Langdon Hammer, the chairman of the English Department at Yale, is the author of a new biography on the poet James Merrill. It looks like a formidable book and in the Times, Dwight Garner calls it “nearly flawless.”
I’m sure the book is an achievement and I’m not interested in minimizing that but I really like what Garner says here:
Mr. Hammer’s book is something close to brilliant, but it would have benefitted from committed liposuction. Its “Shoah”-like length will repel many casual readers, and likely even noncasual ones. While this book is not stuffed with sawdust, 800 pages is a lot of James Merrill, and its girth is admission of a certain kind of failure. Knowing what to omit is as important as knowing what to add.
Sometimes when reading a book, I think that I could have done a better job of editing, other times i wouldn't know what to cut.
It's a real gift to know what to lose. Often, a writer might not be the best judge alone. In film, the great thing about an editor, at least in theory, is that they were not on set and so they come to the material with a fresh perspective.
I'd much rather leave 'me wanting more than leave 'em thinking, "that was good but 15 minutes too long".
[2] Yes - in the legal business, they say that it is not great legal writing, but great legal editing. We are usually forced to limit our number of pages/words/characters, not by choice, but because those are the rules.
Sometimes it sucks, but artificially imposed limits help teach one to be a good editor.
3) That's a great point.