Why I Think You Should Not Purchase #GoSetAWatchman

There are several reasons why I am not going to purchase and read Go Set A Watchman (GSAW) by Nell Harper Lee. One of those reasons is the crooked agents she's had since her beloved agent, Maurice Crain, died in 1970.   Crain was the one who edited her work, advised her, and helped her develop To Kill A Mockingbird.  

Harper Lee really got the shaft at the agency McIntosh & Otis, particularly by Sam Pinkus, who made all sorts of dirty deals behind the author's back. The whole thing is detailed in Mark Seal's excellent expose at Vanity Fair, aptly titled "To Steal A Mockingbird."  This should be required reading for literary writers, students, and book authors. There should be a quiz on it at cashier counters wherever GSAW is sold. 

Additionally, the article reports the following:

A friend once asked Lee if it was true that she’d never written another novel because she didn’t want to compete with herself.
“Bullshit!” she snapped.
“Why then?” the friend asked.
“Because I wouldn’t go through all the terrible publicity and the strain of what happened with Mockingbird for any amount of money.”
Asked about the volume of Mockingbird sales, she replied, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because I only make 10 percent on it.”
She rarely talked about money and never handled it. Her checks bore the account name of Harper Lee and Alice Lee, and Alice balanced her sister’s books, paid her taxes, and reviewed her contracts.

I feel you, sister Nell; promoting a book is not for the faint of heart. The New York Times reported on the history of the book:

“Go Set a Watchman” would have been Ms. Lee’s literary debut, if her editor had not rejected it. She finished the novel, which takes place 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in the mid-1950s. But her editor, Tay Hohoff, told her to write a new version from Scout’s perspective as a young girl.

I must say, I hope no one ever discovers the skeletons of books I have in my closet, completed or not! It is clear that GSAW was a stop on the road toward writing the excellent classic To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAB).

Here are some facts:

• In 2007, Harper Lee suffered a stroke and moved home to Monroeville so her older sister Alice Lee could look after her
• In 2011, Alice ended up in a different nursing home in town after a bad fall coupled with a bout of pneumonia
• Alice Lee died last year, at age 103, and friends reported that Harper was sitting alone at the funeral and talking to herself. She did not seem to be aware of her surroundings
• Alice Lee's law partner, Tonja Carter, carried on the work on behalf of Harper Lee and was part of making the decision with Lee's agents to publish GSAW in 2015
• Tonja Carter also sued Pinkus (Lee's former crooked agent) to get back the rights to TKAM, which Harper Lee had been duped into signing away
• Tonja Carter is also now Harper Lee's power of attorney and can make decisions for her in the case that she is unable to make them for herself
• There are allegations that Harper Lee had kept GSAW in a safety deposit box to keep it safe and unpublished (See NYT article about who knew about the manuscript.)
• It was widely known that Lee didn't want to publish again
• The story of Tonja Carter "discovering" the manuscript in a pile of papers when Alice Lee was near death is suspect
• Alabama investigators are looking into at least one anonymous complaint that Ms. Lee, who is now nearly 90 and infirm, nearly completely deaf, and visually impaired, was manipulated into publishing GSAW

For more, read Claire Suddath's excellent article, "What Does Harper Lee Want?" at Blomberg Business. The point here is that after Harper Lee's sister Alice died all bets were off. I think if she'd wanted to publish GSAW at any point in her career, she would have.  That it is being published now is just a bunch of agents and publishers making a bundle off of an old woman who is not able to make her wishes known.  In short, in my humble opinion it stinks of bad juju.

We live in a reality-TV time when everyone wants to know the story behind the story. Many readers will purchase GSAW just to learn about the book that Nell Harper Lee herself called, "The Parent of To Kill A Mockingbird." I don't watch Reality TV. I don't want to know how the magic trick was done. I believe it is the writer's prerogative to share or not share the behind-the-scenes of her wonderful published novel.  Of course, it's your choice whether or not you yourself purchase the book, but at least you know the shady issues surrounding its discovery and publication.

You Won't Believe What W. Somerset Maugham Did To Sell His First Book!

Novelist W. Somerset Maugham, famous for his book Of Human Bondage, had dismal sales for his first novel, Liza of Lambeth.  His publisher had no interest in advertising the book. So, he cleverly placed a few classified ads in a few daily newspapers in London. It said:

Young millionaire, lover of sports, cultivated, with good taste of music and a patient and empathetic character wishes to marry any young and beautiful girl that resembles the heroine of W.S. Maugham's new novel.

Within 7 days, the first edition of his little known novel sold out. It went on to get critical praise and popular sales. Here are some other first novels that made it big out of the gate:

• Ralph Ellison's only novel Invisible Man
• Janet Fitch's White Oleander
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
• Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
• Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
• David Guterson's Snow Fall on Cedars
• Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees
• Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies
• Harper Lee's only novel To Kill a Mockingbird
• Jay McInernay's Bright Lights, Big City
• Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind
• Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar
• Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
• Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones
• Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Just sayin': Good things are possible.

Even Gordie Lish Rejected Ray Carver Once in A While

Well, competition for space at The Quarterly was "ferociously tough," after all.  It can't be a win every time.

Joan Didion Rejections

Smoke in your face and an avalanche of rejections for a Joan Didion story circa 1965:

Saturday Evening Post:

Many of us read it and a great many were excited and insistent in their admiration of it. Others, and they include Bill Emerson who has the final vote, also admired it but felt that it was wrong for the Post, not so much because of its subject matter, but also because of the oblique method of narration.

The New Yorker:

As a whole it just isn’t effective enough.

Ladies’ Home Journal:

Too negative for us.

McCall’s:

I feel very bad about rejecting this story — not because I think it’s really a well worked-out story but because the writing is so awfully good. She has a very special way of involving the reader… but I’m turning this down, reluctantly, because I don’t think it’s a successful story in the end.

Redbook:

Just too brittle.

Harper’s Bazaar:

While “The Wellfare Island Ferry” is almost my favorite among the stories we have published… I feel that “When Did Music Come this Way?” is not quite as good.

Vogue:

Not quite right for us.

Mademoiselle:

Unable to use this particular story.

The Atlantic Monthly:

I hope you’ll be sending us more of Joan Didion’s work, but this didn’t make it, so back to you.

The Reporter:

Alas, not right for The Reporter.

Cosmopolitan:

Too depressing.

  Good Housekeeping:

Marvelously written, very real, and so utterly depressing that I’m going to sit under a cloud of angst and gloom all afternoon… I’m sorry we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time. 

Via: Brainpicker.com whose magnitude for reading and writing interesting blog posts seems endless. Thank you. (Plus to be totally transparent, this is also a pick up of the cool yellow Brainpicker quotation marks, with which I am now officially in love.) 

p.s. Interesting to see what the respectable magazine rounds for a story were in 1965.

Hunter S. Thompson Goes B*t S***t on Biographer

Does it count as a rejection if the author lambasts his biographer? Here is a charming little hand-jotted note from Hunter S. to William McKeen who wrote Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. Guess he didn't like the book.

Via: Flavorwire.

Rejection Written to Ursula Le Guin's Agent

Here's a good one to Virginia Kidd, famous sci-fi lit agent, from an editor who found Le Guin a bit complicated. Love the line: "The interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance."

T.S. Eliot rejecting Orwel's Animal Farm

Eliot worked for Faber and Faber at the time. He rejected the book, indicating that he thought Orwell's satire was off. He expressed it in this mind-boggling way:

"After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm -- in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs." 

Is he defending Stalin here? And wouldn't a more "public-spirited" pig be a communist pig? Not sure I get it, but I'm not as smart as all that anyway.

 

Via:cracked.com

What To Do About Amazon?

A lot of writers seem to be silent on the topic of Amazon's alleged backhanded business practices to handicap sales of Hachette books. There is a deafening roar of non-response, especially among those who are about to have a book published soon, such as myself.  But, I'll tell you mice. Fair is fair. I have to go with Stephen Colbert on this one. That might be dumb, since he is after all a Hachette author, and I am after all a nobody about to publish my book, but I've heard the beef of even teeny tiny publishers. What do you think? Comment anonymously, of course.

Ann Beattie: New Yorker Rejections

According to Ben Yagoda's book, The New Yorker and the World It Made (Scribner, 2000), editor Robert Angell wrote several encouraging rejections to help develop Anne Beattie. Such as:

"These little slices and moments are often surprisingly effective, but the story itself seems to get away from you as it goes along. It seems possible that there is more form than substance here, but perhaps that is unfair. What I most admire is your wit and quickness and self-assurance. I hope you will let us see more of your work, and that you will address your future submissions directly to me." 

Though he did occasionally get frustrated with her, but only mildly so:

"I wish you would try a very quiet and modest story — one that relies on no devices and is content merely to bring us to its discoveries. But whatever you do write, please continue to send it to us." 

Um..Yeah, I Would Call Your Rejection Officious

You would be correct in thinking that Jerry is J.D. Salinger and that this is a rejection from the New Yorker.  Click the image to read it.  It's really something. My favorite line from Mr. G.S. Lobrano: "Another point: we can't help feeling that this story is too ingenious and ingrown."  Seriously, shut the front door.

They *Were* Being Dense

Dear Miss Plath,
I’m sorry we decided against these poems. We like the second section of AMNESIAC very much, but cannot see any relation between it and the first section. Perhaps we’re being dense. But would you think over the possibility of printing the second section alone under the title? If you would care to resubmit it that way, we’d be happy to consider it again.
Thank you for sending these poems to us, and we hope to see others.
Sincerely,
Howard Moss

April Blurb's Day

This may seem like April Fool's joke, but it's not. Someone pretty hefty among the literati is going to read my novel and maybe blurb it. This happened through a friend, who picked up the phone and asked, who is also sending an advanced reading copy to the person, who has a very large readership, like Oprah-sized (no body jokes, please; we love O at every size). It may not happen, of course. But today it makes me happy to think that it might.

U2 Rejected

U2! Some people are just plain wrong,

More Rejection Wisdom From the Virtual World

• “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” –Ray Bradbury
• “Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.” –James Lee Burke
• “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” –Neil Gaiman
• “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.” –Barbara Kingsolver 
• "Rejection slips [are not]...messages to stop, but rather tickets to the game.” –Anita Shreve 

Question of the Month: "Chick Lit"

I just read this New Yorker article about Jennifer Weiner's complaints concerning how her books are (mis)treated. She makes a noble and worthy argument on the state of books by women, which are ignored and often belittled, but then slightly confuses matters by comparing apples to oranges. No one is in fact comparing her to Chaucer, nor should they, and elite male authors do often seem to be held in esteem as if they were the father of poetry himself, which is irritating, misguided, and often absurd. But there are different categories of fiction in the world, and to make an accurate comparison of a commercial fiction book with a literary fiction book is not necessarily a cogent argument for gender inequality. Wouldn't Weiner do much better to insist on parity with the likes of Stephen King or Dan Brown--she should be treated like those highly successful, very good, male writers of commercial fiction. She should be compared favorably in the category in which she writes, and c'mon, of course she should be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review! To ignore her is ridiculous. But why maudlin Franzen would even occur as her likely comparator is a mystery to me. Your thoughts on the matter?

Some Wisdom Is Needed Here

Let's hear a few words from other writers like ourselves who have struggled with rejection and made it. (Any writer could probably qualify under those terms.) Though, do you think anyone ever feels like he or she has made it? I know of a very famous writer who lives in fear of never writing another book as good as the one that won him the Pulitzer Prize.  I also know of a very famous writer who was awarded a Nobel Prize after she was too old and infirm to collect it in person. Ah, life; a kick in the teeth, no matter how you slice it, right?

• “Rejections slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.” – Isaac Asimov
• “I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’“ – Saul Bellow
• “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath
• “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut
• “Often, you have to fail as a writer before you write that bestselling novel or ground-breaking memoir. If you’re failing as a writer – which it definitely feels like when you’re struggling to write regularly or can’t seem to earn a living as a freelance writer – maybe you need to take a long-term perspective.” – J.K. Rowling

Holiday Monday

Happy Labor Day, Rosemary Ahern.  Happy Labor Day, everyone else.

Geniuses versus Mediocrities: Who Wins?

In this single historical rejection, we have the problem of publishing summed up very nicely:

Catch – 22 by Joseph Heller: "I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities."

(The clue phone rings for you.)

Best Colleges Has Literary Rejections

Here's an article called 20 Famous Rejection Letters We Can All Learn From, including a few letters that we've displayed and discussed here at LROD, including rejections of work by Gertrude Stein, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, and others.  See the label famous for more well-known rejections.

The Finest Fuck-You Prose At the End of the World!

A letter from Norman McClean (author of the short story collection A River Runs Through It) to an editor at Alfred Knopf, after said company started come around to see if he might have a manuscript for them.  With thanks to anonymous for pointing it out in a post, and to Letters of Note:

Dear Mr. Elliott:
     I have discovered that I have been writing you under false pretenses, although stealing from myself more than from you. I have stolen from myself the opportunity of seeing the dream of every rejected author come true.
     The dream of every rejected author must be to see, like sugar plums dancing in his head, please-can't-we-see-your-next-manuscript letters standing in piles on his desk, all coming from publishing companies that rejected his previous manuscript, especially from the more pompous of the fatted cows grazing contentedly in the publishing field. I am sure that, under the influence of those dreams, some of the finest fuck-you prose in the English language has been composed but, alas, never published. And to think that the rare moment in history came to me when I could in actuality have written the prose masterpiece for all rejected authors – and I didn't even see that history had swung wide its doors to me.
     You must have known that Alfred A. Knopf turned down my first collection of stories after playing games with it, or at least the game of cat's-paw, now rolling it over and saying they were going to publish it and then rolling it on its back when the president of the company announced it wouldn't sell. So I can't understand how you could ask if I'd submit my second manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf, unless you don't know my race of people. And I can't understand how it didn't register on me – 'Alfred A. Knopf' is clear enough on your stationery.
     But, although I let the big moment elude me, it has given rise to little pleasures. For instance, whenever I receive a statement of the sales of 'A River Runs Through It' from the University of Chicago Press, I see that someone has written across the bottom of it, 'Hurrah for Alfred A. Knopf.' However, having let the great moment slip by unrecognized and unadorned, I can now only weakly say this: if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole remaining author, that would mark the end of the world of books. 

Very sincerely, Norman Maclean

        (Source: Francis Burr, via Al Pinetree, via Letters of Note)