“COVERAGE” THAT KILLS
It is with dismay that one decides the malaise of the popular reviewing publications—the Times and Tribune and the Saturday Review—is not always to be laid at the door of commerce. It had been simple and reassuring to believe the pressure of book publishers and booksellers accounted for the hospitable reception of trashy novels, commonplace “think” books, and so on. The publishers needed favorable reviews to use for the display of their product, as an Easter basket needs shredded green paper under the eggs. No one thought the pressure was simple and direct; it was imagined to be subtle, practical, basic, that is, having to do with the fact that the advertisements of the publishing business keep the book-review sections going financially. This explanation has, naturally, had an exaggerated acceptance.
The truth is, one imagines, that the publishers—seeing their best and their least products received with a uniform equanimity—must be aware that the drama of the book world is being slowly, painlessly killed. Everything is somehow alike, whether it be a routine work of history by a respectable academic, a group of platitudes from the Pentagon, a volume of verse, a work of radical ideas, a work of conservative ideas. Simple “coverage” seems to have won out over the drama of opinion; “readability,” a cozy little word, has taken the place of the old-fashioned requirement of a good, clear prose style, which is something else. All differences of excellence, of position, of form are blurred by the slumberous acceptance. The blur erases good and bad alike, the conventional and the odd, so that it finally appears that the author like the reviewer really does not have a position. The reviewer’s grace falls upon the rich and the poor alike; a work which is going to be a best seller, in which the publishers have sunk their fortune, is commended only at greater length than the book from which the publishers hardly expect to break even. In this fashion there is a sort of democratic euphoria that may do the light book a service but will hardly meet the needs of a serious work. When a book is rebuked, the rebuke is usually nothing more than a quick little jab with the needle, administered in the midst of therapeutic compliments. “—— is sometimes self-consciously arch,” said one review. “But it contains enough of ——’s famous wit and style to make American publication worthwhile. . . .”
The editors of the reviewing publications no longer seem to be engaged in literature. Books pile up, out they go, and in comes the review. Many distinguished minds give their names to various long and short articles in the Times, Tribune, and Saturday Review. The wares offered by the better writers are apt, frequently, to be something less than their best. Having awakened to so many gloomy Sundays, they accept their assignments in a co-operative spirit and return a “readable” piece, nothing much, of course. (Alice James wrote in her diary that her brother, Henry, was asked to write for the popular press and assured he could do anything he pleased “so long as there’s nothing literary in it.”)
The retention of certain disgruntled, repetitive commentators is alone enough to dispute notions of crude commercialism on the part of the reviewing publications. A businesslike editor, a “growing” organization—such as we are always reading about in the press—would have assessed the protests, if any, and put these fumbling minds out to pasture. For instance, what could be more tiresome than J. Donald Adams’s attacks on poor Lionel Trilling for trying to be interesting on Robert Frost? Only another attack on Adams, perhaps—who is, like the pressure of commerce, hardly the real trouble with the Times. Adams is like one of those public monuments only a stranger or someone who has been away for a while takes notice of. What is truly dismaying about the Times and Tribune is the quality of the editing.
Recently a small magazine called The Fifties published an interview with the editor-in-chief of The New York Times Book Review, Mr. Francis Brown. Mr. Brown appears in this exchange as a man with considerable editorial experience in general and very little “feel” for the particular work to which he has been appointed, that is editor of the powerfully important weekly Book Review. He, sadly, nowhere in the interview shows a vivid interest or even a sophistication about literary matters, the world of books and writers—the very least necessary for his position. His approach is modest, naïve, and curiously spiritless. In college, he tells us in the interview, he majored in history and subsequently became general editor of Current History. Later he went to Time, where he had “nothing to do with books,” and at last he was chosen to “take a crack at the Book Review.” The interviewer, hinting at some of the defects of the Book Review, wondered if there wasn’t too much reliance on specialists, a too frequent practice of giving a book to a reviewer who had written a book like it, or about the same country or the same period. Mr. Brown felt that “a field was a field.” When asked to compare our Times Book Review with The Times Literary Supplement in London, Brown opined, “They have a narrow audience and we have a wide one. I think in fiction they are doing the worst of any reputable publication.”
This is an astonishing opinion to anyone who has followed the reviews in the London Times and the other English reviewing papers, such as the Sunday Times and The Observer. These papers consistently set a standard intrinsically so much higher than ours that detailed comparison is almost impossible. It is not simply what may turn up in an individual review; it is profoundly a matter of the tone, the seriousness, the independence of mind and temperament. Richard Blackmur in a recent article tells of a conversation with the editor of The Times Literary Supplement who felt that the trouble with the American book reviews was just this lack of a strong, independent editorial direction and who ventured that very few publishers would withdraw their advertising because of the disappearance of the bland product being put out at the moment. A description of The Times Literary Supplement, the London publication, by Dwight Macdonald finds that the English paper “seems to be edited and read by people who know who they are and what interests them. That the vast majority of their fellow citizens do not share their interest in the development of English prose, the bibliography of Byelorussia, André Gide’s treatment of his wife, the precise relation of folksong and plainsong, and ‘the large blot’ in a letter of Dr. Johnson’s which has given much trouble to several of his editors . . . this seems not in any way to trouble them.”
REVIEWING AS WRITING
Invariably right opinion is not the only judge of a critic’s powers, although a taste that goes wrong frequently is only allowed to the greatest minds! In any case, it all depends upon who is right and who is wrong. The communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself, is the very least one would expect from a journal devoted to reviewing of new and old works. Beyond that beginning, the interest of the mind of the individual reviewer is everything. Book reviewing is a form of writing. We don’t pick up the Sunday Times to find out what Mr. Smith thinks of, for instance. Dr. Zhivago. (It would very likely be Mrs. Smith in the Herald Tribune.) As the saying goes, what do you have when you find out what Mr. Smith thinks of Dr. Zhivago? It does matter what an unusual mind, capable of presenting fresh ideas in a vivid and original and interesting manner, thinks of books as they appear. For sheer information, a somewhat expanded publisher’s list would do just as well as a good many of the reviews that appear weekly.
In a study of book reviewing done at Wayne University, we find that our old faithful, the eternally “favorable review,” holds his own with all the stamina we have learned to expect. Fifty-one percent of the reviews summarized in Book Review Digest in 1956 were favorable. A much more interesting figure is that 44.8 percent were non-committal! The bare meaning of “review” would strongly incline most people to the production of an opinion of some sort and so the reluctance of the non-committal reviewers to perform is a fact of great perplexity. The unfavorable reviews number 4.7 percent.
ONE SUNDAY
A Sunday some months ago in The Herald Tribune. The following are excerpts from five reviews of current novels, reviews that sadly call to mind a teen-age theme.
(1) “The rea
l value of the novel lies in its awareness of character, the essential personality, and the subtle effect of time.”
(2) “Occasionally some of the workings of the story seem contrived, but this is only a first impression, for foremost of all is the recreation of an atmosphere which is so strong that it dictates a destiny.”
(3) “Miss —— writes well, telling the story with a matter-of-factness and vividness that help to carry the strangeness of her central theme. For a reader who relishes a touch of the macabre, it is an intriguing exploration of the imagination.”
(4) “——, however, is an interesting and swiftly moving book; more complicated than most of its kind, and with subtler shading to its characters. It makes good reading.”
(5) “It is also, within the framework —— has set for himself, a warm, continuously interesting story of what can happen to a group of ordinary people in a perilous situation, a situation, incidentally, at least as likely as the one Nevil Shute postulates in ‘On the Beach.’ ”
(“The one Nevil Shute postulates in ‘On the Beach’ ”—the assurance of this phrase would give many a reader a pause, reminding us, as it does, that there are all kinds of examples of what is called “obscurity of reference.”)
About the Saturday Review, one feels more and more that it is not happy in its job. It is moody, like an actress looking for the right role in order to hit the big time. “Of Literature” has been dropped from the title, an excision the miscellaneous contents of the magazine soundly justifies. The search for feature ideas is as energetic as that of any national magazine; the editors are frantically trying to keep up with the times. With the huge increase in phonograph-record sales, the music departments have absorbed more and more space in the journal. Travel, in all its manifestations, has become an important concern—travel books, travel advice, guides to nearly as many events as Cue tries to handle. Even this is not enough. There are Racing Car issues and SR Goes to the Kitchen. Extraordinary promotion ideas occur to the staff, such as the Saturday Review Annual Advertising Award. Lines from an article on this topic read:
Because Saturday Review is continually concerned with the communications pattern in the United States, it has observed with deep interest the progressive development of advertising as a medium of idea communication, a much more subtle skill even than the communication of news.
The cover may “feature” a photograph of Joanne Woodward and recently in an issue that featured Max Eastman’s written ideas on Hemingway, not Eastman, but Hemingway, wearing a turtle-neck sweater, gazed from the cover in a “photo-portrait.” The book reviews, the long and the short articles, in Saturday Review are neither better nor worse than those of the Times; they are marked by the same lack of strenuous effort. They obviously have their audience in mind—one, it is believed, that will take only so much.
EDITORS’ WISHES
Literary journalism reaches, in the case of a good many writers, such levels of vitality and importance and delight that the excuse of the fleeting moment, the pressure of time, the needs of a large public cannot be accepted, as the editors would have us do. Orville Prescott of the daily Times—is he to be accounted a casualty of speed? Is what is wanting in this critic simply time to write, a month rather than a few days? Time would no doubt produce a longer Orville Prescott review, but that it would produce a more constant inspiration is open to doubt. Richard Rovere mentioned somewhere recently the fact that he could find, today, great fascination in reading some casual article done by Edmund Wilson in 1924 for Vanity Fair or The New Republic. The longer essays Wilson has done in recent years on whatever topic engages his mind are literary works one could hardly expect regularly or even rarely in the Times, Tribune, or Saturday Review. Still, his earlier reviews are the sort of high possibility an editor would, or so one imagines, have in mind. Nothing matters more than the kind of thing the editor would like if he could have his wish. Editorial wishes always partly come true. Does the editor of the Times Book Review really yearn for a superb writer like V. S. Pritchett, who does write almost weekly short pieces in The New Statesman with a week after week brilliance that astonishes everyone? Pritchett is just as good on “The James Dean Myth” or Ring Lardner as he is on the Russian novel. Is this the kind of thing our journals hope for, or is it a light little piece by, say, Elizabeth Janeway on “Caught between books”? It is typical of the editorial mind of the Times that it most frequently assigns Pritchett to write a casual, light London letter, work of insignificant journalism, which makes little use of his unique talents for writing book reviews.
In the end it is publicity that sells books and book reviews are only, at their most, the great toe of the giant. For some recurrent best sellers like Frances Parkinson Keyes and Frank Yerby the readers would no more ask for a good review before giving their approval and their money than a parent would insist upon public acceptance before giving his new baby a kiss. The book publishing and selling business is a very complicated one. Think of those publishers in businesslike pursuit of the erotic novel who would, we can be sure, have turned down Lolita as not the right kind of sex. It is easy enough, once the commercial success of a book is an established fact, to work out a convincing reason for the public’s enthusiasm. But, before the fact has happened, the business is mysterious, chancy, unpredictable.
For instance, it has been estimated that the reviews in Time magazine have the largest number of readers, possibly nearly five million each week, and it has also been suggested that many publishers feel that the reviews in Time do not affect the sales of a book one way or another! In the face of this mystery, some publishers have concluded that Time readers, having learned Time’s opinion of a book, feel that they have somehow already read the book, or if not quite that, if not read, at least taken it in, experienced it as a “fact of our time.” They feel no more need to buy the thing itself than to go to Washington for a firsthand look at the latest works of the Republican Administration.
In a world like that of books where all is angular and unmanageable, there hardly seems to be any true need for these busy hands working to shape it all into a small, fat ball of weekly butter. The adaptable reviewer, the placid, superficial commentator might reasonably survive in local newspapers. But, for the great metropolitan publications, the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting, should expect to find their audience.
1959
BOSTON
WITH BOSTON and its mysteriously enduring reputation, “the reverberation is longer than the thunderclap,” as Emerson observed about the tenacious fame of certain artists. Boston—wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming—has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade. Now, one supposes it is all over at last. The old jokes embarrass, the anecdotes are so many thrice-squeezed lemons, and no new fruit hangs on the boughs. All the American regions are breaking up, ground down to a standard American corn meal. And why not Boston, which would have been the most difficult to maintain? There has never been anything quite like Boston as a creation of the American imagination, or perhaps one should say as a creation of the American scene. Some of the legend was once real, surely. Our utilitarian, fluid landscape has produced a handful of regional conceptions, popular images, brief and naked: the conservative Vermonter, the boastful Texan, the honeyed Southerner. “Graciousness is ours,” brays a coarsened South; and the sheiks of Texas cruise around their desert.
The Boston image is more complex. The city is felt to have, in the end, a pure and special nature, absurd no doubt but somehow valuable. Empiricism will not carry one far; faith and being, sheer being above all, are needed. To be it, old Boston, real Boston, very Boston, and—one shrinks before the claim—proper Boston; there lies knowledge. An author can hardly fail to turn a penny or two on this magical subject. Everyone will consent to be informed on it, to be slyly entertained by it. Actual Boston is governed largely by
people of Irish descent and more and more, recently, by men of Italian descent. Not long ago, the old Yankee, Senator Saltonstall, remarked wistfully that there were still a good many Anglo-Saxons in Massachusetts, his own family among them. Extinction is foreshadowed in the defense.
Plainness and pretension restlessly feuding and combining; wealth and respectability and firmness of character ending in the production of a number of diverting individual tics or, at the best, instances of high culture—something of that sort is the legendary Boston soul or so one supposes without full confidence because the old citizens of Boston vehemently hold to the notion that the city and their character are ineffable, unknowable. When asked for an opinion on the admirable novel, Boston Adventure, or even the light social history, The Proper Bostonian, the answer invariably comes, “Not Boston.” The descriptive intelligence, the speculative mind, the fresh or even the merely open eye are felt to discover nothing but errors here, be they errors of praise or censure. Still, wrong-headedness flourishes, the subject fascinates, and the Athenaeum’s list of written productions on this topic is nearly endless.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 9