Atlantic Shop-Talk

Atlantic Friendships

Among the October publications of the Atlantic Monthly Press there is one book which bears a close relation to the Atlantic Monthly itself. This is Memories of a Hostess, more fully defined on its titlepage as ‘A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships, Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe.’

Under the second editor of the Atlantic, James T. Fields, the place of the magazine in American life and letters was definitely established. As a publisher and editor he had extraordinary gifts, of which none was more notable than his capacity for entering into relations of true friendship with the writing men and women, the most distinguished of their time.

These friendships were furthered by constant hospitalities, for the domestic conduct of which Fields was no less fortunate in his wife, then a young woman of remarkable beauty, charm, and spirit. Her own instinct for writing led her through many years to keep an intimate diary, in which the ‘solemn troops and sweet societies,’ especially of the sixties and seventies — Hawthorne, Dickens, Mark Twain, Joseph Jefferson, and scores of others — are to be seen and heard, not as remote, august figures, but as living friends.

In her lifetime Mrs. Fields published portions of this diary, but many of its best pages were left unprinted. Her literary executor has now used it, together with a mass of unpublished correspondence committed to his hands, to reconstruct the scene — personal, social, intellectual — in which the Atlantic became what it was, under the editorship of Fields, and what, mutatis mutandis, it has remained.

Mr. Howe’s experience in the handling of biographical material was extensive before the death of Mrs. Fields in 1915, and has been enlarged since then. In this volume he has employed it, not so much to produce a biography of a friend of the older generation who honored him with her confidence, as to present a picture of a vanished society as seen through her sympathetic eyes, and described in her journals with a profusion of lively anecdote and reminiscence.

A Dr. Johnson Play

A Dr. Johnson The daily press has an Play immense advantage over the monthly. The Talker of Shop, who has long been in possession of an important’ literary secret,’was planning to divulge it in this issue of the Atlantic. Imagine his chagrin in picking up the ‘Literary Review ’ of the New York Evening Post for August 11, 1922 — after the September ‘ Shop-Talk ' had gone to the printers— to find that the agile Kenelm Digby (agile be it written, though he prefers to call himself debile) had outrun him. Thus the enterprising knight: ‘A long sigh, and we announce that A. Edward Newton, of Philadelphia has got ahead of us. * * * He has written, and the Atlantic Monthly Press will publish in the spring, a Play about Dr. Johnson. * * * The deuce he has; we always wanted to do just that, and had even sketched out a scenario. * * * Anyhow, there’s a chance for theatrical producers who want something that will really tickle the cognooshers.’

Now that is not precisely as the fact would have been announced here; but it is nevertheless a fact. There is even a certain comfort in the reflection that if Kenelm Digby got ahead of us, Mr. Newton got ahead of him. Indeed he has got ahead of many others, and the surprising thing is that nobody before him had the combined ingenuity and knowledge to do what he has done. This is to construct a four-act play of which Dr. Johnson is the central figure, with nearly every word of the dialogue drawn from Boswell, the Doctor’s letters, and other contemporary sources. It is no mere tour de force, but a vivid and authentic presentation of scenes from the actual life of Dr. Johnson, which will be hailed as a unique contribution to our little shelf of eighteenth-century books.

The Juvenile Field

As the season of Christmas approaches, it is natural to turn one’s thoughts to the matter of books for children — though why this youngest battalion in the army of readers should not be regarded in connection with books through the rest of the year may be a little difficult of explanation. Already we are prepared to meet the demands of the year, and the season, with two new books chosen for publication not because anyone has thought them of the kind which older donors will regard as peculiarly appealing to younger donees, but because they have been ‘ tried on ' the young themselves with conspicuous success.

The first is The Boy Who Lived in Pudding Lane, by Sarah Addington, a story of the boyhood of that world-figure, Santa Clause, growing up in a community peopled by the equally real characters of Mother Goose. It is adorned with admirable colored illustrations by Miss Gertrude Kay. When a portion of it appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal for last December, it met with a response, and a demand for publication in book form, which have added materially to our confidence in it as a Christmas book which will make a large and distinctive place for itself.

The second is called David the Dreamer and has afforded the Atlantic Monthly Press an interesting opportunity to combine in one volume the work of two widely separated creators. One is a Rumanian artist, Tom Freud, not a male psychoanalyst as the name might suggest, but a young

woman trained in Paris and London, and well-known in Europe both for her drawings and for the wooden toys she makes. A set of her remarkably quaint and imaginative colored designs is accompanied, in David the Dreamer, by a whimsical, amusing story in prose and verse by Mr. Ralph Bergengren, of Scituate, Massachusetts, whose Jane, Joseph, and John has been one of the popular juvenile books of recent years. The League of Nations is still incomplete, but Rumania and Scituate have ‘got together’ to good purpose.

School and College

Between the really juvenile and the adult reader stands the multitude of youth in process of education. Within the past two weeks millions of pupils have sought — eagerly or reluctantly — the shelter of the schoolhouse. The national interest in education has accordingly risen to its annual flood-tide.

During the past summer we have published two textbooks of more than ordinary importance. One is entitled Famous Stories from Famous Authors. The first three authors are Dickens, Tolstoy, and Lewis Carroll. Three titles picked at random from the table of contents are ’The Great Carbuncle,’ ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom,’ and ‘The Man without a Country.’ The entire book of Famous Stories has been edited with the junior-high-school pupil definitely in mind.

Another book just off the press is Professor E. A. Cross’s The Little Grammar, designed for junior-high-school classes. We believe in teaching grammar, but we don’t believe in teaching a mass of technical verbiage that refuses to function in speech and writing. This new text reduces grammar to its lowest terms, and then offers opportunity for insistent drill upon these minimum essentials. This text, we believe, solves the grammar problem in our schools.

During the past session of the Harvard Summer School, an interesting diversion was offered one afternoon to the students. A group of enthusiastic children, taught by Miss Kathryn Martin in a Salem public school, acted a little play published by the Atlantic Press — The Charm, by Catherine T. Bryce. This play supplements admirably the textbook material in Professor Cross’s Little Grammar.

There was another innovation at Harvard this summer. In connection with one of the courses in the teaching of English, a demonstration class was organized. This group of eighth-grade boys and girls voluntarily offered to come to Cambridge to be experimented upon. They were taught by an expert teacher in the daily presence of a group of observers intent upon receiving all the hints that expert teaching in English offers. The instruction in literature was based largely upon one of our most successful texts, Atlantic Prose and Poetry.