"Your Side of the Street": Cormac McCarthy's Collaborative Authorship By Daniel Robert King Dissertation submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies November 2012 Contents Abstract. iii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - McCarthy at Random House: The Albert Erskine Years 30 Chapter 2 - Toilers in the Orchard: The Long Genesis of The Orchard Keeper 59 Chapter 3 - Evading "Dullness and Garrulity": The Copyediting of Suttree 83 Chapter 4 - "As Proper a Use of History as Any": The Researching and Writing of Blood Meridian 105 Chapter 5 - Skittish Screenplays: The Border Trilogy 128 Chapter 6 - Composite Auteurship: The Varied Production Lives of No Country For Old Men 155 Chapter 7 - Boats and Brothers: The Road 182 Conclusion 206 Bibliography 219 Abstract In this thesis I investigate the relationship between contemporary author Cormac McCarthy and his editors: Albert Erskine at Random House and Gary Fisketjon and Dan Frank at Alfred A Knopf. In investigating these relationships I attempt to give insight into the working practices of McCarthy, and by doing so examine the changing world of publishing at Random House. I also explore the implications for established critical understandings of McCarthy's work of the significant changes which were made during the re-writing and editing of McCarthy's novels. In mapping relationships between author, editor and agent I conduct a study of the changing modes and models of author-editor and author-editor-agent relationships within Random House and its subsidiary Alfred A Knopf. Taking each of McCarthy's novels in turn as a case study I construct an examination of the relationships between this tightly knit core group and the various specialist collaborators who appear at scattered but significant moments during McCarthy's literary career. It is in this web of collaboration and interdependence in concert with established understandings of the author-role and author- function that this thesis builds its understanding of McCarthy's authorship practices. In this thesis I draw intensively upon archival material held at both the University of Texas at San Marcos, where McCarthy's own papers are held following their sale to the Witliff South Western Writers Collection, and the papers of Albert Erskine, currently held at the University of Virginia as part of their Small Special Collections Archive. Between the two archives, this body of material contains personal and professional correspondence between McCarthy and his various collaborators, as well as McCarthy's handwritten notebooks in which he made copious notes from his various source books and, most significantly, the various typewritten drafts and redrafts of all of McCarthy's novels. These drafts include hand- written notes from both McCarthy himself as he altered the typescripts during the redrafting process and those of his editors, who annotated the various drafts McCarthy sent them in order to suggest changes or ask questions about various aspects of the drafts. Through an engagement with these valuable sources of unpublished primary material I attempt in this thesis to resituate the input of McCarthy's editor and other collaborators into an understanding of McCarthy's work. 111 IV Acknowledgements I am indebted first and foremost to my supervisors, Judie Newman and Graham Thompson for their invaluable help and unstinting support in seeing this project through to completion. I must also thank the awards committee of the Sir Francis Hill Postgraduate Scholarship for their generosity in funding my research for three years. Thanks must also go to the BAAS Short-Term Travel Prize committee, the Universitas 21 organisation and the Graduate School Travel Prize board, whose grants enabled me to undertake crucial research trips to Texas and Virginia. My work has also benefitted greatly from the patience and understanding of Nick Selby and others at Comparative American Studies who undertook to publish part of Chapter I. The feedback from this publication process was a crucial early influence in the shape this thesis took. Similar thanks go out to Rick Wallach and those others from the Cormac McCarthy Society who have included parts of Chapter 3 in the casebook You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy s Knoxville. Finally, those who helped portions of Chapter 5 through to publication in Literature and Medicine are deserving of similar thanks. Those working in the libraries whose archives I have been privileged to visit are also deserving of immense thanks for their tireless work, help and understanding in hosting me at these institutions. Special thanks go to Katie Salzmann and Joel Minor at Texas State University's Witliff Collections, and Professor Stephen Railton and Anne Causey at the University of Virginia. This project would not have been possible without their help, understanding and occasional lifts. Finally, my thanks go out to the postgraduate community at the University of Nottingham, especially to those members of the departments of American and Canadian Studies and Film and Television Studies. My work has benefitted immeasurably from their questions, comments, annotations and friendship. v VI Note on Editions: Unless otherwise indicated, the page numbers of McCarthy's published works listed in this thesis refer to the Picador paperback edition vii Introduction Sonny Mehta, the Knopf editor who accepted the 1992 National Book Award for Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses on the absent writer's behalf, told during his acceptance speech a story which was neither about McCarthy nor about All the Pretty Horses: The Sound and the Fury was issued on the 7th of October, 1929, and despite its immediate claims on the literary conscience, this book enjoyed a sale of some 3,000 copies over a 15 year period, at which point, as we know, all hell broke loose. Awards and bestsellerdom come two ways, to paraphrase Hemingway on bankruptcy. Gradually, and then suddenly, if at all. Mehta had been reminded of this story, he told his audience, by another notable absentee from that celebratory dinner, "Albert Erskine, who worked for Cormac as his editor from the very beginning.tf For Mehta, the relevance of his story to McCarthy was twofold. Firstly, McCarthy, an author of "over the last 27 years, six novels so far," was a writer who -like Faulkner- had "waited on such recognition," enduring slow sales despite the opinion amongst reviewers and other critical readers that his "books were made to last.,,3 The second point Mehta made was that, just as with the awards which had eventually come to Faulkner's work, McCarthy's National Book Award was "an honor, as well, for those like Mr. Erskine [... ] who kept Cormac's books in print for so long.t" Mehta's story is a significant starting point for this thesis in a number of ways. The editor's outlining of the difficulties McCarthy experienced in getting the recognition and sales that his work deserved, and the efforts undertaken by Albert Erskine and others to rectify this issue, will be a recurring theme across this thesis. This is particularly true across the first four chapters, which examine McCarthy's early work and the struggles associated with getting and keeping the writer's works in print. The second reason that Mehta's story serves as an important starting point for my consideration of McCarthy's work lies in Mehta's insistence that McCarthy's award also honours the efforts of his editors. Mehta's suggestion that the work of McCarthy's editors was also being recognised by the National Book Awards that night points to the main topic under consideration in this thesis: the effect on McCarthy's novels of the collaboration between the author and his editors. 1 Sonny Mehta, "National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches," accessed 27/03/2012, http://www. nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech cmccarthy.html#. T3HDHTES3N s . 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 1 Taking its cue from Mehta's belief that McCarthy's National Book Award win was a moment to be shared between the author, his editors and his agents, this thesis takes as its point of departure earlier work done on notable author-editor relationships. Cormac McCarthy's interactions with Albert Erskine at Random House and later Larry Fisketjon and Dan Frank at Knopfstand in contrast to most of those relationships that have been the subject of previous studies. The kind of work done on McCarthy's novels was quite different from, for instance, the heavy editing leading to subdivision that Maxwell Perkins undertook during Thomas Wolfe's writing of his impractically lengthy first draft of The October Fair. Now lost as a result of the scattering of original manuscripts to various proof readers and subsumed into Of Time and the River and The Web and the Rock, The October Fair grew during its writing "by a process of inevitable expansion [... to almost 1,000,000 words, almost twice the length of War and Peace] until, in 1933, it was divided into halfby Perkins."! It was this heavy editing, as Elizabeth Nowell writes in her biography of Wolfe, which caused the initial falling-out between Wolfe and Perkins. It was the publicity surrounding the degree and significance of the work Perkins had done on Wolfe's novel, as well as the over-generous dedication which Wolfe made to his editor on the first page of Of Time and the River that, according to Perkins, "gave shallow people the impression that Wolfe could not function as a writer without collaboration.,,60ver-generous though it may be, Wolfe's dedication also hinted at the degree to which the author had come to rely on his editor, not only to edit his books, but also to assuage the writer's doubts about his own talent.