Beyond this, he may be any sort of person, of any physique, of any age, alcoholic or not, paranoid or not, cruel or not, drug addicted or not, horrible to women and children or not, teach Sunday School or not, anything you please. He can even engage in any vocation or profession, as long as he keeps going back to his desk and putting words together. He can be wealthy or have no money at all, and his personal life can be perfectly average and uneventful or utterly unbelievable. Just as long as he really works at words.
The level of his intention and his art may vary from writing for the newspapers to plumbing the depths of experience or pursuing some ultimate vision, but within the range he undertakes, the discipline of words calls also for the discipline of values, intelligence, emotion, perception. Writers who are serious about their business know these things, and the difficulties they present, too well to have to talk about them. In all my conversations with writers, I can recall few instances in which anybody ever talked directly about the art of writing.
In the case of professional writers, I have acted more often as a catalyst than as a volunteer agent. For example, I abused as well as prodded Paul Molloy, the prize-winning columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times, until he turned his hand to a book. The simplicity and sincerity of his style has an undoubted appeal, as the success[success] of the book, And Then There Were Eight, has proved. I am sure he would have written it anyway, ultimately, but even a fine talent can use encouragement.
I have also found it possible to help another type of writer—the expert in a special field who is perfectly qualified to write a type of book that is greatly needed. During the period when my psychiatric book speciality was at its peak, I became aware of the need for a single giant book on the whole story of psychiatry. Dr. Franz Alexander, then Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, was the obvious choice for such a monumental undertaking. No other great authority was so widely respected outside his particular field—not only among those in other “schools” of psychiatric thought, but among workers and scholars in every area concerned with the human psyche.
Dr. Alexander was the very first student at the Institute of Psychoanalysis founded by Freud in Vienna. I loved to listen to Dr. Alexander reminisce about his relationships with Freud and the original Seven and especially admired his view of the relationship of modern psychoanalysis to Spinoza’s philosophy of the emotions. He was one of the few men I had encountered in this field who had a thorough background in philosophy. When I broached the idea of a monumental compendium, embracing the total field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, historically and technically, he at first hesitated, then finally agreed—if the right publisher could be interested and if a fairly large advance could be obtained to help with the extensive research that would be involved.
Shortly thereafter, while on a trip to New York, I had lunch with Michael Bessie of Harper and Brothers and explained the idea to him. He was very much taken with it, and within a few weeks all of the details were worked out to Dr. Alexander’s satisfaction. The work is still in progress, Dr. Alexander having retired to California to devote the greater part of his time to its completion.
Other books which I also managed to place for Chicago analysts were Irene Josslyn’s The Happy Child and George Mohr’s Stormy Decade, Adolescence.
But what of the young man or woman who has determined to devote himself to the difficult craft of writing, who has beaten out a book to his best ability, and is looking for a publisher? What do you do?
Well, of course, there is nothing to prevent you from bundling up your manuscript and mailing it to various publishers. Experience shows, however, that very few manuscripts submitted “cold” or, in the trade phrase, “over the transom” (obviously the mailman can’t stick a manuscript through the letter slot), ever see the light of day. This doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t carefully consider the piece before attaching a rejection slip to it. I should say, however, that something of a very special literary quality—not the self-styled “advance guard” but the truly different, which has no audience ready-made and hence must create its own, the kind of literature which you just possibly might write (and which I think certainly is being written) and that could change the world through its extension of our resources of feeling and expression—does not stand too strong a chance of passing through the literate but patterned screening of publishers’ manuscript readers. Furthermore, since each publishing house has a character all its own, the likelihood of any one manuscript ending up in the right place is a numbers game that can be quite disheartening to play.
Perhaps the best advice that can be given to the determined author is: Get a good agent. This is not necessarily easy and there are pitfalls, including sharks who prey upon the innocent for their own financial gain. A manuscript that comes into the publisher’s office “cold” stands a better chance of receiving serious consideration than one sent under the auspices of a dubious agent. Nevertheless, a manuscript by an unknown writer usually gets a quicker reading if it comes through a recognized agent.[[2]]