A boy has never wept … nor dashed a thousand kim.*

Let’s talk about powerhouse authors and their editors. Even if they published some of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century, these authors almost certainly hired editors. For example, consider E.L. Doctorow. I do not presume to know what went on between E.L. Doctorow, a literary titan, and his editor. But let’s look at some of the things that turned up in one of Doctorow’s masterpieces, Billy Bathgate, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Doctorow almost won the Pulitzer Prize for this book.

Billy Bathgate is about a teenager who joins the Dutch Schultz mob in Depression-era New York City. The book is written in stream-of-consciousness style, which is very difficult to pull off. In Chapter 1, Dutch Schultz abducted fellow mobster Bo Weinberg, and his girlfriend Lola, and took them by tugboat to the East River. Then, one of Schultz’s henchman tied Bo to a chair and put his feet in gradually hardening cement. And Schultz has Lola brought in, and addresses her:

“But be that as it may,” Mr. Schultz went on, “whoever you are you can see the trouble your Bo is in. Right, Bo? Show her how you can’t do certain things anymore in your life, Bo. Show her how the simplest thing, crossing your legs, scratching your nose, it can’t be done anymore by you. Oh yeah, he can scream, he can shout. But he can’t lift his foot, he can’t open his fly or unbuckle his belt, he can’t do much of anything, Miss Lola. Little by little he is taking leave of his life.”

That is a wonderful paragraph. I wish I’d written it, myself. But then comes the moment that the hero must walk into a restaurant where there has just been a bloody mass shooting, and the dead are people he has adopted as family:

I gimp my way to the back, turn, come down the short corridor of the visitation, and before I look into the room oh the air is bad burned air and humid with blood, I don’t want to see this vealy disaster…

What is the short corridor of the visitation? I promise you, reading the book won’t help you understand. But oh, the phrase vealy disaster! Can’t you smell the room yourself?

This sentence has even more problems:

This all went on over an hour or more, and then, it must have been about eleven o’clock, I did hear the real gunshot, there is no question what it is when it is that, the report is definitive, it caroms through the chambers of the ear, and when its echoes died away I heard the silence of the sudden subtraction from the universe of a life…

Oh, dear. And it does not help this passage much that the shooting victim isn’t dead yet on the next page.

Finally, chapter twenty:

I have told the truth of what I have told in the words and the truth of what I have not told which resides in the words.

I need a flowchart. Every time I read that sentence, it gives me a headache. If you go back and read it again, you will have to avoid operating heavy machinery for the rest of the day.

A good editor improves a work, but to the reader, the editor’s presence is unobtrusive. The writer’s voice remains. But whether to leave in the portions that are boldfaced, as I have highlighted here, is a fair discussion to have with an editor, even if the writer is as great as E.L. Doctorow. An editor can either suggest removing difficult or undesirable language or recommend revision. This is one of the many differences between a friend looking over your work and giving it over to a trained editor.

Also, read the book. It’s riveting.

____________________

* “Transcript of Death Bed Statements Made By Schultz,” New York Times, October 26, 1935. It’s worth getting a hold of the entire statement. You can get it from the archive of the New York Times.