Stet: An Editor's Life

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully insightful!
Review: A fascinating look into old-world publishing and life in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. I really enjoyed all of the wonderful characters and details about the editorial process. Anthill, herself, is an engaging and enjoyable character!

Rating:
Summary: A new look at the good old days of publishing
Review: Anyone who has ever worked in newspapers or publishing will be familiar with 'stet', an age-old editor's term for 'let it stand', meaning disregard any and all changes.

This is an apt title for a memoir from one of London's best known and highly regarded editors, Dianna Athill, who spent 50 years massaging the words and assisting in the careers of many literary powerhouses, including V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Mordecai Richler as well as America's Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Kenneth Galbraith.

These feats are worth trumpeting but Athill, now in her 80s, chronicles her working life in an alluring, understated fashion: "All this book is, is the story of an old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it."

'Stet: an editor's life' does a lot more than that. It gives writers and readers a fresh insight into the challenges of publishing as well as the trade's peaks and troughs throughout the latter half of the 20th century, before the conglomerates dominated.

Athill founded with Andre Deutsch a publishing house in the early 1950s which bore his name. Despite its small size and meagre means, the house and Athill's reputation gained a great deal of attention in England, not only for the calibre of writers they attracted, but their publishing approach. One of the most controversial incidents occurred early on when the publishing house was presented with an injunction against publishing Norman Mailer's first book, 'The Naked and the Dead' because of its profane language.

Athill covers this and many other anecdotes about writers and the writing life in a rich, honest manner.

'Stet' will interest writers as well as avid readers. It gives them a new look at the old days of publishing, a time when dollars didn't rule over good literature.

-- Michael Meanwell, author of the critically-acclaimed 'The Enterprising Writer' and 'Writers on Writing'. For more book reviews and prescriptive articles for writers, visit www.enterprisingwriter.com

Rating:
Summary: A new look at the good old days of publishing
Review: Anyone who has ever worked in newspapers or publishing will be familiar with `stet', an age-old editor's term for `let it stand', meaning disregard any and all changes.

This is an apt title for a memoir from one of London's best known and highly regarded editors, Dianna Athill, who spent 50 years massaging the words and assisting in the careers of many literary powerhouses, including V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Mordecai Richler as well as America's Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Kenneth Galbraith.

These feats are worth trumpeting but Athill, now in her 80s, chronicles her working life in an alluring, understated fashion: "All this book is, is the story of an old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it."

`Stet: an editor's life' does a lot more than that. It gives writers and readers a fresh insight into the challenges of publishing as well as the trade's peaks and troughs throughout the latter half of the 20th century, before the conglomerates dominated.

Athill founded with Andre Deutsch a publishing house in the early 1950s which bore his name. Despite its small size and meagre means, the house and Athill's reputation gained a great deal of attention in England, not only for the calibre of writers they attracted, but their publishing approach. One of the most controversial incidents occurred early on when the publishing house was presented with an injunction against publishing Norman Mailer's first book, `The Naked and the Dead' because of its profane language.

Athill covers this and many other anecdotes about writers and the writing life in a rich, honest manner.

`Stet' will interest writers as well as avid readers. It gives them a new look at the old days of publishing, a time when dollars didn't rule over good literature.

-- Michael Meanwell, author of the critically-acclaimed 'The Enterprising Writer' and 'Writers on Writing'. For more book reviews and prescriptive articles for writers, visit www.enterprisingwriter.com

Rating:
Summary: The most delightful book I have read in the last year!
Review: Reading Stet is like taking a seminar in the art and craft of editing and then being invited to tea with the professor afterward. While reading it, I remembered that the relationships most responsible for shaping my professional life were those I enjoyed with professors who made themselves available outside of the classroom or office. I was particularly lucky over the course of college and graduate school to enjoy the company of three wise, interesting, experienced scholars who had spent what amounted to a whole lifetime in the "real world" before beginning their academic careers. That Athill's finely crafted memoir reminded me of my debt to Dr. A-, Mr. R-, and Mrs. S- is the highest recommendation I can give.

Consider this gem:

"[A]n editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but them must always be seen as a bonus). We must always remember that we are only midwives - if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own."

Or this (she is writing about the shrinking population of critical readers):

"Of course a lot of them still read; but progressively a smaller lot, and fewer and fewer can be bothered to dig into a book that offers any resistance. Although these people may seem stupid to us, they are no stupider than we are: they just enjoy different things."

Whether you edit church bulletin or your city's daily, whether you answer phones at a small press in the hopes of moving up or you cull gems from the slush pile, don't miss Athill's attempt to prevent her experience from being erased with her passing.

Rating:
Summary: Priceless
Review: Writing at a very young 83, Diana Athill says of her memoir, Stet, "Why am I going to write it? Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too - they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in me squeaks 'Oh no - let at least some of it be rescued!' It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that. By a long-established printer's convention, a copy editor wanting to rescue a deletion puts a row of dots under it and writes 'Stet' (let it stand) in the margin. This book is an attempt to 'Stet' some part of my experience in its original form...."

And if it hadn't been for that "instinct," some of the best published works of our time might never have seen the light of day. Athill spent 50 years in publishing, most of them at London's Andre Deutsch Limited, working with the likes of Jean Rhys, Norman Mailer, George Orwell, V.S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac and Peggy Guggenheim.

She has some great stories; among them, the plight Orwell faced in seeking a publisher for Animal Farm, and Mailer in the same situation due to the excessive use of profanity in his manuscript of The Naked and the Dead.

And she's funny, too. Of a co-worker, she explains, "Nick edited our nonfiction - not all of it, and not fast. He was such a stickler for correctness that he often had to be mopped-up after, when his treatment of someone's prose had been over-pedantic, or when his shock at a split infinitive had diverted his attention from some error of fact."

Athill has had a long affiliation with books and reading, starting with a grandmother who "read aloud so beautifully that we never tired of listening to her," in homes with walls lined with books; while at Christmas and birthdays, "80 percent of the presents we got were books."

She invites us along as she reflects on, and romanticizes every aspect of her life, including personal relationships: "Quite early in my career the image of a glass-bottomed boat came to me as an apt one for sex; a love-making relationship with a man offered chances to peer at what went on under his surface." Careerwise, she had to endure and learn how to deal with an overly critical boss - the same one who was so flustered upon meeting the Queen Mother that he curtsied instead of bowing - while her work often presented a daunting task.

Of one such occasion, she states, "The latter book was by a man who could not write. He had clumsily and laboriously put a great many words on paper because he happened to be obsessed by his subject. No one but a hungry young publisher building a list would have waded through his typescript, but having done so I realized that he knew everything it was possible to know about a significant and extraordinary event, and that his book would be a thoroughly respectable addition to our list if only it could be made readable." Of the editing process on this project, she says, "It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained...."

Athill has a wonderful way with words. Describing an early employer, she relates, "I remember Allan Wingate's first premises rather than its first books simply because the first books were so feeble that I blush for them."

Speaking of her craft - of editing books about everything from architecture to Tahiti - Athill says, "it can teach a lot about a subject unfamiliar to you, which you might not otherwise have approached," and "One was always moving from one kind of world into another, and I loved that."

And there were other rewards. Author Gitta Sereny wrote, "Diana Athill edited Into That Darkness. She has lent it - and me - her warmth, her intelligence, her literary fluency, and a quality of involvement I had little right to expect. I am grateful that she has become my friend."

But at the same time, not all of those she edited were always grateful. When it came to the gentleman mentioned earlier - the one who "could not write", and whose manuscript Athill had entirely reworked - upon publication of his book The Times Literary Supplement published a glowing review saying, among other things, that the book was "beautifully written." Athill: "The author promptly sent me a clipping of this review, pinned to a short note. 'How nice of him,' I thought, 'he's going to say thank you!' What he said in fact was: 'You will observe the comment about the writing which confirms what I have thought all along, that none of that fuss about it was necessary.'"

Diana Athill's book is a gem, as is she.