The Art of Editing (Don DeLillo)

When DeLillo spoke with interviewer David Marchese in late 2020 as part of the promotional campaign for The Silence, he was quickly confronted with a bibliographical puzzle. Marchese had been sent an advance copy of the novel, but had subsequently been informed by the publisher that a change had been made, and was then sent an updated galley. Why, he wondered, was there a discrepancy between these galleys? Specifically, why was a past-tense reference to Covid-19 absent from the text of the published version?1 His question invited DeLillo to explain this as an authorial decision: “Why did you take it out?” DeLillo’s reply was curt: “I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, ‘there’s no reason for that.’” When Marchese expressed shock that “an editor or whoever had the chutzpah to jam anything, let alone a Covid-19 mention, into one of your books,” the author snapped back, “It wasn’t going to stay, that’s for sure” (Marchese).