In the wake of the most recent fake-memoir scandals, many people have asked why editors don’t do a better job of fact-checking potential frauds. Well, maybe it’s because (invoking Shatner here) those editors. Don’t. In fact. Exist!

Galleycat has done an excellent job of exposing this unethical practice.

But, one reader assures me, sending out rejection letters under false names, in the hopes of avoiding long, tiresome correspondence with would-be writers, really has happened - at at least one company. “I worked at a publishing house which used a ‘fake’ contact for slush submissions and rejections,” this woman emails. “The name used was the maiden name of the deceased mother of one of the editors.”

OK, so maybe it’s not really all that unethical–and, in some instances, it’s even kind of understandable. But still, shouldn’t publishing houses be setting a good example for their would-be authors?

Nicholson Baker, a print guy if there ever was one (Double Fold, 2001), falls in love with something that only lives on servers (”The Charms of Wikipedia,” TNYRB).

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals - up to a point - the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say “Hi”

The End.

The electronic world, it turns out, abets his love of all things archival.

I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton’s manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes “extremist deletion.” And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn’t be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

…and other ways that documentary editors use to determine authors’ intent. On Slate, more on the Robert Frost problem (”The Impossible Art of Deciphering Manuscripts,” by Megan Marshall):

One such reference seems to have tripped up Robert Faggen. A passage in which Frost alluded to fifth-century Mediterranean voyager Hanno the Carthaginian came out as “Hannof the Carlingian.” Context is all. That same sentence mentioned the “coast of West Africa.” Carthage, at least, should have popped to mind. In another passage, in which Frost compared a poet’s early drafts to a baseball player’s trial swings before stepping up to the plate, Faggen offered the phrase “picktie exhibition.” Yes, “public” was hard to read - but even a “pickle” exhibition would have made more sense. When you’re reduced to “counting humps,” as documentary editors refer to those moments of despair when they find themselves decoding words letter by letter, you know you’re in trouble. And, as always, the more complete read-throughs, the better. Faggen actually corrected himself on Hanno farther down on the same page, and got the annotation right. But the first mistaken reference remained for critics to pounce on.

Be sure to watch the slide show. It’ll curl your hair.

I’m a little slow getting around to this story (”Editing of Frost Notebooks in Dispute,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times), but I can’t resist it: last January, Harvard University Press published The Notebooks of Robert Frost, by Robert Faggen (not to be confused with Mr. Dickens’ Mr. Fagin). The hefty tome, which provided transcriptions of 47 notebooks and various loose pages, was widely praised by Frostians (Frovians? Frosties?).

Last October, however, the excellently named James Sitar, in an essay in Essays and Criticism (where else, really?), declared that, ahem, Mr. Faggen couldn’t read Mr. Frost’s writing.

(Last January? October? I’m not that late compared to the Times.)

Mr. Faggen defended himself.

In a forthcoming review to be published in March in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, an American poetry journal, Mr. Logan writes: "Obliged though readers must be for this unknown Frost, the transcription is a scandal. To read this volume is to believe that Frost was a dyslexic and deranged speller, that his brisk notes frequently made no sense, that he often traded the expected word for some fanciful or perverse alternative."

But Mr. Faggen suggests that Frost, who died in 1963, did often employ "odd spellings" in the notebooks. He disputed one reading by Mr. Logan in which he accused Mr. Faggen of failing to make note of a biblical reference when he had done so. In Mr. Faggen’s version a phrase from the notebooks is rendered as "Sog Magog Mempleremagog," and is footnoted for its source in the Book of Ezekiel. Mr. Logan regards the phrase as a misreading because "Gog and Magog" are the actual Biblical names and because there is a real lake between Vermont and Quebec that is spelled Memphremagog. Mr. Faggen argues that Frost changed the "G" in "Gog" to an "S" as a jest about the lake and says the misspelled lake’s name is what Frost wrote.

Jay Parini provides, alliteratively enough, perspective.

Jay Parini, a Frost scholar and professor at Middlebury College, also described the difficulty of reading Frost’s "chicken scrawlish" handwriting. But he added that niggling over the exact wording in notebooks Frost never intended for public consumption did not seem as important as, say, settling punctuation disputes about the published poems. The notebooks, Mr. Parini said, are "fun to read, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter anything about Robert Frost."

The Associated Press (”Dispute over long-buried Stegner book,” by Lisa Leff) has another story about editing and disputed versions, this time involving Pulitzer Prize-winner Wallace Stegner:

SAN FRANCISCO - A small publishing house did not have to dig far to unearth a long-buried book Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Wallace Stegner wrote a half-century ago about oil exploration in the Middle East. 

The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.

For reasons that now are a subject of dispute between Barger and the late author’s son, however, an edited version of Stegner’s manuscript was not published in the Arabian American Oil Co.’s in-house magazine until 1967. It was not available to the public until Vista, Calif.-based Selwa put out a trade edition of “Discovery!” in September without permission from Stegner’s estate.

“His particular version of the manuscript was one that was cut up by one of their PR people. It was never put up for sale,” said Carl Brandt, Stegner’s longtime literary agent. “If Wally had wanted to publish that edition, he would have been on the phone with me saying, ‘Let’s go, and get Viking to do it.’”

(Apropos of nothing, what happened to the days when the AP summarized the story in the first paragraph?)

Many writers have paid some bills with a corporate history or two, and there’s no shame in that. But one wonders whether the work in question is an important enough part of Stegner’s legacy to even be worth fighting over. These things are, in some regards, extended advertisements–I’d be surprised if most of them weren’t owned in perpetuity by the company that commissioned them. But Stegner was certainly writer enough to turn even an advertisement into art, so maybe that’s what he did.

In the Guardian (”What a carve-up“), James Campbell uses the flap over Tess Gallagher’s plans to publish a retitled, reedited version of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981) as a jumping-off point to examine the larger phenomenon of “restored” texts. There’s some thought-provoking stuff about Carver (who “now belongs in the peculiar community of writers who have published more after death than before”)…

But then, if Gallagher and Stull get their way, and the formerly stultified L. D. is permitted to shout and repeat himself, where stands the reputation of Carver, one of the most influential writers of American prose of the past quarter-century? In later books, such as Cathedral, Carver appeared to be progressing to a more ample style - a development not welcomed by all his readers. According to Stull, “the ostensible transformation of Raymond Carver from minimalist to humanist was not a change of head or heart. It was a change of hands.” For better or worse, it seems, the firm must be restored to its original proprietorship: not Carver & Lish Ltd; just Raymond Carver Enterprises.

…followed by a brief discussion of two other examples, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Richard Wright’s Native Son. (The war over War and Peace, while not attacked, is also a worthy target.)

Not to spoil the ending, but Campbell’s conclusion kind of reminds me of some of the reactions to J. K. Rowling’s recent revelations about her characters’ secret lives.

We can only wait to see if they succeed in reaching an accommodation with Knopf (my guess is that they will). But however altruistic they may be, there is no escaping the fact that their mission to rescue L. D. from his abduction by Gordon Lish will bring about his demise in the place where he really lives: the imagination of readers.

Gordon Lish may have been a ruthless editor, but he was also a ruthless writer, according to Gerald Howard: the man who took an axe to Raymond Carver’s prose allowed no whittling of his own. At least, that’s what would have happened had Howard tried. From Slate (”I Was Gordon Lish’s Editor“):

However, I can tell you this with complete certainty: Had I had any bright editorial ideas, Lish would have summarily rejected them. His control-freak obsessiveness redoubled itself when it came to his own work…He wanted what he wanted, and that was that. He was a living no-editing zone. Except, of course, when it came to his author’s work; then out came the pick and the shovel and the scalpel and the drill.

(I don’t mean the past tense to make it sound as if Lish is dead; I believe he has retired.)

Also, on Galleycat, an anonymous editor complains not of not being allowed to do his work but perhaps working too much (”Your Sobering Industry Evaluation for the Morning“).

“As an editor,” this reader continues, “I can tell you that my occupation does not have a bright future and working in publishing is not for the sane…

Also, the pay is poor (”An Editor’s Angstful Cry Draws Mixed Reactions“). Who’s to blame? Agents. Sheesh. Hang in there, it’s almost Friday.