Can editors be trusted?

I’ve been reading some of Aidan Higgins’s tales and autobiographical pieces, Helsingør Station & Other Departures (1989) — a writer who I first read about forty years ago (Balcony of Europe) (what happened to my copy, I wonder? Lent or disintegrated). He was recommended to the publisher John Calder, as I recall, by none other than Samuel Beckett (‘He has talent, I think’); and famously received a letter from Beckett advising ‘Despair young, and don’t look back’ (reproduced in Alannah Hopkin’s memoir, A very strange man (2021).

So here, in a London-based memoir called ‘The bird I fancied’, the author and companion go to London Zoo, and he describes: ‘In the apiary the caged ones stretched out their long arms and took flying leaps at the trapeze’. These are some bees, I’m thinking. The error is compounded several times (p181-182). So surprised I was that I went back to a historical dictionary to see if the word might previously have referred to apes not bees. Elsewhere in the same account, Higgins readily and casually reveals ignorance about cricket and the Lords cricket ground. Why would he write in such a sloppy manner? His publisher was Secker & Warburg, a London firm: did no-one there bother to read what he’d written and quietly suggest amendments?

To me it seems common sense, not eccentricity, if I’m not sure of a word, to check it in at least one dictionary. And even when I am confident of a word, I’ll often check it in an etymological dictionary in order to understand or explore possible resonances.

What the above examples suggest — and this one, and those mentioned here, and here — is that it would be foolish to expect an editor to spot errors, glaring or subtle. What do they do, I wonder?

Nabokov’s 'dark dog nipples'

As I’ve been commenting on the role of editors and, to a lesser extent, translators, I was reminded of an anecdote I read many years ago, concerning the translation of one of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels by his son Dmitri. Describing a railway train, the original text, as I recall, referred to ‘a row of dark dog nipples’ on the roofs of the carriages. Dmitri, rather naively, initially offered the translation ‘ventilators’. This was knocked back by the famous father: ‘there are no ventilators on my train’.

‘And another thing…’

I need to try to stop doing this, but I can’t help being irritated by the failure of editors to intervene when a phrase in a text is glaringly wrong. We writers make mistakes occasionally and overlook things: one of the reasons is that the literary industry encourages excess (‘…we need at least 350 pages to make it economic…’) and too seldom pays attention to wordcraft.

I recently bought, too hurriedly, a copy of Name, a short novel by Constance Debré, endorsed on the cover, unfortunately, by Olivia Laing and Colm Tóibín among others. I made it as far as page 35, where I read the narrator’s comment about the bourgeoisie, described as ‘an infinitely large sample of the population’. This isn’t me being picky: it’s sloppy at best.

I don’t understand how a serious writer can describe a sample as infinitely large, but if they do, how a translator can fail to draw attention to it, or a publisher’s editor (or other reader) can overlook it. I can’t read any further, the book goes to a charity shop. Sigh. Rant over.