Cormac McCarthy's editor remembers a master of prose - The Washington Post
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Gary Fisketjon was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf from 1990 to 2019. For devoted readers, the death of a writer can spark a memory: Here was someone who seemed to speak to them directly, almost personally. And so has it been for me these recent days with Cormac McCarthy, who first entranced me in 1979 with “Suttree,” which immediately sent me racing back to his first three novels — all published by Random House (where I worked as an assistant) and edited by Albert Erskine, whose other enthusiasms included William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison and Malcolm Lowry.
Naturally, I idolized Albert and, in what was then a small company, came to know him even as he gradually retreated from office life. His last hurrah with Cormac was “Blood Meridian,” whose monumental shock and awe intensified my devotion to his work and provoked critical acclaim, though Cormac’s readership remained ludicrously tiny.
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My own contact with Cormac began when I brought “Suttree” back into print as a paperback. In these years, we met on occasion, significantly at Albert’s funeral, and forged the beginnings of a friendship that eventually resulted in my becoming his editor at Knopf. Before long, Cormac delivered the manuscript of “All the Pretty Horses,” which became a phenomenal success in 1992.
While I have always considered editing a strictly private conversation, I’ve lately found myself recalling the pleasures of my maiden voyage with Cormac. His mastery of not only a prose style like no other but also the particularities of every aspect of the lives he created before us on the page — the weather, the landscape, the occupations, the history behind it all. How the dialogue tells you vividly who these characters are. The sly or ribald comedy on so many pages, the utter horror on others. The relentless current that carries you through the story, the surprises and sorrows and comforts that sustain and expand it.
Simple things, as when one boy asks another, “Where’d you get a gun like this?” and the answer’s “At the gettin’ place.” Or how a father ends an unhappy conversation with his disgruntled son by glancing at a newspaper and saying, “How can Shirley Temple be getting divorced?” And narrative at once eloquent and matter of fact: “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Followed by “It’s fixin to come a goodn, said Rawlins.” Seeming juxtapositions that constitute a style of flexibility and grace.
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Editing’s just a more relentless and specific form of reading in which you read a book more closely than any sane person would ever think of doing. And an editor’s responsibility to the author is to note page by page everything that crosses one’s mind, pro or con, large or small, that might prove useful. Only the writers can make those calls, or come up with the best solutions to anything that also seems troublesome to them. Having made my various points, I never look back to see if any changes were made because I’m just an enthusiastic bystander.
Early on, I sensed that Cormac wasn’t accustomed to a persnickety style of line-editing, though his responses to it reflected good humor rather than aggravation. When I queried an exchange of dialogue that struck me as tin-eared? “It can’t be helped, it’s what they said.” When I wondered why “1872” was sometimes spelled out, contrary to the “Chicago Manual of Style,” he said such dates should always be spelled out, “though I’m sure this isn’t what you were looking for.”
But it sure as hell was, because consistency is my only concern when authors have carefully composed their own style manuals.
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Actual writing’s obviously something editors don’t see, and certainly Cormac never showed me anything that wasn’t complete. Yet once, early in “The Border Trilogy,” I’d begun editing when he grew unhappy with a later scene involving grievous violent injury and considerable medical detail — hardly unusual in his novels. He wrote and rewrote until a third draft (if memory serves) satisfied his concerns. I was fascinated to see how artfully he edited himself along the way.
Readers know his novels are replete with death and long discussions of its cost and meaning. Cormac had clearly given it plenty of thought — and laughed when I quoted Beckett’s dictum, “The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.” Of course, Cormac offered some dictums of his own, and one from “The Crossing” has spoken to me directly ever since I read it in manuscript, and it is certainly germane now. “Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.”
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Source: The Washington Post
