Although my last blog post had been written for my own amusement, I did, in fact, send it to The Oldie and it came winging back the very same day as being ‘not quite right for us’.
Having rejected some thousand manuscripts myself, I had never been quite as quick as that, allowing even outlines to spend a few days on the hallowed premises of a publisher’s office, affording these would-be authors a few days of hope.
Perhaps it would have been better to stifle hope, but who wants to be responsible for nipping talent in the bud? And one could be wrong. I still remember the occasions on which I came across reviews of books I remembered having turned down.
Of course it is now more than fifty years since three old codgers in the English faculty at Cornell decided that my husband’s PhD thesis* was not worth publishing, thus shattering his belief in himself, which was only restored when a year or two later his landlady (me) came across her lodger’s dog-eared typescript (what was I doing poking about in his room?) and loved everything about it, that is to say the qualities – above all the wit – which, along with rarefied scholarship, were to be his trademarks.
Narrow-mindedness is, of course, a requisite of regular academics and it was inevitable that R’s brother, a well-respected art historian, should throw up his hands in horror at the lack of specificity in his older brother’s books.
That, some years later, R was invited to spend a year at Cornell as a kind of honoured guest is the equivalent of the way in which, in the publishing world, the obscure origins of a prize-winning author who once fought to get anyone’s attention are long forgotten.
Forgotten by the publishing world – including the agents who, as they trawled our catalogue, now ‘discovered’ these writers they had, of course, seen before – but seldom by the writers themselves. I treasure the continuing friendship of many of those I helped to get started and am amused by the inscriptions of the ones who preferred to forget:
But I don’t, of course, wish I hadn’t taken them off those piles of un-agented manuscripts known as the Slush Pile, which no longer exists but was the life blood of the pre-digital publishing world. And I am left with no regrets about those I had to turn down because no one liked them as much as I did, or André took against them: Eva Figes, Peter Carey and Carl Lombard among them. They soon found a home, as did my husband’s book which is seen in the photograph in its American edition (our own budget didn’t run to using an Atget photograph).
*Industrial Diamonds: The Working Class in English Fiction 1840-1890
I loved the pace of life which took these glitches in its stride, but it would be a mistake to think that life was dull in Essex Street. Not only was there the excitement of the very first Tin Tin, which had just been translated by the editor who worked in a little room off ours, but I had been mesmerised by the androgynous creature who had joined the other secretary and me and the whiskery old lady who banged out the Rights Contracts at the corner desk in our room.
