JOLLY DAYS

I Don't Think So

There are periodically articles about rejection slips dumped on the doorsteps of the worthy. It is a sure fire subject because gatekeepers seldom feel they will be scrutinized — so in lifting the curtain you get to see the gatekeeper's cluelessness revealed in full blossom.

In this latest NYT iteration of befuddled rejection slips the following judgments were offered to Knopf by its editorial “readers” :

• Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”)
• Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”)
• Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”)
• Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”)
• Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”)
• Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy)
• James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”)

The article says that in a two year period Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman.

One particular chuckle-head takes the cake in their assessment of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, “very dull, a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.”