JAC Volume 3, Issue 1/2

Editors of primary autobiographical materials are re-creators of the original author's mind, personality, experiences--life. In shaping and making public diaries, letters, or other personal narratives rescued from attics or archives, editors are introducing people and perspectives from a near or distant past to the present and the future. For students, the process of editing can transform what might have begun as a response to an academic exercise into a serious enterprise of real-life significance. Furthermore, in working intimately with others' writings, student editors can learn a great deal about how to write well, for good editors have to be good writers-sometimes, even better than their subjects.

Teaching writing students at all college levels to edit the autobiographical writings of others has many advantages which, if recognized, might encourage more instructors to make such assignments. Among the benefits which this essay will amplify are the following. Editing autobiographical materials enhances the editor's awareness and understanding of their intrinsic interest or significance. It also raises editorial recognition of their appropriateness in language, tone and simplicity or complexity of ideas presented to a particular audience, whether designated by the author or the editor. The editor teams to pick out a work's main points, and to highlight their importance through eliminating redundant and less significant material. If the documents were discovered in random order, perhaps in "some deep old desk or capacious hold-all,"¹ the editor is obliged to organize them so they make sense, either topically or chronologically--an exercise in close reading and careful thinking. The editor must identify and enhance the authorial voice or personality. The editor has to confront the technicalities, idiosyncrasies, and idioms of another's language, including its diction, spelling, and punctuation, and decide whether to impose a uniformity of style or to account for its inconsistencies. Moreover, through personal commentary the editor may function as a critic, interpreting the work for prospective readers by placing it in relevant personal, historical, intellectual, literary, social, or other contexts.

Teachers themselves often function as editors in dealing with students' writings; one of the major methods of helping people learn to write is to enhance their editorial finesse by showing them how to become their own self-critics.² Editorial functions are very important in the process of revising one's own writings, and often in the initial stages of writing, as well. Yet students are frequently too close to their own material to edit it competently. What they have written seems sacrosanct, even if an outside observer can see that it would benefit from pruning, reorganization, or other alterations.

Nevertheless, as class discussion of student papers often reveals, these very students can often read others' writings with sufficient objectivity to make appropriate critical suggestions.³ Having the same students function as editors of others' writings takes the process three crucial steps farther. (1) The students, with the teacher's guidance, have to make explicit the editorial principles they are using. (2) They have to apply these principles, consistently, to the writings of another in order to make them accessible to a designated audience. (3) As a consequence, the student editors should then be able to apply the same principles and considerations to their own subsequent writings.

Although some of the benefits of teaching students to edit pertain to the editing of materials of any sort, autobiographical writings offer particular advantages. Most importantly, unpublished, unedited autobiographical materials are accessible, physically and intellectually. As listeners, readers, and writers, Students throughout their lifetimes have become familiar with letters, diaries, anecdotes, and other forms of personal narratives. As practitioners of the narrative art, when they tell or write stories, jokes, anecdotes, or incidents from their own lives, students know these personal modes intimately, even if they have never approached them analytically.

Unedited autobiographical materials are abundant, and easy to locate. Students may begin the quest for personal papers in their own desks, or with permission, in the strongboxes or attics of relatives or friends. Students can also look in the archives of their college libraries, or in their hometown historical societies. Most have collections of personal papers of local residents, famous or infamous, or of people of regional or national significance. Special collections, such as authors' papers or materials of physicians' and nurses' life histories can be full of fascinating information.⁴

Furthermore, autobiographical materials are intellectually and psychologically accessible to students who lack specialized knowledge or experience with research in primary materials, as do many freshmen who might initially find editing totally new and foreign. People are people, ever subject to the seven deadly sins, the tantalizing triangle, the eternal verities. Once students have started to understand the historical contexts in which the documents are embedded, they can begin to explore the personalities, motives, and actions of their subjects—who will be understandable because they resemble other people the prospective editors know, or know about.

After students have located the raw material, obtained permission to use it and quote from it in case their papers should be published, and have deciphered the handwriting, they have to confront the editor's fundamental question: Is the material worth editing? This is determined by the answers to three corollary questions. Is the subject of intrinsic significance or interest? To whom? And, is the material well-written?

The worth of autobiographical materials may be determined according to several criteria. The subject may be of considerable significance: for instance, a prominent military, political or business leader; a noted contributor to the sciences or the arts; or the spouse, colleague, child, or lover of such a person. With a conspicuous subject even fairly innocuous material may be valuable because of its association, as is some of the published but repetitive correspondence of Presidents Washington, Adams, and Madison.⁵ In the more likely event that the subject is unknown, or is familiar only to the student and a small number of intimates, other considerations apply. The materials may be worth editing because they may present a portrait or partial view of a memorable or colorful personality (the most unforgettable character ... ), an idiosyncratic intellect (the village inventor, or agnostic), an unusual—or thoroughly typical—life or point of view (the Willy and Linda Lomans of the world). Or they may warrant editorial attention because of the information conveyed by and through the subject's life. They may tell about a profession, trade, or skill, contemporary or vanished participation in a way of life (as, for instance, a resident of a small town) or an event of historical significance, whether common or cataclysmic (a survivor of the 1929 stock market crash, or a local disaster).

Above all, the autobiographical materials must interest the potential editor, whose job it will be to transmute the lifeless pieces of paper into a dynamic entity whose appeal is as evident to the outside readers as it is to the editor. For pedagogical purposes, the significance of the subject may reside in the judgment of the beholder, regardless of what others think. if a given subject or collection of autobiographical writings strikes the potential editor as dull or trivial, it's not worth pursuing. So students might appropriately look for autobiographical writings about people whose lives reflect their own interests or aspirations: students athletes could search for sportsmen and women, the politically-minded could look for governmental figures, descendants could seek their ancestors. Or students might be attracted to lives quite different from their own; the comfortably secure might examine slaves' or immigrants' papers; majorities could learn how minorities lived-and died.

For a paper under five pages a significant letter or two might suffice, but even for an undergraduate term paper the materials do not have to be extensive. They do, however, have to be sufficient to comprise a reasonably self-contained unit. If the emphasis is on the person, there should be enough diary entries, letters, or narrative to reveal typical or fascinating dimensions of the writer's personality, hopes or fears, role(s), relationships with others. Thus letters could show, as do many of the youthful Sylvia Plath's Letters Home,⁶ the writer's professional aspirations and activities engaged in to fulfill these. Plath comments on her writing of poetry and short stories, exulting when they're accepted, and trying to be philosophical about rejection, as in this letter as a Smith College senior to her mother:

Or autobiographical materials might present their author in one or more roles, real or imagined. Plath's other letters reveal a dutiful daughter, a life-of-the-party college girl, an achieving student.

If the emphasis is on events or informational content rather than on personality, the editor will look for autobiographical materials that constitute a relatively complete narrative sequence that describes a phenomenon, an occurrence, an encounter, or a process. Thus one short but self-contained segment of Mark Twain's Autobiograpby extols the joys of eating watermelon, especially those stolen from the fields:

If, as is often the case, the autobiographical materials are too abundant to be quoted completely in a paper, part of the student editor's task will be to determine what to include, what to omit—and why. In the process, the editor becomes the re-creator of the initial creation through his shaping of materials that may initially have been casually contrived or randomly assembled. The editor may choose to restrict the focus by picking out a unified, integrated segment from the totality, as one could do with Mark Twain's autobiographical account of watermelons. Or the editor may select portions of writing that represent the whole—enough short segments of her letters to reveal Sylvia Plath as daughter, student, wife, mother—and always a poet. In either instance, the editor will generally need to accurately represent the author's perspective and scale of values to avoid the distortion that could occur if segments were quoted out of context or truncated for purposes either procrustean or expedient. To make sure the excerpts are representative, the editor will need to have an overview of the entire text, though if the original is too long to read carefully (diaries and collections of letters, after all, can span a lifetime) it can simply be skimmed. Then the editor can choose segments to reflect the author's relative proportioning of events, issues, human relationships, and concerns.

My own experience in editing the original typescript of Natalie Crouter's Forbidden Diary.- A Record of Wartime internment, 1941-45 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980) is illustrative. As I skimmed the manuscript, at her request (for Natalie, like many diarists, wondered if her experience would interest others, and asked for my professional opinion), I realized that though fascinating, at 5000 pages it was much too long to expect readers to tolerate. In cutting it to ten per cent of its original length I tried to retain the diary's major themes: the importance of the prisoners' community organization, the nature and significance of family and everyday life in confinement, American ingenuity and resourcefulness under privation, the unusual understanding and accommodation between Japanese guards and their American captives.⁸

The student editor also has to assess the diary's literary style. Is it written well enough to warrent editing? The significance of some materials would, of course, transcend the style—an eyewitness account of the Lincoln assassination, the discovery of the South Pole, or the first trans-Atlantic flight. These would be interesting for their sheer importance, though even here obtuseness of perception, neglect of detail, or dullness of description could blunt the impact. With less cataclysmic phenomena, the ways in which they are narrated assume even greater importance and prospective editors are justified in asking: Does the writer present a reasonably clear picture of the events narrated? With sufficient details to make them comprehensible to a reader unfamiliar with either the author or the circumstances? Is the language specific, colorful, evocative, or in other ways interesting? Does the autobiographical material in question present a distinctive authorial persona, point-of-view, and/or interpretive intelligence applied to the events or phenomena discussed? Has the author avoided loading the account with trivia, irrelevancies, or details of interest to no one but himself?

The prospective editor will need to consider the wholeness of the work, as well. Is the material self-contained, understandable without identifications of places, people, and relationships familial or otherwise? Or does it need explanations of references to events or information not contained in the text? Or amplifications of material elliptically presented? If the autobiographical materials require supplementary information, will the student editor know what to look for-and be able to find it?

A trial run in class helps students to learn to use these criteria. I distribute copies of excerpts from diaries or collections of letters, some published and some not (but typed so the readers won't be influenced by either handwriting or print), and ask the class to determine whether they are worth editing-and reading. Below are excerpts from characteristic examples, both written by middle-aged American women thirty to forty years ago (that is all the students know beforehand), which invariably elicit pointed discussions of these criteria.

EXAMPLE A:

EXAMPLE B:

These examples are so different in quality that they should be easy to analyze—but not without debate over editorial principles and practices. The author of example A, let's call her "Mary," a farmer's wife, focuses on the minutiae of everyday life—the gathering of eggs, the picking of berries and beans, the making of pies and cakes, the casual entertaining of guests—or are they relatives? Through the interpretation of a perceptive writer, such events could be fascinating indeed—but are they in this context?

Most prospective student editors who have examined Mary's diary think not. They find the sparse narrative flat: "Hank & Don, they got the septic tank in." What is the significance of this? Does it mark a transition from outdoor to indoor plumbing? Did the installation take much work? Money? Students find the absence of detail boring and incomplete: "Sandy went out this evening." Where? With whom? To do what? Did she have a good time? What does the writer think of it? And student readers find the lack of identification or characterization of people mystifying and frustrating: Who are Jennie and Sam? What are their personalities like? Have they other notable features? What is their relationship to each other? To the author? And what of Tom and Amanda? And Sandy, Tina, and Ken? Although the identities of these people might become clearer as the diary entries multiply, if they continue to behave as stick figures, even the accretion of events in which they participate will not make them three-dimensional. If there are fascinating life-stories, intrigues, complex motivations, they remain so submerged beneath the tranquil flow of graceless, unreflective prose as to create not even a ripple on the surface of the oblivious writer's mind. Mary's authorial eye does not look for drama and does not find it.

Some students claim that this record is valuable because of the account it offers of a persumably typical way of farm life in the 1950s. Such slices of life are indeed useful—as evidence for sociological generalizations or historial interpretations of an era or occupation. However, Mary's account would be inappropriate for students to try to edit because, apart from its mundane style, it is too elliptical; she does not provide enough context for students to easily or accurately find information to supplement what is omitted.

This entry raises additional questions. Should student editors try to correct inaccurate spelling and punctuation? Generally not. These manifestations of the author's characteristic expression offer clues about her level of education and cast of mind; to alter them would be to falsify the writer's accidentally-expressed but nevertheless very real literary persona. Should student editors supply details to try to flesh out the skeletons? For the same reasons, such supplementary information—if it could be found—would not belong in the text itself, though it might constitute a preface or footnotes. As a general editorial principle, the editor cannot change the actual language of the text unless there is an obvious typographical error; errors of fact can be corrected in the text through inserting the correction in square brackets or in footnotes:

Such bracketed insertions and footnotes are assumed to be the editor's unless otherwise indicated.

In one important respect, editorial practices may diverge from the conventions that govern scholarly quotation. Ordinarily, editors indicate omissions with ellipses. . . . However, if the editor has greatly reduced the bulk of the text through numerous excisions, continual ellipses . . . would be . . . very disruptive. . . . They might do . . . the author . . . a considerable . . . disservice by making her . . . appear . . . to speak . . . with a continual stutter. In such cases, sparing ellipses, if any at all, would give a truer sense of the author's style; a footnote could indicate the rationale for this practice, as well as the quantity and substance of the text omitted.

Example B, Natalie's account of Pearl Harbor Day in the Philippines, raises other editorial considerations. It is, prospective student editors agree, an exciting narrative about an historically important subject. The perspective is unusual—an eye-witness account by a civilian woman, not of the bombing of Pearl Harbor but of a bombing in the Philippines carried out at the same time. Natalie writes simply but well. She depicts the scene vividly, with odors and sounds ("the smell of powder reached us. We could hear screaming and men yelling orders."), action, tempo, mood, and place ("On Session Road everyone was strolling casually, looking into windows. . . . Japanese store keepers stood unconcerned in doorways"). Through the same details she established the dramatic contrast of the devastation, juxtaposed with the peaceful unconcern of the marketplace--an innocence ironically underscored by the events of the next four years, and by the readers' knowledge of what is to happen.

In appealing contrast to Mary's simple, declarative statements, Natalie's sentences are varied in construction, length, and mode. She intermingles sentences long and short, simple and complex, declarative and interrogative. Natalie's dialogue sounds as if it were actually being spoken; she has an accurate ear for the rhythm and vocabulary of American idiom: “ 'My God, they've bombed Camp John Hay. Those are Japanese planes'."

However, Natalie's very facility and the intrinsic interest of her narrative present for prospective editors problems of a different sort than Mary's. With such a well-written, well- developed account, what is left for an editor to do?

The editor's task here consists, in part, of explaining through an introductory essay or footnotes (or both) events, phenomena, and words to contemporary readers, presumably Americans who know little about either the Philippines or World War II. Assuming that the narrative begins with the beginning of the war, an introduction would be helpful in identifying the main characters—who they are, why (since they appear to be Americans) they are in the Philippines even at a time when they obviously suspect that a war is coming; why else would Natalie have said " 'Well, we probably won't be standing here looking up at planes [which she thought were American] like this much longer' "? Given the abundance of description and detail that Natalie provides in this entry and throughout the wartime diary, the readers can count on the development of characters and the unfolding of human relationships as the narrative proceeds, just as they do in novels. So these do not require extensive clarification at the outset, though after the whole manuscript has been read (and presumably, excerpted, since Natalie's story promises to be a long one) the editor may want to identify people who appear only fleetingly--if that is possible from either historical sources or information elsewhere in the diary itself. Also, in the introduction or an early footnote, the editor will need to indicate the rationale for the editorial principles employed: what material (and what percentage) of the original has been retained, and why; how typical or atypical it is; how much was cut, and why; whether any other changes have been made in the text and if so, what they are (have profane words been bowdlerized? initials been supplemented by whole names?).

Some background information about the Philippines is also necessary for the understanding of Natalie's diary, and this too, can be supplied in either an introduction or footnotes or both. Why was an American Air Force base, Camp John Hay, located there? A military history of World War II might tell.¹⁰ Why does Natalie identify "Pearl Harbor Day in the Philippines" as December 8, when it was December 7 in the United States? A quest for the answer will turn up some information about the International Date Line. On which of the Islands is Camp John Hay? Vigan? Baguio (which a continuation of the text specifies as the town in which Natalie and Jerry live, and where they go shopping on Session Road)? A map of the Philippine Islands can provide the answer—which the editor may wish to supply either in a footnote or in a map of his/her own. What is a lavenders? A Spanish dictionary can answer that—but how can the student tell whether to try Spanish, the language transplanted by the Philippine governors who preceded the Americans, or one of the Philippine tribal languages? Lavendera "sounds like Spanish" is a good enough answer for a start; the other principle of information-seeking is to look in the most obvious or most likely source first. Why did Natalie employ a lavenders (a laudnress) and other servants? Was she rich? Or did most Americans in the Philippines do the same, whether or not they could have afforded such servants in the United States? This information could be supplied by a corollary source, someone who has lived in or visited the Philippines.

Some other unfamiliar terms require identification, which footnotes can provide. A good rule of thumb would be to consult three or four likely sources, starting with standard dictionaries and encyclopedais, and then to abandon the search unless a likely lead turns up in one of them. It is unreasonable to expect a student editor to pursue an extended quest that would require an expert's sophistication to accomplish, when even the pursuit would require an unwarranted amount of time and effort.

The autobiographical materials a student edits may be incomplete. They may present either a partial portrait, or a single phenomenon or aspect of the subject's life. They may show a beginning or intermediary stage in a continuing process. In such cases, the editor may wish to write a brief Afterword to follow through on the text. What were the ultimate consequences of events begun or explored in the text? How did the subject live the rest of her life? Did her personality, public standing, or economic situation remain constant? Or change in significant ways—for better or worse? With what effects? Such questions can be answered if the student knows the subject personally or has access to other information to supplement the text at hand. in these cases, the editor's additions will, in combination with his textual editing, help to re-create the creator of the original writing. if the text itself is the only surviving remnant of its author, then whether to supplement it becomes again a matter of student (or perhaps teacher) choice of how much effort is appropriate to expend on solving the not-so-sweet mysteries of another's life.

Ultimately, the most worthwhile aspect of editing autobiographical materials is that the student editors will have done original work with primary materials of potential interest to others. If these have been selected wisely and edited well, they may be publishable. Narratives about people of local concern can be submitted to campus, community, or regional newspapers or journals; personal accounts of major events or nationally known people can be sent to publications with a wider circulation. Thus through re-creating another's life, the student editor can endeavor to bring this creation into the lives of others, with a reasonable likelihood of success, given the large number of publications that print such materials. Editors--and teachers of editors--collaborate meaningfully in this serious yet pleasurable enterprise of real life. In re-creating creators, they become creators themselves.¹¹