Agents, Which And Which Not

( Originally Published 1944 )

Or that bald heads are covered thick with hair;

A LARGE quantity of my mail each year contains pleas from authors in literary diapers asking how they can get an agent.

Literary agents are a cagey and umbrageous lot. A few large agents practically control the field. With utter cynicism they ignore all authors who need them and batten upon authors who do not. The reason authors who do not need them go to them is that some of the most powerful agents in New York wield great influence in magazine- and book-publishing quarters and can quash an author who is not paying off to one of their guild. The wise author, after he has arrived, pays off ten per cent to an agent of some sort because of this. The top agents do not "criticise" the work of their clients. They do not make any great effort to "sell" it, since they will not take on a new client until his work sells itself but they can do one thing. They can get an arrived author's rates boosted, because they know exactly how much a given magazine will pay as its top price, and how much advance royalties may be wangled out of a given publisher. On the whole it may be said that in this manner they earn their salt. But it is useless for the upcoming author to approach them. When he no longer needs them, they will approach him. None of these top shot agents ever advertise. And please do not write me for their names, because it wouldn't do you any good until you have arrived. They wouldn't even answer your letters.

Beneath these veddy, veddy agents there is a group of minor agents who advertise in all the writers' magazines, some of them good; some of them very bad-and I obviously could not tell you which are which, even if I certainly knew, since I would soon find myself sued. It does seem to me, with what experience of my own I have had, and from the observation of other authors' experiences, that at the outset an agent is not necessary. It is possible to wangle, a top shot agent if you bear down upon some known author. He may write a letter to a Big Shot agent that will get you "in," but in most cases the agent does it because he is intimidated, and will send you polite letters explaining why your stuff hasn't been bought. If you attack the situation without benefit of agent certain disadvantages accrue. The time element, for instance your stories going back and forth between New York and wherever you live. On the other hand a peculiar benefit accrues if your material has drama and conflict, and some worth. A curious sort of war goes on year in and year out between the Eastern agents and the Eastern editors and publishers. The agents hold up the editors and publishers for more and more money for their clients (as, in-deed, they should!), and the editors and publishers are delighted if they can find a newcomer they can milk for even a few months without some agent butting in and raising his rates willy nilly. This means that sans agent you will get a hearing, usually, if there is anything in your manuscript to justify it. This applies in both magazine and book editorial houses. Nothing delights an editor or a publisher more than to turn you over to his favorite agent after he has given you a shave. That is to say, suppose your first novel is a dilly. The publisher, if you lack an agent, can make a close deal with you. He can get you to relinquish all but twenty-five per cent of the motion picture rights. He can get you to take a two hundred and fifty dollar advance, and ten per cent royalties. If you had a hard boiled agent he would in all likelihood get you fifty per cent of the moom pix rights, five hundred advance, and (few authors are aware of it who have not agents) more than ten per cent royalties. Having performed this neat piece of business the publisher knows that as soon as your novel is published all the Big Shot agents will write you. He can then, having put over a neat deal for himself, ingratiate himself further with his favorite agent by recommending him. In short, your not having an agent in the first place will probably cost you money; but there is practically nothing you can do about it but wait until you begin to show signs of success and then pick an agent. One thing here is very dangerous some of the advertising agents will, when approached, sign you up for a period of years. Then, if you go over in a Big Way, you're stuck with them. The best thing to do is to go it alone at first and wait until you have the opportunity to sign up with an agent with eclat.

And now, I know not why the subject should jump to my mind at the tail end of my observations on agents (but it does!), I want to insert a postscript to this chapter on that oblique, elusive, and certainly intangible concept commonly referred to as Free Speech.

At the outset the young author usually takes Free Speech for granted. But after twenty-five years of writing if anyone mentions Free Speech the author looks sad, or, perhaps, giggles a little hysterically.

By that time he will have had any and all Free Speech batted out of him by editors, publishers, readers, literary critics, his wife; his wife's relatives, their relatives; the motion picture industry; the church; his friends, his enemies, his enemies' relatives; his mistress, his mistress' husband; his own children, other people's children and his own illegitimate children. But he will have invented a way of writing, per-chance, which will make it look as though he were, indeed, still possessed of a measure of Free Speech.

If you think I am speaking freely through this roundelay, do not kid yourself. There are a hundred things I dare not say. Nobody, I think, has ever unraveled more of the fringe on the edge of Free Speech than I have but I would no more dare set down here what really I want to say than a professor in a university would dare say out loud that Socialism has merit.

Justice Holmes, of the United States Supreme Court, gave Free Speech in this country the coup de grace long ago with his famous: "Free Speech certainly does not include the right of a man to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre." It will at once be seen by the naughtily erudite that it is far better to lose a lot of theatres full of people thus than to lose Free Speech; also it will be seen by the meticulous that the right of a man to yell "Fire" in a crowded theatre is the same as the right of a man in a crowded theatre to get up and yell: "There is no fire, he's nuts." Thus you would have the guys in an argument as to whether there was, or was not any fire, and everybody would get so interested in the altercation they would forget the fire, if any. But, from Justice Holmes' quotation —which is a binding Supreme Court Decision you can go in any direction in destroying Free Speech. I could set down here at least one hundred things that you cannot say right now in this country presumably possessed of Free Speech.

Voltaire, of course, is supposed to have enunciated the best word on Free Speech in his famous utterance which is by now such a cliche that I would not make so bold as to repeat it. Piquantly enough, Voltaire never said it. It appears in none of his written work, and it appears nowhere among the annotations of those who made a record of his public utterances. It was, as a matter of fact, said, not by Voltaire, but by a lady who years after Voltaire's death remarked, in a volume of hers about Voltaire, that it was the sort of thing he "might have said."

However, I can herewith give you a rhetorical fling about Free Speech that is a matter of record. I think it is the best jive on the subject I have ever read. It was written by Wendell Phillips, who is famous for having American High Schools named after him; and I believe when he wrote it he was in the groove as no other commentator on Free Speech ever was; it distinctly sends me, and I hope that you hep cats of presumably Free Speech will make a note of it:

"No matter whose the lips that would speak they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion let it crack."

Wendell Phillips

To this I might add in my own wistful way my own definition of Free Speech, as I conceived it way back when, not yet dry behind the literary ears, I supposed that the pen had at least a ghost of a chance with the sword. I would define Free Speech as the indubitable right to utter upon any and all occasions that which enrages the powerful majorities and the helpless majorities; the organized minorities, and the unorganized minorities.