An Apt Sensibility

Thomas McCormack on the importance of an apt editorial sensibility:

The right editor—as Pound was for Eliot—is right not because he has some sort of absolutely good taste, a special insight into literary Platonic forms. Nabokov, a reader of exuberant and joyful responsiveness, despised Faulkner, Mann, and Camus. Did Nabokov lack ‘good taste’? You can’t think so if you’ve heard his appreciations of Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoi. It doesn’t take ‘good taste’ to respond to Faulkner. It simply takes a sensibility that responds to Faulkner.

From Thomas McCormack, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (2006).