Sheer Bruff

THAT intellectual area which we sometimes refer to as “The Publishing World” has been in a pretty pother lately over the case of The Manatee, by Nancy Bruff, and its publishers. The Manatee is a novel concerned with a sadistic whaling captain and his very strange family and neighbors. Its chief and most consistent quality is the lack of any sense whatever of reality. One reads the rodomontades of its straw men and women with the feeling that the author is running up and down behind them, whispering: “Now you say this! Put a little dirt in it! Now, Amos, blaspheme! Now, Jabez, it’s your turn — kill that man! Go to it!”

When this novel was presented to the critics, the poor, ignorant fellows wrote what they thought of it, quite unaware that a great wave of advertising was already crest ing above their heads, destined to sweep their opinions into flotsam and jetsam and to carry The Manatee into the holy haven of the Best-Sellers. William Du Bois, writing in the New York Times Book Review Section, summed up his opinion as follows: “All the faults of the born non-storyteller are here in heaping measure. . . . The Manatee, to put it mildly, would serve a class in novel-writing well, as a truly remarkable example of what not to do.” Said the New York Sun ”... no order, no command over her material, no style . . . Miss Bruff has run away from too many schools.” “Her book has the subtlety and profundity of a Grade-C movie,” says Sara Henderson Hay, in the Saturday Review of Literature. “ Her psychology is elementary, her characterization stock property, her dialogue incredibly artificial and the very best ham.”

The publishers of The Manatee, E. P. Dutton and Company, think otherwise. They think otherwise with deep conviction. One has only to read the lyric rhapsodies on the book jacket and in the advertising pages to realize what a really great book they feel this to be. “Written in lusty, vigorous prose, yet with exceptional power and beauty, The Manatee is a classic tragedy of gods and devils played against a setting of sea, sky and fabulous island.” (The “ fabulous island” is Nantucket.)

We are told that Miss Brufl had written and failed to publish six previous novels. This becomes understandable as we scrutinize details of the seventh. Take Captain Jabez Folger of the whaler Manatee, a most peculiar man. Freud would have loved him; so would Havelock Ellis. In a two weeks’ interval of dreamy quietness ashore, he married and honeymooned with his Quaker bride, Piety. Then he sailed away on a three-year unsuccessful voyage, during which he reverted to his normal abnormalities. When at last he returned to home and wife on Nantucket,

he strode . . . bearing the dark streamers his thoughts had woven during the long unlucky voyage. These were almost visible as if he had stumbled into an ancient, smoky spider’s web and carried it away clinging to his head and brow.” Thus we receive on page 7 due notice that Jabez, sooner or later, is going to be bad news.

At home his manner startles his wife. He warns flowery Shrine, a half-caste Polynesian servant in his house, that he has tidings about her white father, Try Pots Pollard. “ He daid! ?” asks Flowery Shrine — in a rather surprisingly Mississippian turn of phrase. Yes, Jabez explains. Try Pots attempted to escape. “He stood up in the boat as I shot him and clasped his hands as if he were praying to me. . . . Anyway he kept his hands together as he fell. Don’t know how he did it.” Jabez tries, at times, to think and talk like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. The sea, “the world of water — too austere for jolly sailors’ talk. . . . While I—am somehow a part of it all. I lie upon the waves and stretch out in comfort, with my feet crossed on the horizon line. I swoop with the gull, dart and turn and turn with the fish. My soul thunders with each storm and hangs brooding in the heat. . . .”

Seafaring has not made the Captain more homeloving.

Piety’s God, Jabez tells her, is “warm, he is sentimental. A tea cozy at a woman’s tea!”

“And thy God?”

“My God lives in the darkest heart of the storm, the jaw of a shark, the rip of lightning and the hard eyes of a black woman who is being raped —”

“Jabez!”

“By me — by your fine husband, Quaker woman . . .“ etc. This gives Jabez an idea. Which he acts on.

All the characters on Nantucket, the fabulous island, are “characters.” Aunt Keziah, aged curiosity personified; Amos Lamb, an embittered, obscene senility whose adjective, adverb, and verb consisted of “Christ Damn!” — strangely permitted by the Quakers of Nantucket in 1830; Yvonne, the French wife of a whaler captain, who revolts against the long voyages in these telling words: —

“So! Zis stranger [husband], what does he do? Why he sects in ze meeting house, hees hands crossed on ze ivory head of a cane carved from hees victims’ bones. Zis stranger, he rrrrrrolls his eyes to heaven and speaks of hees gentle Quaker love for all living theengs and hees horror of violence! Ha, hah, hah!” Students of dialect will find Yvonne’s conversation interesting. She changes all her th’s into z’s but has no difficulty at all with what and why. She is not certain about the vowel i (vide “living theengs”), but, after all, she is French and, of course, an interesting nymphomaniac.

Jabez goes to sea again, this time for nine years. He kills his crew in a mutiny, after murdering one or two just for the fun of it, and then, adrift in an open boat, he and a survivor eat a comrade and then kill and eat the cabin boy, a juicier bit. Later his daughter. Saffron, overhears him telling the cabin boy’s mother all about it — in the calmest way — and at dinner that day she “stole a look at her father. Jabez was in the act of cutting his meat, as he always did, with a deliberate, mathematical perfection. This done, he raised a portion of it to his open mouth; his lips drew back as his teeth closed upon it. Saffron’s hand shot up to cover her eyes, a reflex action that was to stay with her all the rest of her life.”

Well, after another voyage, Jabez returns again, this time with the murder of Portugee Johnny to his credit. And then, by jingo, at long last he confesses to an outsider that his life was twisted by the homicidal treachery of his best friend when he was fifteen years old. This confession clears everything. He is now headed for reconciliation, sweetness, and light, when he mislays a lighted cigar in the folds of his dressing gown and burns up.

As one looks back on Jabez and his charming youngsters, Saffron and Luke, one wonders if E. P. Dutton and Company really and truly accepted this book as the masterpiece they proclaimed it, or did they perhaps see in it the makings of an ersatz bestseller provided the trumpets blared, the drums rolled, the calliope bellowed steam. The answer has a bearing on every American publishing house and on the future of its advertising program.

Time tells us that the author’s husband anted up $25,000 for the author’s publicity, with the understanding that the publishers would match him with a like amount to be spent for the advertising of the book. By good luck a publicity man was discovered in Hollywood, of all places, who was willing to help. A photographer made some charming prints of the well-endowed author, and the artist did his best to catch the spirit of the story with his drawing of the whaler’s prow with its well-developed figurehead. (The New York Times balked at reproducing this in its advertising until 1/64 of an inch was shaved from the figurehead’s bosom — a touch of modesty you will observe in the advertising which the Atlantic accepted for the November issue before any one of us had read the book.)

The results thus far have been eminently satisfactory to author and publisher. The New Yorker, which doesn’t often nod, referred to the book in one of its squibs as “a first novel by a writer of unmistakable talent.” (Paging Mr. Edmund Wilson). The book is selling. Barnum was right.

There is one world which is utterly charmed by this performance. I refer, of course, to the Advertising World. The Manatee’s record justifies all that they have said about themselves. It is now wholly proper for one of them to penetrate a sanctum and say: “Well, A. M., have you noticed the sales of The Manatee? And the movie rights? Boy, are they something! It just goes to prove what I said to you when we were discussing the appropriation for your Cheese Cake in Patagonia and I wanted to play it in a big way. With $40,000, could I have made that book a best-seller! Boy, it had everything— murky passion, wild corrosive hates, uninhibited loves against a background of fabulous Patagonia! Everybody would have read Cheese Cake in Patagonia. Why, with the right psychology in your advertising and plenty of cash to spend in the right mediums, I tell you, you can sell anything!”