Orwell on editing

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Following the recent discussion on writing and editing, you may find the excerpt below from an article on George Orwell as a writer (who resented editor's changes) and an editor of interest. The full article by Jeffrey Meyers may be found at: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/oct03/orwell.htm.

I love the following Orwell quotation:  “It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.”

Yvonne Cunnington

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"From Orwell on Writing" by Jeffrey Meyers:

Reviews and articles kept Orwell going as he labored to complete his novels, and he was interesting on the practical problems of writing for newspapers. As a highly contentious and polemical author, hostile to any form of censorship, he loathed cuts that weakened his argument and changed his meaning, yet had to accept the reality of being edited. He told his agent: “In my experience one can never be sure that one’s stuff will get to press unaltered in any daily or weekly periodical. The Observer, for instance, habitually cuts my articles without consulting me if there is a last-minute shortage of space. In writing for papers like the Evening Standard, I have had things not merely cut but actually altered, and of course even a cut always modifies the sense of an article to some extent. What really matters here is whether or not one is dealing with a civilized and intelligent paper.”

When Orwell took over as literary editor of the Tribune in November 1943, he found his desk drawers “stuffed with letters and manuscripts which ought to have been dealt with weeks earlier, and hurriedly shut it up again.” As an editor himself, he had a fatal tendency to accept manuscripts which he knew very well could never be printed, but didn’t have the heart to send back. When he considered manuscripts submitted to the newspaper, he must have remembered Gordon Comstock’s bitter rage (in Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying) when his verse was politely rejected: “Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, ‘We don’t want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with.’” In June 1947 Orwell, an ex-policeman, recalled his generous weakness as editor and concluded the discussion with a characteristically witty simile: “It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.”  

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/oct03/orwell.htm.