The Peripatetic Reviewer

by EDWARD WEEKS

READING on a trans-Atlantic plane is not as easy as I thought. This is not because of any bumps, for going and returning my flights were more level than any ride I have had on a streamlined train; no, the difference is a difference of rhythm. Personally, I find reading on trains one of the pleasures of our age: you are quite beyond reach and the rhythm stimulates your thinking. But, physically, the effect is very different from that project ile vibration of the big four motors of the Clipper. They jar your mind just enough to make reading a conscious effort.

“Next time, take a little book with you,” said a man who had made six crossings; “a book like Trivia which you can enjoy in paragraphs. Read a little, then tilt your head back and relax.” I noticed that there were three copies of U. S. Foreign Policy, all in English hands — and a useful importation; the chaplain had his New Testament, the man from Scotland Yard a novel of John Buchan’s, and I an unbound copy of John Marquand’s latest . Such was the Hying library on H. M. Berwyck.

The British press

On the train to London we had our first look at the English newspapers. Laurence Winship, the managing editor of the Boston Globe, who sat beside me, kept muttering to himself, “What a job — I wish my copy desk could see this — What a job!” Through his eyes I began to appreciate what the English journalists have done. Into four pages of seven columns each they have compressed forty minutes of reading. I timed myself often, and that is what it took to consume the Telegram, the Times, or t he Daily Mail.

It is slow reading, but good. The war news is analyzed objectively and is supplemented by action stories — “the skin and bleed” — wired back by the reporters with the troops. You notice at once how much space is being given to American news. And you notice that every story has been shortened without losing the graphic touch. The murder in St. John’s Wood or the juicy divorce get s two paragraphs where it once had two columns. The personals those short stories in embryo — are in tiny type: tin* comics, which came in with the American Army, arc held down to four abbreviated strips. Gradually you realize why you are reading so slowly. By the skillful use of smaller types and by dispensing with headlines, the editor has crowded literally thousands more words on every page.

London papers evidently ack the space and enthusiasm for our columnists. They have not produced n military critic as hardheaded and as penetrating as Lieutenant Colonel Charles Repington — but neither have we. I could find no one writing such colloquial and graphic reports of the British troops as Ernie Pyle has done of the Americans in the field. Steinbeck’s copy was occasionally being reprinted in London; Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh, both of whom are with the British Army in the Middle East, will have to go some to match his pace.

Among the signed dispatches, I hunted hard in an effort to find new traces of that adventurous British talent — the talent which made Henry Nevinson’s dispatches from the Belgian Congo, Greece, and Flanders and H. M. Tomlinson’s marine writing such things of beauty. There were suppressed poets in those men who made English journalism the richer.

The dispatches from Montgomery’s Eighth Army which caught my eye were written by Evelyn Montague. He was brought up in the Manchester Guardian tradition. His father was Scott’s chief assistant, C. E. Montague, whose two books, Disenchantment and Rough Justice, spoke so eloquently of the hopes which we managed to lose after 1918. Now his son carries on with the most famous British army since Wellington’s, and his prose has that touch of irony which is too often squeezed out of our daily reporting — as, for instance, when speaking of a momentary hot spot in the Sicilian campaign, young Montague wrote: —

“A number of Italians advanced toward us with no obvious intention of surrender.”

The temper

The temper of the British dailies seemed to me surprisingly calm for a hard-driven people. At first glance, the editorials were almost too passive to be true. There are exceptions: the Manchester Guardian still asserts its independent voice; the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post proclaim the aspirations of the North; the Daily Worker (from which the ban has been lifted) and the Sew Statesman and Nation carry the banners for Socialism and Labor.

Generally speaking, the criticism of the National Government is as subdued as ours is vociferous. The election spells the difference. The British political parties have declared a truce and will contest no national election until the war is over. Hence the absence of dead cats, name-calling, and those heated accusations in which we are about to indulge.

But when an Englishman is provoked he still airs his grievance in an angry letter to the Times. There you will find the moral indignation, the complaints against bureaucracy, the ironic remonstrance which is so often John Bull at his best. When the Sitwells brought suit for libel against a critic who said their books did not sell, it was George Bernard Shaw who applied the cudgel and who in his unassailable letter to the press demonstrated the justice of their case.

The novel

With so many authors in uniform it is no wonder that good fiction is even more sparse than with us. As J look back, two English novels stand out in my mind—Caught, a semi-grim, semi-poetic story of the fire wardens in the London blitz, by Henry Green, an author unknown to us, whose style, strongly tinged with Joyceism, is not yet as pliant or as sympathetic as his talent suggests; and Fair Stood the Wind for France, an exciting, beautifully descriptive novel by Flying Officer X (the last chapter was finished the day before I left), which explores one of the most fascinating, uncharted experiences of the air war: what happens to those bomber crews who are forced down over Germany and who then grope their way into the Underground and eventually back in disguise across the Channel. It is happening every day in the week, but mum is (he word until this book appears.

How the English novel will pick up when Hitler’s fences are down is anybody’s guess. I personally doubt if war fiction will have such a long run as it did in the years directly after the First World War. And I his for two reasons. In the first place, both the British and the American forces have sent hand-picked writing men into the battle zones: their terse, true books are quicker in print anti more authentic than most novels. These books of action are feeding the stay-at-home while the fighting goes on; and when the bells have rung out for victory, it is my guess that the reflective novelist will be more concerned with the human problems of reconstruction than with the retelling of old wounds, whether to man or civilization. The challenge of t his responsibility will give the young writers returning from the Pacific a new lease on writing.

Those who hold the fort

Meantime the middle-aged and the elders hold the fort in Britain. The unification of the war seems to have provided them not only with clarity but with freshness of spirit, and in the talks I had with John Masefield, Logan Pearsall Smith, and II. M. Tomlinson, and with men of my own time like Commander Nevil Shute Norway, Sir Osbert Sitwell, and Lord David Cecil, I was repeatedly impressed by the constancy and skill with which these men carry on their writing. I shall have more to say about them in a later paper in the Atlantic.

Sir Max Beerbohm"s essay, Lytton Strachey, was the first of many little books 1 bought in England, and tlie grace and affection with which it is written told me what I had almost forgotten that the critical essay is very much alive in English print.

My next acquisition was the annual Shakespeare lecture of the British Academy, Hamlet, The Prince or the Poem? which C. S. Lewis delivered in 1942. Here is crit icism penetrat ing and of such spiritual elevation that as you read it the anxiety of war fades from mind.

A day later Mr. Jonathan Cape introduced me to a book, portions of which I mean to reproduce in this magazine. The author is Ivor Brown, the editor of the Observer. During the war years he has drawn together a collect ion no bomb can destroy. He is a collector of language, specifically a collector of English words, many of them rich to the senses, — words which have changed their hue and meaning several times since first they were breathed. I n his light, wellprinted volume, .4 Word for Your Far, he has arranged the droll specimens and the beauties and has told the family stories of each with a knowledge and humor good to read.

Next came Channel Packet, by Raymond Mortimer, the literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation, and a practicing critic for twenty years. So my library grew, and with it my appreciation of literary standards which have not slumped in the war.

The London critics

A century ago it used to be the Edinburgl™eviewers who slew the British bards. Today your best critics congregate in London. And as I read their copy7 I found myself wondering why the English book reviews were in many ways so different from our own. 1 can remember a time when English reviewers did more back-scratching than we would tolerate. But now the responsibility of criticism is in older and more experienced hands. IJpsmond M.acCarth\ and Sir Ronald Storrs in the Sunday Times, Ivor Brown in the Observer, Harold Nicolson in the Spectator, Roberi Lynd in the News Chronicle, Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman and Nation these men handle their books with a knowledge, urbanity, and wit which, I must say, I found refreshing.

The difference is not only a difference in taste: it is a difference in assignment. Too often our American reviewers attempt, to make a news story out. of the book they are discussing. They skeletonize the story and substitute a patter of biographical details in place of candid, searching criticism. Worst of all, l hey leave you w’ith the false assurance that you have read the book when you have read the review’.

What accounts for this difference? It certainly isn’t the pay (two guineas a t housand is a fair rate for an English reviewer). And certainly it isn t because our American readers are more tender-minded. The difference is simply that in England the belief still prevails that good books deserve to be scrutinized by the keenest minds, and that in doing so, you do not have to use superlatives or those little garlands of praise which show’ so prettily in publishers’ advertisements.

The publisher

Most English publishers lead a double life. Being men of brains (Hear! Hear!), they are many of them carrying on a full-time job in the war agencies. They reach their offices in the Ministry of Information or the Ministry of Labor at ten in the morning and there they sit until six. Which means that they read their manuscripts by candlelight and dictate to their authors at the breakfast table.

This double life is both strenuous and tantalizing. Editorial assistants are scarce as hens’ teeth. A good proofreader is worth a king’s ransom, and a good secretary a duke’s. Indeed, typesetting and proofreading, even under the most famous colophons, arc spotty enough to make you grin. What saves the publisher’s life is ihe fact that he has fewer new books to contend with. The annual crop has dropped from 1.5,000 titles to 6000, and the cut is directly traceable to the shortage of paper and the shortage of manpower for printing, binding, and distribution.

But it. is tantalizing to live in a world where there is not enough print to go round. The hardest problem that faces your English publisher today is when to call a halt. The longer he keeps a best-seller in print, the less paper he has for his waiting authors. So the publisher sets a quota for his popular novels (in the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was 100,000 copies), and when that figure is reached the book is withdrawn and the type distributed. It takes courage to drop a book when it is still selling 5000 copies a month, but unless you do, you cannot be fair to the other authors on your list.

The old favorites the books of distinction on a publisher’s back list — are kept in type although there may be an eight-month interval before he has enough paper in his pool to permit, a reprinting. Nora Wain’s House of Exile sold its last copy early in January, 1941. The new edition of 10,000 copies could not. be procured until October. Meantime the orders for it were piling up. Thus in the fall catalogue of the Bookseller you wall see an announcement like this: —

THE GOBI DESERT, by Mildred Cable

Apologies to those who are still waiting for this classic. A very big new edition is coming soon.

The Cambridge University Press has recently published a fine work of history, Saxon England and Roman Remains, a book written as if with that long view from Olympus. But the hotcakes were gone before I could reach my bookstore, and the only thing I could do was to queue up for the next printing.

More than a quarter of England’s reading comes from American authors, and the percentage is rising each month. They do not need our war books, having a natural preference to read of the exploits of their own Army and Navy. But they have a steady appetite for our Americana, our foreign correspondents, and our novels.

I have said that the English books are small, and so they are— small in size and type and even shoddy in paper. But I should not be surprised to see this economical format preserved when the war is over. The little volumes are so easy to read that if I were in England I would make only one exception in the era of reconstruction. I would give the Honorable Winston Churchill all the paper and ink he needs for the history which he must write of the world which was lost and won again.

Home

Our nonessential use of paper was what hit me between the eyes on my returning. I had come from a country where no newspaper is thrown away, ll is passed from person to person in the railway coach, swapped across 1 he aisle of a bus, and when the owner is through with it, dropped into a container for the armed forces.

When I bought myself a hat. at Dunn’s, I paid for it and then stood waiting expectantly. After a pause the clerk handed the new bonnet across the counter. “There you are, sir,”he said. “Of course wc have no wrapping.”

But over here, despite restrictions, paper is still something that anyone can throw around. Perhaps it is important to spend so much of our wood pulp in the colored comics; perhaps it is desirable in a fashion magazine to have 80 pages advertising women’s clothes; perhaps it is essential to have 7£ pages in our Sunday editions. I wouldn’t, know. But. when the pinch comes, I hope some power can be found to discriminate between the real and the superfluous.