Disgust at the opening of rejection letters can go on for so long, and then some of us decide that there is an alternative to these tiresome postal expenses resulting in disagreeable variations on the no. We print our own work, and go through the slightly less painful process of finding venues that will take it. I am very proud of one aspect of my self-publishing attempts; I have yet to show PST to a bookstore that refused to carry it.
A few months back. I found a
small book called Rotten Rejections. In it
are letters of rejection (or sections thereof) received by some of the
world's most famous writers, not the least of whom is our Marcel. His
biographers had, of course, mentioned the difficulty Proust experienced in
finding a willing publisher for the beginning books of Remembrance,
and
Proust's decision to self-publish, information that inspired me to stop
sending out manuscripts and start printing this instead.
The editor who assembled Rotten Rejections, Andre
Bernard, included the
following delightful bit about Proust's difficulties with the world of
publishing:
"In 1911 Marcel Proust had 800 pages of what was ultimately to become the huge complex of novels called Remembrance of Things Past ready for publication. Where? Who would accept such an actionless, plotless sprawl of innerness revisited? He approached the house of Fasquelle and was rejected. He went to the Nouvelle Revue Francaise and was rejected again, by a very special rejecter-- the celebrated Andre Gide. After a third publisher, Ollendorf, had refused his manuscript ... Proust decided to pay for publication himself.Eugene Grasset published Du Cote de chez Swann (Swann's Way) in November 1913. Gide read it, and the following January wrote to Proust apologizing for the rejection, which he called the 'gravest error of the N.R.F.... one of the most burning regrets, remorses, of my life.' He explained that he had considered Proust a 'snob' and a 'social butterfly,' had only glanced at his manuscript, and had been unimpressed by what he had glimpsed. He asked pardon and the two became good friends.
Here are excerpts from two of the rejection letters received by Proust:
"My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep."Rotten Rejections is a most amusing read for anyone who has ever attempted to get their writing published; few of its contents were more amusing, though, than the rejection memo to an undisclosed author from a Chinese economic journal, clearly an indication of a cultural adherence to politeness, unknown in the world of western publishing:
"I only troubled myself so far as to open one of the notebooks of your manuscripts; I opened it at random, and as ill luck would have it, my attention soon plunged into the cup of camomile tea on page 62 - then tripped, at page 64, on the phrase... where you speak of the 'visible vertebra of a forehead.'"
"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."
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P Segal |
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