Book Review: Avid Reader
Robert Gottlieb's memoir shows an editor frequently in the right place at the right time.
A memoir of a book editor? How nerdy.
Robert Gottlieb’s 2016 memoir (he passed in 2023) got my attention when I discovered he had edited my fave novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant* by Anne Tyler. His contribution was simple yet mighty: Tyler had wanted to label the collection “stories”, and another editor felt it was not a novel and shouldn’t be so designated. Gottlieb said not to use either label, and let readers decide (he himself did see it as a novel). The lack of categorization made all the difference for the book to be, as he indicates, her break-through work. (*Full disclosure- the link is to my play adaptation, fully approved by Tyler and her people.)
He didn’t just edit Tyler’s oeuvre. He was the go-to guy for such titles as Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The original title was Catch 18. Gottlieb suggested changing the number. Who knows why it was, no pun intended, catchier? Other writers in his stable: Toni Morrison, John Le Carré, Nora Ephron, Mordecai Richler- and as the dust jacket finishes off the list- Miss Piggy.
Almost every human endeavour is one of collaboration and relationship. Gottlieb shows just how much publishing is exactly that, despite the fact that authorial creation is, in and of itself, singular. Gottlieb’s love for his work stemmed in no small part from being a voracious reader in his youth. By the time he was established in the field, as he put it, “... the act of publishing is essentially the act of making public one’s own enthusiasm.”
In addition to being an editor at Simon & Shuster and Alfred A. Knopf, he also helmed The New Yorker for a time. “If it’s the writer’s book, it’s the editor’s magazine,” he observes. “In other words, writers had to please me, not the other way around, which is what I was used to.”
More unexpectedly, he was drawn into the world of dance, first as audience, then as editor, and writer. He certainly never had any ambitions to perform in that particular domain. Asked to write a lengthy piece about the NY City Ballet’s fifty year history:
“To get it right seemed unlikely, yet I had to acknowledge that there was no one I could think of who had had my double experience as both audience for half a century and total insider…. I had lived for many years inside the yolk of the Balanchine-Kirstein egg.”
When asked not just to edit, but write about it: “ I’ve been watching dance for more than seventy years and have seen a lot and retained a lot. I also have- call it arrogance, call it healthy self- confidence- a solid trust in my judgement of dances and dancers, not unlike the security I felt from the start about my judgement of writing and writers. Finally, I can be funny- not the quality dance writers are best known for.” As he sums up the chapter, “Dance liberated me from the bondage of language, and balanced my life.”
Overall, he states, “My luck was that just about all my work depended on reading, which was the thing I most liked doing, and something I knew I was good at.” Or as he puts it later, “my greatest piece of luck was stumbling into the right occupation at the right moment.” And he was also fortunate to seemingly have “boundless energy”. How many of us have been blessed with that combination of skill and opportunity?
His many working relationships humanize famous names. I love this quote from Susan Sontag, not known for her humour: A friend congratulated Sontag on her novel The Volcano Lover, to which she responded, “‘Yes… and you’ll like it even more the next time you read it.’”
And finally, there are the books. Books Gottlieb had read, edited, wished he’d edited, and even wrote himself. Titles that jump out at me from his remembering, for my own interest and future reading, include:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
The Power Broker- Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro
The Journals of John Cheever
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Zany Afternoons by Bruce McCall
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens by Robert Gottlieb