This Day in Literary History (Edward Aswell, Book Editor and Book Character, Dies)

November 5, 1958—Edward Aswell, who performed major editorial surgery on works by Thomas Wolfe and Richard Wright, died at age 58.

Readers removed from the era of Aswell’s most intensive editing activity, from the mid-1930s to his death, might know him another context—as a very thinly veiled portrait in the opening chapter of William Styron’s 1979 masterpiece, Sophie’s Choice, when the writer’s stand-in as a raw Southern man in the Big Apple, Stingo, slaves away in a publishing house. (I first became aware of this by watching, around the time of the book’s publication, Dick Cavett’s PBS interview with Styron, when the novelist cheerfully admitted that he had attacked Aswell to the hilt. Had the editor been alive at this point, Styron might have been sued for libel.)

Stingo’s boss at McGraw-Hill publishing house is the kind of pompous jerk who makes hell for any English major so dedicated to Art, Culture and Literature (in other words, every man and woman, Jack and Jill of them) that he or she is ready to accept the most menial job in return for the “psychic income” of being in a meaningful job. The young man already senses that he’s living on borrowed time, so to speak, at the famous publishing house for having turned down Kon-Tiki, but he knows it for sure after an encounter with the new editor in chief.

This new boss, Stingo notes, had been brought in “to give to the place some much-needed tone”—undoubtedly the same reason why the real-life Edward Aswell was lured away from Harper & Brothers.

Styron anticipated a strategy used by Woody Allen’s TV producer-character in Hannah and Her Sisters to say exactly who someone is without actually saying it. An official from a TV network’s department of standards and practices upbraids him for his sketch related to child molestation. Allen’s Mickey can’t see the reason why: “We don’t name names! We say The Pope.”

Similarly, Stingo’s boss, we learn, was “chiefly known in the publishing business for his association with Thomas Wolfe, having become Wolfe’s editor after he left Scribner and Maxwell’s Perkins.” Lest we still be in doubt about who this could be, Stingo drops this hint: his new boss was someone “whom I secretly called the Weasel—a near-anagram of his actual surname.”

And Styron’s not through. In a hilarious confrontation, Stingo’s fellow-southerner takes the young man to task for not wearing a hat to work and for reading The New York Post. Weasel, we learn, was “a balding, unprepossessing little man in his late forties…cold, remote, humorless, with the swollen ego and unapproachable manner of a man who had fatuously overvalued his own accomplishments.”

Far be it from me to take issue with Styron, a writer so masterful that I am not even worthy to get within 10 feet of his typewriter. Still, this must be said: as a southerner, Aswell appears to have gotten along reasonably well with Richard Wright for the latter’s depiction of his region’s racism.

Still, let’s see if we can get beyond Styron’s memorable hit job and consider some of the decisions that affected the commercial prospects of the titles he edited. Let’s start with Richard Wright.

Editorial decisions made by Aswell, made for sales purposes, softened the impact of works still potentially incendiary for how they treated ideology, class and sex. Wright had made a reference in Native Son to Bigger Thomas’ “polishing my nightstick” (hint: the Seinfeldian equivalent of being “master of one’s domain”).The Book of the Month Club would accept the novel if Thomas would delete that. The author did.

A few years later, something even more occurred with the publication of Black Boy. The original manuscript, titled American Hunger, featured a long second section that explored Wright’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. Again, the Book of the Month Club wanted this dropped. Again, Thomas acceded.

It would be nearly another fifty years before the Library of America restored these cuts in its editions of Wright's work. The original editions were especially egregious in the case of American Hunger, which made it a fundamentally different book.

The problem with Wolfe—like everything else with that young giant—was a hundred times worse for Aswell. Wolfe had come to Harper & Brothers lured by Aswell’s offer and a chance to escape the long shadow of his first editor, Maxwell Perkins. The author eventually dropped a batch of materials he was recycling from Perkins, set off on a trip to the West—then died!

I don’t know if Aswell was inclined to imbibe the moonshine whiskey produced in abundance in his native Tennessee, but the sight of Wolfe’s manuscript —now without its author to consult—would have provided an entirely reasonable opportunity to start.

Aswell had bundled Wolfe’s leviathan of a manuscript when he received it. Presumably, whenever he felt the need to lug it around the office or take it home, he used a wheelbarrow to avoid getting a hernia.

This manuscript was so large—10 times the average novel—that Aswell was convinced deletions were in order. Technically, he was bound by the contract Wolfe signed, which required the author’s consent to any of these changes.

The way he got out of it was this: another clause stipulated that Wolfe had to submit a manuscript not to exceed 750,000 words. That gave Aswell authority to delete 250,000 words—which he did by combining scenes and characters and even adding his own interpolated sentences. He managed to carve out from all of this The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond.

Aswell’s heavy editing have left Wolfe and Wright scholars divided over how necessary the cuts were. The debate will go on for quite a while, I’m sure.