Too Many Books
I
IN these days when authors, both men and women, follow the example set them in other branches of industry and go in for quantity production, something, surely, may be said for those more modest writers whose lists of titles make so reassuringly meagre a showing in the booksellers’ catalogues.
I yield to no one in my amazement at the fecundity of the pens, or typewriters, or dictaphones of the prolific authors, but I am willing to yield to anyone in admiration for such enormous busyness. There is something that smacks not a little of egotism in their evident assumption that all the fruits of their creative energy, if it may be called such, are worthy of record between the covers of books. I winder whether they do not delude themselves in believing that they owe it to their public to produce one or two or three volumes a year? My opinion is that the public is fast getting weary of such tireless activity on the part even of its favorite authors. They write so much faster than we can read, and so much of their product is merely a product in the commercial sense, that we are losing faith in them.
A typical example of the kind of thing I mean is one of Mr. Bertrand Russell’s latest books, The Conquest of Happiness. I wonder how many writers beside myself read, or tried to read, that book, and threw it aside when they discovered that, as philosophy, it was about on a par with the works of the late Elbert Hubbard?
Mr. James Branch Cabell once had something to say with respect to the temerity of members of his craft in venturing to write at all. ‘Indeed,’ he says, ‘to all of us who have essayed the word game, at which one plays for a dole of remembrance in our former lodgings, after the Sheriff has haled us hence, there comes, at times, a dispiriting doubt as to whether the game is worth the candle.’
It seems to me that there is little evidence to be offered by literary men themselves in proof of such an assertion. They seem to crave, not a dole of remembrance, but all that we have to give, throwing off books so rapidly that if we are to read them we shall have little time for anything else. I refrain from citing examples; one has only to go over the lists of titles, to date, of almost any author of our time who has passed his or her fiftieth year to be convinced that I have not overstated the case.
This appalling industry on the part of literary artists is not merely a present-day phenomenon; the thing has been going on for decades, even generations, although it is only in our time that it has gained such enormous headway. As long ago as the nineties, Anatole France made an eloquent plea to the members of his craft for greater modesty in production.
‘Books are killing us,’ he said. ‘We have too many of them, and too many kinds. Men lived for long ages without reading anything, and that was the very time when they did the greatest and most useful things, for it was the time when they passed from barbarism to civilization. . . . All this was long ago. What frightful progress we have made since! . . . We publish now, in Paris alone, fifty volumes a day. This is a monstrous orgy. It will end by driving us mad.’
It is an orgy — there’s no doubt of it, and more so now than it was in the nineties. Publishers and authors together are debauching us readers. Thanks to them and our own weakness of mind, we have formed the vicious habit of reading with the eyes merely. As a matter of self-protection, in order to break this vicious habit before it becomes too firmly fixed upon us, I suggest a moratorium, if it may be so called, for a period of ten years, during which time we refuse to read any new book. I am well aware that the suggestion has been made before, which only goes to show that readers have a legitimate grievance against authors and publishers.
Herman Melville believed that every novelist has in him a greater or lesser number of bad books that must come out, sooner or later, in order to give him spiritual room for his good ones. If this is true, and I believe it is, it accounts for many of the woes of us readers. Let them come out, if they must, but why should they all come out in print? Here, it seems to me, we have a genuine grievance against publishers. They are not disinterested enough to inform their authors when they have written unmistakably bad books. Instead of that, they blarney them, and try to blarney us, into thinking quite otherwise about them.
II
But I have forgotten, momentarily, to pay my tribute of gratitude to the little band of authors who considerately refuse to publish everything they write, and who use such impeccable judgment in deciding what they shall publish. Small though this band is, I do not, of course, know all of them — I only wish I did. I confine myself here to three or four.
What, I wonder, has become of Charles Flandrau, who wrote Viva Mexico! so many years ago? I am by no means alone in respecting him, if he still lives, or his memory, if he is dead. In the strangest places and in the most widely scattered ones, I am continually running into people who remember Viva Mexico! and whose eyes kindle with interest when it is spoken of. And where is Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, whose small volume, Trivia, which appeared in 1912, was followed at a lengthy interval by More Trivia, but not by more, and more, and more, as would have been the case had anyone but Smith written the first volume?
In asking after these men I am by no means suggesting that they should burst into print again. But ‘burst’ is not the word; they never burst. They write carefully, slowly, and are such excellent critics of their own work that we are in no danger of having to request that they write less. They belong to the distinguished company of the poets, A. E. Housman and Ralph Hodgson, and Robert Frost and Miss Millay. How many years elapsed between Housman’s Shropshire Lad and his Last Poems? How many between Mr. Frost’s infrequent volumes? And how gratefully we welcome them when they do come! Blessed be such men, who give us of their best and care nothing for what publishers would call ‘a solid reputation’ based upon quantity of output.
H. M. Tomlinson almost deserves a niche in this small temple of fame. Unfortunately, in my opinion, he has allowed himself to go in for the solid reputation. I can all but hear what his publishers and well-meaning friends must have said to him some years ago when he was writing, from time to time, some of the best prose sketches that have appeared in our day: ‘See here, Tomlinson! This won’t do at all! You must write novels. The Sea and the Jungle was all very well, but that was only a travel book. You must write novels. You’ll never get anywhere with these little things.’ I should be willing to swear that this is how Gallions Reach and All Our Yesterdays came to be written. Tomlinson knew what he could do best, and was doing it, but deferred to the judgment of those who convinced him that they knew better. Even so, he is far from being a prolific writer, and deserves our thanks for writing his novels with care. But he would deserve them much more if he would produce, every five or ten years, a sketch such as ‘Sand Dunes’ or ‘The Derelict.’ Either of these sketches, which can be read in five minutes, is, in my opinion, worth both the novels.
It is a curious fact that the literary artists who break long silences so happily are usually those whose work is confined to the belles-lettres. There is one more I must not omit to name — Max Beerbohm. During the past forty years and more, he must have been urged, unsuccessfully, times without number, to add to his slender list of ‘Works,’ with the result that every one of his readers stands in his debt. Who of us is not willing to forgive him for his single, lone, and exceptional bad book — A Variety of Things? This saw the light, as he himself explains, only because he was, in a sense, forced to put the material it contains between covers; and no doubt he has many times since regretted what at the time he considered a necessity.
In this hurried, harried age, let us hail these judicious writers so considerate of our time as to give us nothing but their best. Let us wish continued power to their critical faculties, which enable them to judge so wisely for our good. Above all, let us hope that more of their fellow artists may learn from them that silence is indeed golden when they have nothing worth while to say.