This is not, needless to say, my selection of the Great Books; it is merely intended as a stimulation to a young lady, who if she ever reads them, may happily discover that writing may be hard, but also desirable, and as exciting as the theater. I will send her other books as she grows older. There are many she had read, including E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat, whose perfect writing should be on every reading list.
Many of these books I have not read for 15 years or longer, but in thinking about short books that affected me as a writer, I arrived at this selection. There are dexterity here, flexibility, color, humor, suspense, and a variety of moods, and a full course in plot and construction. You will note that the women writers are well represented….
I look forward to seeing you at graduation.
Cordially yours,
JAMES THURBER
* * *
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
Daisy Miller, Henry James
Gentle Julia, Booth Tarkington
Linda Condon, Java Head, Wild Oranges, Joseph Hergesheimer
The Wanderer, Alain-Fournier
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Invitation to the Waltz, Rosamond Lehmann
This Simian World, God and My Father, Clarence Day
The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen
A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather
A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh
Heaven’s My Destination, The Cabala, Thornton Wilder
February Hill, The Wind at My Back, Victoria Lincoln
Blue Voyage, Conrad Aiken
The Bitter Tea of General Yen, G. Z. Stone
Lady into Fox, Edward Garnett
How to Write Short Stories, Ring Lardner
The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
* * *
… Last June I sent twenty-four books to my seventeen-year-old daughter, on her graduation from the Northampton School for Girls. Each of them had excited me at one period or another during the past thirty years. All of them are comparatively short, and most of them are out of print. Some of them I have reread more than once, but others I have never had time or chance to get back to. It had taken several months to round them all up….
What I hoped this shelf would prove is that reading can be fun, that modern writing can be good, and that good writing can be exciting. The adolescent who is plunged into Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, and Great Expectations is likely to believe that respectable writing must be old and mossy, and that respectable writers died in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. If he is a child of any creative talent, he may turn to one of the livelier arts—the theatre, or music, or painting, or ballet dancing. Maybe this is what has become of our young writers. Of all my two dozen books, I have found only My Antonia on any of the school reading lists I have seen, but The Robe appears on a lot of them.
No two persons, of course, would pick the same twenty-four books to give to anyone, and if I were to compile my list again, I would probably throw several out and put some others in. My system, at the time, was simply to sit and remember the short books I’d read, and when one of them struck the bell in my memory, I wrote its title down. We all have our literary idiosyncracies and blind spots. H. L. Mencken used to pray to God for guidance, so that he might be made to see what merit there was in the works of D. H. Lawrence. For some reason, or possibly out of pure cussedness, I have never been able to get very far in Norman Douglas’s South Wind, and although I am a great Max Beerbohm man, Zuleika Dobson leaves me cold. I left out The Red Badge of Courage because death in battle isn’t for girls, and Serena Blandish because a lady of impeccable literary taste told me that the day I liked Serena must have been one of my bad days. This same critic read Wild Oranges before I shipped it off and told me that it is pretty terrible—seems to be full of expressions like “said the former” and “replied the latter.” Well, it has been nearly thirty years since I read this one. The Bridge of San Luis Rey never fetched me, and I couldn’t make up my mind about Sylvia Warner’s Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. A little old item called The Inn of the Silver Moon, by one Knickerbocker Viele, if my memory serves, either delighted me in 1914 or appalled me, I can’t remember which. I omitted from my collection Appointment in Samarra and God’s Little Acre, not because they are too “sexy,” to use a lady teacher’s word, but because I was reliably informed that all seventeen-year-old girls have read them secretly.
Secondary schools must proceed primly on the rule and theory that books intimating or revealing the facts of life shall be taboo. The truth is, of course, that this merely adds incentive to the eager exploration of family and public library shelves, and the trouble with the system of taboo is that only the dubious pages are read by a youngster when he comes upon the treasure of a banned book. I am much too old and tired to attempt to solve this problem now. Besides, there is a wasp in the room….
What Price Conquest?
There is, I regret to say, a kind of lamplight playing over the mood and style, the events and figures, of Mr. Steinbeck’s new short novel about the people of a small conquered town and its conquerors. I suspect that if a writer conceives of a war story in terms of a title like The Moon Is Down he is likely to get himself into soft and dreamy trouble. Maybe a title like Guts in the Mud would have produced a more convincing reality. Anyway, this little book needs more guts and less moon. An impatient friend of mine who had read it, too, said to me, “It is probably Robert Nathan’s best book.” Whomever you may be reminded of, the vastly talented Mr. Steinbeck has definitely taken on here a new phrase and a new temper. One wonders what kind of thing he will do next.
The reader of this book does not have to be told that the author had a stage version in mind as he wrote it (the play has gone into rehearsal as I set this down). This has had the unfortunate effect of giving the interiors in the novel the feel of sets. I could not believe that the people who enter Mayor Orden’s living room come from the streets and houses of a little town. They come from their dressing rooms. The characters and the language they speak are in keeping with the theatrical atmosphere, from Annie, the irate cook, to Colonel Lanser, the leader of the invaders, and his staff. If these are German officers, if they are anything else but American actors, I will eat the manuscript of your next play.
The point upon which Mr. Steinbeck in these pages has so lovingly and gently brooded is that there are no machines and no armies mighty enough to conquer the people. “The people don’t like to be conquered, sir,” says Mayor Orden to Colonel Lanser, “and so they will not be.” This shining theme is restated a great many times, principally by one of the invading officers whose nerves have been worn down by the cold eyes and the silent faces of the little people of the little town. Lieutenant Tonder in The Moon Is Down goes to pieces and raves, and this scene demands comparison with the going-to-pieces scene of Lieutenant Moore in What Price Glory? and that of Lieutenant Hibbert in Journey’s End. Apparently Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson, who did the scene first (and best) have contributed a convention to the war play of our time. I can only say after reading the three scenes at one sitting that if the German lieutenants of today are really like Lieutenant Tonder, then the American Moores and the British Hibberts will be able to rout the pussycats merely by shouting “Boo!”
Let us listen to Lieutenant Tonder in The Moon Is Down:
“I want a girl. I want to go home. I want a girl. There’s a girl in this town, a pretty girl. I see her all the time. She has blond hair. She lives beside the old-iron store. I want that girl….
“That’s it! The enemy’s everywhere! Every man, every woman, even children! The enemy’s everywhere! Their faces look out of doorways. The white faces behind the curtains, listening. We have beaten them, we have won everywhere, and they wait and obey, and they wait. Half the world is ours….
“What do the reports say about us? Do they say we are
cheered, loved, flowers in our paths? Oh, these horrible people waiting in the snow! …
“Conquered and we’re afraid; conquered and we’re surrounded…. I had a dream—or a thought—out in the snow with the black shadows and the faces in the doorways, the cold faces behind curtains. I had a thought or a dream….
“Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses…. Maybe the Leader is crazy. Flies conquer the flypaper. Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!”
Now listen to Lieutenant Moore in What Price Glory?:
“Oh, God, Dave, but they got you. God, but they got you a beauty, the dirty swine. God DAMN them for keeping us up here in this hellish town. Why can’t they send in some of the million men they’ve got back there and give us a chance? Men in my platoon are so hysterical every time I get a message from Flagg, they want to know if they’re being relieved. What can I tell them? They look at me like whipped dogs—as if I had just beaten them—and I’ve had enough of them this time. I’ve got to get them out, I tell you. They’ve had enough. Every night the same way. (He turns to Flagg.) And since six o’clock there’s been a wounded sniper in the tree by that orchard angle crying ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’ Just like a big crippled whippoorwill. What price glory now? Why in God’s name can’t we all go home? Who gives a damn for this lousy, stinking little town but the poor French bastards who live here? God damn it! You talk about courage, and all night long you hear a man who’s bleeding to death on a tree calling you ‘Kamerad’ and asking you to save him. God damn every son of a bitch in the world who isn’t here! I won’t stand for it. I won’t stand for it! I won’t have the platoon asking me every minute of the livelong night when they are going to be relieved…. Flagg, I tell you you can shoot me, but I won’t stand for it…. I’ll take ‘em out tonight and kill you if you get in my way….”
At one point in The Moon Is Down the little people of the town are aided by the falling of a curious manna from Heaven: small blue parachutes come drifting to earth, carrying dynamite and chocolate. The little children of the conquered town go hunting for the candy with as much excitement as if they were searching for Easter eggs. The Steinbeck story will make a very pretty movie.
I keep wondering what the people of Poland would make of it all.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In a subsequent issue of The New Republic (March 30, 1942), Thurber replied to Mr. Marshall A. Best, who felt that Thurber’s review was “a slap in the face” and expressed that “softy cynicism that might yet lose us the war.” Rather than the “more guts and less moon” that Thurber recommended, Mr. Best urged “more dynamite and chocolate, and fewer owls in the attic!”
Sir: Mr. Best will not have to look far to see that the question of what the people of Poland would think of The Moon Is Down has been brought out of the subjunctive and into the present indicative. He will live, I think, to see many more letters protesting against Mr. Steinbeck’s gentle fable of War in Wonderland, not only from Poles who have endured German conquest, but from Jugoslavs, Greeks, French, Dutch, and all the rest. Mr. Best is quite right when he says that we might yet lose the war. Nothing would help more toward that end than for Americans to believe Steinbeck’s version of Nazi conquest instead of its true story of hell, horror, and hopelessness. This true story may be found, to name just one place, on page 10 of the New York Times for March 19, in a summary of a Polish White Book dealing with the German conquest of Poland. The mass rape and systematic debauchery of the women of a conquered country stand in curious contrast to Mr. Steinbeck’s idyllic picture of a lonely German officer who simply wants to talk and hold hands with the widow of a man the Nazis have murdered. I should like to send a clipping of this to Mr. Marshall A. Best, Managing Editor, The Viking Press (publishers of The Moon Is Down), by whose fuzzy mental distress and public heartbreak I am approximately as deeply moved as I would be by the tears of a real-estate agent.
I am sorry about that slap in the face. I didn’t realize my hand was open.
“1 told Womrath’s I don’t want to read anything instructive until the war ends.”
“Your faith is really more disturbing than my atheism.
“Professor Townsend is really too high-strung to be a philosopher.”
Taps at Assembly
The novel F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on when he died in December 1940 has been on the counters for three months now. His publishers tell me that it has sold only about 3,500 copies. This indicates, I think, that it has fallen, and will continue to fall, into the right hands. In its unfinished state, The Last Tycoon is for the writer, the critic, the sensitive appreciator of literature. The book, I have discovered, can be found in very few Womrath stores or other lending libraries. This, one feels sure, would have pleased Scott Fitzgerald. The book would have fared badly in the minds and discussions of readers who read books simply to finish them.
Fitzgerald’s work in progress was to have told the life story of a big Hollywood producer. In the form in which the author left it, it runs to six chapters, the last one unfinished. There follows a synopsis of what was to have come, and then there are twenty-eight pages of notes, comments, descriptive sentences and paragraphs, jotted down by the author, and a complete letter he wrote outlining his story idea. All these were carefully selected and arranged by Edmund Wilson (who also contributes a preface) and anyone interested in the ideas and craftsmanship of one of America’s foremost fiction writers will find them exciting reading. Mr. Wilson has also included The Great Gatsby in the volume, and the five short stories which he considers likely to be of permanent interest. His choices are “The Rich Boy,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “May Day,” “Absolution,” and “Crazy Sunday.” This collection belongs on a shelf of every proud library.
No book published here in a long time has created more discussion and argument among writers and lovers of writing than The Last Tycoon. Had it been completed, would it have been Fitzgerald’s best book? Should it, in a draft which surely represented only the middle stages of rewriting, have been published alongside the flawless final writing of The Great Gatsby? In the larger view, it is sentimental nonsense to argue against the book’s publication. It was the last work of a first-rate novelist; it shows his development, it rounds out his all too brief career; it gives us what he had done and indicates what he was going to do on the largest canvas of his life; it is filled with a great many excellent things as it stands. It is good to be acquainted with all these things. In the smaller, the personal view, there is a valid argument, however. Writers who rewrite and rewrite until they reach the perfection they are after consider anything less than that perfection nothing at all. They would not, as a rule, show it to their wives or to their most valued friends. Fitzgerald’s perfection of style and form, as in The Great Gatsby, has a way of making something that lies between your stomach and your heart quiver a little.
The Last Tycoon is the story of Monroe Stahr, one of the founders of Hollywood, the builder of a movie empire. We see him in his relation to the hundreds of human parts of the vast machine he has constructed, and in his relation to the woman he loves, and to a Communist Party organizer (their first contact is one of the best and most promising parts of the book). We were to have seen him on an even larger scale, ending in a tremendous upheaval and disintegration of his work and his world and a final tragedy. Fitzgerald would have brought it off brilliantly in the end. This would have been another book in the fine one-color mood of The Great Gatsby, with that book’s sure form and sure direction. He had got away from what he calls the “deterioration novel” that he wrote in Tender Is the Night. He had a long way yet to go in The Last Tycoon and his notes show that he realized this.
In one of these notes he tells himself that his first chapter is “stilted from rewriting” and he instructs himself to rewrite it, not from the last draft, but from mood. It is good as it stands, but he knew it wasn’t right. In the last of the notes, Fitzgerald had written, with all the letters in capitals: “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” A br
illiant perfectionist in the managing of his ultimate effects, Fitzgerald knew that Stahr had been too boldly blocked out in the draft which has come to us. There was too much direct description of the great man. He fails to live up to it all. Such a passage as this would surely have been done over: “He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously—finally frantically—and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.” There are other large, unhewn lines which would have given place to something else, such as this speech by one of his worshipers: “So I came to you, Monroe. I never saw a situation where you didn’t know a way out. I said to myself: even if he advises me to kill myself, I’ll ask Monroe.” The Monroe Stahr we see is not yet the man this speaker is talking about. I would like to see him as he would have emerged from one or two more rewrites of what is here, excellent, sharp, witty, and moving as a great deal of it is.
Collecting Himself Page 5