by Stefanie Peters
When asked what it looks like to be an editor at the nonprofit publisher Library of America, I often say two things: first, that my job is as much research as it is editing, and second (with tongue in cheek), that most of the writers I edit are dead. There have been a handful of exceptions to this, one of whom is Wendell Berry.
I’ve had the joy and honor of publishing two books with Wendell so far: Port William Novels & Stories: The Civil War to World War II, which was published in 2018, and Port William Novels & Stories: The Postwar Years, which will be published on July 16 ahead of Berry’s 90th birthday in August.
Library of America’s mission is to champion the best of American writing by publishing definitive, authoritative editions. Our authors include the most influential and essential writers from all periods and genres, and we publish them in heirloom-quality hardcover editions. Maybe you’ll recognize our black jackets, with the author’s name in calligraphy above a red, white, and blue stripe.
What do we mean by authoritative editions? Answering this question normally requires a good bit of textual research. For example, I recently edited a collection of William Faulkner’s short stories. Most of the stories were first published in magazines, and Faulkner’s original texts were edited either for a particular magazine’s house style or to shorten descriptive passages and remove sexually explicit material and obscenities. Sometimes an inattentive copyeditor introduced errors as well. Faulkner then published almost all his short stories in book collections, where he retained more editorial control. He often revised the stories for these collections. Even then, the books’ copyeditors were not always consistent with Faulkner’s preferences for spellings and punctuation. So I worked with the Faulkner scholar Theresa Towner to make sure that the texts we published in the Library of America editions were as close as possible to what Faulkner would have intended, correcting errors, obvious mistakes, and inconsistencies, sometimes with reference to Faulkner’s original typescripts, where they still exist. Authoritative texts are a way to honor the author’s intentions, and also to ensure that readers have access to the best version of a book available. James L. W. West III, the Fitzgerald scholar who edited The Great Gatsby for Library of America, said that the work of creating an authoritative text “can be likened to the stabilization, cleaning, and restoration of a work of art that has deteriorated over time.”
With a living author like Wendell Berry, the question of an authoritative text becomes a bit easier. We publish the version of the text that Wendell wants us to. But there still is a process to get there.
So to describe what I do in editing Wendell’s fiction, I want to back up because I am the last and least of the membership of Berry’s editors.
Wendell’s first reader and first editor, and the most important, is his wife, Tanya. Wendell famously doesn’t own a computer and writes his first drafts by hand, which he reads aloud to Tanya and then revises based on her initial feedback. Tanya then types the handwritten pages and makes further edits as she does so, marking her edits with checkmarks in the margins. Wendell has said that knowing he will read his first drafts aloud to her is intimidating and that he is always trying to impress her: “I haven’t worked alone in any sense. I’ve been by myself a lot, but I haven’t been alone. I’ve been accompanied by her, and I think our companionship has left me very willing to accept the companionship and criticism of other people.”
After the first few drafts with Tanya’s editing, Wendell’s drafts go to friends for critique, and then they go to Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint Press, who has been the editor and publisher of Wendell’s work for over fifty years now. Jack, whom I work with to create the Library of America editions of Wendell’s work, gets a xerox of the typescript draft in the mail, and his edits and Wendell’s revisions are sent back and forth in hardcopy and are also discussed on the phone. It’s a process that takes time—editing Wendell’s recent book The Need to be Whole took them over five years—but, Jack says, “it still provides what Wendell wants in this slow process of things: time to think. Time to reflect.”
The editing process doesn’t always end when the book is published. When Wendell’s first three novels were reissued by North Point and Counterpoint, Wendell took the opportunity to revise. In Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985), Port William was never named, and the original edition ended with a twenty-two-page chapter that was cut in 1985, in which Nathan slept with his neighbor’s wife and was run out of town. A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983) was cut by one-third when Wendell revised it; he called the original version “clumsy, overwritten, wasteful.” And when The Memory of Old Jack (1974, revised 1999) was reissued, Wendell added an author’s note that said “When I began to write about the people of the imagined community of Port William in 1955, I had no idea that I would still be writing about them in 1999. I had no plan, and I still don’t” and that owned up to “‘errors’ of genealogy and geography.”
Many of Wendell’s edits over the years fall under that category of “errors” of genealogy and geography. He once said that he wanted to be sure “the outhouse was always on the same side of the river.” In 2004, Wendell’s daughter Mary Berry was hired by Counterpoint to make notes about geography and genealogy that were used to create the map of Port William and the family trees that are published with all the Port William novels and stories, both by Counterpoint and Library of America. All the editions since then have strived for consistency in those details.
So when I come to edit Wendell’s books, I start by getting the most up-to-date versions of the texts from Jack. Then, I become something like a fact-checker. I send Wendell letters with lists of questions to create the explanatory endnotes that go in the back of the Library of America editions, as well as any typos or errors in the texts I either find or suspect. A few weeks later, I get back careful, handwritten explanations and sometimes further edits.
For example, for the volume of the postwar novels and stories that will be published this month, I wanted to know why, in The Memory of Old Jack, Jack Beechum hears the song “Wildwood Flower” at a dance in 1888, when the first recording I could find by that title was by the folk group the Carter Family in 1928. I was convinced I had the wrong song! But it turns out I caught Wendell in an anachronism, and he revised the sentence so that it doesn’t name the song. Wendell also sent me a handful of corrections, including changing the name of Wheeler Catlett’s boss in Remembering, changing Dorie Catlett’s death date in the family tree, and moving the location of the Stepstone Bridge on the map of Port William.
The United States, more than any other country in the world, is a nation founded on words and ideas, and it is important to preserve those words through careful textual and editorial work—especially at a time when words are often seen as unreliable, and unreliable texts proliferate on the internet. Maybe keeping “the outhouse always on the same side of the river” seems like a small thing, but I’m convinced that it makes a difference to be faithful to the details.
Stefanie Peters is an editor at Library of America in New York City, where she has worked with writers including Louisa May Alcott, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Edwards, Ernest Gaines, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Edith Wharton.
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