20 - My First Book by Various

Have you ever been curious about how your favorite authors embarked on their writing journeys? Did they dive headfirst into the world of literature, or did they pour their hearts into their stories after long days at the office? Some faced countless rejections, while others tasted success almost immediately. In this captivating collection, we hear directly from the authors themselves—like Bret Harte, Arthur Conan Doyle, R.M. Ballantyne, and H. Rider Haggard—as they share the pivotal moments that launched their literary careers. Join us as we explore the diverse experiences that shaped some of the most beloved writers in history. - Summary by Lynne Thompson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter nineteen of my first book. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. My
first book by various Californian verse by Brett Hart. When

(00:21):
I say that my first book was not my own
and contained, beyond the title page not one word of
my own composition, I trust that I shall not be
accused of trifling with paradox or tardily unbosoming myself of
youthful plagiary. But the fact remains that, in priority of publication,
the first book for which I became responsible, and which

(00:43):
probably provoked more criticism than anything I have written since,
was a small compilation of Californian poems indicted by other hands.
A well known bookseller of San Francisco one day handed
me a collection of certain poems which had already aready
appeared in Pacific Coast magazines and newspapers, with the requests

(01:04):
that I should, if possible, secure further additions to them,
and then make a selection of those which I considered
the most notable and characteristic for a single volume to
be issued by him. I have reason to believe that
this unfortunate man was actuated by a laudable desire to
publish a pretty Californian book his first essay in publication,

(01:26):
and at the same time to foster Eastern immigration by
an exhibit of the Californian literary product. But looking back
upon his venture, I am inclined to think that the
little volume never contained anything more poetically pathetic or touchingly
imaginative than that gentle conception. Equally simple and trustful was

(01:47):
his selection of myself as compiler. It was based somewhat,
I think, upon the fact that the artless helicon I
boasted was youth, but I imagine it was chiefly owing
to the circumstance that I had, from the outset, with
precocious foresight, confided to him my intention of not putting
any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative,

(02:10):
and a self abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of
its security, was not without its effect. We settled to
work with fatuous self complacency and no suspicion of the
trouble in store for us, or the storm that was
to presently hurdle around our devoted heads. I winnowed the poems,

(02:31):
and he exploited a preliminary announcement to an eager and
waiting press, and we moved together, unwittingly to our doom.
I remembered, I've been early struck with the quantity of
material coming in, evidently the result of some popular misunderstanding
of the announcement. I found myself in daily and hourly

(02:52):
receipt of sere and yellow fragments originally torn from some
dead and gone newspaper, creased in seemed from long folding
in wallet or pocketbook. Need I say that most of
them were of an emotional or didactic nature. Need I
add any criticism of these homely souvenirs, often discolored by

(03:13):
the morning coffee, the evening tobacco, or heaven nose, perhaps
blotted by too easy tears. Enough that I knew now
what had become of those original but never recopied verses
which filled the poet's corner of every country newspaper on
the coast. I knew now the genesis of every didactic

(03:35):
verse that coldly furnished forth the marriage table in the
announcement of weddings in the rural press. I knew now
who had read and possibly indicted, the dreary heke yackets
of the dead in their morning columns. I knew now
why certain letters of the alphabet had been more tenderly
considered than others and affectionately addressed. I knew the meeting

(04:00):
of the lines to her who can best understand them,
and I knew that they had been understood. The morning's
post buried my table beneath these withered leaves of posthumous passion.
They lay there like the pathetic nosegays of quickly fading
wild flowers gathered by school children inconsistently abandoned upon roadsides,

(04:24):
or as inconsistently treasured as limp and flabby superstitions in
their desks. The chill wind from the bay blowing in
at my window seemed to rustle them into sad, articulate appeal.
I remember that when one of them was whisked from
the window by a stronger gust than usual and was
attaining a circulation it had never known before, I ran

(04:47):
a block or two to recover it. I was young then,
and in an exalted sense of editorial responsibility which I
have since survived, I think I turned pale at the
thought that the reputation of some unknown g genius might
have thus been swept out and swallowed by the all
absorbing sea. There were other difficulties arising from this unexpected

(05:09):
wealth of material. There were dozens of poems on the
same subject. The Golden Gate, Mount Shasta, the Yosemite were
especially provocative. A beautiful bird known as the Californian canary
appeared to have been shot at and winged by every
poet from Portland to San Diego. Lines to the Mariposa

(05:32):
flower were as thick as the lovely blossoms themselves in
the Merced Valley, and the madrone tree was as be
rhymed as rosalind Again, by the liberal construction of the
publisher's announcement, manuscript poems which had never known print began
to coily unfold their virgin blossoms in the morning's mail.

(05:54):
They were accompanied by a few lines stating casually that
their sender had found them lying forgotten in his desk,
or mendaciously that they were thrown off in the spur
of the moment a few hours before. Some of the
names appended to them astonished me. Grave practical businessmen, sage financiers,

(06:16):
fierce speculators and plotting traders, never before suspected of poetry
or even correct prose, were among the contributors. It seemed
as if most of the able bodied inhabitants of the
Pacific Coast had been in the habit at some time
of expressing themselves in verse. Some sought confidential interviews with

(06:37):
the editor. The climax was reached when, in Montgomery Street
one day I was approached by a well known and
venerable judicial magnet. After some serious preliminary conversation, the old
gentleman finally alluded to what he was pleased to call
a task of great delicacy and responsibility laid upon my
young shoulders. In fact, he went on paternally, adding the

(07:02):
weight of his judicial hand to that burden. I have
thought of speaking to you about it. In my leisure
moments on the bench, I have from time to time
polished and perfected a certain college poem, begun years ago,
but which may now be said to have been finished
in California, and thus embraced in the scope of your

(07:22):
proposed selection, if a few extracts selected by myself to
save you all the trouble and responsibility be of any
benefit to you, my dear young friend, consider them at
your service. In this fashion, the contributions had increased three
times the bulk of the original collection, and the difficulties

(07:43):
of selection were augmented in proportion. The editor and publisher
eyed each other aghast. Never thought there were so many
of the blame things alive, said the latter, with great simplicity.
Had you, the editor had not, could you sort of
shake them up and condense them, you know, keep their
ideas and their names separate, so that they'd have proper credit. See.

(08:07):
The edter pointed out that this would infringe the rule
he had laid down. I see, said the publisher, thoughtfully, Well,
couldn't you pare em down, give the first verseon tire
and sord, or sample the others? The editor thought not.
There was clearly nothing to do but to make a
more rigid selection, a difficult performance when the material was

(08:31):
uniformly on a certain dead level, which it is not
necessary to define here. Among the rejections were, of course,
the usual plagiarisms from well known authors imposed upon an
inexperienced country press. Several admirable pieces detected as acrostics of
patent medicines, and certain veiled libels and indecencies, such as

(08:55):
mark the first publications on blank walls and fences of
the average youth. Still, the bulk remained too large, and
the youthful editor set to work reducing it still more,
with sympathizing concern, which the good natured but unliterary publisher
failed to understand, and which alas proved to be equally

(09:16):
unappreciated by the rejected contributors. The book appeared a pretty
little volume, typographically and externally, a credit to pioneer book making.
Copies were liberally supplied to the press, and authors and
publishers self complacently awaited the result. To the latter, this
should have been satisfactory. The book sold readily from his

(09:39):
well known counters to purchasers who seemed to be drawn
by a singular curiosity, unaccompanied, however, by any critical comment.
People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves
of the volumes, say, carelessly, got a new book of
California poetry out, haven't you purchase it? And quietly depart.

(10:00):
There as yet no notices from the press. The big
dailies were silent. There was something ominous in this calm
out of it The Bolt Fell, a well known mining
weekly which I hear poetically veil under the title of
Red Dog Jayhawk, was first to swoop down upon the
tuneful and unsuspecting quarry. At this century end of fastidious

(10:24):
and complacent criticism, it may be interesting to recall the
direct style of the Californian sixties. The hogwash and purp
stuff lailed out from the slop bucket of Messieurs and
Company of Frisco by some lop eared Eastern apprentice, and
called a compilation of Californian verse, might be passed over

(10:47):
so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands
of any able bodied citizen of Red Dog, and a
steamboat ticket to the Bay cheerfully contributed from this office
would be all sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dars
to call his flapdoodle mixture Californian, it is an insult
to the state that has produced the gifted Yellow Hammer,

(11:10):
whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our
readers in the columns of the Jayhawk, that this complaisant
editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and thistles which he
has served up in this volume, should make no allusion
to California's great Bard is rather a confession of his
idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.

(11:33):
I turned hurriedly to my pile of rejected contributions. The
nom de plume of yellow Hammer did not appear among them.
Certainly I had never heard of its existence. Later, when
a friend showed me one of that gifted Bard's pieces,
I was inwardly relieved. It was so like the majority
of the other verses in and out of the volume

(11:55):
that the mysterious poet might have written under a hundred aliases.
But the Dutch flat clarion following with no uncertain sound,
left me time for consideration. We doubt said that journal
if a more feeble collection of drivel could have been made,
even if taken exclusively from the editor's own verses, which

(12:17):
we note he has by an equal editorial incompetency left
out of the volume. When we add that by a
felicity of idiotic selection, this person has chosen only one
and the least characteristic of the really clever poems of
Adeniram Skags which have so often graced these columns. We

(12:39):
have said enough to satisfy our readers. The Mormon Hill
quartz Crusher relieved this simple directness with more fancy. We
don't know why Messrs Blank and Company send us, under
the title of Selections of Californian Poetry a quantity of
slum gullion which really belongs to the sluices of a

(13:01):
placer mining camp or the ditches of the rural districts.
We have sometimes been compelled to run a lot of
tailings through our stamps, but never of the grade of
the samples offered, which we should say would average about
thirty three and a third CeNSE per ton. We have, however,
come across a single specimen of pure gold, evidently overlooked

(13:24):
by the serene ass who has compiled this volume. We
copy it with pleasure, as it has already shown in
the poet's corner of the Crusher as the gifted effusion
of the talented manager of the Excelsior mill, otherwise known
to our delighted readers as outcrop. The Green Springs Arcadian

(13:44):
was no less fancible in imagery. Messieurs and Company sent
us a gaudy green and yellow parrot colored volume which
is supposed to contain the first callow cheapings and peepings
of Californian songsters. From the flavor of the specimens before us,
we should say that the nest had been disturbed prematurely.

(14:07):
There seems to be a good deal of the parrot
inside as well as outside the covers. And we congratulate
our own sweet singer Bluebird, who has so often made
these columns melodious, that she has escaped the ignominy of
being exhibited in Messrs and Company's aviary. I should add

(14:27):
that this simile of the aviary and its occupants was ominous,
for my tuneful choir was relentlessly slaughtered. The bottom of
the cage was strewn with feathers. The big dailies collected
the criticisms and published them in their own columns, with
the grim irony of exaggerated headlines. The book sold tremendously
on account of this abuse, but I'm afraid that the

(14:49):
public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms,
and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather
commonplace collection. I cannot claim for it even that merit,
and it will be observed that the animus of the
criticism appeared to be the omission rather than the retention
of certain writers. But this brings me to the most

(15:13):
extraordinary feature of the singular demonstration. I do not think
that the publishers were at all troubled by it. I
cannot conscientiously say that I was. I have every reason
to believe that the poets themselves, in and out of
volume were not displeased at the notoriety they had not expected.
And I have long since been convinced that my most

(15:34):
remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some
sudden impulse started by the first attacking journal. The extravagance
of the red Dog Jayhawk was emulated by others. It
was a large, contagious joke passed from journal to journal
in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion. And there still lingers,

(15:56):
not unpleasantly in my memory, the conclusion of a cheerfully
scathing review of the book, which may make my meaning
clear if we have said anything in this article which
might cause a single pang to the poetically sensitive nature
of the youthful individual calling himself mister Francis brett Hart,
but who we believe occasionally parts his name and his

(16:18):
hair in the middle we will feel that we have
not labored in vain, and we are ready to sing
monkdimitis and hand in our checks. We have no doubt
of the absolutely pellucid and lacteal purity of Frankie's intentions.
He means well to the Pacific coast, and we return
the compliment. He has strayed away from his parents and

(16:41):
guardians while he was too fresh. He will not keep
without a little salt. It was thirty years ago, the
book and its Rabelasian criticisms have been long since forgotten.
Alas I fear that even the capacity for that gargantuan
laughter which meant them in those days exists no longer.

(17:03):
The names I have used are necessarily fictitious. But where
I have been obliged to quote the criticisms for memory,
I have, I believe only softened their asperity. I do
not know that this story has any moral. The criticisms
here recorded never heard of reputation, nor repressed a single
honest aspiration. A few contributors to the volume who were

(17:27):
of original merit, have made their mark independently of it
or its critics. The editor, who was for two months
the most abused man on the Pacific slope within the year,
became the editor of its first successful magazine. Even the
publisher prospered and died respected end of Chapter nineteen