When Knopf Said No

An essay in the New York Times Books section counts some famous books which may not have seen the light of day, had the judgement of publishers like Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and others been the last word on their literary value.

In the summer of 1950, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. turned down the English-language rights to a Dutch manuscript after receiving a particularly harsh reader’s report. The work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely,” the reader wrote, “I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”

Knopf wasn’t alone. “The Diary of a Young Girl,” by Anne Frank, would be rejected by 15 others before Doubleday published it in 1952. More than 30 million copies are currently in print, making it one of the best-selling books in history.

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned.The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”).

Alright, so many a great piece of prose and poetry didn't catch the eye or capture the heart of Knopf publishers. So what? Is that such an outrage?  Does that make the rejectionists unsophisticated literary novices?  Literature is art, not a science. There is no set formula to distinguish good art from bad.  It is a judgement call. I know I would have agreed with at least one of Knopf's rejections :-) And I could also have done without the turgid and self absorbed prose of Anaïs Nin.  Also, please ponder the fact that if any one or more of these books had never been published, would our lives have been any the poorer for it?  I am a huge book lover and have read and enjoyed most of the books and authors that Knopf passed over.  I can say with certainty that had I missed reading one or all of them, my life would not have been very different from what it is now. Sorry if I sound like a brute. But that is a fact. Literature and art enrich our lives enormously.  But they are not oxygen, water or electricity. I just don't see what the big deal is about publishers making the wrong(?) call on a putative masterpiece.

Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with V.S. Naipaul, the literary curmudgeon with a huge ego: (via Leiter Reports)

Sir Vidia Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, called this week for university English literature departments to close....

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Sir Vidia said the closure of literature departments "would be a great fillip, a great boost to the intellectual life of the country... it would release a lot of manpower".

He accused academics of spreading "ideas about things that they are determined to get one to accept". ... The novelist believes universities should deal in "measurable truth" and teach only science.

In 2000, the novelist was reported to have told the audience at an award ceremony in Bangkok that jargon used in English departments in the UK and the US concealed vacuous thinking. He described academic jargon as "a way for one clown to tell the other that he is in the club".

Sir Vidia, famous for throwing tantrums and cutting words directed at anyone who dares to cross him, is probably in a snit over English professors, some of whom may have had the temerity to criticize him. So he wants them buried ... or at least unemployed. This illustrates my point beautifully - the futility of arguing over literary merits or the lack thereof.  As Naipaul himself put it succinctly, it is not a "measurable science." So who is the final arbiter of beauty and worth in the arts? The author, the publisher, the professors? Or should the reader have the last say without the officious filter of the experts? Of course, Sir Vidia doesn't exactly mean what I am saying. He probably firmly believes that his own literary pearls are beyond reproach. I can only imagine the vituperative and volcanic hissy fit that would have erupted if Sir Vidia had received the following rejection letter (sent to a Columbia University historian) from Knopf:   

“This time there’s no point in trying to be kind,” it said. “Your manuscript is utterly hopeless as a candidate for our list. I never thought the subject worth a damn to begin with and I don’t think it’s worth a damn now. Lay off, MacDuff.”

 

Comments

[Dean C. Rowan]

Bravo, Ruchira! "So what?" puts it exactly right. At a lecture I attended several years ago, Stanley Fish made the remark more pointedly--"So f---ing what?!"--in reference to the hypothetical risk of censorship (on account of anti-Semitic stereotyping) precluding our access to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

Look, I'm a librarian, and I think we grant far too much power to books and literature. We mistakenly equate the power of artillery with rhetorical power. The cliché retort, "Sticks and stones...," contains a certain truth. The beauty of literature, for me, is precisely its quietistic allure. Despite the proclamations of J.L. Austin, John Searle, and Catharine MacKinnon, words accomplish nothing. They are impotent. That is the very basis for their value.

[Ruchira Paul]

I nearly wrote what Stanley Fish said.

[Helen DeWitt]

Publishers' readers are not generally given the brief of identifying great works of literature; they are not given the brief of identifying books that will change readers' lives. Their brief is to determine whether a book is one readers would want to buy. The point at issue is not whether the 30+ million readers of Diary of a Young Girl were right to want to read the book, but whether the publishers who rejected the book were right in thinking no one would want to read it.

These readers' reports have been quoted in isolation. If we had more data on the recommendations of specific readers we could tell whether readers with good track records had made an uncharacteristic error of judgment, or whether the sensibility which did not warm to Anne Frank led to a pattern of missed opportunities. The sales of the book, however, do make clear that in this particular instance a large number of publishers were out of touch with the public to whom they hoped to sell books. The other books mentioned show a similar gap between readers' preferences and publishers' perception of those preferences.