A Literary Experiment

I

IN writing, as in any other business, there is the necessity for middlemen and agents, whose function it is to smooth and facilitate the relation between producer (writer) and buyer (editor). These go-betweens are customarily known as literary agents, but also by a variety of other names such as authors’ sales representatives, manuscript placement services, literary market bureaus, and so on. There are a great many of them. The work is agreeable to the critical mind, not too arduous, and frequently lucrative. In addition to the marketing of manuscripts, it may include other professional services such as the criticism, revision, correction, and typing of manuscripts.

The literary agent either does not advertise at all or else confines his advertising to the better-class magazines. His profession is dignified and legitimate; he is a species of skilled broker, and performs a valuable function. In professional ethics he ranks with the attorney and the physician. He criticizes helpfully the work of young writers who show promise; he charges a suitable fee when he markets a manuscript; he is undoubtedly a great aid to many authors, embryonic and established. And it should be mentioned that in his advertisements, if any, he has the professional man’s horror for anything like blatancy.

Within recent times the United States has become a nation of writers. It is filled from coast to coast with grocers’ clerks writing the Great American Novel, taxicab drivers inditing poetry, miners scribbling away at a Proletarian Pæan. To-day it is not only the writers who write; everybody writes. In consequence of this comprehensive Literary Surge, there has come into being an enormous army of new persons and firms calling themselves literary agents. Their advertisements do not appear in the well-known magazines, but they have burgeoned by the score in the ‘little’ magazines, the here to-day and gone to-morrow publications, and in the Writer’s Gazettes and Writer’s Monthly Helpers which have popped into precarious existence almost as quickly. A typical advertisement may run something like this:

TURN YOUR REJECTION SLIPS INTO SUBSTANTIAL CHECKS!

Editors are looking for new material, new authors. We open for you the door to the Editorial Sanctum! If you have been getting rejection slips, it does not necessarily mean that you lack literary ability. Probably your manuscript just needs a little polishing, a little revision, to make it salable. Send your MS. to us TO-DAY for a reading. We have helped thousands; let us help YOU.

I had been seeing advertisements like this for several years, ever since the dawn of the every-man-a-writer era, and for as long a time I had been consumed with curiosity about the advertisers. It puzzled me to know how on earth they subsisted. For surely no writer, however callow, would be lured by such bait. Never had I met anyone who had actually responded to such an advertisement.

One day I talked to Lee about it. Lee is a young friend of mine wrho has had a brief period of newspaper work, and has been for years a small-salaried job holder in the clerical department of a large, nationally circulated magazine.

‘Lee,’ I said, ‘who in the world would send his manuscripts for criticism to Mr. Oskar Hirschbaum of Hemlock, Ohio? I see Mr. Hirschbaum’s advertisement, month after month, in half a dozen of the slapdash periodicals, so he must do some business. But he has absolutely nothing to recommend him. His advertisement says, “My clients are selling their manuscripts,” but the only specific case he adduces is that of a client who has sold a story for forty dollars to the pulp magazine, Spook Shadows. It would be fascinating to know just how these schemes are worked out.’

‘In that case,’ said young Lee at once, ‘why not experiment, and find out for ourselves?’

‘You mean . . . ‘

‘Yes,’ said Lee. ‘Why don’t we start a Literary Criticism Bureau or an Author’s Aid Association, or what not, and just see what comes of it?’

II

And that is how it started. On the spot we concocted a name for our organization : The Leevoe Literary Syndicate. This had a rather absurd sound, but no more ridiculous than dozens of the ‘firms’ engaged in the same business. We mulled for a long while over the wording of our announcement.

From the first it was decided that we would be exceedingly select and sniffy in our attitude. Instead of advertising raucously, we would emulate more closely the legitimate literary agents. We would merely send out handsomely printed ‘announcements’ of the formation of the firm. In its final form, our statement read thus: —

The Leevoe Literary Syndicate will handle a limited number of manuscripts for enterprising writers, and will attend to all details of revision, editing, criticism, and marketing. Why send your manuscripts to unknown agents when you can procure the services of two such distinguished figures in the literary world? All manuscripts will receive the personal attention of Carlisle Lee and Alan Devoe. Mr. Lee is on the staff of one of the largest literary journals in America. Mr. Devoe is too well known to require introduction; you have doubtless heard his books discussed over the radio. Terms for criticism: Prose, $2 per thousand words; Poetry, 10ȼ per line; Novels, $25. Other terms, for revision, etc., will be arranged through correspondence with the client. In case of marketed manuscripts, a fee of 10 per cent will be charged.

We laughed loud and delightedly while composing this. The little touch about my books having been discussed over the radio was Lee’s masterpiece. I had written a very modest volume which had been published some six months earlier and had attracted a practically nation-wide apathy, but it had been discussed over the radio. Some commentator on a minor broadcasting company’s staff had apparently liked the book, and had chatted about it for perhaps two minutes. So that part was true. And Lee was on the staff of a great literary journal. On the clerical staff, to be sure, but what of that? In the sense that I am a contributor to English as well as to American magazines, I am internationally known. Not quite as well known, perhaps, as George Bernard Shaw or Rudyard Kipling or Sinclair Lewis, but still . . . Bearing in mind that we should be using the United States mails, we were scrupulously careful to tell no lies.

Both Lee and I lived in an ancient and dingy apartment house near Columbia University. Somehow we both felt that 430 West 119th Street was not a sufficiently glittering address for a firm which aimed to be as impressive as the Leevoe Literary Syndicate. Lee solved the difficulty. My apartment was Number 36. Then let the address read: Leevoe Literary Syndicate, Suite 36, 430 West 119th Street! Undoubtedly very few, if any, of our clients would be New Yorkers. They would not know that 119th Street is high up on Morningside Heights, a haunt devoid of office buildings, and we felt that that use of the word ‘suite’ would conjure up in the client’s mind a vision of a great skyscraper, and offices elaborately accoutred with upholstered furniture and bronze ash trays. Lee, I think, would be distinctly promising as a swindler.

No expense was spared in the printing of our announcements. The name of our firm was in the richest Old English, and the stock used for the cards was sumptuously heavy. We indulged in deckled edges, and the envelopes in which the cards were to be enclosed were lined with an exotic material.

In one of the cheapest, newest, and least dignified of the writers’ magazines I found the advertisement of a man who was offering for sale ‘names and addresses of beginning writers, 3ȼ each.’ We wrote to this gentleman and ordered five hundred names. They came to us on mimeographed sheets, which discouraged us a little, for it appeared evident that the five hundred had been ‘played for suckers’ a good many times. However, we got manfully to work and addressed five hundred announcements of the Leevoe Literary Syndicate. We mailed them out, and sat back to wait.

III

We discussed the question of our rates, and wondered whether they might not be a little too high. I in particular felt it was unlikely that any striving poet would care to pay ten cents a line to have his verses criticized, when the chances were good that a magazine would not pay him much more than that for his effusions. The rate of two dollars per thousand words for prose also seemed fearfully high. Having frequently had to sell my own prose to magazines at the rate of five dollars per printed page, and even less, it seemed to me grossly improbable that any writer, however much of a nitwit, would pay almost half that price merely to have his work criticized. I recalled that from the publication of my last book I had made a grand total of $226, and I therefore doubted vigorously whether any embryonic novel writer would want to give us twenty-five dollars for our opinion of his manuscript.

I was mistaken on all counts. The first response to our announcement came from a woman in Detroit. Her letter was not illiterate, but it was written in a childish unformed hand, on the cheapest stationery. She enclosed a poem of twenty lines; pinned to it were two one-dollar bills. I remember being positively thunderstruck at the sight of those bills. It simply did not seem reasonable. Two dollars to have her poem ‘criticized’ by two people neither of whom, in all probability, she had ever heard of. Or, if perhaps my name was familiar to her, it would be as a writer of bookish magazine articles and not as a poet or a critic of poetry.

And yet, there were the two dollar bills, and there was the written request that we criticize the poem.

Lee and I sat down earnestly to our task. It proved overwhelmingly difficult. Even to us — who were not poets — it was patent that practically everything was wrong with that poem. The title was inexpressive; the metre limped and the rhymes were garishly inexact; the punctuation was bewilderingly incorrect; indeed, the very subject was grossly and glaringly unfitted for the poetic medium. We labored rather more than two hours, at the end of which the verse was completely rewritten. Even when our work was finished, the poem was an amorphous atrocity, but at least it was grammatical, rhythmically correct, and had some semblance of poetic form. But one thing was evident: if the rest of the manuscripts which came to us (assuming that any more did come) were as bad as this one, we could not possibly attempt to ‘criticize’ and ‘correct’ them. We should simply have to return them to their senders, with a regretful note that we had more business at present than we could handle.

More manuscripts did come. They came by the bucketful. And out of every envelope, as we opened it, there fell currency, or a money order, or a personal check. Many of the letters which accompanied the manuscripts and remittances were heartbreakingly pathetic.

One of the earliest manuscripts to reach us was a poem entitled ‘My Horse.’ Quite by accident, I happen to have learned that its author has since died, and I can therefore give the text of the poem here without danger that feelings will be wounded. The poem contained twenty-two short lines. It had been written, evidently with a very fine pen, in a Spencerian kind of handwriting which I had supposed to have been extinct for many years, and it covered a page of ruled paper evidently detached from a cheap notebook. This is the poem: —

MY OLD HORSE

I have inserted punctuation, to make t he poem easier to read. Accompanying the manuscript was a postal money order for $2.20, and a letter: —

DEAR SIRS:
(Leevoe Literary Syndicate)
I hope you will like the poem on ‘My Horse ’ which I am sending for your opinion to sell for me. I sent it to the Blank Literary Agency and they said it was fine just as it stands, but they did not sell it yet. Also I sent it to Mr. —, and he says it is fine too, which is what all my friends says, and I am a Poet only I need training. Please sell this poem for me as I have so far spent nearly $20 on it, and I am an old man and not rich. Do you think it was right for the other people to charge so much and then not sell my poem? When you sell my poem, please send me the money right away as I need it.
Oblige
Yours truly
R. F. D. 2, BLACK ROCK, MO.

I felt sorry enough for that old man to have wept. His vanity in believing himself a poet, and his pathetic assumption that his verse was marketable, did not matter. All that mattered was that he was a poor, simple old rustic, and that the Blank Literary Agency and the other ‘literary agent’ he mentioned had coolly pocketed his money and returned his verse to him with the ‘criticism’ that it was ‘fine just as it stands.’

We sent the manuscript and the money order back to the old man, and wrote him a long letter. As tactfully as we knew how, we told him we thought it would be better for him to deal direct with editors, and we assured him we did not think any agent’s ‘criticism’ could possibly improve his poetry. We warned him, too, that poetry is not easy to market these days, and that he must not be discouraged if he failed to find a publisher. In conclusion, we told him what a warm spot we had in our hearts for that old horse of his.

IV

Both Lee and I were more and more upset as the manuscripts continued to come in. Almost without exception they were from people in remote rural districts, and, with no exception at all, they were hopelessly bad. The majority of the writers were women, and the favored literary form was poetry. Poetry, I may say, with a vengeance; always it was filled with such expressions as ‘I trow’ and ‘I wot,’ and contractions such as ‘ne’er’ and ‘e’en.’ The writers — poked away in tiny villages and rural communities — were afire with the Literary Urge, and our hearts bled for them. Because with the Literary Urge there always goes hand in hand Literary Vanity, and these poor people felt sure of their ability — so sure that they were willing to spend hard-earned money in order to get an opinion of their work from people whose opinion, in their pathetic fashion, they thought would be valuable and significant. Many, many of the letters told of sending manuscripts to this literary agency and that one, spending fee after fee to no avail.

One woman was turning to us ‘in desperition’; she had given so much money in fees to other firms that now she must make a sale. We wrote and told her a lie. We told her we had marketed her poem, and we sent her a check for fifteen dollars. Probably it was a foolish thing to do, to encourage her falsely in such a way, but we felt that we had to do something for her. We advised her, too, to give up her writing for a while. It was just by a lucky fluke, we said, that we had been able to market her poem; publishers on the whole were buying practically nothing. We had a reply from her, I remember, although I have since mislaid it. It was tremulous with delight. She would give up her writing for a while, since we said the publishers were not buying. She did not mind giving up, now; she had sold a poem. Where would it appear, and when? Be sure to send her a copy to show to her friends.

That was a contingency which we had not foreseen. But we decided we might as well be thoroughly sentimental about the whole thing, so we had a friend print her poem on a hand press and we mailed her eight or nine copies, with the information that the poem had appeared in Such-and-Such a magazine. We made up the name, but I doubt very much whether our client was ever any the wiser.

V

We continued to get replies to those five hundred announcements of ours for more than a month. In all, we received fifty-nine manuscripts, accompanied by fees totaling more than $150. We wrote each client a long personal letter, returning his fee and his manuscript, and it was quite exhausting, since neither of us was a rapid typist and we did not have a great deal of spare time. A little more than five weeks after the Leevoe Literary Syndicate sent out its announcements, the firm dissolved with relief. We were not only tired, but deeply disturbed.

What we had done merely as an experiment — an interesting adventure — is being done cold-bloodedly, as a lucrative financial scheme, by dozens, scores, hundreds of individuals and ‘firms’ calling themselves literary agents. It is a swindle involving the most dreadful heartbreak. It is damnable for more reasons than one. Not only does it cheat and cruelly deceive that peculiarly gullible and inevitably sensitive creature, the embryonic writer, but it also does incalculable harm to that useful and legitimate business man, the literary agent. Every time a writer or would-be writer is swindled, the profession of the bona fide literary adviser loses just that much of its repute.

I do not propose here to make elaborate suggestions for remedying this nasty situation, but one or two possibilities must at once come to mind. To be a real-estate broker you must have a license. You must, for that matter, have a license to peddle fish or sell cheap neckties from a pushcart. At present anyone may set himself up as a literary agent; he requires no license, no degree, no credentials, no experience. It would seem that licensing literary agents would weed out a great many of the most grossly unfit. Licenses, of course, should be made revocable, in order that the agent, once licensed, would remain ‘on good behavior.’ The lawyer or the physician can be censured in a very tangible and explicit fashion for malpractice; something of the same system should apply to literary agents. None but the licensed agent should be permitted to advertise. If something of the censorship now proposed for food and drug advertising were exercised in the case of literary agents, it would help a good deal. At present they can be prosecuted only for using the mails to defraud, and this is notoriously a difficult charge to substantiate.

There should be restrictions placed on the promiscuous and inaccurate use of such words as ‘syndicate,’ ‘association,’ ‘bureau.’ Thus the racketeer who, operating entirely alone, now advertises himself as the Eureka Author’s Aid Association or the Nonpareil Literary Marketing Syndicate would be restrained from conveying the impression that his establishment occupies a suite of offices and hires seventeen clerks. No man can style himself a corporation unless he is legally incorporated, and a curb should certainly be exercised on these other inaccurate and highly misleading descriptions.

Because of our acute national Literary Consciousness, the racketeer has found it profitable and comfortably safe to invade yet another field of legitimate business — that of the literary agent. It is one of the meanest of all swindles, imperiling alike the aspiring writer and the literary broker whose profession is legitimate; it also tends to cast undeserved suspicion on dependable correspondence schools. All three are made to suffer because of the tactics of the incapable and the unscrupulous. Vigorous and concerted act ion is necessary for their own protection.