I always feel cheated when I begin reading a book, only to discover it is an abridgment.
If I am considering whether to buy a book at the bookstore, and then I read on the cover “Abridged Edition,” I put the book back on the rack feeling something like disgust.
A couple weeks ago, after finishing Camus’ The Fall, I checked out the most recent biography of the writer from the library. Albert Camus: A Life, by Olivier Todd, translated from French by Benjamin Ivry. I began reading the preface, and discovered that the author had decided to abridge his biography, leaving out certain parts that he believed would not be of interest to American readers.
I think anticipation of a stupid audience is perhaps the most frustrating reason I’ve come across for an abridgment. If I am sufficiently educated to know about Albert Camus, as well as read his work; and if I then demonstrate enough perspicacity to go even further and check out Camus’ biography from the library, why should the author of that biography presume I am an imbecile and not sufficiently cosmopolitan enough to take an interest in specifically French elements of Camus’ life?
I am reading the biography anyway. Perhaps there are other, complete biographies available in English, but this one will do for now. Still, I have never come across a scholarly biography in which the author presumes his readers really don’t want to read every sentence that he wrote.
Most often, however, I come across works that were abridged, not with the author’s permission, but by an over-scrupulous editor who presumes not only what a hypothetical audience wants to read, but what the deceased or incapacitated author would want this hypothetical audience to read.
After reading that Camus was a great admirer of Kafka, of whom I am also enamored, I picked up my Schocken Classics edition of Kafka’s diaries. I have had this book for years, dipping into it occasionally. I like the heavy bond paper of the cover; it feels almost like brown paper. And I like the font used for the title and other elements of the cover and binding. A book is all of a piece, you know, and I often find myself most dedicated to books that look and feel a certain way, as much as books with words that have great meaning for me. The Kafka diaries were both: a good looking book with words inside that meant a lot to me Like most such works, however, the diaries do not lend themselves to reading straight through, so I never made a dedicated reading of it. Thus I never read the postscript.
In reading the book, I came across the following fragment of a sentence, “The seamstresses in the downpour of rain.” There was a superscript numeral 2 at the end of the sentence, indicating an End Note. So I went looking for it, and instead found a “Postscript.” Upon reading it, I was disappointed to discover that this book I have owned for years–indeed, this book I regarded as a treasure among my books–is in fact an abridged edition.
The editor, Max Brod (the friend and literary executor of Kafka), had taken it upon himself to decide what Kafka would have wanted published, and what he would have rather kept secret. And yet he writes, “The text of the Diaries is as complete as it was possible to make it.” Oh really?
“A few passages, apparently meaningless because of their fragmentary nature, are omitted. In most instances no more than a few words are involved. In several (rare) cases I omitted things that were too intimate, as well as scathing criticism of various people that Kafka certainly never intended for the public.”
In other words, he took the red pencil to all the good parts.
That is perhaps too harsh. Yet I find such editorial decisions more than a bit annoying. It is likely that Kafka intended that none of his diaries ever be published. Therefore, to single out certain bits as especially unfitting for publication due to some perceived authorial intention is a bit disingenuous. The editor makes his excisions for his own reasons, then blames the author for his own rather prudish judgment.
It is not merely that we live in an age where the “intimate” details of a person’s life are no longer expected to be kept private, but that when we pick up a biography or watch a profile of a person on the news, we expect to be given the whole package, nothing left out.
One of the reasons I picked up the most recent biography of Camus was because one expects that more recent versions will not spare us from the unsavory parts of the writer’s life, if there are unsavory parts. If I picked up a biography of a favorite poet of mine, Philip Larkin, only to read on the book jacket that the author had censored the bits about Larkin’s penchant for looking at pornography, I would toss the book down in annoyance.
Give me the story of the whole person, as best you can, or give me nothing at all.
To tell us that there are “intimate” parts you are leaving out only whets the appetite and results in an imagination gone wild. On one page of Kafka’s diaries, he writes the sentence, “I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.”
Was this all he wrote on the subject? It is certainly all that Brod chose to publish, thus we have to decide whether or not Brod censored something he deemed improper. I do not want to read a book perpetually in doubt about the honesty of the words before me.
Nor at this point do I wish to debate with these modern adherents of dry scholasticism in our Universities who write criticism on the subject of whether there is ever anything “honest” about the words a writer puts on paper, much as their ancestors asked how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. Yes, all words are but a simulacrum, not to be trusted. I’d just like to know whether Kafka frequented brothels, and if so what he thought and felt about it, insofar as he put those thoughts and feelings on paper. That is all.
Perhaps even if Kafka did indicate that he was a patron of brothels, that would be a lie. I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. That is not the kind of honesty I am interested in. I want the author’s words, unfiltered through the medium of a scrupulous editor like Brod, or a condescending biographer like Olivier Todd. Let me make up my own mind about such things.
I don’t mean to reduce the argument to a matter of Catholicism versus Protestantism, yet that is essentially what it comes down to: do we readers need someone to interpret the text for us, to the point of deciding what we will read and what we mustn’t read? Do we need someone to intercede on our behalf to the author? Or do we read for ourselves and make our own judgment?
Before they die, authors ought to make arrangements for the proper dispensation of their works, much as they make arrangements for the interment or cremation of their body. Authors who make no such arrangement are like the atheist who, leaving no will, ends up on display in a church, prior to burial in hallowed ground.
But then once dead, we all make what we will of the deceased and his remains, don’t we? So often we see the corpse in the coffin and think, or even say aloud, “That looks nothing like him.” The corpse has been made up to look more alive than in life; yet it usually seems even more waxen and dead. Thus, perhaps there is nothing to be done about editorial embalming after an author is dead. It’s just the way of the world.
And perhaps I am wrong to feel cheated, when I read that an author’s diaries have been edited a little too closely for my taste, or that some parts have been left out of his biography. Yet I can’t help but feel that way. Sometimes I think that my taste did not mature enough in the halls of academia to truly understand these matters. I still read with a child-like mentality.
I can even remember when I was a child, my maternal grandmother subscribed to the Reader’s Digest and would regularly receive boxes of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, as they were called. I read some of them, until I learned what “condensed” meant. Even at a young age, I felt abused that some abstract editor at the Digest made the decision to give me only so much as he or she felt I needed to know.
So even today, I often find myself looking first thing for some sign that a book has been edited or abridged or condensed. It is perhaps a pointless habit, but reassuring myself that I am not reading someone else’s version of the writer’s work, that these are the writer’s words and only the writer’s words, at least puts my mind at ease. Reading is for me a communion with an unseen, unknown authorial deity. I want to know what that author wrote, not what some priestly scribe in a University or publisher’s office thinks the author would want me to know.
