One sub-sub-genre of journalism that shoots up green every spring is the Cry of Woe (the not-lowing-but-bleating C. O. W.) from a radically disillusioned publisher’s intern or junior assistant-to-an-editor. That ever-renewing cry is the result of a time spent inside the unholy heaps and towers of the slush pile, where the hapless reader finds that all the world is crap. That’s why they call it a slush pile, she discovers.She realizes that the world is radically fallen! She flees the Gothic piles of slush to freedom. From there, she conceives of an article revealing to the world the unbearable blistering horror and yea, even terror of her tenure in the slush. Like an Ishmael, she has escaped into a bracing air that is not permeated with flecks of pain. This calls for hoo and calloo and general uprisings of celebration!
The latest escapee from this travesty of life that is surely, surely worse than days of digging ditches or shoveling out camp latrines is Jean Hannah Edelstein. She has written The Shocking Truth About the Slush Pile. Once again, people around the planet are confronted with the dread internment of a sensitive soul. Once again, they add an amusing array of comments to the slush pile moan.
Jean Hannah, I am so glad that you are no longer suffering the prickly Boschian torments of the once-innocent! No doubt elevation will follow, as you scramble up the glittering rungs toward your goal; I wish you luck, and hope you will be an editor worth having.
Yet I have something to confess.
Many long years ago—more than five years before my first book wobbled into the world—I bought (one must buy) and read a book called Salar the Salmon, by Henry Williamson. It was a reprint from David R. Godine, Publisher, a company in Boston known for its beautiful books.
Back then, I was a poet who had stumbled into writing a novella and nine stories. In my poet’s innocence, I thought, If he loves this, he’ll like my stories. I put my manuscript in an old-fashioned brown paper envelope, added a handwritten address, and slapped on that queer, archaic thing, a stamp. I dropped the envelope in the mail, somewhere near Willett Street in Albany, New York. Perhaps I didn’t even know that term, slush pile.
Many months passed. Eugene Garber told me to call, so I called: and felt abashed. The operator knew nothing. Call back in three days, he said. Three days later I duly called, and learned that the manuscript was on David’s desk.
The night before my birthday, David Godine called to accept the manuscript. He wanted to do the novella and stories as two tiny books rather than one. The strange thing was that I had made that particular birthday the dividing line; if I could not achieve a book by then, I would quit—or so I had told myself. I knew too many poets embittered by lack of publication, and I didn’t want to be one of those.
Of course, nothing is easy. It took many years for the first book to come out, although it was a beautiful object, meticulously designed and produced. My editor, writer Sadi Ranson, made sure that reviews for the novella appeared in The New York Times and The Boston Globe and elsewhere, and that was far more than I had expected. The second book lagged, and I eventually withdrew it; by then I had published a novel with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, and I didn’t want the book of my very first stories to be reviewed as a third or fourth book.
My next book will be my seventh. Despite the fact that I am “midlist” and have never received that rare, desirable gift, “a push,” I paddle on in the stream, keeping to my own course. I have learned a great deal since the day when I put a manuscript in an envelope.
On Saturday, I stopped in at New Haven's Atticus Books and picked up a novel by Imre Kertész, plus a book by Borges that I wanted to reread. I took a quick glance to see if any of my books were on the shelf, down in the bottom right-hand corner where “Y” lives. At first, I didn’t see any at all. Then I noticed the tiny, lovely hardcover of Little Jordan, still in print after all these years.
I laughed, touched by the sight.
If I have learned anything over the years, it is that the proper stance of an artist before the blank page and before those who have gone before is humility.
I hope that I have also learned to be grateful.
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Credit: Above is the logo of David R. Godine, Publisher.
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