The "bad eminence" of turning down Sterling's great poem is one that
you will have to share with some of your esteemed fellow
magazinists--for examples, the editors of the Atlantic, Harper's,
Scribner's, The Century, and now the Metropolitan, all of the elite.
All of these gentlemen, I believe, profess, as you do not, to know
literature when they see it, and to deal in it.
Well I profess to deal in it in a small way, and if Sterling will let
me I propose some day to ask judgment between them and me.
Even _you_ ask for literature--if my stories are literature, as you
are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of
the country turned down that book until they saw it published without
them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in
London, Leipzig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my
stories!
No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the
newspapers, which make no false pretences and are frankly rotten, and
in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten
as soon as it is cold.
I know how to write a story (of the "happy ending" sort) for magazine
readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so so long
as stealing is more honorable and interesting.
I've offered you the best stuff to be had--Sterling's poem--and the
best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me. I do not
doubt that you really think that you would take "the kind of fiction
that made 'Soldiers and Civilians' the most readable book of its kind
in this country," and it is nice of you to put it that way; but
neither do I doubt that you would find the story sent a different kind
of fiction and, like the satire which you return to me, "out of the
question." An editor who has a preformed opinion of the kind of stuff
that he is going to get will always be disappointed with the stuff
that he does get.
I know this from my early experience as an editor--before I learned
that what I needed was, not any particular kind of stuff, but just the
stuff of a particular kind of writer.
All this without any feeling, and only by way of explaining why I must
ask you to excuse me.
Sincerely yours,
AMBROSE BIERCE.
[Washington, D. C.,
December 6, 1904.]