Stet: An Editor's Life

by Diana Athill

Book Overview

Diana Athill's Stet is a beautifully written, hardheaded, and generally insightful look back at the heyday of postwar London publishing by a woman who was at its center for nearly half a century (The Washington Times). A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house Andre Deutsch, Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate portrait of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802138624
• ISBN13: 9780802138620
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Astute observer of interesting times and people.

I read Stet, about Diana Athill's career as an editor, after immensely enjoying her later biography (Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir, written as she approached 90). Athill is a candid, empathetic, and witty observer of herself, her surroundings, and the people (many of them quite driven and some rather loony) with whom she worked as an editor for Andre Deutsch in London for 50 years. In Stet, Athill tells their stories. And, as befits a professional editor, she tells them with wonderful clarity and fluidity. As Athill's sublime writing carries us along through her work and travels, we learn about London during and after World War II, about the evolution of the publishing business and relationships between writers and editors, about the lives and idiosyncrasies of writers famous and not so famous, and, surprisingly, about the poor and wildly beautiful island of Dominica. All these stories are leavened with Athill's lucid reflections on work, sexuality, feminism, social mores and peccadilloes, and religion and spirituality.

Wonderfully insightful!

A fascinating look into old-world publishing and life in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. I really enjoyed all of the wonderful characters and details about the editorial process. Anthill, herself, is an engaging and enjoyable character!

The most delightful book I have read in the last year!

Reading Stet is like taking a seminar in the art and craft of editing and then being invited to tea with the professor afterward. While reading it, I remembered that the relationships most responsible for shaping my professional life were those I enjoyed with professors who made themselves available outside of the classroom or office. I was particularly lucky over the course of college and graduate school to enjoy the company of three wise, interesting, experienced scholars who had spent what amounted to a whole lifetime in the "real world" before beginning their academic careers. That Athill's finely crafted memoir reminded me of my debt to Dr. A-, Mr. R-, and Mrs. S- is the highest recommendation I can give. Consider this gem:"[A]n editor must never expect thanks (sometimes they come, but them must always be seen as a bonus). We must always remember that we are only midwives - if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own."Or this (she is writing about the shrinking population of critical readers):"Of course a lot of them still read; but progressively a smaller lot, and fewer and fewer can be bothered to dig into a book that offers any resistance. Although these people may seem stupid to us, they are no stupider than we are: they just enjoy different things."Whether you edit church bulletin or your city's daily, whether you answer phones at a small press in the hopes of moving up or you cull gems from the slush pile, don't miss Athill's attempt to prevent her experience from being erased with her passing.

Priceless

Writing at a very young 83, Diana Athill says of her memoir, Stet, "Why am I going to write it? Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too - they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in me squeaks 'Oh no - let at least some of it be rescued!' It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that. By a long-established printer's convention, a copy editor wanting to rescue a deletion puts a row of dots under it and writes 'Stet' (let it stand) in the margin. This book is an attempt to 'Stet' some part of my experience in its original form...."And if it hadn't been for that "instinct," some of the best published works of our time might never have seen the light of day. Athill spent 50 years in publishing, most of them at London's Andre Deutsch Limited, working with the likes of Jean Rhys, Norman Mailer, George Orwell, V.S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac and Peggy Guggenheim.She has some great stories; among them, the plight Orwell faced in seeking a publisher for Animal Farm, and Mailer in the same situation due to the excessive use of profanity in his manuscript of The Naked and the Dead.And she's funny, too. Of a co-worker, she explains, "Nick edited our nonfiction - not all of it, and not fast. He was such a stickler for correctness that he often had to be mopped-up after, when his treatment of someone's prose had been over-pedantic, or when his shock at a split infinitive had diverted his attention from some error of fact."Athill has had a long affiliation with books and reading, starting with a grandmother who "read aloud so beautifully that we never tired of listening to her," in homes with walls lined with books; while at Christmas and birthdays, "80 percent of the presents we got were books."She invites us along as she reflects on, and romanticizes every aspect of her life, including personal relationships: "Quite early in my career the image of a glass-bottomed boat came to me as an apt one for sex; a love-making relationship with a man offered chances to peer at what went on under his surface." Careerwise, she had to endure and learn how to deal with an overly critical boss - the same one who was so flustered upon meeting the Queen Mother that he curtsied instead of bowing - while her work often presented a daunting task. Of one such occasion, she states, "The latter book was by a man who could not write. He had clumsily and laboriously put a great many words on paper because he happened to be obsessed by his subject. No one but a hungry young publisher building a list would have waded through his typescript, but having done so I realized that he knew everything it was possible to know about a significant and extraordinary event, and that his book would be a thoroughly respectable additi

Must read for editors

Diana Athill,in this lovely book,exhibits the qualities that surely got her through a 50-year editing career. She is wise, honest, sincere, and most importantly, sane. I read every word with relish. She never attempts to outshine the authors she writes about with such discretion. When she retires, her few words of happiness and relief after a long career are more meaningful than those who go on for pages. When she tells a writer the things that make her happy, one is happy with her, and sad for the writer so possessed with himself that he can't see her simple formula for living. Diana Athill is someone I'd like to have tea with or stroll in the park. When you can introduce yourself to a perfect stranger through the pages of a book, you are a very good writer. Her editing skills must have been superb. Read this book with tea.