11 - The Art of Editing

Summary

When Don DeLillo spoke with interviewer David Marchese in late 2020 as part of the promotional campaign for The Silence, he was quickly confronted with a bibliographical puzzle. Marchese had been sent an advance copy of the novel, but had subsequently been informed by the publisher that a change had been made, and was then sent an updated galley. Why, he wondered, was there a discrepancy between these galleys? Specifically, why was a past-tense reference to Covid-19 absent from the text of the published version? His question invited DeLillo to explain this as an authorial decision: ‘Why did you take it out?’ DeLillo's reply was curt: ‘I didn't put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “there's no reason for that.”’ When Marchese expressed shock that ‘an editor or whoever had the chutzpah to jam anything, let alone a Covid-19 mention, into one of your books’, the author snapped back, ‘It wasn't going to stay, that's for sure’ (Marchese).

The admission of this textual change was unusual enough to be worthy of comment. The audacity of the change was noteworthy in itself, but the idea of editorial interference in the prose of DeLillo, an author long revered as a meticulous craftsman, was more jarring: as Emily Temple remarked, ‘who is going around dropping things into DeLillo novels in 2020?’ (Temple). Anne Enright, reviewing the novel, posed a similar question, before following it with others whose escalating absurdity indicated the book's eerie atmosphere as well as the unlikelihood of such an editorial intervention in the work of a writer she describes in the same review as a ‘master stylist’: ‘Who would do such a thing? Are we sure it wasn't the Russians? Was it a bot? Is there a virus now infecting new novels with lines about The Virus?’ (Enright).

The question of responsibility for the change was, as we have seen, elided by both DeLillo and his interviewer (‘an editor or whoever’), and the mystery has, at the time of writing, not been resolved.