THE ORCHARD KEEPER FIRST APPEARANCE AND MORE

The Orchard Keeper, “Bounty. A Story” in the Yale Review

Yale University Press, New Haven, 1965.

Advance excerpt from The Orchard Keeper in The Yale Review A National Quarterly, Volume LIV, No. 3, Spring 1965, with “Published in March 1965” on contents page,Softcover, 23 x 16,3 cm., pp. XLVIII, 321-480. Powder blue wrappers lettered in black. Price “$1.5 A Copy, $5 A Year” on the spine. The excerpt is at the pages 368-374.

CONDITION: a very good example.

Published March 1, 1965 at a price of $1,50 in a print run of approximately 4,000 copies.

This is the first public appearance of the Orchard Keeper in any form and the first McCarthy published work but two stories, “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan”, appeared earlier on the college review The Phoenix under the name C.J. McCarthy and a few writings which appeared in Gold and Blue, Catholic High School of Knoxville newspaper. The short stories are very hard to find with, as far as I know, just one example of each one in private hand, owned by Chris Hatfield. Apparently, he got them in a Knoxville bookstore around September, 2023 after years of looking for them.

The Yale issue precedes the other excerpt from The Orchard Keeper, appeared almost at the same time on The Sewanee Review which was not available before first days of April.

Albert Erskine was McCarthy editor at Random for more than twenty years and had a great influence on him. McCarthy told to Gayle Feldman: “Other than my brother, Albert was the best human being I’ve ever known […] a person of honesty and rectitude […] warmth and decency [who] saw humor in the absurdity of things […] Albert’s style was to go through word by word. He’d look up everything. If there were typos or questionable facts, or if he thought something was improbable, he’d comment. His editing was trying to fix mistakes, not fix what you’d written.” (Gayle Feldman, “What the ‘New York Times’ Missed About Cormac McCarthy”, in Publisher’s Weekly, June 30, 2023). Erskine made considerable efforts to place excerpts of The Orchard Keeper in periodicals to let a first book of an unknown writer to be known and hoping that “it might not only get the author some additional revenue from his work but also result in increased sales of the novel” (Luce, Embracing Vocation, p.78). Although praising the novel, most of the magazines contacted refused to publish an excerpt because of the intricately wowed structure of it which doesn’t allow to extrapolate sections meaningful in their self. Even John E. Palmer, The Yale Review editor and Erskine’s old friend who had worked with him at Southern Review, on October, 1964 refused Random House offer. A couple of months later though he changed his mind and accepted to host an excerpt on the magazine March issue.

PROVENANCE: purchased from the American collector Paul Ford in 2022.

COLLECTING TOPICS: The Yale Review issue is much scarcer than the later Sewanee Review issues. I have seen only five copies of it, this included. The Woolmer collection hold at University of Texas, San Marcos, has a copy. The second is in the Paul Ford collection. A third was listed by a quite naive seller on the web in 2022 for just $25 and, of course, sold immediately. The last one, and the best, is part of the McCarthy collection of Chris Hatfield, a clever collector from Knoxville, who got it among a bunch of 27 issues of the review for less than $100. No copies were offered on the web on May, 2024. Scarce.