Talk of post-office-reform brings to my mind a conversation I had with
Williams, who is a poet. It was about the time, some two years ago, when
a Postmaster-General of the United States proposed the abolition of the
second-class mail privilege for magazines.
I knew that Williams hates magazine editors with all the ardour of an
unsuccessful poet's soul. Consequently, when he sat down and lighted one
of my cigarettes and said that the magazines in their quarrel with the
post office had overlooked the strongest argument on their side, I
suspected irony. It is Williams's boast that he has one of the largest
collections of rejected manuscripts in existence, the greater part being
in an absolutely new and unread condition. Placed end to end, Williams
once estimated, his unpublished verses would reach from Battery Park to
the Hispanic Museum, at Broadway and One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street.
Every poem in his collection has been declined at least once by every
editor in the United States, and many of the longer poems have been
declined two or three times by the same editor, and for totally opposite
reasons.
It is not mere brute persistence on Williams's part that is responsible
for this unparalleled literary accumulation. As a matter of fact he is
easily discouraged, although, of course, like all poets he has his
moments of exaltation. The trouble, he complains, is that with every
printed rejection slip there comes a word of sincere encouragement from
the editor. The editors are constantly telling Williams that his verse
is among the very best that is now being produced, but that a sense of
duty to their readers prevents them from printing it. They regret to
find his poems unavailable, and earnestly advise him to keep on writing.
"You will recall," said Williams, "the principal point made by the
periodical publishers. Conceding that their publications, as
second-class mail matter, are carried at a loss, they argue that the
post office is more than compensated by the volume of first-class mail
sent out in response to magazine advertisements. The argument is sound,
as I can testify from personal experience. Not long ago I came across a
five-line 'ad' in agate which said, 'Are you earning less than you
should? Write us.' Well, the question seemed to fit my case and I wrote.
That was two cents to the credit of the post office. The post office
sold another stamp when I received a reply asking me to send fifty cents
in postage for instructions on how to double my income in three months.
I was somewhat disappointed. With my income merely doubled I should
still find it difficult to pay my landlady, but it was better than
nothing. So I sent the fifty cents in stamps. You will recall the
half-dollar."
"Oh, don't mention it," I said.
"Well, after a day or two I received in a penny envelope a paper-bound
copy of 'How to Succeed,' being a baccalaureate address delivered by the
Rev. Josiah K. Pebbles, who showed that honesty, thrift, and
perseverance were the secrets underlying the career of Hannibal, Joan of
Arc, John D. Rockefeller, and Theodore Roosevelt. So you see, by the
time the secret had been conveyed to me the post office had sold stamps
to the amount of fifty-five cents. Now assume that there are in the
United States between forty and fifty thousand poets and other literary
workers who would like to double their income, and it is plain that the
United States Government made a very handsome profit on that five-line
'ad.'"
"But that is not what I started out to show," said Williams. "What the
magazines have omitted to point out is that by rejecting every
contribution at least once, the editors are doing more for Uncle Sam's
first-class mail business than through their advertising pages. And the
difference is this: While there must be a limit to the number of people
who will answer an advertisement, there need be no limit to the number
of times a manuscript is sent back. I can't see why the publishers and
the Postmaster-General should be flying at each other's throat, when
there's such a simple solution at hand. It is evident that there is no
postal deficit, however large, which cannot be wiped out by a sharp
increase in the average number of rejections per manuscript. Editors
will only have to augment by, say, fifty per cent. the number of reasons
why a contribution of exceptional merit is unavailable. My 'Echoes from
Parnassus' was sent back thirty-seven times before it found a publisher.
It would have been a simple matter to send the poem back a dozen times
more either absolutely or with a word of hearty encouragement."
By this time I had made up my mind that it was indeed irony, and I was
sorry. I don't mind when Williams gets quite angry and lashes out; but I
hate to have a poet laugh at himself.
"Not that I can help feeling sorry for the editor chaps," he went on.
"You couldn't help feeling sorry, could you, for a man who has been
trained to recognise the very best in literature, and to send it back on
the spot? And the more he likes it the quicker he sends it back.
Frequently I have been on the point of writing to the man and telling
him that if it is really such a wrench to return my poem to please not
consider my feelings in the matter, but to go ahead and print it. What
saves the editor, I imagine, is that after a while he does learn how to
detect some real fault in a contribution which just enables him to send
it back without altogether succumbing to grief. Of the fourteen men who
rejected my 'Echoes from Parnassus,' one wrote that I reminded him of
Milton, but that I lacked solemnity; another wrote that I reminded him
of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, but that I was a little too serious; another
wrote that my verses had the Swinburnian rush, but were somewhat too
fanciful. The editor who accepted the poem wrote that he couldn't quite
catch the drift of it, but that he would take a chance on the stuff."
Here Williams got up and strode about the room and vowed that no
combination of editors could prevent him from continuing to write
poetry. "And I never refuse to meet them half way," he said rather
inconsequentially. "I went into Smith's office yesterday with a bit of
light verse and had him turn it down because it had the 'highbrow
touch.' 'My boy,' he said, 'we must give the people what they want. For
instance, I was going up to my apartment last night and the negro boy
who runs the elevator was quite rude to me; he had been drinking. Now
why couldn't you write a series of snappy verses on the troubles of the
flat-dweller? This line you're on now won't go at all with my readers;
they are not a very intelligent class, you know.' And that's another
thing I can't understand: Why should every editor be anxious to prove
that his subscribers are a bigger set of donkeys than any other editor
in town can claim?"
"I was fool enough," Williams proceeded, "to reject Smith's suggestion.
I should have accepted it. My poet's mission won't feed me. If President
Eliot insists it is my mission to write stuff no editor will touch, he
doesn't know what he is talking about."
"I don't think it was President Eliot," I said.
"Wasn't it? Say Plato or Carlyle, then. You can't go on for ever
slapping us on the back and letting us starve. You have got to back up
your highly laudatory statements by purchasing our wares or we shut up
shop. We don't ask for champagne and truffles, but we do want a decent
measure of substantial appreciation, all of us people with a mission,
poets, artists, prophets, women. Now women, here comes Plato or Carlyle
and says it is a woman's mission to have at least eight children."
"President Eliot said that," I interposed.
"Oh it _was_ President Eliot? Eight children, says he, is her mission.
But let me tell you if you take her children and pitch them into the
waste basket, if you use them only to fill up your factories, and slums,
and reformatories, woman will be chucking that sacred mission of hers
through the window before President Eliot can say Jack Robinson. She is
doing it now and serve them right. Mission! Rot!"
He seized a handful of my cigarettes and went out without saying
good-morning.