(Roughly) Daily

Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison was indeed a teacher (a professor at Princeton from 1989 until 2006). Before that, she was an editor (at Random House, working with authors including Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Muhammad Ali), where, as Melina Moe explains, Morrison’s critical skills and generosity were already evident– as much in her rejection letters as in the works she shepherded through the press…

“I found it extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”

During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States.

Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres…

A fascinating (and instructive) read that leaves one feeling even more warmly about Morrison: “There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters,” from @LAReviewofBooks.

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* Toni Morrison

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As we open the envelope, we might note that today mark’s the anniversary of another epistolary event of literary note: on this date in 1816, Jane Austen sent a momentous missive…

Towards the end of 1815, Jane came into contact with Rev. James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s Librarian. The Prince, it appeared, was an avid reader of novels and was a particular fan of Jane Austen’s works – keeping a set at each of his residences.

Stanier Clarke invited Jane to visit the Prince’s lavish library at Carlton House, and during the visit he suggested that, as the Prince admired her work, she would be ‘at liberty to dedicate any future novel to him’.

Jane did not like or approve of the Prince (or the ‘P.R.’ as she charmingly dubs him in her letters), who was famously debauched and profligate. Nevertheless, she complied with the royal request, dedicating Emma to the Prince…

Her correspondence with Stanier Clarke continued into the spring of 1816, when this letter was written. In it, Jane responds to Stanier Clarke’s suggestion that for her next work she might attempt a ‘Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg’.

She tactfully declines the idea, writing that although such a work might be more profitable or popular than her ‘pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages’, she ‘could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem’…

“LETTER FROM JANE AUSTEN TO JAMES STANIER CLARKE, 1 APRIL 1816” Jane Auten House (facsimile at this link)

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