On The Endless Rejection of the Humanities

I tried my best to cheer her up.  She'd been rejected from an summer internship at the university literary journal, one for which I'd helped edit her cover letter.  She was a few years older than my other students; she'd worked awhile in that most eminently safe and recommended of careers, health care, before she finally decided she'd had it, that life's too short to merely help others prolong theirs, so she would instead pursue her desires to become a writer.  Folks with the courage and gumption to voluntarily leave the STEMs to follow the Humanities are rare, so I try to encourage them when I can.

This had been her first real set-back as an English major.

I rattled off the standard list of famous writers who battled rejection for years before finally finding adulation or even just publication, sometimes only posthumously--James Joyce taking over a decade to publish Dubliners and throwing Stephen Hero into the fire in frustration; Robert Frost publishing his first poem at over 40; Virginia Woolf wrangling for years with both clinical depression and her first novel The Voyage Out; Emily Dickinson publishing in a few scattered newspapers and no where else till her death; Alfred Tennyson poor and well into middle-age by the time In Memoriam makes him poet laureate; Robert Browning not publishing not one solitary copy of his first book of poems; Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry only published after his death; John Steinbeck over 30 before his first book comes out; William Faulkner mowing the lawn at Ole Miss outside the halls of English professors unaware that the grounds-keeper is writing As I Lay Dying on his down time; John Kennedy Toole winning the Pulitzer a solid 20 years after his suicide and failure to publish; Jonathan Franzen finally finding acclaim (and sales) with the The Corrections at 43; the voluminous rejection slips collected by Robert Pirsig for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, David Markson for Wittgenstein's Mistress, JK Rowling for the first Harry Potter, Tom Clancy for Hunt for Red October; even William Shakespeare has a missing 8 years between his first arrival in London and his first play, etc, etc--I'm sure everyone can add to the list.  (David Markson's The Last Novel, by the way, is a perfect compendium of famous artistic failure).

I then realized I was probably coming off as condescending: "You're an actual, functioning adult," I acknowledged, "I'm sure you have plenty of experience with rejection already."

"But I don't!" she said suddenly, lifting her head.  As she explained it, in all her years of working in health care, not only had she rarely gone more than a few days without finding a job, but often places she applied at would make a position for her, such was her competence, work ethic, and qualifications.  This whole new English world of near-constant rejection was strange and alien to her, and she was only now coming to grips with it.

It was an illuminating moment for the both of us: for her, she realized that the thick skin she had in nursing (which you literally need to have when Alzheimer patients start attacking you) is very different from the thick skin you need when mentally-competent human beings in full possession of their faculties reject you out of hand, and often do.  You have to learn to not take it personally.

But for me, the illuminating moment was, well, to realize that there is this whole other world that is not saturated in near-constant rejection!  Seriously, to paraphrase TS Eliot, I have measured out my English career in rejections: from grad schools, academic journals, grants, teaching positions, newspaper jobs, publishers who actually took the time to bypass the standard rejection form letter to personally praise my work even as they had to "pass on it," and magazine internships wherein I was a finalist but not hired.  All my acceptances, sweet as they may be, are vastly outnumbered by my rejections.  I long ago learned not to take it all personally--mainly cause I had to.

Yet part of what helped me not take it personally was my assumption that everyone was in the same boat, that there isn't a career field out there (particularly in this recession), wherein just soldiering on in the face of constant rejection isn't a part of the whole game, e.g. entrepreneurs see their businesses fail, construction workers get laid off, scientists don't get their grant funding, lawyers find their job-bubble has burst, computer scientists' knowledge goes obsolete in 2 years, biologists get rejected from med school, some nurses I know found their field more over-saturated than they were promised, etc and etc (and that's without touching all the legion musicians, actors, and artists who have it way harder than I do).  I figured that if I had to struggle with some rejection in English, well, there wasn't a field wherein I wouldn't, so I might as well just make a go in this one.

Hence, this whole realization that there are entire other fields wherein rejection and thick-skin isn't a fact of life, that you're able to make a decent living if you're reasonably competent at unchallenging work, has caused me some slight consternation.  There is this bizarre stereotype in this country that writers and thinkers are some breed of dandified fragile flowers, sensitive, vain, arrogant and weak.  I've never met this strange creature, for English requires ruthlessness, mental toughness, and a vast reservoir of inner strength--and that's just for the writing process!  When I hear of legislatures trying to encourage more college students to enter the STEM fields, their rhetoric tends to denigrate the Humanities, as though this were the easy way out.  Oh if only; it is anything but.