A You Slant

Written by Steven Johnson

I’ve written a weird number of rejection letters for my age—a sentence that sounds sort of self-congratulatory—and, yes, the common tone among them is one of self-effacement, not quite an apology but close, for the arbitrary power someone else thought unwisely to bestow on you. At this point, anyone receiving a rejection letter knows exactly the change in blood pressure from an email starting with “thank you for your interest . . .”—if you’re lucky enough to receive a response in the first place.

Kurt collected at least sixty-five of his.

Such letters are now the last bastion of formality, of the useful barrier of wordy tact. “We regret to say,” “we are obliged,” “unfortunately, we are unable,” “we should like,” etc. Every letter has a lord and serf. There’s etiquette and power, and some publications bear the crown more gracefully than others. The famous either skip signatures—the New Yorker merely inserts a slim card with “The Editors”—or include them just to show their magnanimity.

The letters Kurt got are beautiful design objects in and of themselves—and a mess of speech acts:

Consolation, by McCall’s: “The fact that we cannot use this manuscript does not necessarily mean that it is without merit or that it will not suit some other magazine.”

The meta-apology, Yale Review: “We are very sorry not to be able to accept your manuscript for publication in The Yale Review, and we are also sorry that we cannot thank you in a personal letter for sending it to us.”

Exhortation, Today’s Woman: “Won’t you try again?”

And frankly ugly wrought-iron prose from The Atlantic: “The manuscript which we are returning to you has been among those in which we have taken a special interest, and if through press of work it is not possible for us to write you a personal letter, we hope you will realize that we have enjoyed your work, and are greatly obliged to your courtesy in sending it.”

Woman’s Life both pats the back and elbows the ribs: “It hurts us as much as it does you—well, almost!—to report that we do not find a spot for the enclosed manuscript.”

And (Miss) Elizabeth Penrose of Glamour caps her “returned herewith” with a flowing blue signature larger than the rejection itself.

The last time a series of signatures was so directly connected to a politics of respect was in 1854, when Edgar Allen Poe ranked authors and editors by their handwriting in “A Chapter on Autography”—basically a literary diss track. C. S. Henry’s “chirography” is “clerky and slovenly.” Ralph Waldo Emerson “belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake.” William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, who might share the closest MS. with (Miss) Penrose above, “writes, in short, what mercantile men and professional penmen call a fair hand, but what artists term an abominable one.” (The more you read Poe’s side-eye, the more you find editors of major magazines.)

Whether or not Poe was getting back at anyone, or actually believed in handwriting analysis, his essay is a candid look at how the world of belles lettres is just as political as any other world. Artistry, as about one million think pieces about the role of the humanities will now tell you, is in part a matter of use, especially to these magazines. This Week reminds its repeat submitters it wants “articles with strong ‘you’ interest, which help the reader better himself and tie in with his concern for his health, family, security, community, and nation.”

In other words, the editors want “literature in its finest sense”—Unk’s letter in Sirens of Titan, a scribbled memoir designed to load the reader with information (History, Astronomy, Biology, Theology) and make him “courageous, watchful, and secretly free.” A letter in which “all the things that the writer knew for sure were numbered, as though to emphasize the painful, step-by-step nature of the game of finding things out for sure.”

A letter to get him off Mars, where he doesn’t know anything.
A letter to get him back to his wife and son.
A you slant.

 

 

What will time on a selection committee teach you? Many things, obviously. But the greatest might be a sort of Vonnegutian forbearance for all sorts of people, including and especially yourself. There comes a point where all deliberation is useless, and the differences between candidates, or manuscripts, or submissions, is at once so minute and so democratically vast that you have no choice but to make an imperfect decision. It’s arbitrary. And this knowledge comforts you as you submit yourself to other distant judges.

As the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent teaches: “Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.”

One of Kurt’s rejection slips later served a much more practical use: someone in the Vonnegut household used the back side as a shopping list.

Corn
6 weiners
Duff’s Devils Food
Junket Instant King mix

Steven Johnson graduated from Indiana University in May 2017 with a Bachelors in English. This summer, he’ll be a camp mentor at Butler University Creative Writing Camp, where he went nearly every summer as a kid. In July he moves to Washington, D.C., to start an editorial fellowship at The Atlantic.