Lit Hub excerpted from a history of the renowned publishing house Faber some very interesting rejection letters, mostly by none other than T.S. Eliot.
The most indefensible one has to be:
T. S. Eliot to George Orwell Esq., 13 July 1944:
I know that you wanted a quick decision about Animal Farm; but the minimum is two directors’ opinions, and that can’t be done under a week. But for the importance of speed, I should have asked the Chairman to look at it as well. But the other director is in agreement with me on the main points. We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane – and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.
On the other hand, we have no conviction (and I am sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.[. . .]
I am very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.
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It is that last paragraph that particularly strikes me: in turning down Animal Farm—essentially because it was being rude about our Soviet allies—Eliot was also turning down the unwritten 1984.
Roz Kaveney detected a pattern in Eliot’s thinking.
When we look at Eliot’s writings on culture, we see a fine critical intelligence allied to a fear of possible consequences that is deeply terrifying in the way that in it elitist arrogance masquerades as humility and passionate concern to keep things as they are as a broadly accepting humanism.
It’s said that as the fourth hour of Otto Preminger’s Israel movie “Exodus†began at its premiere in 1960, the comedian Mort Sahl rose from his chair and said, “Otto, let my people go!†The audience cheered.
As the Democratic debate in Houston entered its third hour last night, I rose from my chair and said, “ABC, let the American people go!†And there was no one to cheer, for I was alone in my office.
Finally, there was to be one debate, 10 candidates, with frontrunners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren facing each other at last. What happened was what Preminger’s Israelis would have called a “balagan†— bedlam, chaos, tumult, like trying to conduct a conversation at Times Square when the 1 and the 2 are pulling into the station simultaneously.
On issue after issue, the candidates engaged in unclear, confusing, halting policy discussions — that is, when they weren’t engaging in pettifoggery designed to occlude our understanding of their views rather than clarifying them.
It got so bad that Julian Castro, one of the seven people on the stage who have as much of a chance of becoming president as I do, thought he’d caught out Joe Biden in a candidacy-ending mistake. Hadn’t Biden just said everyone would be forced into Medicare two minutes after saying they could keep their private insurance?
Could Biden not remember what he had said two minutes before?
Castro was playing the senility card against the 76-year-old Biden. But the person who was senile in that moment was the 44 year-old Castro, because Biden had not contradicted himself. Castro had misunderstood Biden.
It was easy to misunderstand Biden, whose undeniable energy was not matched by clarity. He gave an answer on Afghanistan and Iran that was so confusing Bernie Sanders accused him of opposing the surge in Iraq when he was talking about the surge in Afghanistan. Biden didn’t object to Sanders’ mischaracterization because he might have gotten lost in his own weeds.
So did Elizabeth Warren, whose words, sentence by sentence, were perfectly clear but whose meaning was not. In a lengthy attack on Trump’s tariffs, she defended Trump’s tariffs. In another assault on Trump’s Afghanistan policy she basically said everything that Trump has said about Afghanistan. Was this deliberate?
As for Bernie Sanders, the only question I have to ask is this: Will the $30 trillion cost of his health care plan cover some throat lozenges? He spent the entire night needing to clear his throat. It was maddening, though perhaps not as maddening as him screaming at us as though we had just cut him off in traffic.
French hunting is different. They call their hunts “Rallyes” or “Equipages.” Their hunt uniforms are more complicated. They use circular horns and lots of people carry horns where for us only the huntsman has a horn, and where our huntsman only blows a handful of conventional signals, they play fanfares. We hunt foxes and coyotes. They hunt hare, wild boar, roe deer, and even red deer. People too old to ride car follow over here. In France, they have a load of bicycle followers.
The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior attempted to block a ship carrying coal from unloading in the harbor of Gdansk.
Armed Polish border guards boarded the vessel, breaking a window to gain entry. They arrested the captain, offloaded all 18 passengers and crew and seized the vessel.
CFACT has reported extensively on the strong antipathy the Polish people feel towards anyone who threatens their energy security, particularly as they view this as driving them into dependence on Russia.
Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965. photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.
Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cypress. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.
Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”
The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.
The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.
For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.
Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.
In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.
On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.
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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right. photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.
Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.
A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.
Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.
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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, my own generation’s taste in humor ran to the transgressive and outrageous. We liked nothing better than violating all existing limits on expression and every conventional stricture of decorum.
Now, it seems that Cotton Mather’s generation has been reincarnated into the college students of today. With the Fall Semester opening at Yale, out comes a new issue of Rumpus, the current student humor magazine, and all over the Yale campus, the snowflakes are melting.
Goodness gracious! Mercy me! Somebody had the crudeness and insensitivity to joke about the possibility of girls getting hammered and led astray at a particular fraternity called “Leo.”
Evidently only last year an issue of Rumpus came out featuring Hookup Bingo,” some joking about campus Hookup/Blackout culture. There was outrage. At least a dozen Rumpus staff members walked out in protest, Rumpus was denounced and condemned from every pulpit on the campus, and the issue was actually officially retracted! I haven’t seen it reported, but I assume that a number of Rumpus editors spent a few days in the stocks.
Now, what do you know? Rumpus has sinned again, triggering the deacons of the Yale Daily News and all the rest of the campus elect. Lots of chin-stroking and grovelling and apologizing ensued.
Following a year of non-publication after staff backlash over jokes about sexual misconduct, the Yale Rumpus has returned — but not without controversy.
The annual Freshman Issue of the student-run tabloid magazine hit dining halls on Friday morning, greeting students with a cover that read, “ATTENTION FIRST-YEARS: YOU WILL BE REJECTED.†The issue — the first to come out since last September — was produced by a new editorial team. But despite the new staff — which includes five members who actively worked on the issue and about 12 total staffers, compared to previous staff sizes of 30 or 40, according to Rumpus co-editor-in-chief and a former photo staffer for the News Jakub Madej ’20 — the new tabloid issue has already sparked discontent among many Yalies upset with its new content. Students were particularly angered by jokes about the K2 overdoses on the New Haven Green and a “Rump’s Review†of Leo, which they believe made light of sexual misconduct once again.
“The Leo joke was not intended to make fun of rape victims in any way, shape or form,†current Rumpus Co-Editor-in-Chief Anushka Walia ’21 wrote in an email to the News. “It pointed out messed up practices of frats, and it put Leo down. Part of the point of satire is this kind of commentary anyways. I’m sorry if it offended anyone, but it wasn’t the intent.â€
Last September, at least 12 staffers quit the publication in protest over several jokes about sexual assault that appeared in the Rumpus’ “Freshman Issue.†Those included a spot on the issue’s “Hookup Bingo†reading “Freshman’s First Blackout (Free)†and a line in the editor’s note making fun of a blacked out first year “let[ting] a senior on the baseball team raw [them] on that foul mattress in the Sig Nu basement.â€
The objectionable content in last September’s issue had been reviewed only by members of the editorial team prior to publication, but not the remainder of Rumpus staffers. Following internal backlash, Rumpus leadership retracted the issue, removed all copies of it from dining halls throughout campus and issued an apology for the content.
According to Madej and Walia, this year’s publication — which the current board revived independent of the old editorial staff — was for the most part vetted by board members as well as several staffers prior to printing, unlike in previous years. Also unlike Rumpus leadership’s response to last September’s backlash, this year, Madej and Walia neither retracted the issue nor issued a public apology for the content.
Although Madej said the Rumpus has not established any written standards for the kinds of jokes it will publish, the editors review content on a case-by-case basis to decide if it is fit to print.
“There were some issues last year regarding controversial issues and mismanagement,†Madej said. “We noticed what happened last year, and we believe in the idea of Rumpus, no matter what they say. We do want to bring it back to life.â€
Still, social media posts from Yalies this weekend argued that the publication’s “Rump’s Review†of Leo showed that Rumpus had not learned its lesson from last year’s backlash. …
Hours after the issue hit dining halls, the Instagram parody account @yaleactualweeklynews posted a picture of the review with the headline “Rumpus Learns From Mistakes; Only Publishes Subtle Rape Jokes.â€
In a statement to the News, Leo leadership called “the Rumpus’s attempt to make humor out of sexual misconduct extremely misguided and disappointing.â€
“We take the issue very seriously and work actively to make sure our friends and guests feel safe and have fun at our events,†the statement read.
During a Friday night interview with the News, Madej said the post from the @yaleactualweeklynews Instagram page was “nothing more†to him “than a kindergarten-level attempt to make jokes†and bring up problems from last year, adding that he did not see a connection between last year’s controversy and this year’s issue.
But Walia disagreed with Madej’s statement. In emails to the News following the interview, she stressed that she did not interpret the post as an attempt at humor, but rather as a way “to bring an important issue to light.†She explained that she did not expect the criticisms the post sparked, because she cares “very deeply about the very issues everyone else cares about†as both a woman and a feminist herself. Further, Walia underscored that the Rumpus’ intent is never to be offensive or malicious, and that she respects “people’s beliefs as well as their criticism.â€
“I do care about the criticism received because I want everyone to read the Rumpus and have a good time and laugh at it,†Walia said. “I don’t want anyone to feel offended or hurt by something that someone writes in it. So as editor in chief, I do take concerns seriously and keep that in mind — I care a lot about our readers.â€
Madej clarified in an email to the News on Sunday that he was not “sure of the intentions†of @yaleactualweeklynews, but “if they indeed wanted to be funny, it’d be a tremendously bad level of a joke.â€
Former Rumpus staffer Leila Halley-Wright ’21 — who quit the publication in protest of last year’s jokes about sexual assault — said she was “surprised†to see that the Leo review had been “deemed appropriate†for the issue considering last year’s backlash and its thematic similarity to last year’s editor’s notes.
Mia Arias Tsang ’21, the editor in chief of Broad Recognition, said she was upset to find a screenshot of one of her posts advertising the feminist magazine featured in a collage on the front cover. She stressed that the cover upset her because of the publication’s past of making light of sexual misconduct issues, and she was disappointed to see several similar problems arise in the new issue.
“Satire, I think, is very different from rape jokes,†Tsang said. “I think there’s ways you can tackle these issues satirically, but it has to be done really well and really carefully, and you should probably have some people look at it multiple times that are outside of the sphere of your tabloid magazine if you’re trying to go for a satire angle. … I think the stuff they do satirizing Yale culture has always been pretty on the nose and good, but they’ve just veered so far into this other territory for some reason.â€
Sagan received an appropriately admiring obituary in the Telegraph.
Françoise Sagan, who died yesterday aged 69, exploded on to the French literary scene in 1954 with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, written when she was just 18.
The novel tells the story of a rebellious 17-year-old whose manipulations destroy the relationships between her libertine father and his various women. Published just as teenagers were emerging as a distinct social group, it was an immediate succes de scandale, delighting and shocking with its worldly cynicism and suave amorality. It won the Prix de Critiques and earned Françoise Sagan £500,000 and a papal denunciation. François Mauriac, France’s most respected novelist, hailed the talent of “ce charmant petit monstre” on the front page of Le Figaro.
Yet though she continued to produce novels and plays at a rate of roughly one a year, Françoise Sagan’s writing lost its astringency and she began to be dismissed as a lightweight author of women’s romantic fiction – more Mills and Boon than enfant terrible.
Instead, propelled by her celebrity and wealth, she became better known for her rackety lifestyle – sports cars and crashes, serial lovers, addictions to gambling, whisky and drugs and run-ins with the tax authorities. An opinion survey conducted a few years after Bonjour Tristesse showed that most people in France thought her a film star, rather than a writer.
Fame – or rather, the Paris Match version of celebrity – clung tenaciously to Françoise Sagan. Moody, gamine and matchstick thin, elfin face peeping out from under a mop of cropped hair, in the 1950s and 1960s she seemed the epitome of Parisian radical chic. A frequenter of cafes, nightclubs and student barricades, she dined with Sartre, Hemingway, Henry Miller and the young François Mitterand. Vanessa Redgrave admitted that she began smoking after reading that Françoise Sagan always smoked Gauloises and had a cup of coffee for breakfast: “Immediately, I decided this was sophistication itself.”
Her literary oeuvre offered a version of France in which personal responsibility counts as nothing against stylish living – a principle she was determined to live by. One of her tricks was to arrive at a nightclub with one escort and leave with another; and she always parked her sports cars outside the door of her destination whatever the traffic regulations. As if to illustrate the point, a cover of one of her novels showed her aged 19 or 20, draped in a long leopardskin coat over the door of an open-topped Jaguar, dark circles under her eyes. Yet despite the hype that inevitably accompanied everything that she did, she managed to remain remarkably honest about her own limitations as a writer and as a person.
When offered membership of the Academie Franaise, she turned it down: she had read enough good books, she said, to recognise the difference between the literary merit of Bonjour Tristesse (which she claimed never to have re-read) and the fuss made about it. She never uttered a word of regret for her “unbridled life” but confessed that she had never really grown up: “as a result I don’t really understand adult values and I never will”. …
Françoise Sagan’s life was more colourful copy than her books. Flushed with the success of Bonjour Tristesse, she sped down in her new Ferrari to St Tropez where she turned her publishers’ cheque into gambling chips, whisky and lines of cocaine – and indulged a prodigious appetite for sex. “She tried every experience,” a former lover recalled, “with two persons, with a woman, with three, four. She was in the avant garde, La bande Sagan – a group, with Juliette Greco. They were drunk almost every night and they were a most crazy group. La bande Sagan was the top of sophistication.”
In 1957, she survived a serious accident when her Aston Martin overturned on a sharp bend and left her in a coma for three days. Soon afterwards she married Guy Schoeller, a publisher 20 years her senior. When that broke down, she married an American sculptor, Robert Westhoff. They had a son, but that relationship too ended after only a year. Marriage, she reflected, is “like the matter of asparagus eaten with vinaigrette or hollandaise – a matter of taste but of no importance”. …
Françoise Sagan maintained her reputation as the voice of hedonistim with a fund of bons mots: “You should celebrate the end of a love affair as they celebrate death in New Orleans, with songs, laughter, dancing and a lot of wine”; “a dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you”; “Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.”
But by the 1970s, with her brown hair turned miraculously blonde, fast living was taking its toll. Her passion for gambling became so intense that she asked the Ministry of the Interior to ban her from casinos. She had several brushes with death and in 1978 gave up drinking after a misdiagnosis of cancer of the pancreas. Her drug abuse landed her in court on several occasions and led to a demand from the Right-wing politician Jean Marie Le Pen that she be guillotined.
In 1990 a satirical puppet show on French television presented her as a disshevelled old bat butting in on every conversation, wild-eyed and gesticulating. “I believe I have the right to destroy myself as long as it doesn’t harm anyone,” she said. …
[S[he never quite managed to exorcise her demons. In 2001 she was convicted of tax fraud and given a one-year suspended jail sentence for failing to declare $726,000. But she said: “I always believe things are going to work out. Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I’m convinced she’ll get away with it. It’s the only way to get through life.”
Just as death is immobility, movement is life. That was the implicit motto of the turbulent Françoise Sagan who demonstrated, by making her life a fashion statement in spite of herself, that a life of speed is the best life.
Sagan wrote in an individual way, reminding the reader of La Fontaine, but she conjugated existence in the plural. Pleasures rather than pleasure, problems to drive away boredom, men and women instead of one man, ultimately living a life with which she took liberties with personal liberty as her pretext, incapable of counting the consequences of her actions. She lived as a wonderful and carefree butterfly,infatuated with intensity and speed. She proclaimed: “Anyone has never loved speed, has never loved life, has never loved anyone.”
More than a pleasure, the automobile was after the war an intercession between man and divinity. As we can only access God through the Saints, we can only know speed by propelling ourselves from the interior of a sports car. In the landscape of a France slowly starting its march of progress, Sagan’s Jaguar XK140 was capable of more than 150 km / h (140 miles per hour, hence its name) was a sports car delivering unheard-of power and unprecedented sensations. To drive it was to belong to the aristocracy. At the wheel of a competition Gordini 24S, rougher than any luxury grand touring toy, she earned even the respect of gentlemen drivers and motorsport enthusiasts, and her signature driving stripes. Barefoot driving stories do not really fit the Sagan legend, and were just publicity. No one drives a heavy Jaguar XK barefoot on the hot aluminum pedals and sticky rubber. It was the journalist Paul Giannoli who unshod Sagan forever to spice up his article on the frail young bourgeois girl becoming a part of her virile machine.
As the oil lamp symbolizes the victory of knowledge over obscurantism, the speeding automobile embodies the triumph of technology over time. Milan Kundera observed: “Speed ​​is the form of ecstasy that the technical revolution has given to man.” A form of ecstasy manifest in the words of Fillipo Tomaso Marinetti (Le Figaro, February 20, 1909), author of the Manifesto of Futurism, who affirmed that “the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”
Fascination with it begins when the person or the object embodies his time, as Roland Barthes demonstrated in his Mythologies (1957). Françoise Sagan and her taste for speed illustrate the point. She sets the tone, as Marie Dominique Lelièvre aptly remarked: “Sagan’s tastes are in tune with the collective imagination of her time. She both anticipates and accompanies its changes. She is its dynamic in person. With her royalties, Françoise bought a car: a sports car, symbolic of her energetic metabolism. Françoise spoke quickly, ate quickly, became successful quickly, and thought even faster. Her fast cars, her risk taking fanfared her fame. Inseparable from her legend, her car is the attribute of her glory, the materialization of her triumphs.”
To understand her craze for speed, it must be understood as a way to propel oneself out of oneself, to relieve a metaphysical need to surpass oneself, or to escape from one’s self using speed as a pain reliever. Sagan remarks on this in her fond memoir: “It also removes sorrow. One may be mad for love and in vain, but one is less so at 200 miles per hour. One consoles oneself for one’s earthly situation by physically overcoming the attraction of the earth. “The frenzy of speed is a manifestation of the spirit of revolt, a phase of conflict between inertia and movement. The inertia of habits, the human condition, and social conventions work in vain against speed. Hence our reaction and our tumult of excitement and impatience. …
[Some obscure and typically pretentious French references deliberately omitted.]
But it is necessary to control this energy offered by the mechanical power. Six months after the brutal death of James Dean, Françoise Sagan navigated between life and death at Corbeil hospital. It was an auto accident, again. Sagan thus became a product of her own legend. The newspapers saved their headlines, France held its breath. She was given Extreme Unction and kept anesthetized. In the end, she did survive, but remained handicapped.
Enzo Ferrari recounts in his memoir, “My Terrible Joys,” that he had arranged with the novelist to come to Maranello to take delivery of her Italian racing car. The accident occurred on April 13, 1957 at 2:15 pm in Milly-la-Forêt. Françoise Sagan was planning to have to lunch Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri at the mill Coudray, which she had rented from Christian Dior to enjoy the quiet of the countryside and to write. Her guests were late and she went to meet them in her powerful and luxurious convertible Aston Martin DB2/4. Travelling with her, in a different car, were her friends: Voldemar Lestienne, Veronique Campion, Bernard Frank, and his brother, Jacques. Both cars raced with bravado. Sagan did not take the road into account and accelerated to high speed. At more than 175 km/h, on the small country road, skidding was inevitable. She braked, the wheels locked, her cabriolet skidded and turned over twice, trapping under under two tons of metal the frail young woman.
“We are trained by these little accidents,” Françoise Sagan wrote later in “With Fondest Regards” (1984). “One remembers the distraction, the absence, one remembers everything except the main thing which is the precise opposite, the sudden, unsuspected and irresistible encounter of body and spirit, the contact of a living being with the brief lightning flash of ​​its own existence.
“It’s a precise, exhilarating and almost serene pleasure to go too fast, past the safe limits of the car and of the road itself, past its handling capabilities, beyond one’s own reflexes perhaps. And let’s also say that it is not precisely a kind of wager with oneself that we are talking about, nor an imbecile challenge to one’s own talent, it’s not a competition with oneself, it’s is not a victory over a personal handicap, it is rather a sort of jaunty bet between chance and oneself.” Sagan concluded: “As soon as danger joins the game, speed adds to the happiness of living, just as the vague threat of death is attendant to the happiness of living. That’s all I think is true, finally: speed is neither a sign, nor a proof, nor a provocation, nor a challenge, but an impulse of happiness.”
