by Ryan Fosmark
“If you think it's so bad, why don't you edit it?”
These words launched Greil Marcus into a prolific literary career. In 1968, when he confronted cofounder and editor of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, about the “narrowness and vapidity” of the record reviews published by the magazine, Marcus was put in charge of improving them full-time.
While his contribution to the magazine inspired more flair and flavor in the reviews section, his direction lacked the wisdom of an experienced editor.
“What I brought was the arrogance of someone who thinks he knows better than his writers,” Marcus wrote in an e-mail interview. “I didn't know that my job was to bring out what the writer wanted to say; not to have what he or she had written turn into what I thought he or she should say.”
Eventually, Marcus learned the way of the invisible, silent editor: to improve the words under the byline for the sole sake of the writer’s work.
Still, the writer is not always right. When Paul McCartney released his first solo album, “McCartney,” in 1970, it was accompanied by a press release that affirmed his superiority over the rest of The Beatles. Marcus assigned the review to a top critic and later received the finished piece which completely ignored McCartney’s comments. It was strictly about the music.
“Jann Wenner argued with me for over three hours that this was evading crucial issues, and finally convinced me,” Marcus wrote. “Then I had the same argument, for about the same length of time, with the writer, who ultimately felt it was one of the best critical experiences of his life.”
Marcus, born in San Francisco in 1945, attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a degree in American Studies. He started writing for Rolling Stone in 1968 while he was in graduate school and was going to become a professor of political science. In 1972, when he was giving a seminar at Berkeley, Marcus discovered that teaching was not for him.
“By that time I realized that, as a professor, I'd only care about my own writing, and I'd had enough professors like that not to want to become one,” Marcus wrote.
So Marcus took to his strength as a writer and combined his passion for music and his cultural education to create a unique style. Critics now praise his seemingly effortless ability to break the boundaries that separate popular culture, politics, art, and history.
Marcus’ barrier-blending style has brought him in contact with numerous skilled and experienced editors. From the likes of Jann Wenner and others over his 42 professional years, he has learned, by example, how to refine copy.
“Jann's first principle of editing was to automatically cut the first and last paragraphs of a piece, which, especially for writers who don't know what they're doing, but often for the most experienced, too, is usually a good idea,” Marcus wrote.
“Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century,” a critique of Western culture through popular music and art, was Marcus’ sixth published book. The book was edited over the phone daily, line-by-line, for six months.
His 2006 release, “The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice,” examines the nation-shaping role of America’s great speakers in relation to other artists’ work. The editing of this 336-page collection of essays demonstrated the editor’s level of mastery that Marcus would later show.
“‘The Shape of Things to Come’ [is] the product of an all-seeing editor – someone who could always keep the whole book in mind while noticing the repetition of a phrase on Pages 45 and 217, and who knew what to leave out and what to leave in,” Marcus wrote.
Marcus exhibits his own creative and diligent editing technique in the 1987 collection “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung” which showcases the work of the late music critic, Lester Bangs. It was published five years after Bangs’ death. In the Introduction and Acknowledgments section of the book, Marcus notes the enormous amount of material that had to be sorted to produce such a cohesive collection. He also remarks on the difficulty of editing a deceased friend’s work:
[The collection] omits most of the three million, four million, five million words that were collected for the preparation of this book. But this book is not a record of what Lester Bangs wrote. It is, finally, my attempt to record what what he wrote was about, and what it was worth.
…as I neared the end of the book, as I squirmed over phrasing and choices between one piece and another, the urge to simply ring him up and ask what to do was physical.
Without being able to contact the writer, Marcus was forced to act alone in the editing process.
“I had to balance what I thought was necessary to get a point across [and making] the strongest case with what [Bangs] would have done in my place, and I made some wrong choices,” Marcus wrote.
Several books and countless edits later, Marcus began work on his largest project to date – a sort of editing marathon mixed with a symphonic literary composition. September 2009’s “A New Literary History of America” is a 1,128-page compendium of American literature coedited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. It succeeds two similar books published by Harvard Press: “A New History of French Literature” and “A New History of German Literature,” on which Marcus and Sollors also collaborated.
“We realized immediately . . . that this volume could not follow the idea of the previous two: a history of American literature,” Marcus wrote. “It could be a literary history – in terms of writing, speech, and all forms of representation – of the country itself.”
Marcus, Werner, and a ten-person editorial board began with a list of 400 possible entries which, over the course of two-days’ discussion, was brought to about 200. These individual pieces were then placed on a corresponding timeline reaching to the 16th century, to the birth of America.
“Every entry . . . was to be pegged to date when something happened – an event that left the landscape somehow changed, if only for one person,” Marcus wrote. “We took a bet that as the book took shape it would take the shape, or a shape, of the country.”
And every entry had to be proofread and fact-checked multiple times. Marcus, Sollors, and each member of the editorial board had 12 to 20 writers for which he or she was responsible during the four-year project. Julie Hagen, the copyeditor, did “real, fullbore” proofreading and fact-checking while the coeditors went through every piece, one at a time, often editing multiple times.
The result was what Wall Street Journal book critic Wes Davis called “a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear.”
In his review, Davis implied a sort of culmination of Marcus’ near-lifetime’s worth of work with the release of “A New Literary History of America.” Indeed, as Marcus has been connecting and blurring lines among different aspects of American culture in an effort to define it, it seems this large book is the most overarching and definitive product of that effort yet.
“The line of cultural tinkerers the book describes have been inventing this same America for centuries,” Davis wrote. “But the editors have drawn a new map for us and inscribed it boldly with the strange name America.”
Marcus was not so bold to propose such a case, but he stands by the editorial vision that accompanies such a grand exercise of macroediting – to collect over 200 essays in order to produce a cohesive idea, or, perhaps, shape. Still, with such an immense task, Marcus was focused on what he considers the most crucial editorial attitude.
“[The most important thing is] what the writer is trying to say and how to best get it across without sacrificing the writer's style, personality, passion, and heart,” Marcus wrote.
As a writer first, and an editor second, Marcus has been able to transplant an editor’s sensibilities into his own writing; by knowing the rules, he now knows how to break them. But more importantly, he knows why and when to break them.
“That, as a writer, is what I've learned from editing,” Marcus wrote. “But I learned a lot more from writing, and especially rereading [my] old pieces with complete horror and embarrassment. And ‘old pieces’ can mean from 40 years ago or last month.”
