Josh and Julie Niland’s fresh and sophisticated diner, Petermen, has been crowned the second-best restaurant globally – and the only Aussie venue to make the coveted top 20 list
“A professor gave a balloon to every student, who had to inflate it, write their name on it and throw it in the hallway. After the professor mixed all the balloons up, the students were given 5 minutes to find their own balloon. Despite a hectic search, no one found their balloon.
At that point, the professor told the students to pick up a balloon and hand it to the person whose name was written on it. Within 5 minutes, everyone had their own balloon. 🎈 The professor said to the students: "These balloons are like happiness. We will never find it if everyone is just looking for their own. But if we care about other people's happiness, we'll find ours too."
Every prophet has to come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness.
He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation.
This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.
Rejection letters have a bad reputation. Because they are unwelcome, and sometimes quite crushing, there’s an understandable urge to catalogue extracts from the more ridiculous ones and point to them as evidence of how catastrophically wrong publishers can be.
And there’s plenty to ridicule. To Sylvia Plath: “But there certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” To Ernest Hemingway: “It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.” To J.G. Ballard: “The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.”
T.S. Eliot wrote quite a nice letter to George Orwell, rejecting Animal Farm because “what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs”. The letter was appreciative at any rate than the US publisher Dial Press, which argued it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”.
Now we have a glimpse into the rejection letters of an editor who was frank, fair and often very encouraging – and went on to become a literary giant herself.
Toni Morrison spent 16 years as an editor at Random House before she left in 1983 to be a full-time novelist, and in that time wrote hundreds of rejections. They are filed in the publisher’s archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the library’s literature curator, Melina Moe, describes them in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
In her time as editor, Morrison championed the works of many writers and was pioneering in her recruitment of black authors. It was down to her that Random House published black activist Angela Davis’ autobiography. But she must have also elected to spend much of her time on her rejection letters.
Moe writes that these letters are “an archive of Morrison’s faith in and sheer love for the written word – and of her kindness”. Sometimes they also show a growing tension between her appreciation of a manuscript’s literary qualities and her reluctant conclusion that it isn’t commercial enough – a tension that has only become stronger in our own times.
Morrison could be brusque and direct, but her letters tended to be long, with generous suggestions. These could be on craft or character, but could also be comments on a changing publishing industry, frustrations with the tastes of the reading public and “sympathies for poets, short story writers and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres”, as Moe puts it.
In 1977, Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist that the work was “extremely honest, forthright and moving in ways I had not expected it to be”. She passed it around the office to get support, but her colleagues found it depressing. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” she wrote, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”
Morrison’s frustrations might well have played a part in her decision to quit. In 1981, she issued a warning in a speech to the American Writers Congress that “something is terribly wrong” in the industry.
It was the era of global consolidation, which has continued: today, the mainstream publishing world has shrunk to the “Big Five” (Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan). I suspect that if she were a young woman in publishing today, Morrison might be working for a small press with modest print runs but exciting and experimental publications.
The one thing missing from Moe’s perceptive piece is the names of the authors Morrison rejected. Did any of them get published elsewhere, and did any of them eventually become almost as famous as Morrison herself? I do hope so.
