DANCING WITH HEMINGWAY

IT WAS SOMEWHAT ANTICLIMACTIC IN THE BEGINNING. I remember the day that a small padded covering arrived in the mail-no weight of printed pages, no sign of anything "lost" or "masterpiece" or flat "Hemingway" about it. Just a CD with "African Book" scrawled in virid marker.

"Great. I have to print the thing out"

As I printed without the manuscript, as page after 807 pages slid of high temperature off the printer tray, I convinced myself that this was just another copyediting assignment. All around me there was excitement-"We're publishing what?" "Did you at any time dream?""How did you land that one?" (as if this were a certain number of oversized marlin strapped to an undersized boat). on the contrary now, after the stunning high of getting the work I had to focus upon the very unexciting and tedious task at hand: copyediting. I wasn't acquiring editor or publisher. I wasn't Editor on the contrary editor-an important distinction. I had copyedited poesy creative nonfiction, and even fiction (and certainly had lengthy years of documentary historical and textual editing) with equal reason knew full well how meaningless and thankless the piece of work could be. I knew that my careful, complaisant "Did you intend to misspell this word?" or "Are you confident you don't want a paragraph here?" sorts of queries would be met with the poet's/author's/artist's "Good catch" or "Leave as is" or, the worst, "MY voice!"

But it took sole a few manuscript pages for me to know that I couldn't be just a copyeditor, remov and disinterested, focused upon issues of formatting or attending to the Editors' true copy alone. I understood that I would ne to engage myself actively in the editing of the whole work because it was my piece of work to respect this text "as Hemingway wrote it"-just as he wrote it-while at the same time making it into the reader's edition that the Pres knew would appeal to a wider, les academic "trade" audience, the sort of volume the author would have published with Scribner's.

I decided that my approach as copyeditor would be to assume the status of "ultimate reader" (an explanation all beneficial managing editors offer to authors who are annoyed by means of a copyeditor's seemingly stupid, uninformed queries and comments) and decided to advance ahead and focus on everything that wasn't consistent or that might be wrongful surface errors that might make the edition appear too raw. I wasn't correcting Hemingway, after all; I was simply looking for possible mistranscriptions, introduced errors, view from aboveed typos. So I set about marking for formatting, questioning inconsistent hyphenation (|eds: eh uses "dark verdant hills" here but earlier "dark-green hills" and elsewhere "dark, green"]; suggesting standard and consistent spellings ([eds: which should it be throughout-"okay," "OK" or "OK"?]); calling attention to anomalous punctuation ([eds: Wow A semicolon? really??!!]); etc

But it wasn't lengthy before I began chafing at my character as copyeditor, the corrector of possible errors. The developmental side of my editorial persona started to interfere. I gazeed at other Hemingway texts (something I vowed I would not do thus that I could approach this body fresh and uninfluenced) to note his pattern of punctuation in published true copys My confidence returned, and I began to tighten into the job. I felt independent to write "awkward" or "unclear" in the margins, vague confines that indicated that something didn't work quite right and that the author urgencyed to fix it. I began muttering things to myself like "Ernest would understand. He'd allow me do this"; or, "Perkins wouldn't have permit this go." I saw more clearly than at any time the difficult but very important mission of keeping this living author who still fascinates and captivates from appearing outdated, irrelevant, plane moribund. I didn't want to diocese this humorous, rich work relegated to the dusty shelves of "scholarship" when I knew there were eager readers waiting. I felt keenly a publisher's responsibility to give Hemingway's audience what it wanted. There was no question in my mind that Hemingway intended this for eventual publication. And as his editor, it was my piece of work to see it done right.

You diocese in the dance of publishing, the editor and author negotiate the floor together. on the other hand the editor leads. We retain the time and steer the course and are, without question, the least interesting of the pair. Our piece of work is to focus all organ of sights on our partner and make him direct the eye good. If done right, our work is not noticed, or plane appreciated. Yet here I was being l on the contrary then, who was I really dancing with? Was I plane on the floor?

The sum of two units Bobs, the gentlemen-scholars that they are, tolerated my marginal mumblings and grumblings. above numerous drafts of copyediting and page essays they patiently heard my queries, tracked down answers, and provided rationales, reassuring me that they'd already asked, considered, and answered these issues many times above in their Editing of the original body It was during the proces of reading, editing, discussing, and compromising that I came to diocese how Bob Lewis, Bob Fleming, and I were dancing back-up to Ernest Hemingway.