Atlanta, Ga. June 20, 1936 Dear Mr. Scherman;
Thank you so much for your letter. I was very glad to get it, not only because of the flattering sentiments you expressed but because I have been wanting to write to the Book of the Month Club and did not know who to address. I wanted to thank the Editorial Board from the bottom of my heart for selecting my book. It was quite the most exciting and unexpected thing that ever happened to me, so exciting and unexpected that I did not believe it true and told no one for three days (my husband was out of town at the time and I waited for his return to discuss the matter). Then I cagily told a friend on the Atlanta Journal that Mr. Brett, Jr. of The Macmillan Company had evidently taken leave of his senses for he had written me the most remarkable letter and it did not seem possible that the Book of the Month Club had really picked me. Then my friend said that I was the So-and-soest fool she had ever heard of to know such news for three days and keep it from my own old newspaper and she rushed the news into print, accompanying it with the world’s worst picture. And I quaked, thereafter, fearing there had been a mistake somewhere and that you all would denounce me as an imposter.
I had had the manuscript knocking around the house for so many years, never even trying to sell it, so when Mr. Latham bought it my excitement was naturally great. But when I heard that you all had selected it, it was too much to be borne and I went to bed and was ill, with an ice pack and large quantities of aspirin. And your letter, telling me that it was the unanimous choice, has made me so proud, that it has taken great strength of character not to go back to bed again! I thank you all, so very, very much. I have never had anything happen to me that was as nice.
I hope to come to New York sometime in the Autumn and I hope to meet and thank in person the members of the Board. Henry Seidel Canby’s article about the book in the Bulletin was enough to turn a harder head than mine and Dorothy Canfield’s review in the Ladies Home Journal was most flattering. I suppose I shall have to put my prejudices in my pocket and read the Russians, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, etc. And probably Thackeray and Jane Austen, too. Yes, I know it sounds illiterate of me but I never could read them. But when people are kind enough to mention them in the same breath with my book, I ought to be able to do more than duck my head and suck my thumb and make unintelligible sounds. Heaven knows, this “up-country” Georgia girl never expected to get in the same sentence with them!
Sincerely,
(signed)
Margaret Mitchell
(Mrs. John R. Marsh)
4 East 17th Street N. E.
The Scherman method worked from the beginning. By the time the Club turned twenty-five, in 1951, 100 million books had been sent into the nation’s households. Scherman felt that less than 10 percent of that number would have made it into readers’ hands if it hadn’t been for his invention. But some critics worried about the standardizing effect that such a massive distribution of preselected books would have on America’s reading habits. In his challenging essay “Masscult and Midcult,” Dwight Macdonald criticized the Book-of-the-Month Club for what he felt was its tendency to water down and vulgarize high culture. On the other hand, Carl Van Doren said, “A good book is not made less good or less useful by being put promptly into the hands of many readers.” Harry Scherman was a pragmatist, and a populist, when it come to reading. He understood that there would always be that gulf between Macdonald’s High Culture and popular culture, but he also felt that the two sometimes merged and, anyway, that a bridge existed between the two and that people could walk back and forth as they chose. Which is what Book-of-the-Month Club members did then and do today.
“If you are to deal with or think about the American people en masse,” Scherman wrote in 1966, “you can trust them as you trust yourself. You can trust their consuming curiosity about all the quirks and subtleties of human existence; you can trust their fascination with every colorful aspect of history; you can trust their immediate response to good humor and gaiety, but also to the most serious thought; you can trust their gracious open mindedness, forever seeking new light upon their troubled but wonderful world. Whoever may have good evidence about that world, and whatever it may be, here is proof that the thoughtful people of this country will give him the audience he deserves.”
Harry Scherman died in 1969 at the age of eighty-two. Clifton Fadiman, the senior judge of the board at the time, remembered Scherman as full of “goodness and generosity.” The publisher Bennett Cerf called Harry Scherman “the happiest man I know.”
“Trust them as you trust yourself.” That became the philosophy of the first editorial board assembled by Scherman. And it is the abiding watchword of the Club to this day. But what kind of audience deserved that trust? Scherman talked about “the thoughtful people.” That was close to George Saintsbury’s “general congregation of decently educated and intelligent people.” Those standards fit the Scherman era, but since then the world has become more complicated, and more perilous. Today, Clifton Fadiman says, members are looking for books that will satisfy “the serious American interest in self-education. They want books that explain our terrifying age honestly.” The newest member of the editorial board, Gloria Norris, opened it up even more. “I think one reason we’ve kept members for so long is that we respect their possibilities.”
The Club has had eighteen judges in its sixty years. Five of them— Amy Loveman, Basil Davenport, Lucy Rosenthal, David Willis McCullough, and Gloria Norris—rose from the ranks of the Club’s editorial staff. These wise and learned men and women were in the forefront of the search for books that would strike their hearts and would therefore be likely to pierce the hearts of the reading public.
But when the Club was founded, Harry Scherman felt that it was important to find literary figures with established reputations—for his first board. “You had to set up some kind of authority,” he said, “so that the subscribers would feel that there was some reason for buying a group of books. We had to establish indispensable confidence with publishers and readers.” Scherman chose well: Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, William Allen White, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley. White was the editor of the Emporia(Kansas) Gazette and represented the values of middle America. The New York newspaper columnist Heywood Broun spoke for urban America. The witty and sophisticated novelist Christopher Morley looked for “what literature is most intended to be, entertainment, surprise, and delight.”
But the two most influential figures, as you will note by their contributions in this volume, were chairman Canby and Miss Canfield. She was a woman of high moral values and determined taste. She was also the most conscientious reader on the first board. Robert Frost sums up her character in these pages, but it can be said that her standards were exacting. A novelist herself, she tended to focus on the accuracy of image, the unity of plot, the depth of characterization. She didn’t like books that seemed “soft and arranged.” She looked for books that exhibited “value, truth, and literary skill.”
It was Canby, a Quaker, who shaped a board that acted on the Quaker system of concurrence—that is, the judges arrived at a sense of agreement about their enjoyment of a book or its importance. No concurrence, no Book of the Month. At least once, the spirit of concurrence worked against Canby. In his American Memoir he recalls holding out for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Alas, he couldn’t get any of his colleagues to concur. More recently, in 1985, John K. Hutchens, a member of the board since 1964, a loving and gentle man with a hard-rock Montana integrity and a deep sense of balance in his judgment of books, lost his heart to a novel called Heart of the Country by Greg Matthews. It was about a half-breed, hunchbacked buffalo hunter, and Hutchens called it “one of the best books on the old West I’ve ever read.” Another judge, David W. McCullough, was almost as enthusiastic. He mentioned its faults but said, “I think it’s a great, strong book.” But two of the other judges felt just as passionately the other way. No concurrence. The book became an Alternate, not a Selection.
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p; Even through this debate, however, the spirit of concurrence prevailed. Clifton Fadiman once explained the process. “In all the time I have been with the Club I have never heard a judge defend himself, only the book in question. Because we know that the book and author under discussion are more important, for the moment, than our prejudices, oddities, life-slants.”
Harry Scherman was always proud of the system he had worked out for selecting books. But he remembered one book that got through the net —The Caine Mutiny—“because our first reader’s reaction happened to coincide with the original unexcitement on the part of the publisher.” He also recalled how Darkness at Noon, another book that arrived without the publisher’s “excitement,” was discovered by its first reader at the Club and passed on to the judges, who made it a Selection. Over the years, inevitably, worthy books were missed, some that were to become classics. Man’s Fate didn’t make it, nor did Under the Volcano or All the King’s Men, though all of them received favorable reviews in the News. No Faulkner novel became a Book of the Month until his last book, a minor work called The Reivers, perhaps because one judge confessed that he always giggled when reading Faulkner. Yet many other books by little-known writers who became well known were taken, including Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and, more recently, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and John Irving’s The World According to Garp.
Lest you think that books are picked by the Club when they become winners, you should know that manuscripts are submitted six months or more before publication. The Club’s readers and judges don’t have the benefit of hindsight. They must make their decision long before the fate of the book in the marketplace is known. Will the judges make the book a Selection? Will it become an Alternate? Will it be ignored? The readings, the reports, the debates, and the passion that a reader has for a book—these are all elements that go into the final decision. Incidentally, when we talk about “Selection,” sometimes called “Main Selection,” it is the Book of the Month, the book picked by the outside judges. An Alternate is a book that has been selected by the editorial readers who work inside.
In the early days, Selection was all. More than 50 percent of the members took the Selection. But they didn’t have much choice because only one or two Alternates were offered along with the Selection. The last Selection to reach 50 percent acceptance was Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower. That was in 1948. Today the Club offers a dozen new Alternates in each issue of the News, along with the Selection and a backlist of 125 books, most of them quite recent. Club members, that family of intelligent book readers grown more intelligent and sophisticated in their reading tastes over the years, now make their choices from a rich variety of possibilities. So much for masscult.
When the original judges died or retired, they were replaced by others of similar stature. They included John P. Marquand, author of The Late George Apley and other novels about the Brahmins of Boston and its environs; John Mason Brown, the eminent drama critic of the Saturday Review of Literature; Paul Horgan, the novelist, critic, and historian of the West; and Gilbert Highet. Highet served from 1954 until his death in 1978. He was the most erudite of all the judges—a writer, critic, teacher, raconteur, classicist, translator, and radio commentator. He once began a lecture to his Columbia students by saying, “I was reading Toynbee this morning while shaving.” He had a habit that annoyed some publishers: he would correct galleys of their books and send them back to be worked on. It was said that he could start, finish, and correct an entire galley while hanging on to a subway strap on his way home.
The current members of the board are Clifton Fadiman; John K. Hutchens; Wilfrid Sheed, the critic, novelist, essayist, baseball and cricket fan; Mordecai Richter, the Canadian novelist and saturnine humorist; and David Willis McCullough and Gloria Norris, both former editors of the Club and both writers. It is a harmonious group, still operating on the principle of concurrence.
Of all eighteen judges in the Club’s history, none has had more impact than Clifton Fadiman. None has served longer. “Kip” is in his forty-second year as a judge. But it is not so much his years of service that count as how Fadiman has used those years. He is a man of high energy who looks years younger than his age. He acts even younger. He is a cultured man, one who loves books—though not uncritically—and who can’t stand to be without a book to read. In his understated way he exerts a patriarchal influence on the board’s deliberations. He is never without an opinion, but he is also an accomplished listener. He manages to see whatever point of view a colleague might put forth, not that he always agrees with it. His own pronunciamentos are voiced with a persuasive combination of wit, authority, and, if tactically necessary, self-deprecation. Once, discussing a novel of some soap-opera dimensions, Fadiman allowed that he rather liked the book. He excused himself with these words, “I’m by far the most sentimental of us and should be watched with suspicion.” Here is a sample of other judgments pronounced by Fadiman at board meetings:
• On a book about Mount Everest: “I think we should take it because it’s there.”
• On a contemporary novel: “It has no center. What it has is a lot of wonderful periphery.”
• On a volume of William Shirer’s memoirs: “One should never reach the age of eighty because by then you realize your life is not worth a good goddamn.”
Here Fadiman was making a judgment on himself as an octogenarian and not on his fellow octo, William Shirer. And of course it was a judgment at odds with the facts. For Fadiman’s whole life has been one both of reflection and engagement, and of constant self-scrutiny. In 1983 he wrote a letter to Gloria Norris, who was then the Club’s editor-in-chief, about the novel The Name of the Rose:
Clearly, I admired the book enormously. But through pride I assumed that my admiration of it followed from my superior taste and knowledge. I should know that at my age such superior taste and knowledge are shared by hundreds of thousands of my fellow Americans. The book is now a bestseller. I said, “This remarkable novel will sink without a trace.” I also said, “It’s the kind of book our culture will automatically reject.” Unless we assume that the bestsellerdom merely reflects a kind of snobbery, we must conclude that while my judgment of the book was correct, my judgment of its appeal was ludicrously at fault. There is only one deadly sin and all the others follow from it: Pride.
Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this.
—WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING
Invasion of the Book Envelopes
BY JOHN UPDIKE
John Updike is the author of more than three dozen books, including novels, short stories, poems, essays, criticism, children’s stories, and a play. In this short essay—which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1981 and later in his 1983 book of essays and criticism, Hugging the Shore—he paints a dire, if tongue-in-cheek, scenario of the obliteration of the human race by book envelopes.
Small puddles of gray fluff had been appearing for years on office floors and in the vestibules of suburban homes, but no one paid attention. An occasional book reviewer or mail clerk showed up in city-hospital out-patient clinics bearing the tiny double marks of “staple stab” all over their thumbs, but it never made the newspapers. It was not until the iron-gray fluff was augmented by a ubiquitous snow of magnetized white plastic pellets and entire secretarial staffs were incapacitated with digital cuts and sprained wrists suffered while wrestling with thread-reinforced strapping tape that the full scope of the horror dawned upon the public—by which time the plague was far advanced. The book envelopes and their deadly, drifting spore were everywhere.
From what dying star had they been launched into space, and upon what deserted patch of our planet had they made their unwitnessed landing? Northern New Jersey seemed the best guess. No one could remember wh
en they had not existed, when books had been simply wrapped in brown paper and string, like everything else. At first, the envelopes had parted with their contents easily, releasing what seemed a negligible spattering of dull-colored matter as innocuous as the woolly beige corymbs maple trees drop in the spring. Then their staples seemed to lengthen and to become baroquely tenacious in shape, so that only a prolonged struggle pried open the limp brown pods, with a proportionately lavish dissemination of the ominous fluff. People began to notice the book envelopes piling up in corners of their basements and garages, with no recollection of who had put them there. The post offices, in a move whose dire significance was grasped only in vain retrospect, began to sell the things—disarmingly named “mailers,” after a civic-minded, prize-winning author of the era—over the counter, in every precinct and hamlet. The infiltration had spread to the top levels of government and soon contaminated the entire globe.
Distracted by tension abroad and economic malaise at home, the nation did not concern itself with the strangely swelling bales being unloaded by “banana boats” in New Orleans and Galveston and “macadamia freighters” along the vulnerable, already fad-ridden West Coast. A mutant third species of book envelope entered from Japan, lined with a plastic bubble-paper that children in their innocence loved to pop, releasing odorless vapors into the atmosphere. Paid experts pooh-poohed any correlation between bubble-paper and acid rain. Canada, long regarded by the anti-envelopment underground as a refuge, ceased to be so when André Jiffy was elected prime minister and ordered the border stapled shut.
A Passion for Books Page 23