How to Reform the Magazines

YESTERDAY, as I read the magazines at the Club, I enjoyed what is coming to be a common experience. My neighbor on the left, similarly occupied, threw down his favorite monthly diet with disgust and the query, ‘Why don’t the magazines print something worth while? There’s plenty of good stuff written; what becomes of it? Why don’t we get it?’ My neighbor on the right, who has had some experience in an editorial office, volunteered the reply: ‘You can’t get by the editor, that’s all.’

Then we took the situation apart; we compared notes. Each of us contributes now and then to the magazines; when the articles are accepted, we contribute to the best magazines. We are not chronic or habitual offenders, and really send things only when we have something to say. We have other ways of making a living, such as it is. Furthermore, our barrels are empty. We have no axes to grind, no grouches to nurse. But we all had the same story to tell, — an endless and needless sending of a perfectly good manuscript to one editor after another, until the tired carrier-pigeon, scarred with cancelled postage-stamps, found a lodging and failed to return to the domestic ark. As the result of its adventures, it was kicked upstairs quite as commonly as down. It settled down, after its peripatetic unrest, in a ‘preferred stock’ magazine just as often as in one of lower quotation in reputation or compensation. It certainly would have done magazine Number One no harm to have printed what Number Five or Six or Ten took a chance on. For in the mean time magazines Number One and Number Two and the rest were printing articles that they all should have declined with or without thanks, along with just as many that obviously were acceptable, and properly so.

On this we all agreed. ‘Getting by the editor,’ said the Right Neighbor, ‘is the most fascinating of indoor sports. When I was a journalist in the Freudian sense (that is, as an unfulfilled wish), my chum and I devised a way to get money for all our articles. Each agreed when he sent out a “story” to bet the other the price of the “story” that it would n’t be accepted. That little arrangement took the sting out of a rejection completely; and when you lost your pay, you had the glory of the acceptance. Why and how the scheme broke down, I shall not divulge.’

“But seriously,’ said the Left Neighbor, ‘what’s the solution? Editors are good enough judges; and not more than half the articles are engaged at dinner parties. Very embarrassing to decline an article by the man — usually the woman — who was so entertaining as a companion at a delightful dinner. But an editor who really indorsed all the articles he accepts and assembles in any one number would have not a single-track mind, but an entirely erratic switch-yard,’

‘The trouble is — if you’ll let the Interlocutor answer your conundrums — that the editor is in a false relation to his judgment. He trusts it so implicitly that he has better reasons for his prejudices than for his convictions. And when he opens a manuscript that has the wrong name to it, or starts out in a way that does n’t keep step with his mental pace, he goes on reading with the intention of finding ingenious and irrelevant reasons for declining it; who could n’t? Then you get one of those notes that would n’t deceive a moron. None of us would object to a plain statement of fact: “The Editor is obliged to decline your article because he ate something yesterday that did n’t agree with him, and doesn’t like it”; or “The Editor has got himself so entangled with promises to his friends that with the best of intentions he cannot find room this season for your really valuable contribution.” If an editor uses his magazine, as we use this club, as a place to indulge his prejudices, and says so — well and good! But no editor admits this, any more than any of the fighting nations will admit starting the war. They’re all defending hearth and home against invasion by unlicensed intruders, — that’s us.’

‘Yes, we know all that,’ said the Right Neighbor, ’but what’s your remedy? This is mine; when you’ve heard it, you may not care for yours. Start a new magazine and call it “The Discard.” Make it a rule not to accept an article that is n’t accompanied by at least two perfectly good letters of rejection from first-class magazines. With such vouchers you ’re bound to get the best stuff that’s written.’

‘No! That’s good as far as it goes, but it won’t reform the others. What you must do is to get every good editor to agree to print at least one article in each number that that judgment of his would lead him to decline. Once the editor discovers that printing such an unsanctioned article does n’t stop the magazine or buckle the press or annihilate the subscription-list, he may become a wiser and a happier man. He may even ask the readers to guess which article it is that meets with his cordial disapproval, and offer a prize for the best guesses at the end of the year. I contribute the idea freely without copyright, in the interest of the higher literature.’

‘Do you happen to know the address of any editor with gumption enough to try it?’ said the Left Neighbor. ‘I’ve got something that I’d like to send him, and expound your sentiments in my most persuasive style.’

‘Can’t say I do. Try it gingerly. Send him something rather short, — you know, the kind of thing for “The Contributor’s Club”; and I think he’ll be a sport and print it.’

I was right. This is it.