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Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing
Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing
Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing
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Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing

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Craig Munro began his blue-pencil adventures at the University of Queensland Press in 1971. Over the next thirty years, he became friend, counsellor, and occasionally foil to some of the country’s leading authors.

From a champagne-fuelled telegram to Patrick White to a run-in with Xavier Herbert, Craig’s editorial life was punctuated by encounters with remarkable writers. Championing the early works of Peter Carey, right up to the Booker–winning True History of the Kelly Gang, Craig also edited David Malouf’s first novel, Johnno. He was teased by Murray Bail’s tantalising mind games, discovered a passion for Olga Masters’ fiction, and helped create UQP’s acclaimed Indigenous list.

Blending book history with memoir, Under Cover explores the invisible art of editing from an insider’s perspective. Told with warmth and humour, it is a wise, entertaining tour of three audacious, intoxicating, and ultimately inspiring decades of publishing mayhem.

PRAISE FOR CRAIG MUNRO

‘[A] relaxed, engaging memoir about being the man with the blue pencil, which should open the eyes of people interested in the publishing business and entertain anyone who picks it up … A charming breeze of a book … [Munro] has a born raconteur's ear for anecdote.’ The Sunday Age

‘[The early 70s to the late 90s] was a fascinating time in Australia's cultural history, and Munro's account is a warm and engrossing one. If you have the slightest interest in writing and publishing you'll love this book — just as I did.’ Readings

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 26, 2015
ISBN9781925307092
Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing
Author

Craig Munro

Craig Munro is an award-winning biographer and the founding chair of the Queensland Writers Centre. As the inaugural fiction editor at the University of Queensland Press, and later as publishing manager, he worked with many emerging writers who have since become celebrated authors. Craig won the Barbara Ramsden Award for editing in 1985, and studied book publishing in Canada and the United States on a Churchill Fellowship in 1991. His previous books include Paper Empires: a history of the book in Australia, 1946–2005 (co-edited with Robyn Sheahan-Bright) and Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing.

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    Under Cover - Craig Munro

    UNDER COVER

    Craig Munro is an award-winning biographer, and the founding chair of the Queensland Writers Centre. As the inaugural fiction editor at the University of Queensland Press, and later as publishing manager, he worked with many emerging writers who have since become celebrated authors. Craig won the Barbara Ramsden Award for editing in 1985, and studied book publishing in Canada and the United States on a Churchill Fellowship in 1991. His previous books include Wild Man of Letters: the story of P.R. Stephensen and Paper Empires: a history of the book in Australia, 1946–2005 (co-edited with Robyn Sheahan-Bright). Since 2012 he has been a judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

    Scribe Publications

    18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

    2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

    First published by Scribe 2015

    Copyright © Craig Munro 2015

    All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

    Excerpt from Samuel Wagan Watson’s unpublished poem, ‘Writer for the Red Dust’ is reproduced with kind permission of the author.

    Speedy typewriter drawing courtesy of David Mackintosh

    National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

    Munro, Craig, 1950- author.

    Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing / Craig Munro.

    1. Book editors–Australia–Anecdotes. 2. Manuscripts–Editing–Anecdotes. 3. Developmental editing–Anecdotes. 4. Publisher and publishing–Australia–Anecdotes.

    070.5092

    9781925106756 (paperback)

    9781925307092 (e-book)

    scribepublications.com.au

    scribepublications.co.uk

    To Rosie Fitzgibbon

    (1947–2012)

    Contents

    Other People’s Words (a preamble)

    South to the Sub Culture

    Holding the Brisbane Line

    Style versus Substance

    A Novel Apprenticeship

    Titles & Typos

    Poor Fellow My Editor

    Artist in Exile

    Raising Hell

    Piano Man

    Inside the Human Heart

    Illywhackery

    Family Picnic

    Editors at Large

    Black Words, White Page

    A Pair of Aces

    True History of the UQP Gang

    Word by Word

    Further Reading

    Acknowledgements

    ‘It is essential that author and editor are capable of being temperamentally in tune, even of becoming friends: to be otherwise would be damaging or disastrous.’

    Beatrice Davis

    Other People’s Words

    (a preamble)

    In a 1967 Paris Review interview, Vladimir Nabokov revealed his disdain for any hint of editorial interference. ‘By editor I suppose you mean proofreader,’ he sniffed. ‘Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor — which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to make suggestions, which I countered with a thunderous stet!

    Witty intransigence on this scale is all too rare nowadays. I have, however, known resistant authors who, on being handed an advance copy of their book, suddenly become seized with the desire to make changes to the text. At the other extreme are those requiring constant reassurance and a high level of emotional support. With fiction and memoir in particular, editors engage not only with other people’s words, but also with their lives. Such relationships are complex, alarmingly interactive, and hidden from public scrutiny by an underworld-style code of silence.

    As undercover agents, editors find it difficult, if not impossible, to explain what we do, even to friends and family. When questioned at parties, I have sometimes invented a less slippery vocation — once going so far as to masquerade as a panel beater in order to avoid explaining how a wordsmith might straighten out a book-length manuscript for publication.

    Melbourne editor Mandy Brett, who has written about book editing’s ‘cult of secrecy’, also describes it as a ‘crazy’ occupation and an intense ‘affair-of-the-mind’ with a writer. In Edward St Aubyn’s satirical novel Lost for Words, his fictional editor derives pleasure from something as simple as ‘two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two’, or ‘the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment’s reflection’. Such editorial intervention gives ‘the appearance of ease to the greatest difficulty’, and brings ‘clarity to tangled and obscure ideas’.

    In the fabled high-rise publishing houses of Manhattan, the best views are enjoyed by editors exalted enough to be company vice-presidents. To them, no advance is ever too large and no manuscript too unwieldy. Their prize acquisitions are gently massaged and then passed down the line to copyeditors, who check grammar, spelling, and punctuation, while imposing a consistent template of ‘house style’.

    By contrast, suburban freelancers working on-screen are among the invisible heroes of Australian publishing, though they didn’t exist when I was an editorial apprentice in the early 1970s. I was taught to use a 2B pencil for suggested changes to the text, and a red pen for marking up house style. The pencil edit was an incentive for authors to revise. It also allowed them to judge whether an editor was in tune with their work.

    Having grown up on a postwar diet of British books and American comics, I worked as a cadet reporter and then as a fledgling book editor in Brisbane. Yet this transition from journalism to publishing was quite a culture shock. On a daily newspaper, the results of editorial effort were in print within a few hours, whereas books could take months — even years — to produce. It was also a surprise to find that book publishers and editors showed so much respect for writers: referred to as ‘authors’ rather than ‘reporters’ or ‘journos’.

    Book editors, I was to learn, were more like project managers than the paragraph carpenters I’d seen at work around a newspaper subs’ table. At the University of Queensland Press, I was given my own office, even as a trainee editor. And it didn’t take long for me to realise that editors not only work collaboratively with authors, but also must negotiate on their behalf with deadline-obsessed production, marketing, and sales managers. At every stage on a book’s journey, the editor is its shepherd, transforming raw manuscript keystrokes into an object of readerly desire.

    As a young fiction editor I developed a special interest in short-story collections, launching the careers of several writers, including Peter Carey, Murray Bail, and Olga Masters. Among my other authors were novelists David Malouf, Barbara Hanrahan, Roger McDonald, and Rodney Hall. Over the decades, I also edited a wide range of nonfiction, including memoirs and biographies, and was fortunate enough to work on those publishing projects that most interested me. My career as a book-builder has been a lifelong adventure, and one that happily coincided with the reinvigoration of Australian literature in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

    One of the finest exponents of the editing craft was Maxwell Perkins, who worked with authors as demanding as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. ‘A publisher is blamed if a book fails and ignored if it proves a success,’ Perkins was fond of quoting to his editorial acolytes at the august New York publishing house of Charles Scribner’s Sons. ‘The job of an editor,’ he assured them, ‘is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating, and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world.’

    South to the Sub Culture

    The most unusual book I ever commissioned was an illustrated anthology — Ferretabilia: life and times of Nation Review. Published in 1993, this was Richard Walsh’s homage to his irreverent and provocative 1970s weekly, whose mascot was a ferret. (‘Lean and nosey like a ferret’ was the paper’s feral motto.) Nation Review had featured the satirical skills of Richard Beckett, Mungo MacCallum, and Bob Ellis, along with savage cartoons by Patrick Cook and the irresistible whimsy of Michael Leunig’s linework.

    During the 1970s it was the only paper I read avidly every week. When I was, for a time, the University of Queensland Press audiovisual editor, I approached Richard to negotiate the rights to microfilm the paper. In this film format it became a library ‘bestseller’, as their paper copies had been plundered by fans souveniring cartoons and personal ‘D-Notices’ (from the ‘Dalliance’ column): ‘Disillusioned with dope and drink, damsel desiring enlightenment through yoga …’

    Ten years later, I approached Richard again, this time asking him to consider two book projects for UQP: a memoir of his media adventures, beginning with OZ magazine in the 1960s; and a larger-format book collecting together the best of The Review and its offspring, Nation Review.

    Richard had run the country’s largest publishing house, Angus & Robertson, since 1972, travelling once a week to Melbourne to edit Nation Review. By 1987, he was a magazine publisher for Kerry Packer’s lucrative Australian Consolidated Press stable, looking after dozens of titles. I visited Richard that year at his ACP offices near Hyde Park in Sydney to pitch both the memoir and the anthology idea. Witty and hyperactive, he inhabited two adjoining offices, both piled high with paperwork. While I was with him, we were continually interrupted as first one and then another of his editors — from The Bulletin or Women’s Weekly, Wheels or Rugby League Week — came rushing in to show him magazine covers.

    Though wary of the memoir idea, Richard showed great enthusiasm for a volume of ‘ferretabilia’. Yet as he was Australia’s highest paid, and possibly busiest, publishing executive, his work on the book was delayed for several years. Finally, in a production blitzkrieg, he organised the page design and cleared the many permissions with his contributor-friends. But just before the book went to press, Richard phoned to tell me we’d have to pull the four pages of material by Germaine Greer. As there was no time to repaginate, Richard added in bold italics at the bottom of page 83 the following flourish: ‘Because of the very late removal of Germaine’s pieces from this anthology, keen readers will notice the absence of pages 84–87 — an idiosyncrasy well in keeping with the best improvisations of the Ferret’s heyday.’

    We sold more than 6000 copies of a wildly ambitious 20,000 print-run of Ferretabilia, largely due to the continuing appeal of those classic Cook and Leunig cartoons.

    As a long-time comics fan, I understood this appeal. Back when I was starting school in cyclone-ravaged North Queensland during the 1950s, comic strips were for me the highlight of the otherwise sober Mackay-based Daily Mercury.

    In that lush sugar town, my reading adventures began with Disney Golden Books, followed by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven series. Classic Comics — those precursors to graphic novels — introduced me to Robert Louis Stevenson and other nineteenth-century writers. Superhero comics were frowned upon in our house, so my Phantom addiction relied on neighbourhood friends with more freewheeling parents.

    In 1960, my family packed up and left the tropics, driving south for several days in our Austin. The Brisbane we encountered was suburban and hilly, its streets alive with trams and trolleybuses. We moved into a house among the trees at St Lucia, just up the hill from the university, and I often cycled around the campus with my friends, riding through the big concrete drainpipe running under the football ovals all the way to the river.

    Television had reached Brisbane just a few months before I did. In Mackay, our family’s Friday-night diversion had been a drive out on the harbour breakwater. Now we’d head for the bright lights of Brisbane city at week’s end. In Queen Street, we’d join other mute refugees from the old empire of radio, all standing on the footpath outside the electrical-goods emporium, watching the latest episode of Bonanza on a bank of silent black-and-white television sets.

    The world of books — a parallel universe spun with nothing but words — had already drawn me into its orbit. As my parents were not book-buyers, it didn’t take long to work my way through their collection, starting with the story of Tenzing and Hillary’s historic ascent of Everest, and Richard Pape’s prisoner-of-war bestseller Boldness Be My Friend. My mother developed an addiction to the blockbusters of James A. Michener, who’d been a New York publishing editor before serving in the South Pacific during the war. His first short-story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, had won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction before morphing into the musical South Pacific.

    My mother always took me along on her regular visits to our local library. Shaped like a flying saucer, the Toowong Library had come to earth just around the corner from the Regatta Hotel, which faced a broad reach of the Brisbane River. Along the polished timber walls of this spaceship were shelves and shelves of fiction hardbacks.

    Because my father had been a wartime flier, I began piloting my way through many of the hundred Biggles books of Captain W.E. Johns, before graduating to Alistair MacLean. Somewhere along the way I had an adolescent crush on the novels of Daphne du Maurier, and began to revel in Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. In grade eight, my class read Booran: a tale of early Australia by Maurice John Unwin. Published by Brisbane’s Jacaranda Press, Booran was a novel about first contact between two shipwrecked white men and Aboriginal people on the coast of what later became South East Queensland.

    For the 1963 August school holidays our family drove north again, to a ramshackle old house right on the beach, with metal shutters instead of windows. There was a surf ski but no surf, as we were in the lee of the Great Barrier Reef, and every time we paddled out on this plywood monster it would fill with water and begin to sink.

    Beach houses in the tropics always have reading matter, and this one was no exception. Already familiar with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books from my parents’ bookcase, I discovered on a shelf of our holiday house dozens of these edited-down novels. Every day, after the tide had receded far out in the shallow bay, I lay back in a hammock slung between palm trees and gorged myself on condensed fiction.

    The more I read, the more enthusiastic I became about writing as a creative pursuit. My first attempt was a flying story tapped out on a natty two-tone Italian typewriter, a fourteenth-birthday present. I also used this to produce a neighbourhood newspaper satirising some of the personalities in our street. Illustrated with my own cartoons, the enterprise drew inspiration from the iconoclastic American MAD magazine.

    By the time I reached my final year of school, writing was something I began to consider as a profession. Law was another career option I had discussed with my parents, but it soon became apparent that this would see me sentenced to interminable years of servitude as an articled clerk in some Dickensian city law firm. A more appealing prospect was applying for a journalism cadetship on The Courier-Mail. Though its senior staff were almost all Catholics, heaven was on my side because the paper’s editor — a wily old cuss always referred to as ‘T.C.’ — was, like me, a Presbyterian. My high distinction in English at a neanderthal boys school run by the Presbyterians and Methodists thus found favour with T.C.

    So, at the age of seventeen and only a few weeks out of school, I became a cub reporter on Brisbane’s answer to the Daily Planet. All of a sudden I was an apprentice adult, complete with a spiral-bound notebook, a shiny polyester suit, and a knitted woollen tie.

    The first thing I learned was that news stories were ‘inverted pyramids’, constructed of short sentences that were easy to subedit and even easier to consume in the insect-brief life of daily newsprint. Though working till midnight on a city newspaper was not conducive to early rising, I found myself racing out every morning to retrieve the rolled-up paper from the front lawn. Tearing it open, my feet wet from the dew on the grass, I’d search in vain for one of my stories.

    When some snippet of mine was eventually printed, I found that it had been rewritten. I knew the paper’s feared subeditors took a great many liberties with journalists’ copy, but especially with the fledgling efforts of the cadets. My first stories were invariably reduced to a few short sentences, as the chief-of-staff only assigned us the most inconsequential items. (He called me in one day during a prolonged rain spell and suggested I phone department stores to check whether the sales of umbrellas had spiked.)

    Within a few months I tired of writing formula news items, because there were so many restrictions on the stories that could be written and published. It was a low point for journalism, when self-censorship was second nature. Relying on century-old technology, The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail reinforced popular prejudices and backed the Vietnam War to the hilt. Their gutters of narrow type ran across the broadsheet page with news that rarely challenged readers. We cadets were all told to keep our stories simple because someone in the United States had calculated that the average reading age of the newspaper audience was twelve.

    Before long, after showing some aptitude for subbing the Saturday bowls results, I was inducted into the ranks of the subeditors myself. Straight away I felt at home among this tribe of misfits and punsters. Every evening we’d gather around the oblong subs’ table to receive our special sacraments: stories that had been typed (with two fingers) on ancient typewriters in the reporters’ room. News stories were made up of a number of brief paragraphs, or ‘pars’, each on its own small sheet of copy paper. Our first job was to dismember these stories, sometimes elevating the last paragraph to become the intro. Collectively, we subs despised those reporters with pretensions to be feature writers; they always wanted to put the punchline last. Any journalist who broke the ‘inverted pyramid’ law of news story construction incurred the chief sub’s everlasting scorn.

    Our subbing equipment in those days was basic: scissors, a glue pot, and a blue ballpoint pen. We worked flat-out for six hours, ramming discarded sheets of copy down onto our steel spikes. These spikes were weighted at the base with lead, and by the end of a shift they would be stuffed to the top with superfluous words. The thrill of rearranging other people’s stories, and impaling the rejected sheets of copy paper on my spike, became intoxicating. To be paid for this pleasure — $27 a week, in my case — was a bonus.

    It was also the sub’s job to add a snappy heading of an exact number of letters. We worked fast. Once, for a story about the new chairman of a national organisation, I innocently wrestled the two-line heading into ‘Psychiatrist Is Head Man’, and earned a rebuke from the paper’s editor-in-chief for ridiculing a distinguished medico. Another time, he complained about a headline of mine indicating that a Brisbane hospital had put babies in boxes on the floor, when the story itself made no mention of it. That crucial paragraph must have ended up on my spike.

    Towards midnight, I would take part in the newspaper’s most sacred ritual, on the concrete floor of the cavernous compositors’ room. Each page was set up in printer’s lead on the ‘stone’: the heavy trolley holding all the type and photographic plates. Each line was a separate ‘slug’, with the letters in mirror image. Stories were invariably too long to fit the allocated space, so it was my job to rapidly scan these over-length items and

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