And there’s plenty to ridicule. To Sylvia Plath:“But there certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” To Ernest Hemingway:“It would be extremely rotten taste,to say nothing of being horribly cruel,should we want to publish it.” To J.G. Ballard:“The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.”
When Toni Morrison was an editor with Random House her rejection letters tended to be long,with generous suggestions.Alamy
T.S. Eliot wrote quite a nice letter to George Orwell,rejectingAnimal Farm because “what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs”. The letter was appreciative at any rate than the US publisher Dial Press,which argued it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”.
Now we have a glimpse into the rejection letters of an editor who was frank,fair and often very encouraging – and went on to become a literary giant herself.
spent 16 years as an editor at Random House before she left in 1983 to be a full-time novelist,and in that time wrote hundreds of rejections. They are filed in the publisher’s archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library,and the library’s literature curator,Melina Moe,describes them in theLos Angeles Review of Books.
In her time as editor,Morrison championed the works of many writers and was pioneering in her recruitment of black authors. It was down to her that Random House published black activist Angela Davis’ autobiography. But she must have also elected to spend much of her time on her rejection letters.
Toni Morrison championed Angela Davis’ writing at Random House. Nicole Emanuel
Moe writes that these letters are “an archive of Morrison’s faith in and sheer love for the written word – and of her kindness”. Sometimes they also show a growing tension between her appreciation of a manuscript’s literary qualities and her reluctant conclusion that it isn’t commercial enough – a tension that has only become stronger in our own times.
Morrison could be brusque and direct,but her letters tended to be long,with generous suggestions. These could be on craft or character,but could also be comments on a changing publishing industry,frustrations with the tastes of the reading public and “sympathies for poets,short story writers and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres”,as Moe puts it.
In 1977,Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist that the work was “extremely honest,forthright and moving in ways I had not expected it to be”. She passed it around the office to get support,but her colleagues found it depressing. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” she wrote,“but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”
Morrison’s frustrations might well have played a part in her decision to quit. In 1981,she issued a warning in a speech to the American Writers Congress that “something is terribly wrong” in the industry.
It was the era of global consolidation,which has continued:today,the mainstream publishing world has shrunk to the “Big Five” (Simon&Schuster,Penguin Random House,HarperCollins,Hachette and Macmillan). I suspect that if she were a young woman in publishing today,Morrison might be working for a small press with modest print runs but exciting and experimental publications.
The one thing missing from Moe’s perceptive piece is the names of the authors Morrison rejected. Did any of them get published elsewhere,and did any of them eventually become almost as famous as Morrison herself? I do hope so.
Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger..
