“Perseverance is much more important than talent. Because so many talented people fall by the wayside.”
—James Michener
In On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated the Five Stages of Grief—DABDA—which apply to the petit mors of manuscript rejection:
Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”
Anger: “It’s not fair.”
Bargaining: “Gimme another chance.”
Depression: “What’s the point?”
Acceptance: “It’s going to be okay.”
Though the last stage eludes pessimists, most writers—even manic depressives—are, deep down, optimists. Though the writer may never really accept that her labor of love is roadkill, she reaches Acceptance by rejecting rejection. And so she presses on, heroically or compulsively.
In another groundbreaking title, Outliers, The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell argues that success in most fields depends not so much on Luck or Suck, but on the Ten-Thousand-Hour Pluck Law. Statistically, professionals bust ass for at least that long before collecting the fruits of their labor. Calculating at eight hours a day, that’s about three year’s work. Gladwell estimates that it took him ten years (thirty thousand hours) to go from journalistic “basket case” to The New Yorker staff writer, and four more before his first book (Tipping Point) came out. As we have seen, historically, most writers have worked ten to thirty years before becoming “successful,” if not legendary.
Let’s look at three literary Outliers now to see how they supplemented their Luck and/or Suck with even greater Pluck to survive rejection.
Norman Mailer’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), made him an overnight sensation. The precocious Harvard grad, though only twenty-five, had already put in his Outlier ten thousand hours. His next title—Barbary Shore—tanked. Fearing that he was a one-hit war story wonder, Rienhart, Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Harpers, and Harcourt Brace rejected his third roman à clef, The Deer Park. “Perversely, this energized Norman,” wrote his biographer.1 “He went into overdrive promoting his manuscript.” Mailer described himself as its “messenger boy, editorial consultant, Machiavelli of the luncheon table, fool of the five o’clock drinks.” At last, Putnam gambled on The Deer Park and took a bath. Mailer didn’t write another novel for ten years. Meantime, stuck in the second circle of grief, he lashed out with Advertisements for Myself, eviscerating all his more successful colleagues.2 At the cost of many friends, the “Village Villain” and “The General,” as he called himself, was now back in the headlines building an Outlier personality cult which would buoy his career. He became a talk show provocateur, he ran for mayor, he knifed his wife, he threw a Four Seasons bash. He wrote about Marilyn, Ali, Oswald, Gilmore. He climaxed with Jesus in the first person (The Gospel According to the Son). No one had more Pluck than The General.
In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer charged that his Beat colleague Jack Kerouac lacked “discipline, intelligence, honesty, and a sense of the novel.” Early on, many editors shared the view. Kerouac’s Visions of Neil, Dr. Sax, and Maggie Smith were universally rejected. “Will I be rich or poor? Will I be famous or forgotten?” he wrote in his journal. Finally, Harcourt agreed to publish The Town and the City. “I’m going to sell it,” declared Kerouac. “I’m ready for any battle there is!”3 He failed to even make back his $1,000 advance on the novel. He grieved that he suffered the “curse of Melville.” Unlike his more stoic predecessor, he found that only expletives could vent his disgust and rage, and he often blamed his novel’s failure on “the worst shit luck” and the publishers who had “f---ed” him. But Kerouac compensated for his lack of Luck and Suck with Pluck: “Because I’m not famous they don’t care,” he said. “But what they don’t know is that I am going to be famous, and the greatest writer of my generation, like Dostoyevsky.” In five years, by his estimation, he had written “600,000 words, all in the service of art”; now he redoubled his efforts while working as a day laborer and trying to launch his own press with Allen Ginsberg. At last he entered the literary pantheon with On the Road.
James Joyce was one of Kerouac’s greatest inspirations—not only for his work but for his diehard attitude in the face of unrelenting opposition.
At age twenty, Joyce, poems in hand, started knocking on the doors of Dublin literati. He was still in college and living at home with his parents, six sisters, and three brothers. He had written his Aunt Josephine: “I want to be famous while I’m still alive.”
The young artist cold-called W.B. Yeats. “The first spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce,” the poet wrote a colleague. “I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.” He gave the upstart a hand, though “such a colossal self-conceit with such a Lilliputian literary genius I never saw combined in one person.”
Still unpublished, Joyce later started his debut autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero (released posthumously in 1944). Meanwhile, he was competing in opera-singing contests (he won a bronze in the 1904 Feis Ceoil); he was wearing a hole in the seat of his pants writing 250 letters a day in an Italian bank; and he was “blogging” about Ireland for the Il Piccolo della Sera. “I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself,” the lapsed Catholic wrote a friend, “but I think I must have a talent for journalism.”
Stephen Hero was turned down by everybody. So, too, was its follow-up, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At last, Irish publisher George Roberts agreed to take a gamble on his story collection, Dubliners. But in the eleventh hour he backed off. Joyce contacted seven different lawyers about suing Roberts and complained to 120 different newspapers—all to no avail. At last he wrote King George V himself. But the monarch refused to be interrupted from his stamp collecting and bird hunting. At last Joyce threatened to shoot Roberts.
Yeats, Pound, and friends petitioned the Royal Literary Fund to rescue “this man of genius.” Though it agreed to pay him a small sum for nine months, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Pound sent a Get Well card. “Dear Job,” it began. By this time, Joyce called himself “Melancholy Jesus” and “Crooked Jesus.”
Drinking was his only relief from the cross. He left pubs doing his “spider dance.” Recalled his daughter-in-law, “Liquor went to his feet, not to his head.” Nora Joyce had seen one too many tarantellas. One night when her husband waltzed home, she told him she’d torn up Ulysses. He sobered up long enough to find she was bluffing.
Joyce drank not so much for inspiration but for pain relief. He met another chronic sufferer, Marcel Proust, for the first and last time in 1922 at the Paris ballet. Neither had condescended to read the other’s work. They spoke only of their health. Joyce complained of his headaches, bad eyes, and ulcers. Proust, who spent the equivalent of $20,000 annually for narcotics and elixirs, wept about his “poor stomach” that was “killing” him. The two agreed to a shared love of truffles. With that, the penurious Ulysses took his leave of the trust-funder Swann without hitting him up for a few francs.
Months later Proust died of pneumonia in his cork-lined room, leaving behind his unrevised 3,200-page Remembrance, which won him immortality. The novelist had weathered his share of the storm over the years, too. But he had gone on to claim the coveted Goncourt Prize by “actively courting the judges with expensive presents and fine meals,” according to a rival who called him “a talent from beyond the tomb.”4
Joyce died two decades later from a perforated ulcer. His mad daughter, Lucia, asked her mother, “What is he doing under the ground, that idiot? When will he decide to come out? He’s watching us all the time.”5
So the master must know that his tenacity paid off posthumously, making him—like Kerouac, Mailer, and the other literary Outliers—required reading on every syllabus.
Besides building a personality cult, begging already-famous writers for endorsement, threatening to shoot a publisher, or petitioning charitable organizations for support, here are a few other time-tested DIY career accelerators.
In 1897, W. Somerset Maugham was learning about the razor’s edge and human bondage: His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, was dying on the vine because his publisher refused to market it. So he took matters into his own hands. He placed a personal in several London newspapers.
“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.”
The first edition of Liza quickly sold out. Critical praise and serial printings followed.6
By 1869, Charles Dickens was the first international rock star of fiction. But that didn’t prevent Little Nell’s creator from writing a glowing anonymous review of his The Innocents Abroad.
Fitzgerald prevailed upon his wife, Zelda, to review his The Beautiful and Damned for The New York Tribune. She entitled her 1922 blurb “Friend Husband’s Latest” and urged readers to buy the novel so she could afford a new winter coat.
Masters who advanced themselves using this MO were legion.7
The benefits were, and still are, inestimable. The writer-editor becomes the rejector, not the rejectee. Escaping the slush, he can revive his old ms.carriages. He gains suck by running movers’ and shaker’s work, even if substandard, and promotes his own aesthetics.
Dostoyevsky’s editorial assistants called the touchy epileptic “Spitfire” for his reaction when they tampered with his punctuation or modifiers.
Poe terrified everybody in his Messenger office. “Even a typographical error threw him into an ecstasy of passion,” his co-editor noted. Although the perfectionist complained of being overworked—“I must do everything!”—he went on to found Literati. In it, the essayist, poet, and short story specialist pilloried every rival, including Dickens, Longfellow, Emerson, and Thoreau.
At age fifty, dissatisfied with middlemen, the financially insatiable Twain launched his own press, Webster & Co. Its two debut titles—his own Huck Finn and Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs —were hits. In the next nine years Webster followed up with Connecticut Yankee, plus some Whitman and Tolstoy. Twain’s enterprise folded after disasters such as a biography of Leo XIII, the poet pope, which sold two hundred copies.
Balzac was less fortunate with his own publishing house: He went belly-up after a few years, exhausting his mother’s fifty thousand franc seed capital.
Around the same time in Russia, Fyodor and his wife, Anna, founded the Dostoyevsky Publishing Company and The F.M. Dostoyevsky Bookstore. His 1869 title from Stellovsky, The Idiot, tanked, and the fact that Tolstoy earned twice what he did annoyed him. In the first year of business, the couple sold three thousand copies of their debut title, The Possessed.
Virginia Woolf started The Hogarth Press for her own work and that of her Bloomsbury friends.
Then there were the many masters who moonlighted as editors for their own publishers. To name a few: Gide at Gillimard, Michener at Macmillan, Doctorow at Dial, and Toni Morrison at Random House. At Faber and Faber, T.S. Eliot himself said: “I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.”
Finally, the wave of the future: James Frey’s Full Fathom Five writer’s sweatshop. The Million Little Pieces author employs unpublished MFAs in an Andy Warhol-like factory, giving each a few hundred dollars for a manuscript or Hollywood concept with a promise of participation in back-end profits. Among Frey’s most promising recent collaborative brainstorms is his animated Fart Squad concept for eight-to-ten-year-old boys. He characterized Fathom Five with his customary modesty: “This is the future,” he told Esquire magazine. “Every writer I know is scared of the future,” he added. “I’m making the future. I’m gonna be a part of who determines what the future is! Same as Henry Miller!”
Oprah’s pick is nothing if not plucky. “I believe in myself almost more than anybody I ever met, which is how I’m able to do things,” he went on. “It’s not because I’m smart. It’s not ’cause I’m gifted … [or] went to great schools. It’s because I get up every day and I go to work.”8
1 Mary V. Dearborn, MAILER: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
2 James Jones, William Styron, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, J.D. Salinger, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, Anatole Brouillard, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Herbert Gold, William Burroughs, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers.
3 Paul Maher Jr., Kerouac: The Definitive Biography (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004)
4 Edmund White: Marcel Proust (Fides, 2002).
5 Richard Ellman, James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1983).
6 “Success Stories: First Novelists, Debut Novelists” www.bookmarket.com/debutnovels.htm
7 Balzac had his Chronique de Paris and Revue Parisienne; Twain, his Buffalo Express; Dickens, Daily News; Poe, Messenger, Journal, and Stylus; Dostoyevsky, Citizen, Epoch, and Time; Proust, Le Banquet; Cather, McClure’s; Orwell, the Tribune; Maugham, the Legal Observer; Robert Penn Warren, the Southern Review; Mencken, the Baltimore Herald.
8 John H. Richardson, “’There Is No Truth,’” He Said,” Esquire magazine, October 13, 2011.