A Silent Film Company’s Brutally Effective Rejection Letter

So sorry, writer! Image via Open Culture/Slate; full list available via link below.

If you opened a bookstore with a section devoted to climate-change fiction, you’d have a pretty shitty shelf on your hands. (You’d also run the risk of attracting those who believe that climate change itself is the ultimate fiction.) Amitav Ghosh wonders why so many “serious” novelists consider the subject beyond their grasp: “Fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel … This discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction … The calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, If this were in a novel, no one would believe it.”

A good form rejection letter should be like a good execution: swift, efficient, and demonstrating the kind of brutal indifference that marks true authority. Essanay Studios, a Chicago film company from the silent era, had it down to a science. They would mail prospective screenwriters a stock list of seventeen reasons their screenplays sucked, with a check mark next to the relevant one. E.g.: IDEA HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE, NOT INTERESTING, NOT HUMOROUS, and that old classic, ROBBERY, KIDNAPPING, MURDER, SUICIDE, HARROWING DEATH-BED AND ALL SCENES OF AN UNPLEASANT NATURE SHOULD BE ELIMINATED.

Therese Oneill’s new book, Unmentionable, looks at your wedding night through the eyes of the Victorians, who were not, hindsight has revealed, exceptionally skillful sex educators. As Oneill writes, the books of the era found women inscrutable to the point of lunacy; they made sex sound like something that might, someday, with luck and patience, become almost enjoyable: “A new bride is to face her wedding night with a completely symptomless sexuality, dormant inside you, to be awakened only by your lawful husband’s touch … The new you is described thusly in 1895’s The Doctor’s Plain Talk to Young Men, written by the impossibly perfectly named Dr. Virgil Primrose English: ‘[The bride] is not deficient in sexuality and amativeness; but her mind and habits have been so pure, and free from lust, that there has never been anything to produce an excitement of the sexual passions. She may be indifferent regarding intercourse, and she may look upon it with horror.’ ”

Going back further, to the sixteenth century, we find Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, an attempt to cobble together a record of every traveler and seafarer the British Empire had seen to date, for posterity’s sake. Its second edition ran to more than 1.7 million words, and in its variety it is, Nandini Das argues, “perhaps the greatest collection of travel writing ever to be put together in any language”: “The Principal Navigations would become, in many ways, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial ambitions, but it also serves as a unique record of figures and voices, of lives and experiences like that of Samson Rowlie, that could so easily otherwise have been lost. It seems appropriate to celebrate it this year, the four hundredth anniversary of the death of the man who compiled it almost single-handedly, and in the process helped to lay the foundations of a moderately-sized island nation’s rather disproportional global influence and presence in the furthest corners of the world.”

In the seventies, as a visiting professor at Harvard, Elizabeth Bishop met Alice Methfessel, the woman with “blue blue blue” eyes who would animate Bishop’s last years: “Methfessel helped Bishop move into her second-floor rooms and showed her how to use the basement washing machines. Soon, she was handling Bishop’s mail, and meeting her at the airport after a late return from New York. One night, she stopped in to see Bishop after a ‘beery party’ with the boys of Kirkland House. They began spending nights together … In the morning, Bishop watched Methfessel dress from the large blue bed that took up more space than anything else in the room. She adored ‘the way you pull on your stockings … very American, careless and extravagant,’ and the sound of Methfessel’s voice, ‘nice & loud and cheerful,’ as she brought her coffee and spoke the words that soon became their waking-up ritual, ‘Good-morning I love you.’ ”

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