Maggie's Farm by Sherry John;

Author:Sherry, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Permanent Press

CHAPTER IX

The letter from Hiram Haydn rejecting my work in progress arrived sometime after the first of the year. I realize now that my hope that the novel would bail out the boat financially was far greater than any essential belief I had in the work itself. I was disappointed but at the same time curiously relieved; there was no further need to play charades or indulge false hopes that my pen could simultaneously save our bacon and install my name among the luminaries. I was rather in the position of a painter dressed in a smock, floppy bow tie and all the rest of it, who suddenly decides to throw his velvet beret in the corner and paint a picture.

Unfortunately, there was nothing quite that dramatic about the change; several weeks had to be spent reviling Haydn and explaining to my wife his total inability to tell his ass from his elbow. Curiously enough, at the same time I was bitter about the novel’s rejection, I tended to accept it. Some professional instinct warned me that to use as ground upon which to stand and fight a work in which one has less than total faith is tantamount to disaster. To stand firmly behind work in which one has implicit belief is another matter entirely—even when total bleakness of possibility looms ahead. Any artist worth a damn must back his real bets even though he comes to grief in the process. So, though I continued to act the role of a wronged author and to bemoan to my wife the stupidity of editors and publishers in general, my critical faculties were hard at work accepting the premises behind the rejection to the point where I could relegate the manuscript to a drawer rather than waste time by indulging in the fantasy necessary if I were to put the bundle back in the mail to another publisher.

The more or less successful navigation of those strange straits bordered by spleen and paranoia through which all rejected authors pass, had the rather happy effect of leading me towards my first fully professional act of authorship. After about a month of fruitless stewing and worry about money, I began to fiddle idly with the beginnings of a thriller rather along the lines of Eric Ambler, a writer whom I wholeheartedly admire. As I fiddled, two things became clear quite soon: I was enjoying myself a great deal and the story was not half bad. As luck or a sensible guiding hand from the subconscious would have it, I had chosen a genre which admits neither pomposity of intention nor execution. Even my capacity for self delusion was not up to the task of turning a sixty-thousand word thriller into the great American novel bearing a golden burden of kudos, fame and fortune. Therefore, I assigned no roles of financial or spiritual salvation to my tale and, as a result, had a damned good time. It took me exactly one month and a half to write.

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