The Imprint of Alan Swallow: Quality Publishing in the West

7 Alan Swallow and His Authors

114 7 Alan Swallow and His Authors as an editor, Alan Swallow worked slowly and carefully, spoke briefly and bluntly, and was, in words of poet Vi Gale,“very adamant about what he would tolerate and what he wouldn’t.” He edited word by word, comma by comma, scribbling marginal notes that were so hard to read that Gale thought he must have hurt his hand in his motorcycle accident .1 Reading one prose manuscript, he found that he was managing only thirty pages per hour. One writer noticed that as he discussed a manuscript with him he seldom made “any gestures of those strong, almost stubby hands.” Some of Swallow’s writers did not appreciate the close scrutiny.The poet and critic Yvor Winters complained to him about “green ink on the galley sheets” for a collection of his poetry.“You took it upon yourself to revise three of my poems with disastrous results,” he wrote.“Please return these passages to their original lineation; it was correct in the galley proofs and was correct in the copy I sent you. These are my poems.”2 Gale, too, did not always agree with Swallow’s editing. “He tended to push me into a kind of formality that I was trying to break out of,” the Portland poet said. “And he thought that stuff ought to be rhymed, and I had tried to break away from that.”3 A lan Swallow and His Authors | 115 When a manuscript entitled Displaced Persons was submitted to him one summer day in 1956, Swallow wrote the young poet Don Gordon that he liked the work, but publication would not be until several weeks into 1957. He also said that after a careful reading he felt that “the collection needs some selection.” When the time came for specific cuts, he proposed eliminating nine poems altogether and editing out the second pages of two others. This amounted to about one-fourth of the original manuscript . “I realize I have been pretty severe,” he told Gordon . “Think over the suggestions. I shan’t kick too hard at the admission of a few—a very few.”4 Swallow could also be severe with authors of prose. The New Mexico novelist Frank Waters was a fluent writer who found that “the words flowed easily from my old Parker pen.”5 Alan considered him sometimes “bullheaded ” and thought his work could stand condensation. He persuaded Waters to condense an early trilogy about western gold mining—Below Grass Roots, The Dust Within the Rocks, and The Wild Earth’s Nobility—into one novel, later published by Ohio University with the author’s changes. Oddly, Waters, much unlike Winters and others, thought Swallow did not edit his books at all.6 ThepoliticallyleftistSwallowcalledThomasMcGrath, whose poetry he had first published while still at LSU, “possibly the only poet of the Left in America worthy of serious consideration alongside the distinguished Left poets of Europe.” This opinion did not stop him from wielding his editorial pencil.7 He continued to publish his old friend’s work, but with reservations. Working with McGrath on a collection in 1964, he told him that 116 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow some of his recent poems were repetitive, “pretty cruel caricatures of your style” and, in short, that the volume would require deep cuts because his current output was so disappointing.8 With writers he found just plain inept, Swallow could be truly harsh. He told one woman who had submitted a historical work about Dodge City that “the writing is really quite poor” and “in some places you have been taking legend for history, or something near legend.”9 Winters, despite his objections to some editing, said that while Swallow was not, in his opinion, a good poet and had “no gift for style in his work,” he had “a remarkable sense for style in the work of others; he could read accurately and evaluate correctly.”10 26. Alan Swallow considered Frank Waters’s classic novel The Man Who Killed the Deer “darned near as much my book as Frank’s.” In his old age, Waters believed he owed his career to Swallow. Photo copyright Cynthia Farah Haines. A lan Swallow and His Authors | 117 Like most editors and publishers, Alan Swallow was on the lookout for talent. Winters first met him when the future publisher, just discharged from the army, appeared at the...