Writers Love These Stories.

Two Booker Prize-winning novels, one by V.S. Naipaul, were rejected by almost all the British agents and publishers who read them when they were retyped and submitted as work by new writers. (A big hat tip to Be Be Re.)

Typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of Naipaul’s In a Free State and a second novel, Holiday, by Stanley Middleton, were sent to 20 publishers and agents.

None appears to have recognised them as Booker prizewinners from the 1970s that were lauded as British novel writing at its best. Of the 21 replies, all but one were rejections.

Only Barbara Levy, a London literary agent, expressed an interest, and that was for Middleton’s novel.

She was unimpressed by Naipaul’s book. She wrote: “We . . . thought it was quite original. In the end though I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”

The rejections for Middleton’s book came from major publishing houses such as Bloomsbury and Time Warner as well as well-known agents such as Christopher Little, who discovered J K Rowling.

The major literary agencies PFD, Blake Friedmann and Lucas Alexander Whitley all turned down V S Naipaul’s book, which has received only a handful of replies.

This experiment has been tried before in the U.S., with Jerzy Kozinski's National Book Award-winning Steps (an affectless avant-garde novel that had benefitted the first time around from its sexual kinkiness and the success of Kosinski's sensationalized autobiographical Holocaust novel The Painted Bird). Submitted by freelancer Chuck Ross under the name "Erik Demos" (ha ha), it was rejected by 27 publishers including its own publisher, Random House.

These tales paradoxically make writers happy, because even more than they prove that it's almost impossible to get published unless you're a) already famous or b) young, sexy, and edgy, they prove that rejection doesn't mean a damn thing. It doesn't necessarily mean you're a misunderstood genius, but it certainly doesn't mean you're a no-talent who should throw in your pen. Novelist John Gardner once said (among many other rejection-survival aids, comforts, and antidotes here), "If every (literary) agent in the end turns you down, you will know you're either not good enough or too good." I don't think there's even that much logic to it anymore.

Comments

[Tom Strong]

Though only indirectly related, this story and the pee-book together remind me of the saga of Atlanta Nights, which you can read about here.

And the manuscript's available here. It is paradoxically well-worth reading, just for the sheer hilarity of the badness.

[amba]

Great story, especially the fierce defense of fantasy and SF writers that extended to the donation of any and all royalties to a health care fund for same.