THE MORNING LINE + CODA

GUEST ESSAY CONTRIBUTION

To my surprise — I was, as ever, at least as naive as I was persistent — it took less than an hour of taping and stapling before I found myself falling into the blackest of depressions. I took all the rejection slips down and put them in the bottom drawer of my desk, and I brooded on my nonexistent literary career: I would never be published, and — an inevitable consequence — I would never be happy again. I did not, however, take down two sheets of paper that had been on the wall before my antic impulse took over — one that contained a quote by George Gissing I read each morning to encourage me to stay the course, and one on which, to keep track of submissions, I listed where my various books, stories, and articles were, and when I had sent them out. Then, one morning not long after I’d gotten out of the wallpapering business, when I was typing up a fresh list of what I had out on submission, and after I’d typed the title of my most recently completed novel, the name of the publisher I’d sent it to, and the date on which I’d sent it out, I hit the tab key, let the carriage slide to the left, and typed in odds — 9,999 to 1. Then I typed in odds for each item, and when I got to the bottom of the page, under the column in which I’d posted odds, I listed a Best Bet, Long Shot, Hopeful, Sleeper, and Daily Double. To the left of these selections, in order to keep a running score of how my work was faring in the world, I typed in the words “THEM” vs. “US.”

I’ve kept a scoreboard on a wall near my desk for the sixty years that have passed since then, and though the odds can fluctuate wildly from day to day, depending mostly on the early-morning mood of the handicapper, stories, essays, and articles usually go out at between 500 and 1,000 to 1, poems at about 2,500 to 1, nonfiction books at about 5,000 to 1, novels at about 7,500 to 1, screenplays at about 100,000 to 1, and film rights to unpublished novels at more than a million to 1. Several times, on a canny gambler’s instinct, I’ve suddenly gotten out of the two-dollar line, as it were, moved to the hundred-dollar window, and have sent a story or novel (sometimes with a new title) back to a large-circulation magazine (i.e. The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ) or a mainstream publisher (Holt, William Morrow), and have had my gambler’s instinct validated by a letter from an editor telling me that he or she was delighted to tell me that he or she would like to publish my work, and sometimes — without any seeming memory of having seen the work before — telling me how much he or she thought I had “grown” as a writer since the last time he or she had read my work. I accumulated nearly three thousand rejections before, at the age of twenty-seven, I sold my first novel, and since then, when literary agents have submitted a large portion of my writing, I have accrued some two to three thousand additional rejections. During these six decades I’ve had the good fortune to have had two screenplays produced and to have published a fair number of books, along with several hundred stories, articles, poems, and essays. My eleventh published book, Imagining Robert — my most successful nonfiction book in terms of reviews and sales — was passed on by forty-one publishers, and published by a publisher that had originally turned it down.

Other than the value of persistence, I see no moral to this tale, or in the arc of my particular literary career. Many books that have eventually attained great literary and/or commercial success were turned down, some with great frequency: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Peyton Place (1956), A Separate Peace (1959), Animal Farm (1945), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), The World According to Garp (1978), Nickel Mountain (1955), and A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), among others.

Still, a cautionary note: even when a book is eminently worthy of publication — and no matter an author’s or agent’s persistence — it may languish forever unpublished; and if, after having been turned down multiple times, it is accepted for publication, it rarely happens that it enjoys anything close to the successes that books like those noted in the previous paragraph have enjoyed.

’Twas ever thus. Consider this passage from George Gissing’s The Letters of Henry Ryecroft, published in 1903 — a passage I typed out sixty years ago and taped to the wall next to my scoreboard:

And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world’s neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause of complaint. But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it? If it is honest journey-work yet lacks purchasers, at most you may call yourself a hapless tradesman. If it comes from on high, with what decency do you fret and fume because it is not paid for in heavy cash? For the work of man’s mind there is only one test and one alone, the judgment of generations yet unborn. If you have written a great book, the world will come to know of it. But you don’t care for posthumous glory. You want to enjoy fame in a comfortable armchair. Ah, that is quite another thing. Have the courage of your desire. Admit yourself a merchant, and protest to gods and men that the merchandise you offer is of better quality than much which sells for a high price. You may be right and indeed it is hard upon you that fashion does not turn to your stall.

To which, whenever I read it, I respond with two words that, no matter my early-morning mood, or the vagaries of the literary life, have continued through the years, and on a daily basis, to make great good sense: Keep typing!

CODA

In the spring of 1956, a few months before my nineteenth birthday, I had several lymph nodes surgically removed and biopsied, after which I received radiation to both sides of my neck. My mother, a registered nurse, told me that the pathologist’s report concluded the lymph nodes were benign. When I asked why, then, I was being radiated, she said something vague about the radiation being a precaution because of several nodes that had not been removed during surgery.

When, several years later, I gained access to the medical reports, I found out that the lymph nodes were cancerous, and that I had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. At the time of the surgery and radiation, part of me believed my mother, but part of me believed I had cancer (why else was I being radiated?) and that I was probably going to die within a year. And so I decided that before I left this world I would do what I’d been longing to do: I would write a novel. 

I worked on a novel all through that spring and summer, and in the fall I brought it to Charles Van Doren, who’d been my Freshman Composition instructor at Columbia, and who I looked to as a friend and mentor. He read the novel, praised it lavishly, and offered to recommend it to his publisher. I began to believe that I might soon become the American Françoise Sagan, and have my first novel published at the age of nineteen. 

A month or so after I submitted the novel, I received a note from the publisher: She wrote that I was a gifted young writer, that she would love to read my next novel, but that she was going to pass on this one.

When I saw Charles the next day, and told him the novel had been turned down, he asked me how I was feeling about the rejection.

I said I felt fine.

“Really?!” he said. “Having a novel you’d worked hard on and had so many hopes for — wasn’t it as if someone had called your child ugly?”

I wasn’t a parent, but I got his point, and admitted that the rejection had hurt.

“But the novel is still the good novel it was,” he said, and he offered to recommend it to another publisher. 

I’ve often recalled this first experience with rejection, and how — a mistake I’ve tried not to repeat — I’d let my hopes become expectations. Charles was not the first to compare a writer and his or her work to a parent and child, and the analogy still holds. When a book, story, script, or essay is done — when I can’t figure out anything else I can do to improve it — I send it on its way and hope that, like one of my children, it will fare well in the world. Also — another benefit of my conversations with Charles — although I’ll feel rejections personally, I try not to take them personally. Who knows why a particular editor, or editorial board (or marketing or sales department) has decided to say no, and usually does so — think of all the splendid novels that have been turned down multiple times — for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the work itself.

In the year and a half since I wrote “The Morning Line” I published a novel, After Camus, that received many excellent reviews and gratifying reactions. Prior to its publication it had, like Imagining Robert, been passed on by several dozen publishers. “But most of them never read it,” a novelist-friend said. “They looked at your track record and profile — an aging white man whose recent novels had not sold especially well — and that was it. We’d both have a better chance at publication were we young debut writers . . . ” 

Who knows? What I do know is that I recently changed the titles of two short stories and placed them in magazines that had previously turned the same stories down. I took my inspiration here from Ray Bradbury, who, after he began having great success publishing stories in large-circulation magazines, changed the titles on earlier stories these magazines had turned down, submitted them again, and had them all accepted. And I continue to take pride in being able to say, as happened during the week I’ve been writing this “CODA,” that I placed a story I worked on through many drafts after it had been passed on many times. What sweet pleasure in seeing the story into print so that it can now give pleasure to others. And what pleasure too, no matter the vagaries of literary fashion and what’s being taken and what’s passed on, to be able, most days, to keep typing. And while I type I also take pleasure from having these words published in the inaugural issue of Eleventh Hour Literary, a periodical that gives heart to writers who, despite disheartening responses from periodicals, persist both at their craft and in trying to get their work into print.

---

Jay Neugeboren is the author of 24 books, including award-winning books of both fiction and nonfiction, and four collections of short stories. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, Tablet, Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, etc. His most recent books are the novel After Camus (2024), and a graphic novel on which he collaborated with his son, Eli Neugeboren: Whatever Happened to Frankie King (2024).

A version of The Morning Line, edited and without the Coda, first appeared in American Book Review.