The Literary Worker's Polonius
Nature of Magazines and Editors
THE primary fact to be grasped about editors is that they are not independent agents, but function as parts of the larger organisms known as magazines. Magazines, like other living organisms, develop according to certain laws and pass through regular life cycles. These cycles may vary in length from a few years to many years; but they all complete the same cycle (unless they meet untimely ends): they have a youth, a maturity, and an old age. In its earliest years, a magazine may seem spontaneous, novel, and daring; but in its maturity it has, as the French say, ‘taken its fold’ and it succumbs to a force of inertia against which the youngest editor is as powerless as the oldest. Thereafter it grows old, declines, and dies.
Magazines have their principle of being in a relation between some part of the mind of the editor and some part of the mind of the public. They rarely represent the whole of the editor or the editor at his best; and they do not usually give the public all it wants. But the relationship, once established, cannot be altered. Both editor and reader may be bored by the contents of the magazine; but it will be impossible to introduce any novelty or to make any serious new departure. To his readers as well as to his contributors the editor may seem timid, pedantic, unimaginative, obsessed by formulas. But anyone who has had anything to do with magazine offices knows that there is always a Higher Power involved which decides all important issues: the magazine as an entity in itself. And this entity is of a purely metaphysical character: it has nothing to do with commercial considerations. It can often be demonstrated that a drastic change in policy would increase the circulation of the magazine; but such a change is no more possible to effect than the transformation, by grafting on claws or wings, of one kind of animal into another.
Magazines cannot be born again. The most that can be done with a magazine is to subject it to a sort of face-lifting process, which, though it may improve its physiognomy at long distance, only exposes it on closer examination in a more hideous state of senility. Or, like the old Dial, it can be deliberately killed off, and the name taken for a new magazine. But the most that can be hoped for magazines otherwise is that they may grow old in decency and peace without lapsing from their original standards. All too often they linger on in a dotage or in a cheapened or degenerate form which disgusts their former readers.
Duties of the Editor to the Contributor
The scope within which it is possible for the editor to exercise independent volition is thus seen to be narrowly circumscribed. It is limited, in fact, to the purely business aspects of his dealings with his contributors. The selection of material is determined by the higher will of the magazine; but the editor can be more or less prompt in registering and conveying to the contributor the decisions thus arrived at. And there can be no question that the prompt communication of decisions is one of the editor’s prime duties to his writers. The editor has a regular job; the writer very often has not, and he may depend for the very necessities of life on selling what he has written. He usually wants an immediate decision even though it may be adverse; such a decision would at least make it possible for him to send his manuscript elsewhere.
Some editors are efficient about this: Mencken and Nathan, for example, were remarkable for the definiteness and promptness of their decisions. But many editors are either the victims of extremely badly organized offices or completely lacking in consideration for writers, and cause by their negligence or irresolute stalling an immense amount of depression, exasperation, and sometimes even actual privation.
A piece of writing, once accepted, should be paid for immediately (if the finances of the publication permit it); and, once accepted, should be printed. In the first connection, the ideal method is that of one of the New York weeklies, which sends the check with the letter of acceptance. In the matter of printing, it ought to be said that there are sometimes extenuating circumstances, which the writer should understand and allow for. One of the editors may have pressed a decision in favor of accepting a manuscript which one or more of the other editors afterwards consciously or unconsciously sabotage; or an editor may sabotage a manuscript which he has been responsible for accepting himself. Allowing, however, a certain small margin for sincere differences and doubts on the part of editors, it must be asserted, as a general thing, that the writer has just cause for complaint when an editor accepts his manuscript and then suppresses it by leaving it unpublished in the ‘barrel.’
Connected with this is another matter which has probably caused between the editor and the writer more misunderstanding and more bitterness than any other aspect of their relations, and which has often for the writer, and sometimes for the editor, resulted in serious loss. This is the question of ordering things in advance. The task of making these decisions clear and afterwards keeping them straight is entirely in the hands of the editor, and it is sometimes not the least difficult of his problems, as the writer, through his eagerness for the order, will sometimes unconsciously do his best to mistake an expression of possible interest for a commitment to buy what he writes; but any editor with a rudimentary grasp of the responsibilities of his position will school himself never to leave any doubt as to whether or not an article is actually ordered and to stick by his order once it has been made. If the manuscript turns out too badly, he is not absolutely bound to print it; but he is certainly bound to pay for it and to give it back to the writer so that the latter may have a chance of publishing it elsewhere.
Duties of the Writer to the Editor
On the other hand, the writer should give the editor a reasonable length of time in which to decide and should not pester him with telephone calls and letters until a maximum of, say, two weeks has elapsed.
The writer should always have his manuscript typewritten, and he should never send it in accompanied by a long letter, or, unless he knows one of the editors, by any letter at all. In the first place, these letters are rarely read; and in the second place, they usually have the effect of prejudicing the editor against the manuscript instead of interesting him in it. This prejudice is sometimes unfair on the editor’s part, because the writing of the letter may have been due to a perfectly natural impulse on the part of an inexperienced writer. The writer has been a reader of the magazine and — especially if it is a magazine with editorials — he has, in his rôle of reader, been accustomed to being addressed by the editor in a friendly and even confidential manner. It seems to him logical that in sending in a manuscript he should himself address the editor. Inexperienced writers, however, should be warned that manuscript reading is one of the most trying of the editor’s tasks and that the notion of reading long letters in addition is one which he rejects and resents. Manuscripts must speak for themselves, and letters can never help them. If the writer knows anyone on the staff who he imagines may be sympathetically disposed toward him, he may address his manuscript personally to this editor (though some magazines have tried to bar this): he may possibly get prompter consideration. But he should never write more than a line.
Nature of Authors
The relations between authors and reviewers are a constant source of anxiety to authors. To understand why this should be so, we must first examine the nature of authors.
Authors in the main are individuals who are preoccupied with constructing, peopling, and furnishing special intellectual worlds. They may be roughly divided into three classes: —
1. Novelists. Novelists are writers who make up fantasies about imaginary people. Novelists are sometimes friends, but the imaginary worlds they inhabit tend to be mutually exclusive. As a result, they seem ungenerous to one another, and it is sometimes superficially concluded that they are exceptionally vain and envious people. This is, however, not always the case. The pure type of novelist who merely reacts to life with no larger philosophical or historical interest naturally feels that the work of another novelist, especially if he is dealing with the same material, is a monstrous misrepresentation or even a deliberate imposture.
2. Poets. Poets are writers who use the technique of verse. This technique, though it was employed by the ancients for almost every form of human utterance, art, and record, is confined to-day to highly specialized uses. Where the novelist deals in character, situation, and adventure, the poet is usually limited to the expression of emotion and mood or to the simple description of things. The consequence is that being a poet is rarely a full-time job, and the poet has large spaces in his life which are not filled by his literary activity proper and in which he occupies himself intellectually by a kind of literary politics. Poets are likely to form into groups, which in their combinations, disruptions, and recombinations, their debates, practical jokes, and fierce battles, keep them in a continual state of excitement. In this group instinct they somewhat resemble painters — though painters, by reason of the fact that they practise a genuine handicraft instead of a purely intellectual métier, have a certain amount of physical work to tire them and are not so erinaceous as poets. The reactions of groups of poets toward each other correspond to the reactions of the individual novelists.
3. Scientific, philosophical, and critical writers. This class includes all those writers who are occupied with the attempt to present or to interpret known events, or to investigate the nature of reality. They are sometimes capable of a kind of collaboration hardly known among novelists and poets, because, where the materials are facts themselves, it usually requires more than one person to ascertain what the facts are and to organize them, and, where they are concerned with mathematical or metaphysical theory, a number of persons may be enlisted to develop the ramifications. Thus a number of writers of this kind may work together in the same field. Nevertheless, there are frequent cases of monopolies being attempted by individuals or groups and these lead to stupendous combats like the brawlings of Behemoth and Leviathan. Literary critics, it should be said, may sometimes develop the worst characteristics of novelists and poets.
(It may be suggested that the writers of fictionized biography and history make a fourth class which should be listed between classes 1 and 2; but the truth is that producers of books of this type are not genuine writers at all, but merely a kind of chimæra believed in by publishers during the Boom.)
It will be seen, then, that all the classes of authors tend to assume that their personally created worlds are authentic pictures or true hypotheses, and that they are profoundly disturbed when any other person does anything to upset this assumption.
The people who upset the author most in this way are the reviewers of his books. For an author, the reading of his reviews, whether they are enthusiastic or unfavorable, is one of the most disappointing experiences in life. He has been laboring for months or for years to focus some comprehensive vision or to make out some compelling case, and then he finds his book discussed by persons who not only have not understood it, but do not. even in some instances seem to have read it. In twenty-two reviews out of two dozen, either the reviewer has attempted nothing more than to give a description of the contents of the book and usually described them incorrectly (and these reviews are often copied word for word from each other), or his comments, either praise or blame, seem to have little or no relevance to the book which the author believes himself to have written. Reading reviews, indeed, lets the author down so after the excitement and satisfaction of finishing his book that there is a good deal to be said for the practice of those writers who go on trips to remote parts of the world as soon as their last proofs have been corrected.
In order to understand why the reviewer thus lets the author down, we must inquire as to what reviewers are and under what circumstances they do their work.
Nature of Reviewers
Reviewers may be classified under five heads: —
1. People who want work. Every magazine office is a clearinghouse for people who need money or need jobs: the waiting rooms are always full of college graduates, indigent radicals, escaped débutantes and wives, young boys who have just bummed their way from the Coast, and many other types of persons who want to write or to associate themselves with writing, as well as personal friends of the editors in difficulties. These people deserve considerate attention, if only because there are sometimes important writers among them; and it is customary on magazines with literary departments to try them out writing book reviews.
These book reviews are often very bad and not far, if at all, removed from school exercises. But the editor usually wants to pay for them because he knows that the writer needs the money, and when he has paid for them he feels that he ought to print them if they can by any means be made presentable. The best solution to this problem is probably that adopted by one of the New York weeklies. This magazine sells the extra books which come into the office for review and thus provides a permanent fund for the relief of needy writers so that it is unnecessary to purchase from them reviews which may turn out to be either unprintable or printable only at the expense of a great deal of drudgery on the part of the editor.
And to the groups mentioned above should be added the impoverished novelist or poet who, though admirable and expert in his own field, may have no aptitude or training for reviewing.
2. Literary columnists. The writer of a newspaper literary column has to read and talk about one or more books a day five or six days in the week. To go through all these books conscientiously and comment upon them thoughtfully is a task beyond human capacity; and in consequence it is not to be expected that these writers should produce much serious literary criticism. Some of them have no particular interest in books and are literary columnists merely by accident; others are rather well equipped persons who have to write so much and write it so fast that they are unable to do themselves justice. But in any case these writers are to be valued, not as essayists or critical authorities, but. as chroniclers of the literary news, who manage more or less sensibly and more or less entertainingly to give, by a selection of excerpts or a swift résumé of a book’s contents, a more or less adequate idea of what is being published.
Where the newspaper reviewer is most likely to go wrong is in explaining the purport or the significance of a book. A short and concentrated piece of writing like a novel by Thornton Wilder or one of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories is quickly read (the newspaper reviewer is delighted when he strikes something that he can get through very quickly), and the chances are that the reviewer will miss many things which the author has worked hard to make implicit in it, that he will in fact miss the point altogether. And in the case of a long book he is likely to skip through it, and so not only mistake the author’s intention, but make blunders as to what is actually stated. When André Malraux’s Man’s Fate came out in English, for example, the newspaper accounts of the characters and the story seemed to me so different from what I remembered from reading it in French that I was driven to look up the translation. But the translator had in general been accurate: it was the reviewers who had sometimes been deceived through having so crowded and complicated a book to deal with. Yet it is also true that even in the case of such a short novel as Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination one of the newspaper reviewers confused the characters. It may perhaps be demanded of the newspaper reviewer that he avoid this sort of literal inaccuracy, but even that is probably demanding a good deal and the most that one has a right to insist on.
3. People who leant to write about something else. Book reviewing is often exploited, especially by the young, as a pretext for writing an independent essay on the same subject as that dealt with in the book or for neglecting the book altogether and writing an essay on some other subject. These reviews are often bitterly resented both by authors and by conscientious critics; but anyone who has ever been an editor must regard them, if they are interesting in themselves, with a certain amount of leniency: it is so comparatively rare for an editor to get really interesting articles of any kind that he cannot afford to be grudging about them even when they displace proper book reviews. The author may console himself with the thought that the review which he would otherwise have had would probably have been as poor as most reviews.
We may also treat under this head the problem of young people in general. Should a brilliant but inexperienced young writer be allowed to do a mature writer flagrant injustice by a brilliant but uncomprehending review? The young ought to have a chance to write and their point of view is sometimes important, even when aside from the mark. The answer is that, since magazine editors usually lack the willingness or the time to perform also the functions of English professors, older writers will have to resign themselves to be sometimes mistreated by youth.
And there are also the embittered old who are irked at being obliged to do reviews and who take it out in putting the young in their places and undermining their more conspicuous contemporaries.
4. Reviewer experts. The extremely unsatisfactory results in many cases of having books of poetry reviewed by persons who have never written verse, works of philosophy reviewed by persons with no philosophical training, and so forth, lead editors to get poets to review poets, philosophers to review philosophers. The trouble with this, however, is that the philosopher or the poet is likely to belong to the same school or to an opposing school, and in either case the review may be biased and give a totally false impression of the book.
5. Reviewer critics. These are extremely rare. Most people who are capable of first-rate criticism do not want to interrupt their other work for jobs as badly paid as book reviews. First-rate regular weekly or monthly reviewing is particularly rare. Exceptional cases were Van Wyck Brooks and Mencken; but the former was rather narrowly specialized, and the latter has always tended to use book reviewing as a way of putting over his own personality and opinions. The only writer who has tried recently to do this kind of thing the way ideally it ought to be done was a second-rate man, Stuart P. Sherman. Such a reviewer should be more or less familiar, or be ready to familiarize himself, with the past work of every important writer he deals with and be able to write about an author’s new book in the light of his general development and intention. He should also be able to see the author in relation to the national literature as a whole and the national literature in relation to other literatures. But this means a great deal of work, and it requires a certain amount of training. Sainte-Beuve worked all week for his Causeries du Lundi, hardly taking time out for lunch. But Sainte-Beuve was perhaps a unique case. Has there ever been another example of a man of SainteBeuve’s abilities devoting so large a part of his life to weekly articles on miscellaneous subjects?
I want to suggest, however, that it might be a profitable idea for some editor to get some really able writer on literature and make it worth his while to do a weekly article. For a man who should combine a sound education with intelligence and literary ability he would probably best go to the universities, where the Herald Tribune got Stuart Sherman and the NewMasses Granville Hicks. Let him take, say, a Newton Arvin or a Haakon Chevalier, impose upon him no editorial duties or any duties that would impede his weekly article, — Burton Rascoe’s weekly articles suffered, when he ran the Herald Tribune book section, from his having too much to do, — and pay him enough to live on without his being obliged to resort to other work. He should not be expected to cover what is published, but to write each week of a man or a book. I believe that such a feature would prove both valuable to the magazine and an excellent thing for the literary world in general.
Attitude of the Author toward the Reviewer
It will thus be seen that the author has no justification in expecting serious criticism from reviewers, and that in becoming indignant or elated over reviews he is merely wasting his nervous energy.
His reviews, if he knows how to read them, may have for the author a certain interest; but it is unlikely that he wall be able to find out from them much that is important about the value of his work. For this he will have to depend on other sources, such as remarks made in casual conversations and evidences of his effect on other writers — always bearing in mind, however, that the true excellence or badness of what he has written may never really be understood during his lifetime: a chance for which we must all be prepared. And in the meantime he must read his reviews, not as the verdict of a Supreme Court of critics, but as a collection of opinions by persons of various degrees of intelligence who have happened to read or look into his book. Considered from this point of view, there is sometimes something to be learned from them.
Special Psychology of Reviewers
The reviewer, like other kinds of writers, has his ego; and, as he is continually occupied with other people’s books, it is somewhat difficult for this ego to assert itself. What usually happens is that the reviewer gives himself a vicarious sense of creation by helping up and introducing new writers who have been previously unknown; but when a writer is already known the reviewer gives himself a sense of power by making the gesture of putting him down. This psychology must always be reckoned with. During the last few years one has seen a number of writers first cried up, when they were still obscure, by the more discerning critics and then afterwards disparaged by the same class. This has happened in turn to Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder. It is the rarest thing in the world at the present time to find a word of intelligent critical comment on any of these writers. And the unfortunate Mr. Saroyan has been put through the cycle in record time. He had already been discovered by the editors of Story and had acquired a reputation among its readers. Then, when his book was published, he got some prompt enthusiastic reviews. He had now been triumphantly brought out, and after this there was nothing left for the later reviewers but to try to make him ashamed of himself.
Duties of the Reviewer to the Author
On the other side, however, the reviewer has certain obligations in relation to the author.
I have recommended lenience toward reviewers who use the books they are supposed to be reviewing as pretexts for expressing themselves; but this leniency is to be approved only in the event — and it happens comparatively rarely — that their articles are actually interesting. There is no excuse for an uninteresting review which does not tell anything about the book. At the least, the reviewer should supply information. The retelling of the story of a novel, the summary of an historical or philosophical book, the selection of representative passages and the communication of the quality of a poet, is the most boring part of the reviewer’s business, but it is an absolutely essential part. An attempt should be made to give the reader an opportunity to judge for himself whether or not he would be interested in the book irrespective of what the reviewer may think of it; and it is an indispensable discipline for the reviewer (or for any other kind of critic) to have to restate the gist of the book in his own words. The critic, when he sets about this task, is quite likely to find that there is more in the book, or less in it, or something different in it, than he imagined when he first went through it. If the author is incoherent or woolly, the critic will be able to detect it. If the reviewer is incompetent, his incompetence will be disclosed to more intelligent or careful readers when they find out that he does not know what is in the book.
The failure to follow this procedure has produced those pretentious æsthetic, social, and metaphysical essays which, especially in the more highbrow magazines, are sometimes hung on the names of new books. The reader has no means of knowing, if he has not himself read the books, whether they prove the critic’s points or not: the titles are merely used as counters to which, for the reader, no value has been assigned. It is as important for the critic to establish definite values for the books which he discusses in an essay as it is for the novelist to establish personalities for the characters who figure in his story.
Attitude of the Author toward His Public
Another class of persons toward whom the author should adopt an unemotional attitude are the writers of letters. Most of these fall into the following categories: —
1. Insane people and cranks. The author should be able to identify these and should remember that people in abnormal states of mind are likely to be set off by anything.
2. Lonely women and persons in provincial isolation. Of these people, even though they are sane, very much the same thing is true: the fact that they write the author letters signifies merely that they want to communicate with somebody and does not necessarily imply any interest or merit on the part of the author’s books.
3. Young people who want the author to read their manuscripts,
4. People who leant the author’s autograph. These, for the most part, either want it for a collection, and have no interest in the author’s books, or want it simply to sell.
Besides these, the author will get a few letters from people who are interested in what he has written and have something to say to him about it. But in general it may be said that the letters received by authors mean nothing. No writer who has been an editor can ever take letters so seriously as writers who have had no such experience often do. Every editor knows that it is impossible to publish anything in a magazine so bad that some reader will not write in to say that it is masterly or anything so good that some reader will not write in to denounce it.
Duty of the Public toward the Author
One should never send manuscripts to authors. They have enough to do writing their books. If authors read all the manuscripts sent them, they would never be able to do anything else. The author of a manuscript who desires advice should send it to a publisher or an editor: they pay people to do this kind of work.
Duty of Authors to Other People
The author should not make a practice of sending out to his friends, or to persons whom he does not know but admires, large quantities of inscribed copies of his books. In the first place, he will be out of pocket if he exceeds the publisher’s quota of free copies. In the second place, inscribed books from the author are likely to prove a nuisance: the person to whom the book has been sent is likely to feel that he ought to read it and yet at the moment he may not be able to — so that he will go around having it on his mind that he ought to have written the author. And when he does read it he may feel that the flattering or affectionate inscription obliges him to be nice about it, whether he really likes it or not. A book sent in this fashion is really a sort of bribe which may prevent the reader from giving the candid opinion which the author supposes himself to value.
The author should not send people books unless he is very certain either of their interest in his books or of their not being bothered by having them around unread.
Duty of the Novelist to the Public and the Profession
The novelist should never put at the end of his novel a date of the following kind: —
BOULOGNE-SUR-MER-HOBOKEN December 1934-January 1935
This kind of thing has been done ever since Joyce dated Ulysses: —
TRIESTE-ZURICH-PARIS, 1914-1921
But Joyce had a right to date Ulysses, because it had taken him seven years to write, and the date was really a part of the story: Dedalus had told the Dubliners in 1904 that in ten years he would produce something important. But it is a mistake for other writers to imitate this, because, in the first place, it is dangerous to suggest a comparison with Joyce; and, in the second place, such dates are irrelevant. Date and place may be in order for a poem, because they add something which helps in understanding it and which cannot be conveniently introduced into the poem itself. But if a novelist is successful, he has interested us in characters and events which are supposed to have nothing to do with himself, and has induced us to accept their reality; and it is an impertinence to his own creation to remind us of himself and where he worked. If the novelist has been unsuccessful, the reader, when he has got through the novel, does not want to be reminded of the author and Boulogne-sur-Mer.