On Writing for the Best Magazines

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

YOU HEAR it said now and then about some happy person: “He writes for the best magazines.” So do I: I always write for the best magazines. I don’t, very extensively, publish in them; but that’s because I mostly don’t publish at all. And that, not to linger over a disagreeable subject, is my misfortune, and nobody’s fault.

I am a person of five acceptances: at present I have just five stars in my crown. Four of them are from a Best Magazine, — one of the very, very best, — and the other is from a periodical (nameless here, forevermore) that pays four dollars for a poem of five stanzas. Yet, “let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor;” for I have means of vindicating my right to exist, as a Literary Person, which the world knows not of. I have a packet of Flattering Rejections.

There are twenty-one of them. It’s easy to be definite; I can count them in a few seconds, and then subtract five, — the number of those letters that begin, “It gives us great pleasure.” There is something adorably naïve, by the way, about that beginning; it is like gilding refined gold, painting the lily, and adding a perfume to the violet. On the rare occasions when I have the happiness to see it, I cry out irrepressibly in spirit, “O great, distant, and benign Power! What do you know about pleasure ? And if you’re glad, what do you suppose I am?” It is exactly the opposite, in its delicate, supererogatory courtesy, of that other dismal preliminary, “We regret.” Even yet, I invariably turn upon that most unwelcome commiseration with, “ Who are you to ‘regret ?’ What do you know about it ? In the presence of such a dignity of black despair as mine, the least you can do, in decency, is to avert your face, and hand it back in silence. I don’t want your sympathy.”

Of course, that is only the Printed Slip. It is different with the Flattering Rejection. A Flattering Rejection is lovely; if it comes from a Best Magazine, it’s quite as good as an acceptance from a poor one. For a long time, I did not know there was such a thing. That was about four years ago, when I first began in earnest. I can’t tell you how long ago it was that I really began, because that would mean an unsolicited confidence as to my age, and that would n’t be in very good taste. (I would like, though, as long as I’ve been so frank about those five uncrowded little stars in my crown, to slip in, unobtrusively, somehow, the statement that it’s less than thirty. I wish I could.) But, as I was saying, I used to think there was nothing ’twixt failure and success; but there is. There’s many a slip, — and they’re not all just rejection-slips. Some of them are Flattering Rejections.

Toward the Flattering Rejection, I am the meekest, most docile, most extravagantly grateful soul alive. So far from resenting their sympathy, as I so venomously do in the case of the printed slip, I ardently love, in spite of all subsequent snubbings, every editor who has ever sent me one. It really is n’t unmaidenly to confess it, for I picture them as vague, colossal abstractions, with benevolent eyes, draped in flowing garments, — in style a compromise between a toga and a dress suit, and in hue partaking of the prevailing color on the covers of their respective magazines. And, like the camel crossing the desert, I can sustain life on a Flattering Rejection for weeks.

And yet they present puzzling problems. Since nothing can shake my allegiance to their authors, I am forced to conclude that apparent contradictions are due to the fact that the edited mind cannot expect to comprehend the editing; it must just have faith, and wait for things to be cleared up in a higher life. Emerson says that with consistency great minds have simply nothing to do; so of course that explains why one can’t expect it of an editor. Take just one example. I have one story that has never yet been hustled back with the disgraceful promptitude which is characteristic of the return of some of his brothers and sisters. He always makes long journeys, and stays until I have concluded in my secret soul that he will never come back, stoutly insisting the while, to my waiting family, that I expect him in the next mail. But when he does come, he always brings his own welcome in the shape of a Flattering Rejection. It is delightful to reflect how much pleasure that story has given. So many editors, indeed, have expressed gratitude for the pleasure they have had in reading him, that my brother, who is of a practical turn, has suggested that I make out a bill, “To pleasure in reading So-and-So,” at such and such an amount. But I am no such mercenary creature; I am willing to do what I can; it is no small thing to win the gratitude of an editor. But to return to those inscrutable utterances. The editor of the Best Magazine — the dear, Best Magazine that has been glad with me four times — wrote me that he should have accepted that story, “but for our disinclination to publish stories associated with college life, just as we are averse to those which treat of writers and artists as such.” Yet, in the very next issue, and in many succeeding ones, have appeared stories most emphatically and unmistakably, to the edited mind, dealing with “writers as such.” It is a difference, I suppose, between the intelligence of the editor and the editee that puzzles me. I accept it, blindly, though I can’t help being a little curious and interested. But it really does n’t matter; that editor might tell me that white is black without disturbing my allegiance.

The other editors who have sent Flattering Rejections home with the same story were not so explicit as to their reasons for returning it. On that point they took refuge behind that impregnable editorial Gibraltar, and said that the tale was “not suited to their needs of the moment.” As to that, of course, no mere contributing mind — for I hope I know my place — could presume to judge. But most of them left me with the impression that they, too, were averse to college stories; and yet it has seemed, to my disordered fancy, that some of them have been fairly reeking with college stories ever since. And why shouldn’t they? Why discriminate against college stories, any more than against department-store stories, or kindergarten stories, or stories of firemen and portrait-painters ?

I had so much more to tell! I have shown you only one of my twenty-one; and there is something interesting about each one of the rest. But the Muse, at my elbow, makes a valuable suggestion. She says, “Don’t make it any longer; if you do, it won’t bring back even a — Flattering Rejection!”