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21. Transitions: Bradbury and Don Congdon
- University of Illinois Press
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126 | | 5 21 Transitions: Bradbury and Don Congdon The early months of 1946 were challenging for Bradbury, both personally and professionally. For Christmas, Beach presented Bradbury with a copy of Edwin Seaver’s latest anthology, Cross-Section 1945: A Collection of New American Writing, but there was now a somewhat unfathomable jealousy in Grant’s approach to Bradbury’s career. This tenseness further aggravated the growing sense of stagnation that Bradbury felt about his own prospects. The nine weeks away from Los Angeles had significantly slowed his writing schedule—he had nothing under review with the major market magazines, and during the first three months of 1946 Schwartz was able to sell only one of the pulp market stories he was still circulating for Bradbury. To add insult to injury, that sale went to Weird Tales, for “The Smiling People,” and netted only $31 at the usual penny-a-word rate. In spite of these challenges, however, there were developments that boded well for the long term. He was still establishing the contents and revising stories for Dark Carnival, which he had promised to deliver to Derleth in April. Who Knocks?, Derleth’s latest anthology for the major New York publishing house of Rinehart, would include “The Lake,” Bradbury’s first anthologized story. But a wider range of anthologists were now interested in Bradbury’s work. The previous year, Oscar Friend had requested “The Jar” for a projected Leslie Charteris anthology under his well-known “The Saint” (Simon Templar) series imprint. Bill Spier, director-producer of the popular Suspense radio program, was also considering several Bradbury stories for a Suspense anthology. Neither of these projects worked out, but Bradbury did win a place for “The Watchers” in Rue Morgue No. 1, the first Rex Stout mystery annual, for 1946 publication.1 At the same time, Bradbury’s four major market magazine sales from the summer of 1945 led to even greater opportunities. In early November, while Bradbury was still in Mexico, New York agent Jacques Chambrun wrote asking to represent Bradbury. Chambrun, who represented Bradbury’s beloved Somerset Maugham in America, had just read “Invisible Boy” in Mademoiselle. Leland Hayward, the agent-husband of film star Margaret Sullavan, did Chambrun one betterbycontactingBradburyinMexicoCitywiththesamerequest.ButBradbury did not yet know enough about these agencies, or indeed about any agency, to i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 126 6/27/11 2:51 PM Chapter 21. Transitions | 127 makeacommitment,andhepolitelydeclinedboth.VariousNewYorkpublishing houseswerealsointerestedincontactinghim—betweenAugust1945andMarch 1946, Bradbury received three direct requests—from Lippincott, Farrar-Strauss & Company, and Simon & Schuster—to submit a novel or story collection of his own. Two of the letters came from names that Bradbury recognized: editorpublisher Whit Burnett of Story Magazine and The Story Press made the Lippincott offer, and Roger W. Straus Jr. initiated the Farrar-Straus bid.2 But the earliest of the three offers came from Don Congdon, the most recent editorial hire at Simon & Schuster. He was no newcomer to publishing, though, having spent nine years with Lurton Blassingame’s agency and a year as an associate fiction editor at Collier’s. In July 1945 he moved into the book trade with Simon & Schuster, but a month later his friends at Collier’s tipped him off to a new major market talent named William Elliott. Bradbury had submitted all three of his late-summer slick sales as William Elliott, fashioning the name from the Modernist poets William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. On August 27th Congdon wrote “Mr. Elliott” to see if he had a novel or anything of length for Simon & Schuster to review. Bradbury was already arranging to have the three slick sales published under his real name, and on September 11th he revealed his identity to Congdon in a letter that also outlined his first plans for a novel. It involved the sometimes unbridgeable differences between adults and children, and it would eventually evolve into the Summer Morning, Summer Night materials that produced both Dandelion Wine and Farewell Summer. Congdon wrote back on the 18th with interest, comparing Bradbury’s idea favorably with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Richard Hughes’s The Innocent Voyage, a novel Bradbury had already encountered under its original title, A High Wind in Jamaica. Bradbury received Congdon’s letter on the 20th, just before he set out for Mexico, and he didn’t have to wait very long to discover that Congdon was won over as a fan; a letter forwarded to Bradbury in Guadalajara praised “Invisible...