To see the moment of an artist’s intention, in which the creative impulse is realised in the present, is a rare privilege. Inspiration comes in privacy, the writer at a desk in solitude, feeling a way along the path their calling requires. But standing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I can observe the moment when Franz Kafka realised the shape his final novel, The Castle — published posthumously as Das Schloss in 1926 — would take.
In that book, an observer arrives in a village, seeking access to its castle. The Bodleian’s manuscript of the text shows the author starting off, sure enough, in the third person, just as the published novel begins. But then there’s a switch, three and a half pages in: in dark ink, Kafka makes a short, thick line and starts again, this time in the first person: “Es war spät abend als ich ankam” (“It was late in the evening when I arrived”). He continues for some pages in this way before returning to his original plan, and he neatly crosses out every ich, every “I” and replaces it with K., the initial by which the protagonist would be forever known. A moment to send a shiver down the spine.
It is only one of the insights on offer in Write, Cut, Rewrite, the Bodleian Library’s fascinating new exhibition on the art of editing — shining a light on the way that writers themselves analyse and improve their work, and how editors (be they spouses, friends or professional collaborators) play their part. Drawing almost entirely on the Library’s own remarkable collection of manuscripts, curators Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon offer an intimate journey into the deepest processes of some of our greatest authors across the ages.
Editing is the hidden secret of great work. We hold the finished book in our hands and marvel at the author’s gifts: we almost never see the labour, the endless drafting, the false starts and revisions, that build a work often over the course of many years. We know, perhaps, a few celebrated stories of the editorial process. Gordon Lish’s drastic and fastidious work on Raymond Carver’s prose created the author’s stripped-down style. Carver was grateful to Lish; but just before the publication of What We Talk About When We Talk about Love in 1981 he told Lish that his interventions left him feeling “confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid”.
Without Ezra Pound’s work with TS Eliot, “The Waste Land” would be a very different poem indeed. In the late 1950s, editor Tay Hohoff received a manuscript called Go Set a Watchman by a first-time novelist called Harper Lee; it was Hohoff’s work that transformed that draft (eventually published in 2015, just before Lee’s death) into To Kill a Mockingbird. The 2022 documentary Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb offered remarkable insight into the decades-long relationship between the great biographer of Lyndon B Johnson and his longtime editor: a relationship that would make any writer, myself included, green with envy. (Editor: cut “green with envy”.)
The editorial relationship is an intimate one; not least when it is marital. In the Bodleian’s exhibition, Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein, with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s editorial suggestions inked into the margin, is on display. In Chapter 7, she has Victor Frankenstein describe his creation as “handsome” — PBS altered this to “beautiful”, which appears in the final text.
In 2008, Alan Bennett donated his archive to the Bodleian; here we see the way in which director Nicholas Hytner collaborated with Bennett first on the play The Madness of George III and later on the film version, The Madness of King George. “Alan’s endings often take time to emerge,” Hytner wrote in his memoirs; a sequence of revisions shows how director, playwright and actor Nigel Hawthorne found the finale the work needed. Bennett had become attached to the notion of introducing an anachronistic 20th-century physician at the play’s close to explain the king’s illness; it was hard for him to let go of this notion — “kill your darlings” is the famous phrase for this process.
As the Bodleian’s exhibition delightfully shows, this phrase is itself the result of a kind of editorial process. In 1914 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch — author and renowned editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse — delivered a lecture at the University of Cambridge in which he exhorted his audience to be strict with themselves: “Whenever . . . you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — obey it wholeheartedly — and tear it up before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” At the end of the century, bestselling author Stephen King would admonish: “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart”.
Moving through the displays, we see over and over again writers working to improve themselves. John le Carré took months to construct the opening of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). “The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all,” the novel begins, dropping the reader in medias res. If it had begun “I still see him there. At night or when my mind wanders during class, on winter afternoons when the mist slides off the Quantock Hills into our valley, I see his fat shadow tucked into the tree trunks and his round face smiling in the gloom” — would you have kept on reading? Maybe not. The pages from le Carré’s archive are a terrific reminder that writing is labour. Le Carré handwrites, crosses out, the pages are typewritten and then sections are cut and stapled over other pages.
Not every writer’s struggle is purely internal. Stephen Spender’s novel The Temple is a semi-autobiographical work that draws on a summer spent in Weimar Germany in 1929 with a group of friends who included WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Herbert List. In 1931 Geoffrey Faber, of Faber & Faber, rejected it as unpublishable, considering it both libellous and pornographic: homosexuality between men remained illegal, of course, until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.
Manuscript selections on show reveal Spender’s attempts to rework the novel by changing its narrative to a third-person viewpoint; and by replacing the male protagonist, “S”, with “Catherine Crawleigh”. That might have been the end of it — but for the fact that Spender’s friend, the poet John Fuller, rediscovered the manuscript after Spender’s papers were acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin. Spender had forgotten he’d even written it. The novel was finally published, in its original form, by Faber & Faber in 1988.
Writers find different methods to push themselves forward. Both Van Hulle and Nixon are Beckett scholars (they are co-directors of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project) and so there’s plenty of Beckettiana here. In 1937 the writer began what would have been his first theatrical play, to be called Human Wishes, and based on the life of Samuel Johnson. He had abandoned it by 1940, but the manuscript shows one of the methods by which Beckett kept his creativity flowing: drawing. Less than half of the page is taken up with writing; the rest is taken up with images, mainly of little cartoon men and women, in bowler hats, riding donkeys, kneeling, smiling, scowling — hung up on crosses, perhaps a metaphor for the writer’s struggle.
You don’t have to be a writer to fall for this fine, unusual show. If you’ve ever tried to do anything at all — plan a journey, cook a stew, figure out how to have a challenging conversation — you’ll know there’s process involved, and that method can help with process. Raymond Chandler was famous for his similes, which read like funny throwaway lines in books such as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Well: they weren’t. He wrote them down in a list, displayed here, and crossed them out when he used them. It reads like a found poem: “As cold as a bride’s dinner/ As cold as a nun’s breeches/ As clean as an angel’s neck”.
Creative spark and hard graft are companions, not opposites, as this exhibition and its lucid accompanying catalogue demonstrate. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” as Beckett put it in his 1983 story, “Worstward Ho”. Here’s the proof, in black and white.
‘Write, Cut, Rewrite’, from February 29 to January 5 2025 at Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
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