In a letter to Bridges, Bradley voiced the conflict of one who accepts change as a fact of life but is not confident that all change is for the good. “Because people used to ignore the fact of language being a natural growth,” he wrote, “and to propound futilities about ‘improving’ it, there has arisen a tendency to run in the opposite extreme.”
Canby was no stranger to London, a town he liked and felt comfortable in, and as the co-author of some books on writing and grammar he might even have been received as an authority. He was also one of the first literary scholars to believe that American literature was deserving of serious intellectual attention and not merely a trivial subsidiary of the great British tradition. A graduate course he had created at Yale in 1919 to study American literature had gotten off to a rough start but was possibly the first of its kind.3
Attending the conference were a variety of scholars, writers, and other cultural figures: the head of the British Museum, George Bernard Shaw, Sir William A. Craigie, another OED editor who later headed the Dictionary of American English. Canby and the philologist Louise Pound, among others, represented the old colonies, but, alas, America’s most well-known student of language, H. L. Mencken, the great champion of the American language, whose other politics had gotten him into trouble during World War I and would do so again in the next war, did not come. Mencken admired English but not England.
Canby was then developing into a major publishing figure: He was the founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, a successful weekly newspaper of intelligently written but rarely scathing book reviews. He liked to tell the story of a publisher who claimed that his paper’s review of a book had earned him a million dollars. According to Canby, a year later the same publisher complained that a negative review in Canby’s paper cost him a million dollars.
Canby’s views of books were becoming even more consequential to the fortunes of individual authors and publishing houses. Starting in 1926, he became the chairman of the selection committee for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which began with fewer than five thousand subscribers and reached sixty thousand one year later, hardly slowing down for the next two decades.4
Although Canby, to a dandyish undergraduate at Yale, might appear “very small and insignificant, half bald and half scraggly hair . . . utterly commonplace,” he was a great example of a slowly fading type, what might be called (though only in retrospect) an establishment intellectual. And not all the undergraduates disdained him. A couple of years ahead of Dwight Macdonald at Yale, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, the future founders of Time magazine, thought Canby sympathetic enough that they showed him drafts of their magazine idea, written in longhand on yellow sheets of paper.
He described himself and his generation of academics as being under an English spell, which had encouraged him to accept an invitation from the British Ministry of Information to visit England during World War I and function as a freelance cultural emissary. Yet there in Britain he began to discern the limits of his Anglophilia and discover within himself a hunger to know more about his own nation’s literature.
A Quaker by birth, he became a believer in the League of Nations. Though the 1920s seem notable for youthful nonsense, Canby, very much the responsible adult, prospered and enjoyed the kind of life that appeared, especially to him, illustrative of his own times. He looked back to the nineteenth century as the Age of Confidence, and was perfectly accepting of the philosophical distance between himself and the young writers of the 1920s, whose literature he more than once described as “defeatist,” a term coined in the wake of World War I.
He had mixed feelings about the literary tendencies of Hemingway and company. “What the new writers were experimenting with . . . was a fresh use of those words and others drawn from colloquial speech, and still more, new techniques of literary structure.” They made “their books read more like men talking well in the nineteen-twenties and less like something called literature.”
As students of the language later mapped it out, the rise of colloquial patterns in public speech had been under way since before the Civil War and could be seen in the folksy speech of politicians and the down-home language of some newspapers. But for it to be breaking into the ranks of serious literature was a remarkable change. Here it was affecting the upper registers of usage, where one had expected to find the bookishly correct voice of cultivation. But, increasingly, literary language was no longer the same as formal language.
Such experiments, Canby thought, actually made for a welcome departure from the status quo ante. What he called “the civilized style” of the nineteenth century had become so polished by the 1920s that it was eerily predictable. “A reader could shut his eyes and guess what was coming next.”
And so now there was writing that sounded different and kept you guessing, but sometimes it was awful. Witness the very modern prose of Gertrude Stein—one of the first Americans to take up Paris, she was a major influence on the younger writers who came later. Ugh, Canby might have said, were he too becoming more colloquial. “The pages of disintegrated grammar and repetitive diction which she wrote and called fiction, used to upset me like a bad dream.” It reminded him of the poet e. e. cummings, who Canby suspected had ceremoniously dispensed with capital letters to distract the reader from the fact that he had so little to say. Stein “picked the English words with color and significant sound, regardless of meaning.”
The following sentence by Stein, on the question of repetition, was both an example and a defense of her terrible writing: “Repetition then comes slowly then to be to one who has it to have loving repeating as natural being comes to be a full sound telling all the being in each one such a one is ever knowing.”
If this was the new thing in literature, Canby didn’t mind being considered a little old-fashioned. But the Society for Pure English conference did not prove to be a gathering of mossbacks. And this was what made it so important, Canby thought.
The conference addressed the international spread of English but settled no controversies of usage. The mother tongue was not declared sacred and in need of defending. Dangling modifiers, though surely an irritation to some, were not recommended for amputation. There were no unanimously passed motions on reuniting the split infinitive. The rule of rules was not upheld. Yet the proceedings “marked the end of one era and the beginning of another.”
One simple thing happened. “Without a single dissenting voice we agreed that there was no longer a single ideal standard for the English language except excellence. That the best written and spoken usage of New York or San Francisco were as authoritative as those of London or Oxford if their influences were felt upon the broadening or the strengthening of the tongue.”
So, not only were American writers seizing the right to sound like Americans; this esteemed gathering hosted by British scholars and cultural leaders was formally acknowledging that right. The whole thing smacked of Mencken and the spreading influence of new linguistic scholarship. “What we accepted in theory,” said Canby, “Mencken was to continue to document in his admirable books.”
But his respect for Mencken and American literature didn’t save the mainstream Canby from the disdain of the younger generation of writers and poets.5 A few years later a Harvard student was having his verse torn up by Ezra Pound, who called it “too poetic.” Pound suggested he find some other way to make himself useful.
“What is useful?” the apostle asked.
“If you have the guts,” said Pound, “you might murder Henry Seidel Canby.”
Instead, the young man started New Directions, a successful American publisher of avant-garde literature. It was not the death of Canby or his brand of conventional wisdom but it was a sign of things to come.
Chapter 8
Smith College president William Allan Neilson waited for Professor Withington to call on him at his office. The two walked across campus together. On their way Neilson asked what the da
y’s topic was. This left fewer than ten minutes to plan the lecture in his head before delivering it.1 Not a problem. This was Neilson’s routine, and he was still at the height of his powers as an educator. Dates and names from literary history were at his fingertips, his trademark wit ready to fire.
He spoke at daily chapel, too. He received faltering students at his house for tea to assure them that whatever their failings in the classroom, they would not be ostracized. In the evenings he attended countless meetings and receptions, but wherever he went, he was always, always setting the tone.
Chapel was “voluntary-compulsory” in the early 1920s. Neilson had made it entirely voluntary but attendance plummeted. The student government then voted to require attendance four days a week, establishing an honor system that relied on students to report their own absences.
President Neilson was intensely popular with the students, whom he rarely called girls. Their budding intellectual and emotional maturity was always foremost in his thoughts, though he had other concerns, too. Smith students, he felt, should avoid upsetting the locals. He did not mind when they cut their hair and wore it in a bob. But women field hockey players were expected to wear skirts over their bloomers on their way to practice. And until it was proven unnecessary, an invisible hat line remained drawn on Main Street, forbidding students from venturing below Beckman’s bareheaded.
Many were the rules on campus, though few were overbearing. Students were not permitted to have cars, but an exception was made for second-term seniors in good standing. Dancing the Charleston was prohibited in the upstairs of dormitories, to protect the rickety wooden floors. Smoking cigarettes was permitted, but never in one’s room, and smokers had to suffer the intense pleasure of being scolded by President Neilson: “Smoking is a disgusting, expensive, and unhygienic habit,” he said with a gleam in his eye, “to which I am devoted.”
What really got him going, though, was how these young women smoked: “You do not smoke like ladies; you do not even smoke like gentlemen; you smoke like fools.”
Neilson was known and admired off campus, too, as an authority on the subject of higher education. When the postwar surge of college enrollment among men began to taper off, he noticed the uptick in female enrollment continued, and wrote about it in the Nation, the progressive weekly whose literary and intellectual standards tended to be old-fashioned.
Female education was, indeed, becoming commonplace. “During the last few years,” he noted, “the remaining prejudices against the college woman, whether held by young men or old ladies, have been rapidly disappearing.”2
Like Charles William Eliot, he was a liberal of the superior type: a believer in eugenics and the League of Nations. Where and when a society’s leaders were able to come together and think rationally about the problems of their time, it was possible to advance the cause of goodness. Progress was not inevitable, but it was possible. This aristocratic optimism was often reflected in his chapel talks and his conception of the role of a college president as a wise man at large.
In 1924, Asa S. Baker, president of G. & C. Merriam Company, the makers of the Webster’s dictionaries, invited William Allan Neilson to become their wise man at large, the titular editor of their forthcoming unabridged dictionary, Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition.
The idea appealed to Neilson’s feeling that while higher education should be reserved for the “fit,” education should do more for society than adorn a few lucky individuals. In this light he viewed the legacy of Noah Webster. “There is probably no book that has been written in a hundred years that has done so much in this respect for the country at large as his Dictionary.”3
Still, Neilson sometimes felt an impatience with the rise of equality in schooling. In 1926, he recalled the pioneers who had made up the first class at Smith. They were “brought into this place because of their appetite for intellectual things.” By contrast, “today we have here two thousand students gathered—one must confess—in obedience to a social convention. . . . Education is being defeated by its own success. Education is ‘the thing.’ ”4
The work at Merriam took him an hour away to Springfield on alternate Tuesdays. He presided as head of the Editorial Board, which consisted of himself, Mr. Baker, general editor Thomas A. Knott, formerly of the University of Iowa, and managing editor Paul W. Carhart. The board hashed out decisions on innumerable items of style, staffing, and schedule. Discussions were sometimes heated, and the sounds of argument could be heard through the door.
It was not always easy to strike a balance between what could be admitted privately among men of like mind and what it was appropriate to state publicly in a commercial book that might end up sitting in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of family rooms. Some words had no place in this book or the smaller ones that derived from it. Especially tricky were those words and expressions, seemingly coined five minutes ago, that lacked the dignity of age.
Did hot dog belong in the dictionary? This very question the board reportedly debated for over an hour.5
The dictionary was a kind of arbiter between the worthy and the unworthy. A person hoping to learn what was correct in a given situation should not be left in the dark or confronted by more information than was useful.
The dictionary user came with questions; the successful dictionary provided answers, clear and unambiguous. The most successful dictionary contained the most answers.
While colleges and universities recognized that specialization had placed increasing amounts of knowledge far beyond the grasp of laymen, the dictionary business continued to operate on the assumption that it was possible to distill all that was worth knowing. Perhaps one reason the work attracted William Allan Neilson was that he was no longer a specialist. He gave up classroom lecturing in 1926, after he found he could no longer answer students’ questions about the latest literary theory. The author of several books and the co-editor of several anthologies, he of course knew a great deal about his subject, but his research had been undermined by administrative work.
Yet there was much in his work as a college president that resonated with being the editor of Webster’s Second. In both cases he was a figurehead, an institutional symbol. Of course he did work, keeping tabs on a hundred little things at the college while giving voice to the intellectual and moral verities the college sought to instill. And at Merriam he presided over the Editorial Board, which routinely asserted its authority over the tiniest details. He personally took charge of two special categories of words: British university terms and Scottishisms. But he was no more a professional lexicographer than he was a full-time literary scholar. And yet to the women on campus and people beyond he personified the worlds of education and scholarship.
This gave him the freedom and credentials to comment on the passing scene. And among all that was going on in the 1920s, two subjects caught his eye.
Despite the decade’s well-earned reputation for dissipation, he noticed in 1927 the beginnings of a return to older moral standards. “We have turned the corner and are now moving with our backs to the Jazz Age,” he wrote in a letter to the Smith alumnae council. “We are reverting to Victorian formalism.” He mentioned that a freshman was said to have “burst” into Northrop House and asked “who that man was with the little gray beard who twice bowed to her on the campus without being introduced!”6
Neilson himself was still a Victorian in some important ways. In the new culture of candor he maintained the habits of one more comfortable when much is left unsaid. And not just about sex, vulgarity, and other taboo subjects. For Neilson it might include one’s own self. In 1926, in an essay he wrote about the life of Charles William Eliot, he described how Eliot had taken on the job of editing the Harvard Classics. Neilson paused to mention that Eliot had not done this work alone, but had chosen an assistant from the Harvard faculty—and yet Neilson did not mention even parenthetically that he was that assistant.
Nor did an essay on censorship he wrote for the Atlantic mention his firsthand experience with editing out “naughty bits.”7 He did make it clear that he felt some sympathy with these efforts to protect man from “pander[ing] to the lower side of his nature.”
As a writer, he was a discusser, not a pronouncer, and he labored to appreciate his opponents’ arguments. He seemed especially concerned with protecting children from what might be called filth. But he despaired of employing postmasters and policemen as literary critics and could imagine no solid legal or moral ground for “depriving the adult citizen of the privilege of choosing his own books and his own plays and pictures.”
Once a self-censorer, Neilson now wrote, more or less, against the practice, his arguments affecting a kind of slow divorce from the opposite thesis only after a demonstration of close familiarity.
He finished by quoting the English literary critic Sir Walter Raleigh, a founding member of the Society for Pure English, on the subject of Henry Fielding, the great eighteenth-century novelist whose scatological comedy would certainly have been a frequent target for censorship were it not so old. “Some literary critics, it is true, with a taste for subdued tones in art, have found some of Fielding’s loudest notes too strident for enfeebled ears, but not to the great musician can the whole range of the orchestra, not to the great painter can the strongest contrast of colors, be profitably denied.”
As he had in his inaugural address at Smith College, Neilson borrowed his most forthright statements from someone else, and again someone British, underplaying his own rooting interest while giving a preferential nod to the humanists and scholars with whom he kept faith. It was an elaborately dignified gesture, spoken to the like-minded after pages of quietly hearing out the un-like-minded.
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