[_Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the
extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the
head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know
him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable
manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very
good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia
was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre
books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and
unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read
MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet
in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last
wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here
in memory of my very dear friend_.]
In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself.
Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal
trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never
did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I
am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy.
My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other
more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to
speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is
interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a
symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while
reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing.
My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world.
Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter
my message without fear or favour.
As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and
nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff,
poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and
strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they
beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most
preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful
authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid
blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly
sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is
in the blood.
Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible.
George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas
and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is
still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many
unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he
said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety."
But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as
publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did
they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich
garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and
younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on
into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing.
But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true
specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is
content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican
that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of
good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some
winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular
conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his
thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et
dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing
terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the
publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I
believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully
when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote
an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a
week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the
head reader of a large publishing house.
One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the
profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will
rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration;
only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the
others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away
their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript
which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it
betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable
to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere
in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into
her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his
ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a
score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me
once, containing this immortal couplet:
She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse
on the air,
A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen
to set it there.
Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral
ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when
one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs'
trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert
Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity.
Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are
repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its
absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack
of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords
to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in
many cantos, beginning
Our heart is but a bundle of muscle
In which our passions tumble and tussle.
Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis:
"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual
circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being
a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the
day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a
paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced
case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by
a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been
bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles
and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female,
under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well
as in large cities and fashionable watering places.
But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition,
let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a
manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which became a by-word in one
publisher's office.
She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant
figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca.
Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured
like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and
combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing
tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful
crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and
tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its
own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of
the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering
strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of
the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was
destined to be pushed forward by sighs.
Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such
plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero
in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently:
For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah
Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the
appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases.
His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and close
together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in
many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his
lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper
lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across
his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and
expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine
proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges
there was a device that worked splendidly, when he wished to show
unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in
the kindest advances one would wish to see.
It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley.
I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the
A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read
too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output
of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional
reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which
distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history,
poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes
a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of
things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is
fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable
treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on
using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And
with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of
writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.
Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is
all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for
the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on
foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging
anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of
intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and
talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of
substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts
all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week?
Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the
authors!