Scribblers Page 6

  The chance of an unsolicited novel manuscript finding its way into print through a commercial publisher is remote. Where I work, the success rate is perhaps one in a thousand. Prospects may be better at houses more noted for their fiction, but I doubt it; most of them probably don’t even look at unagented material. Since the competition is so fierce, one might expect published fiction to be of consistently high quality. But in seeing the mediocre stuff on bookstore shelves, would-be novelists are understandably bewildered. They’re also encouraged, believing their manuscripts are as good as most of what’s out there.

  When these writers submit material, they’re often treated shabbily. Manuscripts are discarded unopened. Or they’re opened and put directly into their return envelopes. Or they sit in a pile unexamined for six months, after which they receive a form-letter rejection. Or they find a use as scrap paper or worse. I have a good friend who once got a rejection typed on the back of page 142 of someone else’s manuscript; at least it was a personal reply, he figured. In the publisher’s view, material is so plentiful and available slots are so few that it doesn’t make business sense to pay someone to read more than a page or two into most manuscripts, when they’re read at all. Writers are so debased by the process that they’re grateful for any human contact at all, even when it’s a barely polite kiss-off.

  Just as I expect, I receive a thank-you note from each of the three friends whose novels I turn down.

  The slush pile was once a responsibility of mine. Manuscripts came in plain envelopes, in brown paper tied with string, in boxes weighing six or eight pounds, in boxes within boxes within boxes. They came registered mail, or postage due, or marked “Urgent: Unsolicited Material.” Some came shoddily packed and split open, others so securely shrink-wrapped, stapled, and double duct-taped that getting into them practically required power tools. Some were already copyrighted, others elegantly laid out, still others handwritten. Some were pristine, even perfumed. Others were dog-eared or stank of cigar smoke or had what appeared to be dried snot on the pages.

  They were sent by grandmothers, doctors, grade-schoolers, bereaved parents, pilots, professors, war veterans, philosophers, librarians, Libertarians, perverts, and time travelers. A surprising number came from convicts; these were written longhand and never had any return postage. The ones from foreign writers were accompanied by something called an International Postal Coupon, bearing seals peculiar to the country of origin. Since neither I nor our local post office ever figured out how these were to be redeemed in American currency, I returned foreign parcels at company expense, or didn’t return them at all.

  Some writers insisted on making appointments and delivering their manuscripts in person, over my protests that there wasn’t a thing in the world I’d be able to tell them until I had a chance to review their material. That argument carried no weight; they showed up anyway. A few, having traveled a good distance, expected me to read their manuscripts while they sat across the desk. I once spent a surreal hour with a man who claimed to be a Gypsy and his toddler son clad in nothing but a pink diaper. Freely admitting he could neither read nor write, the man wanted me—expected me—to scribe his Gypsy story for him.

  They sent memoirs, novels, folk tales, kids’ books (though all the writers’ guides clearly state that we don’t publish children’s material), religious tracts (though we don’t handle these either), poetry (likewise), three-hundred-thousand-word whoppers, collections of newspaper columns, single short stories (though we publish only books), and antigovernment diatribes. They submitted samples beginning with page 215. They sent synopses that ran twenty-five single-spaced pages. They compared their work with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Bridges of Madison County. They judged their writing of a kind with, and even superior to, that of Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy, and John Grisham. They hung their hats on having studied for a semester with Anne Tyler or Annie Dillard or Gordon Lish. They said how well their work would translate to the big screen, and sometimes even cast the lead roles. They claimed all their friends had read their manuscript and recommended they get it published.

  “Tina was thirty-six, chronologically and in two measurements.”

  “They watched in horror as a slow-motion hand shut the door and oil-stained trousers and a rumpled shirt moved toward them under a scraggly mustache.”

  “Maybe her myopia caused her dearth of vision, her inability to see.”

  “Fresh from the oven, Aunt Mona brought a heaping tray of blueberry muffins, cathead-size.”

  “The People of the Appalachians had one thing in common: They lived in the Mountains.”

  “If you like my writing style but have no need of the present manuscript, I have seven others completed and ready for examination at your request, synopses below.”

  “My work defies a two-page outline. This is destined for a bestseller and you’ll be sorry if you don’t read the whole novel, guaranteed.”

  The competent arrived a couple of times a week, the well conceived monthly or so, the inspired once or twice a year. The great majority of manuscripts required little more than a glance to determine they were of no use to us. My assigned task was to package them and ship them back. Moved by pity, however, I often sent personal letters. What I generally got for my trouble were requests for clarification or, more likely, swiftly delivered packages containing second manuscripts that had been lying in wait, for which I’d feel obliged to send further personal correspondence. I commonly read sixty to a hundred pages when a couple of paragraphs would have sufficed. I carried manuscripts home on the weekends; my reading of published books was nil; my companions instead were “Murder on Mountain Trout Creek,” “NASCAR Days and Nights,” and “Bobbing Red Tulips.” Two stacks of unread manuscripts on my shelves at the office grew to four, six, nine. Writers not part of my expanding circle of pen pals might wait six or seven months for a response.

  They kept rattling the gates. They wore me down. I wasn’t their benefactor, I came to understand. I was a naive boy.

  Meanwhile, my editing—which was mainly what I was employed to do—suffered. Without reprimand—with a touch of mercy, even—the slush pile was taken from me. My company reading was thereafter limited to manuscripts that had already been through some of our readers and stood a chance of publication.

  That’s how I first hear of Charles Price. People around the office start talking about a story in which a woman dies horribly of lockjaw, about a fair-haired, pale-eyed bushwhacker who calls himself Nahum Bellamy the Pilot, about a pair of grimy women riding double on a mule who come to burials to heckle the grieving, about a former slave once called Black Gamaliel. The novel has come to us in the kind of permanent binder made by copy stores, so the pages can’t be divided up and circulated. All of a sudden, our company reading isn’t such a burden. Rather, we’re negotiating over who can have the manuscript, and for how long, and who will get it next.

  Often, what appears to be support for a manuscript lasts only until the first loud contrary opinion comes along. That isn’t a danger here.

  Price calls his story “Held in Equal Honor,” after a line from The Iliad. He lives near Burnsville, in the high mountains north of Asheville, but his novel is set farther west in North Carolina, in the valley of the Hiwassee River. It is the Reconstruction-era story of the Curtis family, former pillars of society brought to a lower station after the Civil War. Nahum Bellamy, the villain, wants vengeance for a wartime act to which one of the Curtis boys was party. Judge Madison Curtis, the patriarch, is incapacitated with guilt over having sacrificed a neighbor family to save his own during the war. His sons are either dead or are pale shadows of their father. It falls to Daniel McFee, the former Black Gamaliel who now rejects his old slave name, to struggle against his bitterness, discover his better nature, and come to the aid of the family that once held him in bondage.

  It is actually a continuation of Price’s first novel, Hiwassee, published by a small house and not widely travele
d, though it won high praise from review sources like USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus, the toughest nut in the business. Why the new novel isn’t being done by the same publisher doesn’t much matter to us. We feel that what we have in our hands is superior in every regard to Hiwassee, which we have by now procured and passed around the office along with “Held in Equal Honor.”

  The best thing about working in publishing is that, every day when the postman arrives, there’s a possibility that you’re about to become part of something exciting, significant, and unexpected.

  All of a sudden, we aren’t a dumping ground for bad prose but rather players in an industry of ideas. We feel we have a winner.

  My parents still embody for me many of the virtues: honesty, industriousness, thrift, foresight, perseverance, devotion, selflessness.

  They did not, however, feed the family in particularly high style.

  When I was in junior high, my mother worked nights and my father was responsible for supper. He had no kitchen skills and was understandably tired from his labor in a machine shop. Our definitive meals from those years were two: a large tinfoil pan of frozen Salisbury steak patties in brown gravy, which we ate twice a week, and a like-sized tinfoil pan of frozen, breaded veal cutlets in a red sauce, which we had weekly. We had no illusions about these entrées, knowing them collectively by the name of “frozen garbage.” Both were served over cottage cheese—large curd—for reasons that made sense then but are mystifying to me now. We customarily had cling peaches on the side, always in heavy syrup, or canned fruit cocktail. Though a thriving garden grew in the backyard, vegetables were unaccountably absent from our table. When I went away to college, most students complained bitterly about the cafeteria fare, but it was to me a revelation. Canned ravioli, tamales in a jar, frozen pizza, little wienies in barbecue sauce, macaroni and cheese from a box, corned beef in a tin, hot dogs wrapped in bread, cheddar cheese soup or canned chicken à la king on toast—those were the foods that brought me to what maturity I attained and that I still crave today.

  All of this is to say that I am not uniquely qualified for every editorial assignment that comes my way. Before beginning work on Charles Price’s novel, I must finish editing the project on my desk, which happens to be a cookbook. This means a month of chervil and chipotle, of fretting over whether quantities of butter ought to be expressed in pounds, ounces, sticks, cups, or tablespoons, of wrestling long distance with an author I’ve never met over the fine points of Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup, Baked Brie, and Grilled Herb-Crusted Lamb Rack with Cilantro Pesto and Smoked Tomato Salsa.

  So it is with much of what I edit—boating guides, travel books, folklore collections, Civil War biographies. The main requirement of the job is not expertise in a certain subject, or a literary sensibility, or even a command of the language. Rather, it’s a tolerance for boredom.

  But Price’s novel is in line with my taste. Moreover, it doesn’t call for substantial reorganization or rewriting by the editor, a blessed relief. Its problems are few and easily identifiable. First, everyone on the staff has trouble remembering the title. And the sequence of the opening chapters needs to be rearranged. And there is one flat, transparently literary scene late in the story that exists only to provide Bellamy, the antihero, a platform for examining his thoughts. Otherwise, all the novel needs is tightening.

  Since I have such an easy project in hand, I enjoy a rare opportunity to do what I suppose is routine for top-drawer editors: I’ll get to know the author.

  I learn a few facts about Charles Price. He has just turned sixty. He is a former journalist, urban planner, and Washington lobbyist. What I don’t expect is his physical appearance, when he comes down from the mountains to take lunch with some of the staff. He wears a Western jacket with a three-inch fringe, tooled leather boots that come to a long point at the toe, and a big cowboy hat. Together, they make him appear bigger than he really is. He has a ponytail, a mustache, and a triangular thatch under his lower lip. Having resigned from his stuffed-shirt career, he apparently doesn’t intend going back. He draws looks from people as we walk to our restaurant table.

  Charles has tended toward the writing life since childhood, when he drew comic books and sold them to his classmates. Inspired mainly by his mother, who read historical fiction, he spent his adolescence imagining himself an average person living in various periods in the past. In college, he started cultivating the persona of a writer, though he had neither skills nor credentials. He read “all the writers I thought I was supposed to, then decided I was good enough to be in their company,” he says. “I was an insufferable little bastard.”

  In the mid-1960s, while working as a newspaperman, he wrote a novel of the Crimean War. His early, unsuccessful submissions were a Wyatt Earp novel and other Western fare—“not genre Westerns,” he hastens to point out.

  His devotion to writing became a point of contention in what was an unhappy marriage. Following a divorce—and much influenced in his mood by it—he wrote a medieval novel packed with murder, rape, torture, and other mayhem. One editor to whom he sent it scolded him for writing one of the most offensive things she’d ever read and then, in the same letter, invited him to submit something else. That should have told him he had talent.

  In the early 1990s, Charles began making frequent trips from Washington to his native North Carolina mountains, which rekindled his love for the region and led him to see it as a canvas for his fiction. He began writing the manuscript that became Hiwassee.

  Meanwhile, his professional career followed a downward course. He was demoted to clerical work at his lobbying firm, though he had eighteen years of service and was the senior member of the staff. A man “wedded to security,” he stepped out of character and resigned one day.

  A surprise was waiting in the mailbox when he got home that very evening: a book contract for Hiwassee, sent by the same publisher whose editor was so offended by his medieval story. It was a lightning strike. To that date, his best-known writing had been for a journal called Airport Noise Report.

  He took his sudden success as an omen. His wasted years of spare-time scribbling were reinterpreted as “fuel,” as an apprenticeship for the writing he meant to do now. He packed up and headed home. When his house in Arlington, Virginia, didn’t quickly sell, a friend loaned him money for a place in Burnsville.

  Hiwassee was a critical—if not a commercial—success. Charles had higher hopes for “Held in Equal Honor,” but when he sent it to his publisher, it was rejected without explanation. He worked up the nerve to demand some criticism of the manuscript and subsequently got more than he reckoned. Daniel McFee, the editor wrote, was a white man in a black skin, and the novel’s other black character tended so far toward the other extreme—toward defiance and belligerence—as to be cartoonish. The novel was flawed at a conceptual level. Readers would be offended by his handling of racial issues.

  “Here I was, a classic Southerner trying to heal the divide,” Charles says, “only to reveal myself a bigot.”

  “No, no,” one of us protests.

  “We don’t see it like that at all.”

  “They’re just afraid to touch anything racial.”

  Still feeling the glow of discovering something we judge special, we resolve to prove our vision of the novel the true one.

  A better opportunity to get acquainted comes when Charles sends me a brochure for a writing seminar he is conducting at his house. “A day of retreat and creative expression awaits you in the beautiful Black Mountains,” it promises.

  “Getting Out of Your Own Way: Finding a Voice,” he calls the seminar. Charles feels he has some insight to offer into how a writer can step back and let his narrative voice flow unimpeded. As for the credentials that give him authority in such matters, he summarizes the plaudits for Hiwassee and briefly touches on his forthcoming novel, which, knowing the old title has been rejected, he is temporarily calling “Heaven’s Fire.” He has circled that title on my copy of the brochure and
penciled “Who knows?” in the margin.

  Not having the social sense to realize that the invitation is intended as a courtesy, I promptly send in my registration fee. Better yet, I resolve to bring the whole family to the mountains.

  Charles’s letter acknowledging receipt of my check conveys a mild surprise. “Clearly I will have to do some heavy lifting,” he predicts. With the letter comes a modest assignment: attendees of the seminar are to write an original, two-page voice piece, to be read to the entire group. Pressed for time, I consider dusting off something from my stash of unpublished gems, but I finally compose a self-consciously humorous tale about a man who writes two pages of prose for a seminar, piles his family into the car, and heads for the high country, bickering with his wife and slapping at his kids in the backseat all the way. They show up at the host’s house “looking like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath but acting worse.”

  The actual trip isn’t much like that. The Black Mountains—a cross range running east and west between the Blue Ridge and the Great Smokies—contain the highest peaks east of the Mississippi. I once traveled there on a fifty-degree day in January, foolishly got off the main road, and found myself climbing a sheet of pure ice on the north slope of one of the mountains. I was scared to continue upward but more frightened at the prospect of turning around and heading down. Traffic was sparse, homes where I might obtain help sparser. If I’d gotten stuck, it would have been a week before a tow truck got my car. The place, in short, is rugged. If you get in trouble, you’re likely on your own. Flatlanders generally go quiet during their trip up the switchbacks, even on a bright June day like the one that brings us to Charles Price’s. We’re barely aware the kids are in back.

  When Charles comes out to greet us before my wife and daughters depart to see the local attractions, he is older and humbler than I recall. He is a man earning a living.