The Fabulous Rejections of Those Who Write Magic

The Cobbe Portrait of WillIam Shakespeare (1564-1616) is in the public domain.

When I flipped through Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard’s collection of rejection letters, Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections: A History of Insult, a Solace to Writers, I noticed patterns in some of the negative responses given to people who used speculative elements in their fiction, ranging from William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Time and again, critics perceived mental illness, weirdness, vulgarity or frivolousness. They shook their heads in confusion.

This makes sense to me. Some people feel uncomfortable straying from the conventions of reality, and such a bias can lead to the misjudgment of literature. To see what I mean, take a look at the following quotes, all but the last of which came from Henderson and Bernard’s book.

Vulgar

William Shakespeare

“It is a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy. . . one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage,” Voltaire said of Hamlet in 1768.

Jonathan Swift 

“. . . evidence of a diseased mind and lacerated heart,” John Dunlop said of Gulliver’s Travels in The History of Fiction in 1814.

Oscar Wilde

“…unmanly, sickening, vicious (though not exactly what is called ‘improper’), and tedious,” Athenaeum said of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891.

Edgar Allan Poe

“A verbal poet merely: empty of thought, empty of sympathy, empty of love for any real thing. . . he was not human and manly,” John Burroughs said in The Dial in 1893.

H.G. Wells

“An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would take. . . I think the verdict would be “Oh don’t read that horrid book,” an unidentified publisher said of The War of the Worlds in 1898.

Margaret Atwood

“Norman Mailer, wheezing lewd approval of some graphic images he encountered in the writing of Germaine Greer, remarked that ‘a wind in this prose whistled up the kilt of male conceit.’ Reading Margaret Atwood, I don my kilt but the wind never comes. Just a cold breeze,” The American Spectator said of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986.

Frivolous

Aldous Huxley

“A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda,” the New York Herald Tribune said of Brave New World in 1932.

John Barth

“…a pervasive silliness that turns finally – if one must bring up the university image – into college humor, a kind of MAD magazine joke,” the Christian Science Monitor said of Giles Goat-Boy in 1966.

Anthony Burgess

“…The holy bearded veck all nagoy hanging on a cross’ is an example of the author’s language and questionable taste. . . The author seems content to use a serious social challenge for frivolous purpose, but himself to stay neutral,” the Times (London) wrote of A Clockwok Orange.

John Gardner

“…dreadfully long and padded and it often degenerates into drivel. . . as a philosophical novel, it is a sham. Stripped of its excesses, however, it does not have enough substance to have made a good Raymond Carver short story,” the Saturday Review said of Mickelsson’s Ghosts.

Kurt Vonnegut

“…a sorry performance, full of bored doodling,” Robert Towers said of Slapstick, or Lonesome No More in the New York Review of Books in 1976.

Confusing

Lewis Carroll

“We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story” Children’s Books said of Alice in Wonderland in 1865.

William Butler Yeats

“I can see no sense in the thing: it is to me sheer nonsense. I do not say it is obscure, or uncouth or barbaric or affectd – tho’ it is all these evil things; I say it is to me absolute nullity. . . I would not read a page of it again for worlds,” an unidentified publisher said of the poet in 1895.

J.R.R. Tolkein

The founder of Grove Press, Barney Rosset wrote in The New York Times that The Lord of the Rings “Was not credible. I thought I recognized Nordic figures from mythology, but it seemed a mishmash to me. I couldn’t follow it, literally couldn’t finish reading it.” (According to Michael Alvear in his book The Bulletproof Writer: How to Overcome Constant Rejection to Become an Unstoppable Author.)

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