a single capitalist beast whose purpose is to produce published work? Is there, I’m now wondering, an actual fundamental difference between the character, temperament and world view of an editor and that of a writer?
I enjoy this kind of overthinking. It’s actually fun for me. Whether it’s good for me, or anyone else, though, I don’t know. I suspect editor-me might tell writer-me that relying on labels, categories, types or stereotypes is a mark of intellectual laziness. But editor-me is not here today.
I perhaps got hold of this idea of vocational identity or being when I began befriending young poets in graduate school at Brooklyn College 35 years ago. I was enrolled in the fiction writing program, but adjacent to us were the poets, who I found far more interesting and fun than my own classmates (they also happened to be Allen Ginsberg’s first workshop cohort there). So I just starting hanging out with them and they let me. I began then to understand what it meant, not just to write poetry, but to be a poet in the world. I saw this commitment expressed by these young poets — a few of whom became my lifelong friends and one who became my wife — and even more dramatically in the working poets Allen discussed and invited to the college to read (Amiri Baraka, John Wieners, Eileen Myles, Ann Waldman, et. al), and of course, in Allen himself. I saw an embodiment — in each poet different, but in all of them present — of passionate commitment to their vocation articulated not just on the page but in their bearing and intellect, in their actions and presence in the world.
Despite my suspicion of types and labels, I’m still thinking about this difference between doing the thing and being the thing. Last week I came upon a wonderful interview with the fiction writer Mark Leyner in a 2013 edition of The Paris Review (yes, that’s not a typo; it’s 10 years old, but still super-fresh), made even better by the fact that it was conducted by another terrific writer, Sam Lipsyte. (The interview link is here. It requires subscription but, really, why not? It’s the freaking Paris Review. With an unmatched 70-year archive. Are you just going wait until civilization collapses and lament when it’s not there anymore?)
These two — Leyner and Lipsyte — got each other completely. Their exchange, recorded in a cafe in Hoboken, had a sort of hyper-intelligent Abbot and Costello vibe to it. Or maybe Burns and Allen. And with the local characters and waitress coming and going during the exchange it took on the feel of a slightly absurdist play that turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and instructive things I’ve read in months. In it, Leyner says that “writing a new book involves a whole series of difficult decisions for me. Who’s writing it, first of all? I have to invent the writer of the book anew each time. Not the narrator. The writer.”
And then a little more from Leyner just because this is so good.
This machine needs to be engineered, something that, with all its alien hydraulics and algorithms, can think itself into existence. It needs to mangle me like a piece of farm machinery. It eats me alive. I’m a lump in the snake. I love doing this more than anything in the world, but it’s a sort of ghastly war waged against myself.
This is how it’s done: I bring myself to a pitch of crisis and hysteria, then perfect clarity and resolve about how to proceed, which is accompanied by the most exquisite euphoria and grandiosity, and which is then almost immediately followed by total abject disillusionment and self-loathing. And then it’s on to the next sentence! So the ideal book is an index of this whole tumultuous illness, this whole garish nightmare of being digested by a machine and then excreted on the side of the highway.
I’ve met a lot of editors, but I’m having a really hard time imagining one saying anything like this about his or her work.
At the very least, Leyner’s riff gave me confirmation that this notion is not just a product of my own bizarre neurosis — the obliteration of an old self to make way for the new one to write The Book, ostensibly because not writing The Book is not an option, because The Book has already burrowed into some unspecified part of you and begun feeding on you, growing and growing until you become the person required to write it. I know now that at least two of us have had this thought.
So far, I have not undergone the horror-cartoon version of creative immersion that Leyner describes here. But I am observing subtle changes in myself. I’ve developed a new subset of habits, rituals and tendencies. I have more self-discipline. I also have a new (or renewed) tolerance for illogic and occultism when it serves the work (the road to truth is inevitably paved with error). I am more forgiving of my own inconsistencies, more prone to clue-seeking and identifying messages or signs in happenstance, more open to the music of chance. And I have a faith in the inherent value of my work that borders on sheer mysticism.
In short, I’m just not the rational, unfailingly helpful creature I was two months ago. And I like it.
Brooklyn, Staten, Verrazano
Bridging it is Peter Catapano
Questions from the heart's valley to its highest hill
Wise enough to break down in Mechanicsville
Is suffering redemptive, do virtues have vices?
The writer and editor identity crisis
Faith and reason, Hermes and Apollo
Cat's stories lead and insights follow