I brainstorm, you brainstorm, but genius needs a good editor, or, an alternate universe wherein lived a good version of Jack Kerouac
Pretty much the main literary event of 2015 is something that a large amount of people think shouldn’t be happening: the publication of the long sat-upon Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. The reason said people think said event shouldn’t be happening is because it appears that it may only be happening because of Harper Lee’s dementia and its “discovery” by her lawyer two months after the death of her sister/caretaker.
But this is neither here nor there. Something I want to focus on is how several reviews of GSAW have said that the book is unspectacular, but stands as a point of interest since it contains the seeds of what was later to become the To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, had encouraged Lee to develop further into what she believed were the strongest points of her novel - Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch’s recollections of her childhood. And so it goes.
This is arguably the strongest result of editorship in literature. Editors are usually seen as people who trim away at the edges a little bit, who do a bit a of fact-checking, who correct any wayward typos - and this is when they’re not seen as bamboozling fuckups, as is in the interesting case of the Nabokov masterpiece Signs and Symbols - but sometimes, evidentially, they can do an incredible amount of good.
I then started wondering: who else could have truly benefited from a much better editor?
Jack Keroauc’s On The Road was initially rejected multiple times by publishers, and subsequently edited to be tighter and tighter (so much for the myth of it being the result of pure wild ecclesiastical beatific thought processed through a scroll as fast as it was remembered) before being published into the novel we all know and having violently varying opinions about. Yes, it announced a way of living and a counter-culture mindset to literature that has arguably heretofore been absent, and thus inspired the beats, the hippies, Bob Dylan, etc. etc. etc. onto the modern day. It also essentially invented the wanker hipster, and it’s practically worshipped by that unbearably pretentious guy on your MFA.
And it bored the hell out of me. Except for one niggling aspect of genius. One occasionally reoccurring faint spark of actual brilliance. Something that seemed to come about when he wrote “We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.” Something in the line “I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” Something Jack was digging into when he said “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities”. Something that got waylaid, that we were hideously distracted from with all this stuff about his boring, narcissistic, charmless friend Neal Cassidy and the inept jazz writing and the car stealing and the relentless droning quest for kicks.
At uni, a friend of mine lent me Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller to try change my mind about him. And it did. It solidified what I’d been thinking. Every story was, again, a pretentious self-loving rigmarole of meaningless movement across the States and back, up until one story titled Alone on a Mountaintop. “After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop (sic) the machine of ‘thinking’”, it begun. Keroauc goes on to tell us how he applied with the US Agricultural Department for a job as a fire lookout in the Mount Baker National Forest in the High Cascades of the ‘Great Northwest’. The advantage of this job, as he saw it, was the great loneliness it would entail, spending a whole season out on this mountain by himself. And that’s all the tale is. A melancholy calm between so much movement, a beautiful, American pastoral peacefulness that’s tender and slow and thoughtful, and though flawed (it spins off into too much student/recreational-drug-enthusiast philosophising around the end), you can see a Jack Kerouac who could really write something interesting, something profound, something that was insinuated in both the story and the collection’s title.
Like the editor who told Harper Lee to go and focus on Scout’s childhood, we needed an editor to sit Jack down and tell him that the beat thing was mainly a distraction from his real talent - as a great chronicler of human loneliness. As someone who really looked into the great, essential divide between everyone. As a mind desperate for connection in a body being thrown all over the place in a search for fun that never really translated to that much fun on the page. But so it goes.
I wonder what else we could have had with the right editor at the right time?
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