Why the literary world (and every single No. 2 pencil) is mourning the loss of Robert Gottlieb
The relationship between political writer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Bob Gottlieb was the subject of the 2022 documentary Turn Every Page directed by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie. Courtesy of Lizzie Gottlieb
By Talya Zax June 15, 2023
There’s a flawless scene in Turn Every Page, Lizzie Gottlieb’s 2022 documentary about the long professional relationship between her father, Robert Gottlieb, one of the most renowned literary editors ever, and Robert Caro, the equally renowned biographer of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses.
Gottlieb and Caro are meeting in the offices of Knopf, the New York City publisher with whom both have had long affiliations, to go over Caro’s latest chapters. But there’s a problem: Neither has a No. 2 pencil, a necessity.
So the two elderly, famous men go puttering through the offices, asking anyone and everyone for the most basic writing implement on earth. One young staffer offers up a mechanical pencil, patiently demonstrating how the device works. Gottlieb and Caro watch with bemused interest, and offer profuse thanks — but no thanks. Only a No. 2 will do.
After Gottlieb, 92, died Wednesday, I found myself thinking about what, exactly, makes that scene so lovely. Part of it has to do with how aptly it follows the classic literary formula: Rising action (the hunt for the pencil), conflict (what to do if there is no pencil?), climax (considering the awful mechanical pencil) and resolution (somehow, a No.2 is procured). It’s delightful to watch two giants of literature act out that sequence, which both have so consistently deployed to profound effect, on such a minute level.
But it has more to do with what the scene says about the daily work of literature — the work that Gottlieb, editor of Toni Morrison, John le Carre, Cynthia Ozick and more, redefined and brought to new heights.
There’s an old joke about a writer who spends the morning adding a comma to a sentence, and the afternoon taking it out. It’s funny because it’s close to the truth: Literary people are often procrastinators, and also, often, comically passionate about the details of their work. But it also makes light of the way in which writing is, genuinely, work. If you’re going to make a living from it — or, more meaningfully, ever produce anything worth reading — you have to show up every day like anyone else.
So there are Gottlieb and Caro, procrastinating — they didn’t have to enjoy that pencil hunt quite so much, after all — and comically passionate about a detail that, from the outside, seems close to inconsequential. And there they are, both old, both aware of encroaching mortality, still showing up every day to get it done.
And get it done, they do. They sit down with their pencil, and start arguing over Caro’s copy, just as they’ve done for decades.
Gottlieb was an author in his own right. (I read his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader, in a single happy weekend, dreaming of a life of books, books, books.) He wrote primarily biographies: of George Balanchine, with whom he shared a great love for ballet; of Sarah Bernhardt, perhaps the greatest actress of all time; of the children of Charles Dickens; of Greta Garbo. One could say that the most profound interest of his life — aside from the peculiar handbags he collected with an obsessive ardor — was the issue of how artists live, and how they work. It wasn’t that he wanted to solve something about them, as one might solve an equation. He just found them fascinating; each one unique, each one a puzzle to think about, happily, forever. He wanted to know everything about them, and when he did, he could see to their hearts with a unique incisiveness, and unique compassion.
In a way, that was Gottlieb’s greatest talent. Sure, he could edit any book to perfection. That, in some ways, was easy. But what he could really do was understand authors, and understand, as well, the unique relationship between authors and their books. In a remarkable 1994 interview for The Paris Review, in which he conversed not with a single interviewer but instead with a number of his greatest authors, he displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of what the writers he worked with were like.
You have to shout at Robert Caro,”because for him each manuscript has been so much work, so much effort, so much obsessive concentration, that everything is of equal weight because everything is of total weight.” Not so with Joseph Heller, who “is completely objective, he has that kind of mind, even immediately after finishing a book.” John le Carre “is unbelievably sensitive to editorial suggestion because his ear is so good and because his imagination is so fertile — he’ll take the slightest hint and come back with thirty extraordinary new pages.”
What stands out most, in that interview, isn’t Gottlieb’s clarity of vision, or the extent to which his authors obviously adore him. It’s how thoroughly he refuses to think about himself as a creature of distinct talents; he saw himself as talented in the context of working with others, not, necessarily, on his own. To him, there was not really such a thing as a good editor. There was only a good editor of the manuscript in front of him, or, more accurately, the person who wrote it.
Gottlieb’s death leaves much to mourn. But what I’ll miss most about his presence in the cultural world, as an editor, writer, and reminder of great literary eras past, is the way in which he treated art as, first and foremost, a human endeavor.
Most of us have some version of a sorting impulse; we like to know who is good, and who is bad, what we should like, what we should not. Gottlieb just wanted to know — of everyone, and in some ways, everything — what the whole thing was about.
That kind of unflagging interest is a rarity. It is one of those unusual qualities that can make an artist great; it certainly did so for Gottlieb. May he find, in the world to come, an eternal array of new curiosities. And with them, a stockroom full of No. 2 pencils.
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