Philip Watts Editor/Edited

Abstract

In an age when our annual performance reviews invite us to assign metrics to all of our activities--so many student credit-hours taught, so many articles published, so many dollars of grant funding received--some of the most important work we do for each other and for the profession as a whole cannot be accounted for: namely, editing. I am not referring primarily to the type of editing we do under the guise of peer review, which can count as service to the discipline at institutions that value such service. Rather, I have in mind the kind of attentive reading and critical feedback that is informal, a response to a request from a close colleague or friend, and ends up in no ledger of faculty workload. It is editing as a metric-defying labor of love that defined my relationship in the profession to my brother. Allow me to back up and explain why I want to describe Phil's work as editor. I became more fully aware of the effort required in editing and the implications of that effort when I spent a year as acting editor of Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ) while its regular editor was on sabbatical. Marshall Brown, who has edited MLQ for nearly two decades, has a reputation as a provider of extensive feedback; even in the case of submissions that are clearly unpublishable, Marshall often sends three single-spaced pages of comments to the author, which speaks to his sense of responsibility to the field and ethic of care in relation to everyone who has chosen to be part of it. I could not quite replicate Marshall's mode as editor, but I certainly aimed to evince the same attention and devotion to the task and realized, as I tried to refine my practice, that Phil's mode as editor was my model for engaging and, hopefully, improving the work of colleagues during my time at the journal's helm. The nature of Phil's notes and comments in the margins of the sometimes half-baked work I would regularly send him--and I did send him a lot, and he did read it all--is my focus, but starting with what he wrote in his first book, Allegories of the Purge (1998), in the handwritten dedication of the copy he gave me (which is particularly germane to the money/l'argent theme of the 2014 20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies conference) can help give the sense of the tenor of his comments: Rich: Please don't sell this book! With all my love, Phil. One finds in this dedication his usual self-deprecation and lack of self-seriousness, but there is also, by antiphrasis, the recognition of the virtual unsalability of academic writing. Writing in this space somewhat removed from market pressures was important to Phil, who was not looking to tell heartwarming, popular stories and certainly was not interested in making money. To return to the matter at hand, though, the brevity and ironic counterpoint on display in that dedication are the hallmarks of Phil's marginal comments that served as advice for improving my work and, I suspect, that of many of those who are reading this tribute. In relating this anecdote of Phil's inscription in his own book, I am following another piece of brotherly advice from someone who, like Kurt Vonnegut, an exemplar of sorts for Phil (perhaps because Vonnegut is the bien-pensant version of Celine?), could be grave and comic in nearly the same instant: always open with a joke, even if what you are talking about might make your audience cry. So what was his mode as editor? As his own writing so clearly shows, Phil valued straightforward honesty in intellectual work above all else, and so tended to focus his editor's gaze on those flourishes in my writing least grounded in solid evidence. Any ad hominem attack on a critic, any too-easy or tendentious accusation in my dissertation or first book of, say, colonial racism in the paratext would elicit suggestions to contextualize the statement. The point was not necessarily to soften the attack or accusation, but to make it more compelling and more plausible through understatement of the point and overstatement, as it were, of the evidence. …