“It was a crushing defeat but put iron in my backbone and sulfur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail.”
—Henry Miller, after the rejection of his first novel, Clipped Wings
“Eighty percent of success is showing up,” declared Without Feathers’ Woody Allen.
For many, the idea of writing for a living is a siren call because it seems to be the one profession exempt from this rule, that authors become rich and famous by spinning fantasies at home in bed like Proust—without ever having to change out of their pajamas and dress for rehearsal. Cheating death and becoming immortal in the written word is the cherry on top, making the profession sound too good to be true.
Which, of course, it is.
Even so, the literary population explosion has sprung from this fantasy of fame, fortune, and immortality with little or no inconvenience. And without having to bone up like, say, a brain surgeon or nuclear physicist. After all, anybody who can read can write. As for the technicalities, a NewNovelist plot generator and SmartWrite cliché check cover that.
But even before computers and million-dollar advances, writers were cropping up everywhere.
In the Book of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon was the first to sound the overpopulation alarm. “…Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Martin Luther, after nailing his self-published Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg church door, agreed: “The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.”
Even before the flood of vanity printings and e-books, Pulitzer Prize winner James Michener told wannabes, “Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you.” In spite of selling 75 million books, none of his historic travelogues rivaled War and Peace or Anna Karenina except in length. But with his army of researchers, the novelist cranked out forty doorstops anyway, making no effort to reduce his own literary carbon footprint.
Other greats have tried to put a condom on the literary baby boom by depressing, if not scaring off, wannabe Tolstoys. John Gardner, the luminary of New England’s Breadloaf Conference, complained: “There are other writers who would persuade you not to go on, that everything is nonsense, that you should kill yourself. They, of course, go on to write another book while you have killed yourself.”
Recently Eat, Pray, Love’s Elizabeth Gilbert scolded Portnoy’s Complaint author Philip Roth for discouraging an upstart. When Julian Tepper, Roth’s waiter at a New York deli, gave the Pulitzer Prize winner his just-published novel, Balls, about a songwriter with testicular cancer, Roth told him, “Quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture.” In her Bookish piece, Gilbert told her literary idol, “Take it easy on the complaining, OK?”1 She insisted that, compared to most other professions, writing is “f---ing great.” You don’t have to wear a nametag, put up with sexual abuse, or risk amputation by machinery, she pointed out. She urged Roth to appreciate that he was “phenomenally lucky … blessed and not blighted” and so should welcome newcomers “who want to follow you into this marvelously pointless and wonderfully unproductive occupation.” In fact, Roth had just announced that he was throwing in the towel after more than fifty years in the trenches.
Other veteran authors are not welcoming to newcomers because they would prefer less competition. Martin Amis, who followed in his father’s footsteps to become a prolific novelist himself, confided to The Paris Review: “I feel generally resentful of younger writers. You’re not thrilled to see some blazing talent coming up on your flank.” Editor/agent/author Betsy Lerner confirms this, declaring: “Dislike and resentment of younger writers is something fairly universal among writers.”
More than a few “Purple Heart” authors resent younger colleagues who have made overnight fortunes with little more than a paper cut. Recent Publishers Clearing House winners, as we will see in the next chapter, “Luck, Suck, & Pluck,” include Prep’s Curtis Sittenfeld, “Lucky Girls” Nell Freudenberger, and Girls’ Lena Dunham.
“Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed at,” Flaubert fumed. But the real object of his resentment wasn’t idiot colleagues so much as the idiot readers who made them rich. “Human stupidity is limitless,” he constantly complained.
Emerson was on the same page: “People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with the bad.”
Steinbeck went further. The reader is “part moron, part genius, and part ogre. There is some doubt as to whether he can read.”
Some best-selling authors agreed. “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,” confessed Newsweek editor, LBJ speechwriter, and Jaws creator Peter Benchley. “But I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”2
John Grisham, who by 2008 had sold 250 million copies of his legal thrillers, beginning with his self-published A Time to Kill, echoed: “My success was not planned, but it could only happen in America.” He added, “I’m a famous writer in a country where nobody reads.”3
Kurt Vonnegut grew so cynical that after writing the poorly reviewed but popular Slapstick he shrugged, “Everybody else writes lousy books, so why shouldn’t I?”4
In any case, rejections—whether by colleagues, critics, editors, or readers—are the dues most every writer must pay to the muse. Some more, some less. In this sense, serious professionals are not judged by how many acceptances they have enjoyed, but how many rejections they have weathered, earning them the red badge of courage.
Today, stubborn persistence is indispensable to the writer—literary or popular—even more than yesterday.
“I finished my first book seventy-six years ago,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth. Their refusals were unanimous: and I did not get into print until, fifty years later, publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.”5
Fellow Nobel laureate John Steinbeck had the same experience. By 1934, he reckoned that he’d made $870 for seven years of nonstop writing. “I am so tired. I have worked for so long against opposition, first of my parents … then of publishers. … Rejection follows rejection.” He finally scored an agent, Mavis McIntosh, but even she couldn’t place his To a God Unknown. She told him—as reps do their clients today—that the market for unknown writers was “extremely tight and unpredictable.”
Still, The Grapes of Wrath creator didn’t lose hope. “Eventually I shall be so good that I cannot be ignored,” he decided. “These years are disciplinary for me.”6
1 Elizabeth Gilbert, “Roth’s Complaint,” Bookish, February 4, 2013. www.bookish.com/articles/elizabeth-gilbert-takes-on-philip-roth
2 Dolores Gregory, “Benchley: Seeing a Famous Forebear Whole,” Washington Post, February 18, 2003.
3 “Grisham’s Gospel.” Newsweek/Daily Beast. February 14, 1999.
4 The Paris Review self-interview, No. 69, 1977.
5 www.goodreads.com/quotes/show13709
6 Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).