The Reviewing of Books
1
THE founding of a new literary magazine is like setting up a feeding table for winter birds trying to survive until spring. They arrive by flocks from all the neighboring thickets and soon are squabbling for crumbs. So it is with literary aspirants who want reviewing. In New York, from tenements and lofts, from shared apartments and from the best uptown addresses; from Syracuse, Bangor, and Spartansburg (just arrived), they hurried by foot or taxi to the reception room of the Saturday Review, each with a good reason why a book (almost any book) should be given to them for review.
Most of this swarm were not prospective or even potential critics. The girls and boys (many of them were only that) who came to us were writing novels, short stories, or plays, and only hoped to earn a few dollars and get their names in print while they waited for an acceptance or a try-out. Many of them were very able, but usually not in our direction. Most of them had only two qualifications for reviewing: they liked to read and could write a passable English. Ninety-nine out of a hundred among the young had a fixed (and fallacious) belief: if you could not get your own books published, you could at least tell what was wrong with the books other authors had written.
I was sympathetic with the slightest budding creative talent. Yielding to fresh young faces (charming girls in particular), for a while I dealt out lesser novels for experimental reviewing. The results were devastating. If the review was favorable it was pointless; if it was pointed it was savage. I did not realize then how much easier it is to damn than to praise with any effectiveness. I was not then aware of the primitive cruelty of the young intellectual’s mind, or how the hidden self-distrusts of an unformed personality could be soothed by aggressiveness or impudence. After a year or so of this service to the youth movement, we had accumulated a vast stock of unpublishable reviews.
Criticism and reviewing are, of course, two quite different arts. Criticism values and sets in perspective a seasoned work of art which is ready to be placed in its relation to literary history. Reviewing need do no more than describe and define a current book, with an opinion as to its merits. Criticism requires an erudition and a trained judgment no youth is likely to possess. Yet reviewing books puts strong tests to the intelligence, since the reader of an unpublished book must rely on his own reactions. Unlike the scholar at work upon the past, he has no absolute knowledge as to whether he is reading a failure or a success. His book as yet has no history. But such problems never troubled our aspirants. They were all Davids asking for a sling and a Goliath to pop at.
2
I HAD not been long in New York before I discovered that Grub Street was still a reality. Today it is lined with expensive apartment houses inhabited by ghost writers and the more successful anthologists; but in the early twenties it was more like its ancient hack-infested predecessor in London. In New York’s symbolic Grub Street lived a race of professional reviewers. Those who worked for us were elderly and must have long since gone to an endless rest for tired eyes and bruised typewriter fingers. For they worked hard. Reviewing should be an avocation or a by-product of the study of literature, but these honest hacks made a job of it which was poorly paid by cash and salable books.
One reviewer I remember particularly introduced mass production into the business. Well educated, with an encyclopedic mind that never lifted above the level of competence, he had too little personality to teach, too little originality for research, and too much real love of books to go elsewhere for a living. But he had to live and support his family, so he set up a factory of reviewing, feeding to his intelligent wife and daughters armfuls of books, some from us, more from the Sunday supplements. He was the foreman and reviser, and the reviewer of the more difficult volumes. He was most useful to us in the days when we tried to review everything, but I doubt whether his whole establishment earned as much as $75 a week.
It was seldom dull in our reception room. We could count upon at least one paranoiac a week. I do not mean paranoiacs in the strict medical sense, though a few of them were definitely crazy. Our would-be reviewers of this kind were obsessed creatures of one idea, which they tried to sell us. There is something about writing that attracts such brains, and something about criticism that has an especial appeal, Criticism gives to the obsessed mind a long-sought opportunity to avenge the fancied wrongs of a warped ego upon a society to which it has never been able to adjust itself. Nor is this neurotic desire to be found only in the unbalanced. Pope with his twisted body made it into an art of abuse.
Some of these erratic men were dangerous. I was nearly strangled by an expert in early history because I had given the book he wanted to a rival historian. I escaped only by dodging into the crowded traffic of 45th Street. Others wore pathetic, such as the old and rummy composer of excellent sonnets, who would sit for hours muttering to himself in an anteroom while I worked behind a locked door. The stenographers were afraid to pass him in order to go home. Sometimes it was not paranoia at all but the calculated malice of Job, who wished that his adversary had written a book. A critic of rising reputation once got from my innocent hands the new novel of an established writer. When he finished the review, there was little left of the book but the dust cover, and we, at the time fanatic upholders of free speech, published it as written. Later I was told that the reviewer was kicked downstairs by the author in a Greenwich Village brawl!
Never paranoiac, but too often intolerably dull, were the scholars, the masters of those who know, whom we were determined to draft for the education of our reading public. If the advisability of interesting others occurred to them, the result seldom showed in what they wrote. Many of the academics then were good lecturers, but when they reviewed they reviewed for each other, and the public be damned. Many a great authority would write ten words on the value of the book he was reviewing, and a thousand on minor errors and misprints. Or still more frequently, he would devote his space to telling how he would have written the book.
In politics, economics, and history we did better, for these were the years of controversy over the causes of World War I and the imperatives of reconstruction. The scholars in government, economics, and the sociology of change were aware of the absolute necessity of influencing public opinion. They learned to write effectively if they were not already skillful, and if they failed in their great cause it was not because of a halting rhetoric. Indeed, the curious may find in the files of the Saturday Review for the twenties, and in many another periodical of the times, a convincing analysis of what was bound to happen in a world weary of war but still bogged down in nationalism.
What we remember is how few books and how few competent reviewers there were on military or naval tactics and strategy, or on the broader questions of how democracy might win World War II if it came. Yet the fault was not in the direction but in the tempo of our thinking. We were not rid of war; yet we insisted upon concentrating on the problems of peace. We were busy tearing up the roadblocks while mines were still under the pavement. We said good-bye to force while forgetting original sin. All this the books of that time make clear now, but it was not so then.
3
SCIENCE, both pure and applied, and the fellow travelers of science, psychology and sociology, were also intensely productive in the twenties. And, as it happened, in the field of scientific scholarship we scored one success that had the elements of the sensational. This was in the early days of the Saturday Review.
I had met in England, while doing some work for the Society for Pure English, C. K. Ogden, whose career since has been extraordinary. He has already published somewhere his account of the following incident. A psychologist, a physicist, a philologist, and I do not know what else, he lived in the twenties on the lower floors of a London house crammed with gadgets such as machines for running records backward so that the hearers could analyze the rhythms, and astonishing electrical devices. It was not to see those that I called upon him, but to discuss the now famous Basic English, for which I. A. Richards, the critic, and he were responsible.
The range of his knowledge of new thought and investigation was unequaled in my experience — it was truly incredible. And so I thought of him as a reviewer when, in 1926, an interim edition (the 13th) of the Encyclopædia Britannica was brought out in three volumes to be added to the pre-war complete edition of 1911. The idea was to bring us up to date in all important knowledge of what had happened in the world since 1911. Mr. Ogden was fortunately in New York, and agreed to undertake a review from which a university faculty might have shrunk. He asked only a free hand and sufficient space — and got both.
I remember his light figure as he hurried into the office almost at the deadline, with an armful of manuscript. A few pages were enough to show that it was a massacre. The editors of the edition, unwilling to delay, had shoved wads of new material into an old reference book with an insufficient consideration of new fields of developing knowledge and new men. The resulting omissions were startling. Ogden’s review was a survey of the new thoughts, new procedures, and new talents which had been overlooked. It listed names which were clearly of primary importance, and discoveries and discoverers that I knew to be indispensable for a reference book, yet were not even recorded in the index of the three volumes. As the proofs came up we began to throw out reviews, articles, poems, then whole departments from the number in order to get space, until finally the week’s issue was chiefly Ogden — a brilliant, devastating criticism of a reference work about as useful in some of its important sections as a 1911 telephone book.
A few weeks later the vice-president of the American branch of the Britannica (it has changed ownership since) came to my office. He was sorry to make trouble but he feared that they would have to sue the Saturday Review and its editor for libelous statement. They had suffered heavy financial damage from that review. “But you know,” I said, “that the courts have ruled that a review, no matter how hurtful to a book’s reputation, is not actionable unless it contains malicious misstatement. Otherwise there could be no criticism.” “Yes, of course,” he replied, “but we shall sue you for maliciously choosing an incompetent man to review a great work. That is cause for an action.”
Many times I have been challenged by this or that and have thought of the right answer only hours later, and too late. This time I was ready. “If Mr. Ogden is incompetent, why did your editor choose him to write the article on psychology for this edition?” We were not sued!
The modernist critics invaded our office frequently (the verb is exact) with lightning in their eyes and grenades in either hand. They wished to upset all the old categories and set up new ones, and they wished us to help them do this before the end of the month. The war had disturbed old values, though in the early twenties it had not produced, at least in the United States, a recognizably new literature. Yet readers of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922 were aware that something new (in talent as well as in values) had come into English.
It was difficult to tell from what they wrote just what our modernists wanted, since they were more eager to attack other modernists than to blast accepted books. Yet one thing was clear: like Walt Whitman in 1855, they felt that the diction of current art was inadequate to express new sets of experience. So far they had little to say, though much to feel, and there were no T. S. Eliots among them. The sayers in this country were the E. A, Robinsons, the Robert Frosts, the Willa Cathers, whose roots were in our age of confidence, and who were summing up magnificently the results for our day of the great American experiment.
The controversy of the ideologies, which was not to reach its peak until the 1930’s, nor to translate itself into action until the preliminaries of the Second World War, was already beginning. But my modernist callers did not want to live their lives differently; they wished to find new ways of describing how people they did not like lived their lives. Some of them were wild men (I had met their confreres in the London world) whose restlessness was more significant than anything they wrote about it. Others, like Paul Rosenfeld, Malcolm Cowley, and Kenneth Burke, were to build distinguished careers on intuitive recognitions of new trends in the art of literature, forecasting new tastes.
I myself was deeply sympathetic but puzzled and skeptical. Change was coming, but it did not seem wise or right for a magazine like ours to proclaim a new age which clearly had not arrived. Also I thought that new ways of estimating the imagination of man were reflections of profound changes in our attitude toward God, Fate, and our fellow man. The new semi-science of psychology was already indicating that such a turn in man’s long road was ahead of us. But were these restless prophets, who were not themselves creative artists like T. S. Eliot, able to sec beyond their own dogmatisms? I was dubious because of my own past experience when, in company with many another literary historian, I had trotted after Brunetière and his philosophy of literary evolution only to land in a swamp of bad criticism based on ill-comprehended science. I had my choice: to be labeled conservative or radical — and chose to be called conservative; an interesting experience, for in New Haven I had always been, and still was, regarded as radical. But conservative in this sense only: that I decided our chief function was intelligent teaching, and that we would let the vigorous “little magazines” of the day conduct the reconnaissance, since what was said there could be written for professionals who alone at that, stage would find much of it intelligible.
We chose to keep the emphasis of the Saturday Review upon books of high artistic value (fortunately there were many of them) which were not only successful in their art but were being read by the intelligent public. Modernist prophecy we in no way suppressed, but set it in the back of the magazine, and published much prose and verse from abroad as well as at home — which in our opinion gave samples of the future. And we offered a column now and then even to the wild men. Ezra Pound, who was going wild by this time, agreed to do some prophesying, but characteristically sent in comments on a local and not important, art show instead — and was abusive when not paid twice our rates. Our readers were sufficiently warned of rough water ahead, and told of new types of genius appearing. As I look back, I think our compromise was right. In these early twenties Americans were writing books that no change of taste is likely to exclude from our permanent literature. What the Frosts and Glasgows were publishing was finished art representing a great period of American life at its peak, even if, perhaps, nearing its end. By the 1930’s the story would be different. A critic’s (or a reviewer’s) first job is to estimate, not to prophesy.