NYT on Literary Rejection

The classic feeling of "I told you so" makes these accounts of famous authors and their rejections so delightful. We've all heard such stories--this is the proof that you need to persist, persist, persist! And it's something to re-read when someone says your songwriting is so-so...

Nothing embarrasses a publisher more than the public knowledge that a literary classic or a mega best seller has somehow slipped away. One of them turned down Pearl Buck’s novel “The Good Earth” on the grounds that Americans were “not interested in anything on China.” Another passed on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” explaining it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” (It’s not only publishers: Tony Hillerman was dumped by an agent who urged him to “get rid of all that Indian stuff.”)

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”).

Kurt Vonnegut's Final Thoughts

Picked up an in-flight magazine and there was a great 2007 interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut, whose works I have never read but now plan to. Here are some gems:

On choosing a life of creation:
I always say to people, practice an art, no matter how well or badly you do it, because then you have the experience of becoming, and it makes your soul grow... I speak with real painters and real artists from time to time about when they get their rocks off, and it's the process of actually doing it. The rest of it--rave reviews or flops, or whatever--is just noise to them. It's the doing that matters, the becoming. The rest of it doesn't matter.

On the decline of literature:
I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It's an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I've said that to open a novel is to arrive in a a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.

On reading as a pastime:
There are all these other things to do with time. It used to be people would wonder what the hell they were going to do for the winter. Then a big book would come out--a big, wonderful book--and everybody would be reading it to pass the time. It was a very primitive experiment, before television, where people would have to look at ink on paper, for God's sake. ...Now you don't have to be literate to have a good time.

On television as one of the most viable art forms today:
It works like a dream. It's a way to hold attention, and it's awfully good at that. For a lot of people, TV is life itself. Churches used to provide people with better company than they had at home, but now, no matter what your neighborhood life or family life is like, you turn on the television and you get relatives, family. I don't know if you've heard about this, but scientists have created baby geese that believe that an airplane is their mother. Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is part of that. I have seen episodes of TV that would have been major Broadway plays in the '20s and '30s. That's where so much of our great writing is going on, if very rarely.