This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [3]
It proved somewhat baffling to magazine editors to hear from a literary agent in Seattle, or anywhere else west of Rockefeller Center, but they managed to be reasonably polite about it and Ann proved to be a gifted agent. She quickly had me writing, among other assignments, travel articles for the New York Times. With the magisterial editing I was receiving from the Times, those Sunday travel section pieces likely were my best work among the couple of hundred articles I'd done. But while travel writing can be an honest enough pastime, growing known as a travel writer made me a bit uneasy. You may recall the passage in The Education of Henry Adams where Adams ponders the roaming around Europe he had done as a young man while supposedly studying civil law at the University of Berlin. If his father asked Adams at the end of it all what he had made of himself for the time and money put into him, Adams figured the only possible answer would be: "Sir, I am a tourist."
Not wanting to spend my time as a kind of typewriting tourist—and also beginning to feel worn down by the magazine life, which as I got better and better at it seemed to pay worse and worse—I suggested to Ann that I would put in practically full time on the Montana manuscript until we had a hundred decent pages and, if she wanted to handle it, we'd send off that sample to book publishers. She said sure.
During that year, 1976, my work on the manuscript appeared to me to be going better. One diary entry: "Some of last week's work about the Stockman Bar ... has things in it I didn't know I could do." So, just after Thanksgiving, I had accumulated enough pages for the manuscript sample and Ann had run her finger down the rosters of major publishers in Literary Market Place and chosen the name of a senior editor from each. We did a cover letter, made multiple photocopies of the manuscript sample, and mailed it out into the world to six editors at a time.
Over the next few months, our first batches of submissions brought us back two standard rejection slips and a growing series of semibaffled, sometimes rather wistful letters from editors.
From Simon and Schuster: "Doig's experiences and his feel for the time and place are wonderful—here and there a line about a mountain or a remembered phrase quoted from his father would strike the perfect chord. But ... I don't think it would be a successful trade book in its present shape."
From St. Martin's Press: "You do write beautifully—and what marvelous recall you have for childhood perceptions. Unfortunately, much as I do like your work, I find that what you have here is not at all commercial."
From Holt, Rinehart and Winston: "Although Ivan Doig writes intelligently and well, I don't think his memoirs are going to add up to a publishable trade book."
And then, after the buts and unfortunatelys and althoughs, the lucky thirteenth letter:
"I have read Ivan Doig's manuscript sample and like it. It is an unusual kind of book, and I need a little more time to give you a final decision about whether we can publish it. I'll get back to you soon, but I wanted you to know it is under serious consideration."
Signed: "Carol Hill, Senior Editor, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich."
The date on that letter was the 24th of March, 1977. It had taken about four months, vastly less than I thought it would, and This House of Sky had lucked onto its perfect editor.
Ann Nelson at once did some dickering with Carol Hill—levered the advance up from $3,500 to a whopping $4,500—and we had a book contract.
All that remained, of course, was to write the last three-fourths of