I’m sad to report the death of Robert Gottlieb, a brilliant editor (at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker) with amazingly eclectic tastes and profound knowledge. His books on song lyrics and ballet are must-haves for anyone interested in the dance, jazz standards, show tunes et al. I was lucky enough to have him as a final reader and fact-checker (!) for my book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. He was a wonderful felllow. Below are some comments from writers he edited from a Paris Review feature. — DL
CYNTHIA OZICK:
I will tell you two stories, one about somebody else and one about myself. The somebody else is a close friend, also edited by Bob, who when writing a novel tends to find herself writing episodes or short stories. He said to her, Maybe that’s just how you write a novel: you have to write short stories, and then you put them together and that’s the novel. I, on the other hand, have begun novels and then abandoned them and they have become short stories. He said to me just the opposite: Maybe this is how you write short stories. You have to think you’re doing a novel, and then it turns out to be a short story.
CHARLES MCGRATH:
Bob has an uncanny knack for putting his finger on that one sentence, or that one paragraph, that somewhere in the back of your mind you knew wasn’t quite right but was close enough so that you decided to worry about it later. Then you forgot about it, or you convinced yourself that it was okay, because it was too much trouble to change. He always goes right to those places. It’s an instinct. He and I share a belief that if you take care of all the tiny problems in a piece, all that small attention will somehow make a big difference. Sometimes I think that’s just a touching faith of ours, and that, in fact, nobody ever notices whether, say, you use the same word twice in a paragraph. At other times, I’m convinced that the details are all that matter.
BOB GOTTLIEB:
Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That’s why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It’s the number one qualification. Because you could have all the editorial tools, but if you’re not a responsive reader you won’t sense where the problems lie. I am a reader. My life is reading. In fact, I was about forty years old when I had an amazing revelation—this is going to sound dumb—it suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life. I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t even known that I had thought it, it was so basic to me.
Oddly enough, I find that reading noneditorially is a very different experience for me. When I’m reading for pleasure I don’t tend to think as an editor, even with books I’ve edited. I remember, for instance, that when the finished book of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy came into the office I decided to reread it although it had only been three or four months since I’d read it in galleys. It was as if I were reading something I had never read before, because I was reading it simply for fun. Very rarely have I had the impulse to make changes in a book I’m just reading for pleasure or instruction. It’s only bad translations that drive me to madness and make me reach for a pencil.
CHARLES MCGRATH:
Bob is the best-read person I’ve ever met. I used to have a somewhat inflated notion of how well-read I was, but Bob makes me look like someone who’s just got his first library card. It’s because his ear is so well trained that he never falters in questions of tone.
BOB GOTTLIEB:
When you’re dealing with nonprofessional writers, you have to give them a tremendous amount of encouragement simply to convince them that they can write at all. Lauren Bacall is a perfect example. I knew she could write her own book, and I knew that she would never be satisfied if she had a ghostwriter, but she didn’t know how to do it, so finally we set up a system. She would come into the office every day and write in longhand on yellow pads, and every night little elves would type up what she had written during the day. She kept saying, Is it all right? and I would say, Yes, yes, it’s fine. You write it, I’ll edit it. And it was fine. Of course, it needed standard editorial work, but it was her book, it came right out of her. Betty Bacall is a bright Jewish girl from New York—she wasn’t going to write a bad book.
BOB GOTTLIEB:
The first thing writers want—and this sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world—is a quick response. Once they’ve finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting. I’m lucky, because I happen to be a very quick reader, so I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight. Besides, when I receive a manuscript from a writer I’ve been working with I’m consumed by curiosity to know what he or she has written. But easy or not, one’s first job is a swift and honest response—tempered, of course, by tact.
It took me some time, when I was a very young man, to grasp that a writer—even a mature, experienced one—could have made an emotional transference to me. But of course it makes sense: the editor gives or withholds approval, and even to a certain extent controls the purse strings. It’s a relationship fraught with difficulty, because it can lead to infantilizing and then to resentment. Somehow, to be helpful, an editor has to embody authority yet not become possessive or controlling.
from The Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1760/the-art-of-editing-no-1-robert-gottlieb
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-door-opens
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