Literature and Hollywood

by JAMES HILTON

1

THE book boom will doubtless recede now that the boredom of war is over — indeed, it is already receding — but it will have had lasting results in a considerable addition to the army of confirmed reading-addicts. No writer can complain of this result, any more than the journalist could have complained when, about fifty years ago, the popular press became the first beneficiary of popular education. What the war years have done is to extend somewhat to books the revolution that made the newspaper as necessary on the doorstep as the morning milk. Which probably points to an end of many things, including that special sacrosanctity attaching to books, as such, which makes the average reader clutter his shelves with stuff that he will never read again.

I could not myself think of more than a hundred books (from the Bible to Ring Lardner) that I am apt to reread—it takes me quite enough time to read new books that are worth reading once. Yet books are actually among the most indestructible things, and if, after reading, you discard them in a train or bus or restaurant, some well-meaning person generally runs after you with them. I welcome the likelihood that books at a magazine price (twenty-five or forty-nine cents) will encourage readers to love them and leave them.

Another likelihood is the decay of the olderfashioned relationship of author and publisher, but about this I am not so happy. Despite the traditional cat-and-dog relationship of the two species, I have yet to find any businessmen whose ethics are, on the whole, higher than those of book publishers, though it may be that my own experience has been fortunate. After Good-bye, Mr. Chips! first came out as a long short story on both sides of the Atlantic, I did not foresee any future possibilities, and a cable from an American publisher offering royalty terms for book publication inspired me to what I then thought was a smart idea — that is, to sell outright for enough cash to provide me with a holiday in Switzerland. I still cherish that publisher’s cabled reply to the effect that, in his opinion, any outright sale would be against my best interests, and that he would give me the modest sum asked for as an advance. And, of course, knowing him personally now, I know also that, even had I insisted, he would have changed matters to my advantage when the book turned out a best-seller.

A Hollywood motion picture company, however, which bought the film rights at a low figure, made a fortune without, of course, suggesting any revision of the deal. I say “of course” because I have no complaint at all against this picture company. It is one of the best in the business, it is scrupulously honest, it treats writers well, it pays them what it has to, and believe me, that is beginning to be plenty. The fact that it held to a good bargain in dealing with me is matched by my own readiness to do the same with it should ever the occasion arise.

Perhaps I should add that the older-fashioned author-publisher relationship seems to be part of an international integrity which is now waging a last-ditch fight against what ails it. All over Europe, in ex-enemy as well as ex-Allied countries, there are publishing houses that have tried to swim against the tide; I get letters from them now, pathetically explaining that they owe so much but cannot yet pay because of currency embargoes, treasury restrictions, inflation, and so forth. Maybe I am credulous in believing them.

Anything that has survived for a hundred years or so is probably due for a change, but a few notions that the old-time publisher had might be considered evidence of a social conscience did they not stem from the eighteenth-century feeling that an author could accept a patron without being patronized— as today he cannot. To which there was the collateral feeling that a publisher had some sort of obligation to publish scholarly books that might not sell well, out of the profits of his runaway bestsellers. Perhaps some publishers still feel this, helped by the possibility that a scholarly book may nowadays even become a best-seller — for example, Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson.

On the whole, though, there are many signs that the book world is moving with the times — and the times are considerably out-of-joint. One can no longer be quite certain that any publisher exists who will turn down a likely best-seller because he considers it unworthy of the literary standards of his list. Publishers’ advertising has become less scrupulous, more blatant; and a reviewer who says: “The plot is ingenious enough, and had the writing been equal to it, one could have recommended Mr. So-and-so’s new story unreservedly; as it is, however, he is only moderately exciting,” must always take the chance that he will be quoted as saying: “Ingenious . . . exciting . . . recommended unreservedly. ...”

More books are ghosted; almost anyone in the news, however reputable or disreputable, has a name-value that some publisher would grab; a professor’s authoritative study of American diplomacy during the nineteenth century will doubtless find acceptance, but there would be more spirited bidding for, say, AI Capone’s Memoirs of Cook County. And Hollywood prize-money now passes direct to book publishers, not behind the author’s back, but with the author looking on with bemused satisfaction.

Cutting in the publisher on Hollywood money is doubtless good business for Hollywood, since, apart from creating good will, it subtly influences the publisher to become a talent scout for the studios — a feeder pipeline to the gigantic gusher. Nor can it be said that the author is victimized. Indeed it is hard to diagnose his qualm if he has one — except possibly as a feeling that when he submits a novel to a publisher he would rather have it judged on its literary merits than by whether somebody thinks it will suit Greer Garson or Gregory Peck.

2

WHAT has happened, anyway, to the business of writing is a belated fragment of the Industrial Revolution. It sprang, you might say, from the spread of popular education, but it has been oddly clinched by the development of screen and radio — two rival media that do not impose a literacy test. For four hundred years the printed word has been the bottleneck through which the nectar of enlightenment had to pass; and only pedants will wholly regret the end of such a monopoly. Today it may accurately be said that never in history has it been possible to be better informed while at the same time remaining technically illiterate.

However, though the necessity to read is not what it used to be, the need for writers is greater than ever, since both screen and radio stuff have to be written; and it. has been amply demonstrated that people who “hear” or “see” the work of writers become avid to read either the same writers or the same sort of writing. This again intensifies the demand for “easy reading” — not a bad thing in itself, for the best writers are either easy to read or would be better if they were. There is, however, a constant pitfall in the fact, that so many people learn to read printed words with difficulty but to believe them with no effort at all, so that, in effect, they come to believe the things they can read with least difficulty — which puts a dangerous premium on the glib, the popularizer, or the hasty synopsist who finds it quicker to simplify by slightly falsifying.

All of which has probably done more to evict writers from their ivory towers than any amount of ideological preachment. The modern popular writer is in Big Business whether he likes it or not. In Soviet Russia, they say, he is the most privileged of all workers; while in America, if he is very successful, he can see his name in lights, can have his picture on the cover of Time, or can visit a department store and autograph live hundred books (all bought and paid for) any day he feels up to it. He is admired, envied, courted. He has an upholstered place in the scheme of things. He has become part, of a giant Entertainment Machine which, as people’s leisure increases, may well constitute the largest industry in every modern state.

Already the ramifications are so complex that he leaves much in the hands of his agent or business manager. He finds that whenever he has written a book he has also done something else; he has created a highly lucrative Frankenstein that can function in any of almost, innumerable guises - motion pictures, radio, stage, television, phonograph recordings, even comic strips. Probably he enjoys all this, though in a way he may be a little bewildered bv it, sometimes even bothered; because with every new form to which his work can be adapted he finds it passing increasingly out of his control into the giant hopper of the Machine.

The Machine is run for profit, but that is not its vital attribute; the Soviet Publishing industry, which is not run for profit, has the same Machine quality; ideas go in at one end and emerge as stereotypes. The same thing was true of the OWL The final product is the Myth — the Hero Myth, the Happiness Myth, the Success Myth, and especially the Myth of the Great Man who is also the Little Man, the Fellow Who Might Almost Have Been Ourself.

You make your popular hero by making your hero popular. He must be a Regular Guy. No longer usable is the type of Ossian’s chieftain — “tall as a rock of ice; his spear, the blasted fir; his shield, the rising moon; he sat on the shore, like a cloud of mist on a hill.” Your modern moviegoer and best-seller reader would sneer (and rightly) at such fustian, preferring the subtler flattery of the press agent who stresses how like, not unlike, the hero is or could be to ourself—for example, “It is not generally known that the new King of Ruritania is a keen railway enthusiast and frequently drives the royal train”—or (fine fleur of this sort of thing) “Throughout the entire interview Van Johnson (or Bob Feller, or Stalin, or Henry Kaiser, or Professor Einstein) smoked a pipe — an old pipe which he lingered lovingly from time to time. . . .”

Democracy and autocracy alike seem equally susceptible to this kind of mythology. Hollywood is exactly geared to it. Goebbels was an expert handler of it. The Kremlin thrives on it. Perhaps only the obstinate artist—the really displaced person in this modern world — has deep misgivings about it, especially now that the Myth-making Machine has become so pervadingly operative that we are beginning to take it for granted. Consider the crop of recent Hollywood film-biographies. Purporting to be “the lives” of Cole Porter or Sister Kenny, they bear, in fact, only that relation to truth which is deemed consistent with the Success Myth. Audiences, cynical enough to be aware of this, are also apathetic enough to forget it. Presumably they also like it, since Hollywood would do differently otherwise.

A few years ago I made personal contact with this aspect of the Machine when I wrote a short factual piece about a national hero who had been praised by Mr. Roosevelt in a fireside address and whose name had thereby attracted the attention of a well-known movie producer. Though a wartime propaganda job, I did not see why it should not be done as honestly as possible, the more so as it was a plain tale of simple human courage. When the producer wanted to inject a fictional love-story into his film version I was neither surprised nor shocked, but when he suggested I should incorporate the same fiction into the published work, I was obliged to tell him that this sort of thing wasn’t done in the literary world, and that the bookbuyer of something claimed to be true still attached meaning to the adjective.

Perhaps he should have replied that Hollywood standards increasingly are being accepted, and that if more people see a film than read a book, more people are disappointed if the book is not like the film than if the film is not like the book. The argument (based on arithmetical count, as so many bad ones are these days) would not have convinced me. I am bound to admit, however, that the logical trend is towards a Book of the Film of the Book. Take, for instance, the strange case of Mrs. Miniver. Thousands who bought the book after seeing the film must have been disconcerted by those slight, almost too charming vignettes of English life in wartime, with nary a German parachutist among them; some readers, perhaps, felt that Miss Struther had done them wrong.

Yet you couldn’t blame the film company for buying the title and character of her best-seller; you couldn’t blame the scenarists for inventing the story that wasn’t there; nor could you blame the publishers for selling more copies of the book after the film appeared. Would it not have been worth while to commission a different writer (if Miss Strut her didn’t want the job) to produce a book version of the film, thus adding yet another allotropic formation to the Miniver Frankenstein?

The movie producer who wanted his film fiction put into the book might also have pointed out that the claim of truth is increasingly an artifice of salesmanship in an age of “true confession” stories that are invented and “eminent medical authorities” who are nameless; to which I might then have agreed that a semantic Gresham’s Law has affected adjectives to such an extent that when once I told somebody in Hollywood that a certain book was “good,”he answered doubtfully: “I guess you don’t like it.”

Even in the wider world there has been a change of viewpoint — helped by and certainly adapted to the building of the Myth. Did the frank acknowledgment of the fact that Robert Sherwood wrote part of President Roosevelt’s speeches disturb anyone? Probably not. Would, however, the public of the last century have been no more disturbed to learn that, say, Carlyle had ghosted for Gladstone, or that the Gettysburg Address was actually composed by Whittier?

And, to be logical, why stop at speech-writing? The late President was fortunate in having a magical radio personality; but for some future President who hasn’t, why not borrow a Voice? And the step after that would be the Face — obviously one chosen for its photogenic qualities (the gnarled Massey-Lincoln, or the Harry-Davenport-BenignElder-Statesman, or the Speneer-Tracy-Plain-Man, or some other stereotype). Thus would be evolved a composite of assorted perfections, the sort of thing with which the English, more transcendentally but no less deliberately, sought to buttress their King-Personality until Windsor kicked over the traces.

If all this should sound fantastic one might reflect upon the growing tendency of the public to identify actors and actresses with the parts they play. This is of course nothing new in itself (it was always a primitive urge to hiss the villain), but it is new when it is taken seriously, when protests shower in at the thought of Shirley Temple having a cocktail, when Ingrid Bergman is solemnly warned that her current part of a loose woman in The Arch of Triumph ill accords with her recent part of a nun. It would seem that the modern world sees fiction as fact almost as readily as it prefers facts with a coating of fiction.

3

IN ALL this mix-up, the writer of today is himself mixed up. The mass audience to which he has limited access in lieu of his former monopoly of a smaller audience gives him too often an illusion of leadership, when actually he is following or, if smart enough, diagnosing. The more popular he is, the subtler the temptation to concentrate on merely appearing to be free-minded. That daring short story which editors with big circulations like so much, provided it does not offend anybody, the outspoken article that attacks someone whom every reader can readily identify as the other fellow, the motion picture that holds the mirror up to lifelessness but with amusing dialogue — these are the successful writer’s occupational hazards, all the more dire because they are so easy to take. Indeed, it would not be surprising if, in the black market for his soul, he should jack up his price.

What is surprising is that writers, by and large, are as honest as they are; that they so often refuse big-time assignments to do small-time ones that they get more fun out of. They are certainly not overpaid when you consider the profits that others make out of them, though most successful writers will admit that they are lucky. In the purely technical department of their work they have grievances; the law of copyright, for instance, which is in drastic need of revision. (The other day I was faced with the possible republication against my w ill of an old pot boiling novel I wrote twenty years ago, the copyright of which, when the original publisher went bankrupt before he could even pay the stipulated advance, apparently passed into the hands of a series of owners of whose existence I was not even made aware.)

Perhaps also an author has a legitimate grievance against the tax law that permits an oil well to have depreciation, whereas a writer, apparently, is expected to gush till he dies; with the further anachronism that an institution like Steinbeck or Marquand passes into public domain after a number of years, whereas an institution like Doubleday or Warner Brothers or, for that matter, Maey’s, just goes on making money in perpetuity.

A few writers in Hollywood, led by James Cain, have attracted some recent attention by advocating an American Authors’ Authority. This organization would lake out and hold copyrights for authors, guard their rights, and lease (never sell outright) their work for screen and radio. It could lie said that these reforms were broached as tactlessly as possible (the word “Authority” had an unfortunate ring and the suggestion of a “tough guy” or “literary czar” to run it was not a beguiling slogan for the setting up of what amounted to a closed shop for writers); but the whole idea would have been attacked in any event, if only for the reason that the Industrial Revolution in writing has created a bonanza to which all sides of the business are rushing to stake claims.

Naturally also this projected A. A. A., which might so much more agreeably and just as alphabetically have been called an Association, has been attacked on political grounds, since it emanates from the Screen Writers’ Guild, which has many enemies both in and out of Hollywood. As a member and former vice-president of the Guild, I can testify that it is amply what it originally set out to be — that is, a necessary advocate and defender of the rights of screen writers.

Whether, as has been alleged, it contains any Communists, I cannot accurately say, but I should be surprised if it didn’t, since it would then be unique among modern social groupings, and I do not believe it is unique. Doubtless such Communists as it does or might contain would, if they obtained power in the A.A.A., seek to influence the ideological content of writing; which means that the demand for a closed shop (arguable if the Authority is to confer big benefits on all writers) should cause inquiry as to whether the present constitutions of the writitig unions could ever be subject to amendments that would bar individual writers from membership for espousing minority causes.

James Cain, who is certainly no Communist, has already admitted that earlier fears among writers were due to a “mistake” he made in the early promulgation of the scheme, and a revised plan nowdrops the closed shop and definitely stipulates “that there be no discrimination in the rights or treatment accorded by the American Authors’ Authority to any piece of written material by reason of its content.” This is fine, if one were certain that such a stipulation could never legally be revoked by a majority vote, which is sometimes as tyrannical as even Molotov thinks it is. Reckoning free speech of infinitely greater importance than making more money, I am somewhat warily in favor of the A.A.A., as of a nice-looking baby panda that might or might not grow up with the right sort of disposition.

Profit, after all, is not the modern author’s chief problem. It is the world he lives in, which, as it realizes his importance, gives him less and less real freedom, less even of that icy freedom of its indifference which enabled Samuel Butler, for instance, to remain for a whole lifetime busily and fruitfully a worst-seller, whereas nowadays only the accident of birth would have determined whether he were liquidated for “deviations” or chosen by the Bookof-the-Month Club and commissioned by MetroGoldwyn-Mayer to write a purl in Erewhon for Mickey Rooney.

For the Myth, in a benign sort of way, is also totalitarian, and it has yet to be demonstrated that good art can flourish under any kind of totalitarianism at all. The Communist and the Myth-maker may jointly retort that art is useless unless it serves the Machine; but the odd thing is that lately, both in Russia and in Hollywood, there seems to have been a revival of this curious hankering to be useless. Perhaps it is that the artist, if he has sold himself without quite delivering all the goods, is feeling his art like the prick of ail old conscience.