What CEs should read for edification.

My wife just finished reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I didn’t know anyone still did that. I tried, years ago, which is how she came to find it on my bookshelf. Previous to that, I’d pointed her toward Buddenbrooks, which by then I had read twice and enjoyed, and it turned out so did she. But Magic Mountain is a whole other beast. That leads to the question of what kind of writing a CE would benefit most from reading, since it isn’t The Magic Mountain, though one could make a case for Buddenbrooks.

I’m one of quite a few who would say, first, George Orwell, especially his essays and long-form non-fiction. That’s hardly going out on a limb – he’s a famously lucid writer. Animal Farm and 1984 are political screeds in fiction form – there’s nothing wrong with that, but they don’t rise to the level of mastery, the way his non-fiction does. He has a gift for choosing the right word and putting it in exactly the right place. The communication, in that sense, is as close to perfect as anyone can approach. That’s my prejudice, to a degree – after all the time I’ve spent unkinking overcomplicated English, I get a lot of pleasure from reading authors whose writing I don’t have to fix under my breath as I go.

After Orwell, well, take your pick – there are plenty others, it’s just that Orwell is mine. That is, look for your own heroes and keep a special place on your shelf for them. Some of Robert Graves’s writing has, for me, the same magic as Orwell’s – I’m thinking mainly of his Great War memoir, Goodbye to All That, and his Claudius novels.

Too much elegance is a fault in a manuscript, no matter how competent the writer is. Writing should be no more elegant than the content requires, and most content requires very little elegance. Which brings to mind Elmore Leonard’s dictum that if a piece of prose sounds like writing, you’d best rewrite it. I wouldn’t go quite as far as that, but I understand why he would say it. It’s largely true.

There’s no correlation between excellent writing and an excellent book. Form and content can be surprisingly ill-connected. The cleanest mscript I ever worked on was a puzzle book. I didn’t find a single typo or a word out of place, but so what? – it was only a puzzle book. The filthiest mscript I ever worked on (recently – there were others almost as bad over the years) was a biography of an Eastern European journalist, translated from the Polish, six hundred pages of it. A fascinating guy who was world-renowned for the high-adventurous life he led. The problem was that the translator of the mscript was, to put it plainly – I’m always in favour of that – a gut-wrenching incompetent. The AE knew it (belatedly), the house knew it, and I knew it without having to be told (though I was warned). The mscript’s Polish author, who found the guy, obviously didn’t know it. I used every tool I had on that file, from a buzz saw up to a chisel and, beyond that, a dozen grades of sandpaper. I confess, that job got under my skin: it was a wonderful book that had been destroyed during transit to English. By the time I was done, there wasn’t a sentence or a word left of the original. Then when the proofs came in, the AE read it again and tweaked it in one or two places. Then I read the entire book again, word for word (which isn’t expected of a CE, but by then it was a labour of love) and caught a few more sentences to recast. It seems that the author had no idea how much effort everyone at the press had invested in salvaging the book, and when that became clear, for once in my career I asked for an acknowledgment. The other’s guy’s name was on the cover, which disgusted me, and I wanted my name somewhere in the book.