Finally heard from the publishers

I had sent them a manuscript of original short stories. They were nice enough to respond:

My dear Bryant,
I return to you the dreadful document, pronouncing it without hesitating the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish I could possibly conceive. Utterly empty and illiterate, without substance or sense, a mere babble of platitudinous phrases, it is beneath comment or criticism, in short beneath contempt. The commonness of it simply nauseates-- it seems to have been given to those people to invent, richly, new kinds and degrees of commonness, to open up new oceans of vast dismal deserts of it. But I'm not, my dear Bryant, expressing myself with resentment--only with a bewildered sense of strangeness through I look at you as over the abyss of oddity of your asking about that thing to which I hate to accord the dignity even of sending it safely back to you!

Sincerely,
A publishing house

I don't know, a simple 'No thank you' would've been welcome.

;)

(extracted from the letters of Henry James)

Comments

[joshi]

have you read graham greene's charming essays on henry james? now THAT is good lit writing - i was even able to sit without barfing through a discussion of the style started by flaubert, enhanced by maupassant and finished of by james.

incidentally, henry james lived a few hundred yards from my house - de vere gardens - did i ever show you his place?

t.s. eliot, henry james and thackeray: dude, i am surrounded.

[Bryant Manning]

mozart and samuel clemens too.

james rules. i think i enjoy his prose more than any other writer.