Accent on Living

A GOODLY number of book publishers, whenever a new best seller begins its climb toward the top of the list, come unhappily to light as those who Turned It Down. They appear as men who had their great chance and muffed it, incapable not only as judges of literary values but even as crass businessmen in pursuit of profits. How could any editor have failed to foresee that Ashley Doakes would sweep the country with his new novel Whangee? Anyone who had barely skimmed Whangee must have sensed that here was a big — a very big — book, bound to go places, a natural, a cinch. The movies grabbed it, promptly; Hollywood is smart. There’s a musical in the making, too, and new printings, 25,000 at a time, are reported every few weeks. The eventual struggle for Whangee by the reprint houses will be a wide-open brawl. How to account, then, for the publishers who were offered Whangee but who dolt ishly let slip the chance?

We learn of them when Ashley Doakes muses to an interviewer on his long search before finally finding print for his masterwork. Doakes himself bears them no ill will; the steadfast artist is above such concerns, he explains. The public can only conclude that publishers are a queer lot who don’t read half the books submitted to them, and who probably wouldn’t understand them if they did. Their main activity is the ruthless rejection of deserving and highly salable manuscripts.

The fact is that publishers are a rather queer lot, although not in any wise for the reasons implied by Doakes to his interviewer. Each publisher has his cherished beliefs. If some persons insist that wearing a bit of copper wire will cure rheumatism, so w ill certain publishers insist that the public won’t buy books about the war. Others are convinced that no market exists for cartoon books, or cookbooks, travel books, historical novels, or whatever their particular myth may dictate. The same publishers suffer equally from affirmative delusions, and each will support some favorite category hopefully, year after year, in the face of repeated refusals by the public to take the least interest in his ventures. But these are merely publisher’s quirks, like a tendency to baldness or a taste in salad dressing, and they should not blind us to the realization that the book publisher is rarely the simpleton he is cracked up to be.

What, in reality, did happen between Ashley Doakes and the several publishers he solicited with Whangee? The facts are far from what Doakes implied in his interview.

Doakes, who was operating a photographic studio at the time, was, as usual, dead broke. He told the first publisher on whom he called that he stood ready, for a beggarly $2500 advance, to begin work on a novel. Doakes argued that, unlike other novels, his book could be illustrated by actual photographs that he himself had taken, and the publisher could have the pictures at a special reduced rate. Doakes walked out in a rage when the publisher — after taking a good look at Doakes — decided that the yet-to-be-writ ten manuscript did not sound like a good $2500 risk.

Doakes managed over the next year to hammer out an incoherent novel about a Vermont schoolteacher who became the victim of small-town gossip, and two more publishers refused him. One of the editors told Doakes his farmer hero was too dull for the heroine and to get some action and color into the character.

By shifting the scene from Vermont to the East Indies, Doakes converted his farmer into a dashing Eurasian gunrunner, and the schoolteacher became a cabaret performer, down on her luck but the toast, nevertheless, of the whole gunrunning trade. As a born plagiarist and a fervent reader of the pulps, Doakes had no trouble in letting this run on to some 1100 pages. A fourth publisher, who already had an East Indian gunrunner novel on his next year’s list, turned the new version down. He thought, rightly, that it was baloney.

The fifth publisher mentioned by Doakes to his interviewer had never been approached by Doakes at all, and Doakes tossed in the name simply for good measure. A nameless assistant editor proved to be the ultimate rescuer of Doakes and his book at its final port of call, By throwing away every other chapter, he brought it down to a manageable length. The remainder, after more cutting and revising, he typed into a clean new copy, correctly spelled.

Doakes had titled the story Where the Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder, but the assistant editor substituted the now famous Whangee, a reference to the small swagger stick which the gunrunning ex-farmer was forever flicking airily at life in general. This afforded the book, also, a jacket showing the hero administering a savage cut with the whangee to a ruffianly Asiatic, while the cabaret girl cowers behind an overturned table.

Whangee, as published, bears only a vague resemblance to the story as Doakes wrote it, and the same will be true of its sequel, which the assistant editor is even now fashioning from the alternate chapters discarded from Whangee. He hasn’t yet hit on a title for it, and he is hoping for a ten-doll a r raise.

Doakes, meanwhile, is lecturing up and down the land on his struggles to make a place for himself as a creative artist, despite the stupidity of the publishing world.