When then-novice writer Helen Hazen got her article entitled “In Defense of Rape” published in an American magazine in 1975, she received a letter from Jacques Barzun, then the literary adviser to the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, asking if she could write a book. In the letter, Barzun, a noted American historian of ideas and culture, wondered “whether you would think it possible to make a short book of the ideas you broached in your essay, each of which I can see implying others in the domains of life and literature that you so adroitly shuttled between… Without wanting to be ranked suddenly as an art-for-art’s sake promoter, I must confess it is your writing I should like to see more of, on any subject.”
When Hazen accepted the challenge, little did she expect that she was to be introduced to a process that would involve so much fear and pain. Over the next few years, she would send to Barzun numerous partial and complete drafts of the book she was writing. “He edited them with such fury that some pages were entirely covered with corrections, comments, and questions,” Hazen recalls with horror. “On one occasion the entire draft clunked back into my mailbox, copiously marked up, before I had received the certified notification from the post office that Scribner’s had received it. Didn’t this guy have anything else to do?”
After endless edits and rewrites and reedits, however, Hazen finally got this note from Barzun: “Your book rereads very well and works up to a really strong ending.” The book,
Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance and the Female Imagination, was finally published by Scribner’s in 1983. To this day, however, Hazen isn’t sure who won: “Was it that shrewd, tough old sophisticate who knew there was a book somewhere or the weary creature who did not break under the onslaught of ARGHs?”
Read Helen Hazen’s “Endless Rewriting” in The American Scholar magazine now!RELATED READING:In “An A from Nabokov,” an article that came out in the April 4, 2013 issue of
The New York Review of Books, Edward Jay Epstein recounts taking a literature course at Cornell University under Vladimir Nabokov, the fabled émigré from tsarist Russia who wrote the widely popular novel
Lolita. Epstein hit it very well with his professor and the latter’s wife Vera—Nabokov even gave him a one-day-a-week job as an “auxiliary course assistant”—until he made a careless remark—a literary
faux pas—that suddenly soured their good relationship and eventually cost him the assistantship.
Read Edward Jay Epstein’s “An A from Nabokov” in The New York Review of Books now! ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “To be sure, journalists love clichés,” an article that came out in the March 22, 2013 issue of
The Washington Post, the paper’s Outlook editor Carlos Lozada discusses his collection of clichés that journalists have come to rely on too much. He says that “the list became a Rorschach test, if you will, for how you perceive journalism in the 21st century, particularly with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle.” Among the clichés in the list: “literally,” “demurred,” “It is what it is,” ‘political theater,” and “part and parcel.”
Read Carlos Lozada’s “To be sure, journalists love clichés” in The Washington Post now! THIS ARTICLE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING
