namelos means "nameless." We believe that editors should be heard (by the author) and not seen (by the public). What goes on between an author and an editor in their work on a project is intimate and private. Below is the credo we have honored for over thirty years.

CALL ME EDITOR

I once received a list of first lines of famous novels. It came from an author at a critical time in our work on her manuscript. I'd like you to read a few of them.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a good manuscript must be in want of an editor. Pride and Prejudice

Here's another:

Happy editors are all alike; every unhappy editor is unhappy in his own way. Anna Karenina

And another:

Here is my book, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of its spine, behind my editor. Winnie-the-Pooh

And finally:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a gigantic editor. The Metamorphosis

I have often pondered what it was she was trying to tell me. I would like to address the business of being an editor in a less cryptic manner. I will continue to speak in the words of others—more faithfully—because it gets to the heart of the matter.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his essays, has a great deal to say that is worth listening to. In 1879, he wrote: "To explain in words takes time and a just and patient hearing . . . Patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely." Stevenson's observation that patience and justice are scarce is, perhaps, more true now than it was then.

An editor’s job is to give writers a "just and patient hearing." Stevenson also said, "The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish."

An editor's role is to be the ideal reader, just and patient. An editor's skill involves communicating to an author the meaning a reader takes from a manuscript, and the precise way the manuscript affects the reader. The author must then assess how well he has written and revise accordingly. I have observed a prevalent misconception that editors "fix" manuscripts. This not what an editor does, and to the extent that it is practiced, it is a violation of a fundamental and essential aspect of the author-editor relationship. I’ll explain.

There are no new stories to be told, only new ways of telling the old ones. All that an author has to offer is a unique vision, expressed in a unique telling—what I will call "voice." To this end, an author must be totally self-indulgent, find his own voice. An editor must be self-effacing. If he is to give a just hearing, he must humble himself to the manuscript, put aside his own vision, deny his own voice, and receive what the manuscript has to offer. Both efforts require discipline and concentration. As a result, the manuscript assumes absolute authority, and that is as it should be.

What then must an author strive to achieve and an editor look for? The same thing. Marianne Moore states it well; discussing "Poetry"—her rubric for her art—she says,

One discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must . . .

The genuine. What is genuine? For me it is signaled by a compulsion to read on, to turn pages, not only from the need to find out what happens, but to hear and see in a new way. This revelation—and I use the word precisely—is what I seek in manuscripts. It is what distinguishes the genuine from the fake, the quick from the dead. It is the telling, the voice.

Voice is most easily isolated and identified in lyric poetry, in lines and phrases embossed on your consciousness by their uniqueness. The concentration of poetry intensifies voice. But voice is equally crucial—albeit less evident—in prose: fiction and nonfiction. Read Ernst Pawel's Nightmare of Reason, Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star, or John McPhee's Coming into the Country and compare them to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entries on Kafka, General Custer, and Alaska. You will understand the difference. That's voice. Listen to Paula Fox, Virginia Hamilton, or Natalie Babbitt. You will be compelled to hear more. That's voice.

These are daunting models--intimidating, to say the least. Listen to T. S. Eliot at the end of his life "trying to learn to use words," and take comfort.

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
. . . And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

In the dialogue that takes place among an author, an editor, and a manuscript, there is no competition.

Here's Stevenson again:

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years . . . All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.

Well, the mechanical aspects of publishing distract us all too often from what Stevenson calls "the note of that time-devouring nightingale."

Still, there are so many new voices out there. Voices crying in the wilderness, perhaps, but editors are meant to be explorers. Our frontier is the thousands of manuscripts that arrive in the mail. Aspiring writers wonder why editors are reluctant to meet with them, talk with them about the manuscripts they want to submit, "put a face to the name." From what I've said, our priority is obvious: the manuscript must speak for itself.

In the course of an editor’s career, he will read millions of words, hundreds of thousands of pages. But we are trained to hear the genuine. As Hart Crane wrote in his poem "Chaplinesque":

We have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can.
And through all sound of gaiety and quest,
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Despite the current emphasis on the business of publishing—the how-to—it is important not to forget the why. Erik Haugaard, a brilliant and underappreciated writer, explained what drives him precisely: "I write my books because birds must sing, as dogs are meant to bark."

I've spoken at length of singing. In conclusion, let me speak of barking. Lest you think I've forgotten my subject, I'll relate a formative experience I had as a novice. I was wielding my harpoon—call me editor, remember—against a manuscript by an author whose name you would know. I had deleted some exposition from a paragraph and written a note in the margin: "Is this absolutely necessary?" When the manuscript came back from the author, the deletion was reinstated, my note roughly crossed out, and the following note written to me: "No, it is not absolutely necessary. Nothing is absolutely necessary, but texture is everything. Shithead." Those words still ring in my ears.

I am not a writer. I am an editor. So I have shamelessly, but appropriately, addressed you in the voices of writers I admire. On their behalf and mine, I thank you for a just and patient hearing.

Stephen Roxburgh

April 24, 1988