Harry W. Pope | September 2013

Writing is a craft that inflicts those who practice it with much self-doubt and long periods of loneliness. Rebecca West described the act of writing as “a nauseous experience,” while Georges Simenon exclaimed “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness!” Paul Theroux said that placing words on paper “is pretty crummy on the nerves.” Extrovert and raconteur Truman Capote once commented, “It’s a very excruciating life, facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.”

Solitary days, weeks, and even months spent struggling with a work causes many writers to suffer feelings of angst. William Styron once said, “Loneliness is your companion for life. If you don’t want to be lonely, get into TV.” Dick Francis, who has written a string of best sellers on the horse-racing game, and is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s finest thriller writers commented expressively, “When you’re writing, that’s when you are lonely. I suppose that gets into some of the many characters you are writing about. There are hours and hours of silence.”

Some writers admit to struggling for hours over the placement of a single sentence and will spend an hour or more finding exactly the right word. That giant of literature, Ernest Hemingway, was once interviewed by George Plimpton of the Paris Review, and was asked how much rewriting he did.

His response was, “It depends, I rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.” Surprised, Plimpton wanted to know why and asked whether there had been a technical problem or if something had stumped him. Hemingway replied simply, “Getting the words right.”

Then there is the additional pain of rejection, and every writer experiences this without exception. Rejection is inevitable, a deflating experience that cannot be avoided. Having slaved for countless hours over a work, a manuscript arrives back from a publisher’s office along with a terse note, usually sent by a faceless reader, passing a negative judgment on the story.

In defending their judgments, publishers often say that their rejections differ from those of other publishing houses and are not necessarily based on the perceived value of the manuscript.

While they may acknowledge a liking for a story, other obstacles to publication are put forward such as prior commitments, problems with scheduling, and sometimes even a lack of money. Some books which have slipped through a reader’s fingers and then gone on to become blockbusters include War & Peace, The Good Earth, Watership Down, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Fountainhead, to mention but a few.

In 1920, Agatha Christie, who would become a master storyteller of murder mysteries, sent off her manuscript of The Mysterious Affair at Styles to a publisher, only to be advised that “It is quite interesting and has several good parts, but it is not suitable for our list.”

A few years earlier, in 1915, D.H. Lawrence had confidently sent off his work The Rainbow, only to be promptly told, “As it stands, it is unpublishable because of its flagrant love passages.” He would continue to be stalked by rejection as in 1928 his novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, was returned with a note saying, “For your own good, do not publish this book.”

Norman Mailer had his work, The Naked and the Dead, returned to him in 1948 with the comment “All other considerations which this book presents are subsidiary to the problem posed by the profanity and obscenity of its dialog. In my opinion it is barely publishable.” Lust for Life, based on the life of Van Gogh, was written by Irving Stone, who had his manuscript rejected in 1934 with the comment, “A long, dull novel about an artist.” In contrast, the response to George Orwell’s acclaimed Down and Out in London and Paris was, “It is decidedly too short...”

The novel by James M. Cain titled The Postman Always Rings Twice caused a sensation when it was first published in 1934. Its plot had nothing to do with the US Postal Service and was all about sex. Going on to success with other books, James Cain later explained why this book had such an unusual title. Before finally being accepted for publication, several publishing houses had turned it down. Cain explained that each time a rejection letter was delivered to his home, it seemed the postman always rang the doorbell twice.

On occasion, a publisher will be highly expressive when rejecting a story, as when Earle Stanley Gardner received a turn-down for his The Shrieking Skeleton in 1937. The reader commented, “The various characters talk like dictionaries, the so-called plot has whiskers on it like Spanish moss hanging down from a Louisiana bayou.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald lived with regular rejection between his many successes, and when Hollywood beckoned, he became a screenplay writer. He disliked this type of work, but stuck with it because the pay was good, and he enjoyed the long sunny days of southern California as well as the fast lifestyle of the movie capital.

In 1920, his manuscript for This Side of Paradise was rejected by a note which read in part “... it seems to us, in short, that the story does not seem to work up to a conclusion; neither the hero’s career nor his character are shown to be brought to any stage which justifies an ending... so the story does not culminate in anything.” Sixteen years later, in 1936, his Thumbs Up was turned down by a reader with the comment, “I thought it was swell, but all the femmes down here said it was horrid. The thumbs I suppose were too much for them.

A popular story which circulates in the book trade is that a certain publisher once accepted a book and then sent it out to an artist to be illustrated. When his work was complete, the artist returned the manuscript only to have it sent back to him with a rejection notice.

Best selling author Joseph Heller is another who enjoyed heady success coupled with the pain of rejection. He encapsulated such experiences very neatly when he said, “Success and failure are equally difficult to endure. Along with success comes drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, mediation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure, comes failure.” His hugely successful book Catch 22, was originally rejected by a reader who commented to a colleague, “I haven’t the foggiest idea about what this man is trying to say. It is about a group of American Army officers, stationed in Italy, sleeping (but not interestingly) with each others’ wives and Italian prostitutes and talking unintelligibly to one another. Apparently the author intends to be funny—possibly even satire—but it is really not funny on the intellectual level. He has only two devices, both bad, which he works constantly... this as you may imagine, constitutes a continual and unmitigated bore.”

The novel Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1957, was filmed on two occasions. Though when it first landed on the desk of a reader, he duly commented to his manager “...it contains some wonderful writing, but is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. The public will judge it to be revolting. It will not sell... I am most disturbed at the thought that the writer has asked that this be published. I recommend it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

Writers often accuse publishers of being blind to good works, and this theory has been put to the test. Back in 1969, Jerzy Kosinski won the US National Book Award with his novel Steps. Some six years later, a freelance writer by the name of Chuck Ross typed the first twenty-one pages of Kosinski’s novel and submitted them to four publishing houses under the pseudonym of Erik Demos. All four publishers rejected the story. Some two years later, Ross sent out a complete manuscript of the book, once again crediting the writing to Erik Demos. Among the ten publishing firms who were approached was Random House, which had originally published the book for Jerzy Kosinski. Without exception, all rejected the book, failing to recognize a work that had already been published and which had been awarded a prestigious prize.

On occasion, very small cosmetic changes can bring success to an author. The publishing house of Longmans Green turned down a manuscript called The Problems of the Single Woman only to watch another firm print it under the title of Live Alone and Like It. A similarly rejected effort was called The Birds and The Bees. It quickly soared to best-seller status when the title was changed to Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.

The rules seem to be these: if you have written a successful novel, everyone will invite you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have proved yourself by being published elsewhere.
                                        —James Michener

In a highly unusual turn of fate, a manuscript written by best-selling author Catherine Cookson, which was rejected exactly fifty years earlier, was finally published in March of 2000, nearly two years after her death. It was her 100^th published work, and was eagerly awaited by her fans all over the world. Catherine Cookson’s tales of working-class life sold over 100 million copies and were translated into twenty-three languages.

This rejected manuscript, titled Kate Hannigan’s Girl, was Cookson’s second novel, and was a sequel to her first, Kate Hannigan. It was rejected by her agent back in 1950 saying that the story had the fault of many second novels in that it lacked drive and did not have as much energy as her previous book. He also thought it portrayed the sexuality of its heroine poorly.

Telling the story of Kate’s illegitimate daughter and clearly mirroring the life of the author, Cookson even gave the heroine her own middle name, Ann. Macdonald, her publishing house at that time, felt the strong personal storyline was not appealing enough.

Cookson was a school dropout at age thirteen, and when her first book was published, she felt she was on her way to establishing herself as a popular writer. So the rejection of her second book was a traumatic experience for her but a hugely significant point in her writing career. She turned away from writing explicitly about her mother and herself, and sharply developed her powers of characterization, going on to produce a new work tiled The Fifteen Streets, which became very popular.

Shunning the opportunity to rewrite the rejected manuscript—for she was asked to make changes—Cookson withdrew it, placed it in an envelope, and filed it away. She returned to the story and made changes to it in the months before her death in June 1998 at the age of ninety-one.

The publication of her earlier rejected story, half a century after it was written brought happiness to many in the area which she grew up in, north-eastern England. The authors’ will decreed that royalties from the novel should go to the Cookson Trust, which supported a wide variety of social and charitable causes in that region.     

An assemblage of some of the briefest rejection notices with a few comments passed between manuscript readers in various publishing houses.

The Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle, 1954
“A very bad book.”

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, 1931
“Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China.”

Sanctuary by William Faulkner, 1931
“God! I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.”

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, 1961
“It can never be translated.”

The Spy who came in from the Cold by John Le Carré, 1963
“You’re welcome to Le Carré—he hasn’t got any future.”

The Deer Park by Norman Mailer, 1955
“This will set publishing back twenty-five years.”

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, 1955
“Definitely too racy for us.”

Animal Farm by George Orwell, 1945
“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.”

Gandhi a Memoir by William S. Shirer, 1980
“Too elementary.”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, 1925
“Do you realize, young woman, that you’re the first American writer ever to poke fun at sex?”

A River Runs through It by Norman Maclean
“These stories have trees in them.”

Harry W. Pope is a freelance journalist residing in Bowmanville, Ontario. His work has been published in the USA, Britain, Germany, Australia, and Canada.