Mark Twain as an Editor.

Cromwell Argus, Volume III, Issue 147, 3 September 1872, Page 7

Mark Twain as an Editor.

Mark Twain has recently published a work entitled "Roughing it," in which he gives his experience as local editor of the Virginian Daily Enterprise. He says :-—I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr Goodman went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. Tt destroyed me. The first day I wrote my leader in "the forenoon. The second day 1 had no subject, and put it off till the afternoon. The third day ] put it off till the evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the American Cyclopedia, that steadfast friend of the editor all over the land. The fourth day 1 " fooled around till midnight, and then fell back on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter personalties on six different people. The sixth day 1 laboured in anguish till far into the night, and brought forth—nothing. The paper went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the eighth Mr Goodman returned, and found six duels on his hands—my personalities had borne fruit. Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you : it is easy to clip selections from other papers ; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality ; but it is an unspeakable hardship to write editorials—subjects are the troubles—the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day it is a drag, draff, drag—th ink and worry and sutler—all the world is a dull blank ; and yet the editorial column must be filled. Only give the editor a subject and his work is done—it is no trouble to write it up ; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one simply low-spirited to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would till from four to eight bulky volumes Ike this book. Fancy what a library an editor's work would make after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Buhvcr, Dumas, &c, have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought so voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labour, this exhausting consumption of brain-fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying up of facts, like reportinff), day after day, and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons in the week is wearying in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is so ; and, therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week, and keep it up for all the year round, is further beyond comprehension ,imn ever. Ever since I survived my week as an editor, f have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand ; it is in admiring the long columns of editorials, and wondering to myself how the mischief he did it.