The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

This should have been a warning that we were at the end of an abnormal expansion, but publishers hate to take no for an answer, and book manuscripts continued to pour into the presses. The manufacture of a book takes months where it used to take weeks, and new titles announced for the autumn must be in the works by the end of April; thus, despite the spring slump, production continued to go up. Thirty-live hundred new titles, the harvest of two years of writing, editing, and production, came crowding for sale in the last three months of 1948. This was a glut.

All through the year the reading public showed itself to be restless, dissatisfied, and wary. The booksellers were the first to see this and to note the reasons. Said Miss Lillian Friedman of St. Louis, one of the wisest women in the Trade: “I know the day is over when a woman hands you six books and says, ‘Send these to my boy in Africa and help pick out another six for my nephew stationed in England.’ We’ve got to put the books in the customers’ hands now - they’re not putting them in ours.”

There is no doubt that book prices are too high - too high, that is for the pocket book. What teacher, doctor’s wife, or GI couple is going to gamble $3.50 on a novel and not feel badly stung if that novel turns out to be a mediocrity? But the publisher is right up against it in this matter of price. Because of the inescapable pressure of labor and materials, it costs today more than twice as much to produce a book as it did ten years ago. If a publisher passes this increase on to the purchaser. he prices himself out of business. His only present alternative is to pay the costs and then try to sell twice as many copies of every book he makes. In too many firms the result has ended in red figures.

The only relief in this vicious spiral is the hope that invention in photo offset and new forms of composition will come to the rescue. It hasn’t yet.

Meantime there is this matter of mediocrity. The war had a paralyzing effect on most creative writers: many of the oldest English and European novelists were living in exile, roots in the air; the middle-aged and younger everywhere were in uniform. It was to be expected that books of quality would emerge slowly after the war.

But in the interim, publishers made three bets which have proved to be bad: they bet that American readers did not want war novels or much else that was serious in fiction; as a substitute, they bet on romance with a teasing ingredient of sex; and they bet heavily on repetition. In this they were encouraged by the older booksellers, who recalled that in President Harding’s normalcy there was a demand for flaming youth.

You have seen the result. For two years and a half we have been treated to a succession of fat, blowsy romances (“just pieces of writing to be turned into movies” remarked Miss Marion Dodd, the good bookseller of Northampton) whose heroines as they run toward or away from the man on the dust cover seem always in danger of losing their shirts. These beauties and the flapdoodle about them have disfigured a good many pages of advertising. The battle of the bosoms — at $3.50 a volume — went on until readers had enough and the market went down.

It was stupid so to misjudge the American temper, stupid to argue that this time would be like last time, stupid not to realize that many of the seven million men and women coming out of uniform would demand the truth about the most violent experience in their lives. Tom Heggen’s Mister Roberts and Command Decision by William Wister Haines (both of which ran in the Atlantic), Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The Gallerg by John Horne Burns, The yaked and, the Dead by Norman Mailer, The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw there is the masculine writing which reached for the truth and beside which the fat cats looked so silly.

There is another manifestation of American taste which publishers might lake to heart. The revival of interest in Henry James, the delight in the evocative, beautifully written autobiography of Sir Osbert Sitwell, the welcome accorded to the fastidious evaluation of Thorcau by Joseph Mood Kruteh. indicate a liking for fine style, for prose that will make us forget the nervous, staccato chatter of journalism.

Among the conscientious, the urgency to understand is what compels us to read Sherwood’s illuminating portrait of Harry Hopkins, Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, the booming eloquence and remembrance of Winston Churchill. But whether we consider fiction as biography or history, I think that American readers fundamentally are looking for this: —

They are looking for the truth that man still does have dignity, that he is not simply a puppet twitched into love or war by his unconscious which pulls the strings; they are looking for some semblance of order; they are seeking for integrity; they are seeking for the will and imagination to believe that, there is a cohesive power in mankind greater than the atomic bomb.

In James Thurber, once of Ohio and now of the yew Yorker, we have the number one funnyman of the U.S. Thurber, like Edward Lear, excels in both his drawings and his writing, and in his new book, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (Harcourt. Brace, $3.00), we find him at his best.

Here are those solemn hounds so unmoved by the antics of their morose owners; here are the lumpish women and the little men tilting at each other in the relentless Mar Between the Sexes; here are the animals, Thurber’s “fauba,” the “Extinct Animals of Bermuda”—Pritchard’s olf, and the waffle-crested bly drawn and described in what are to me convulsing lines; here are the seal at the head of the bed and the first Mrs. Harris so beautifully watchful on the top of the bookcase. Take them straight or with Freud, these drawings are unique and irresistible, a reflection of us all.

In his prose Mr. Thurber can be the deadpan observant reporter watching the dismantling of Joseph Pulitzer’s old home on Seventy-third Street; he can be serious find let the facts carry the irony, as when he describes the individuals, the serials, the rates of pay and production which have made Soap Opera such an industry as could be found only in this country; he can be mock serious, as when he slays for all time the fatuities of the cocktail party in those two lovely short stories, “The Maters of the Moon” and “The Ordeal of Mr. Matthews”; he can be diabolic, as when he makes those two tight wives recite their lines in “Am Not I Your Rosalind?”; he can be just foolish. Any way, I like him.

No woman, not even Emily Kimbrough, has a more amusing gift of simile and a more laughable reaction to life than Betty MacDonald. Her Egg and I, which was the most popular serial I have printed in the Atlantic and which later sold over a million copies in book form, is the incomparable, candid chronicle of how a young couple can make a howling failure while raising chickens. After the chickens came a divorce; and then Betty, now almost thirty, with her two daughters, aged nine and ten, went back to live with her mother in Seattle. She took a government job to help pay her share of the crowded menage. She and three other girls, she tells us, worked in close quarters wilh a clerk who “looked like a cadaver and coughed constantly, with a dry little hacking cough, much of the time in my face.” He was later found to have had active, communicable tuberculosis for nineteen years; and not unnaturally after twelve months of such service, Betty began to develop symptoms which no one in her exuberant family could take seriously. Eventually she went to a specialist whose X-rays showed beyond doubt that she had pulmonary tuberculosis. Since there wasn’t money enough to pay her way, she was packed off to The Pines, an endowed institution free to those who need care and cannot pay. So begins The Plague and I (Lippincott, $2.75).

To anyone looking at Betty MacDonald’s redheaded blooming vitality today it is hard to realize that she could ever have been at death’s door. But she was. And this book tells the at first funny and then increasingly sober account of her six-month struggle for life.

The book gets off to a delightfully irresponsible start. Betty has a knack for drawing people. She catches the idiosyncrasies of those she dislikes and the endearments of those she likes: her father, the mining engineer, with his worship of ihe out-ofdoors; Gammy with her dreadful cooking and her love of disaster; Mother who despises what she calls the “saddos” (sorry-for-themselves). The etching becomes a little more biting when the author goes to The Pines. You can hardly expect to find the bounce and rollick of The Egg and I in a sanatorium. And once she is flat on her back and depressed by the ominous doctoring, Betty becomes the griping, worried patient which is any invalid.

Her humor as much as anything else pulls her through as it pulls the reader through her long convalescence. Her figures of speech are always a surprise: Charlie’s b.o. “preceded him like a fanfare and followed him like an echo”; Madge’s dropped books “crashed to the floor and noise rolled along the corridors like spilled marbles”; the Barking Dog’s coughs “bursting from her like balls from a Roman candle.”I don’t know how many millions of invalids there are in this country, but I do know that many of them will see themselves in this book.

Billy Rose is God’s gift in a dreary year and his book Wine, Women and Words (Simon and Schuster, $3.00) the most refreshing slice of Manhattan we’ve had since Damon Runyon. The origin of the book is interesting. Five years ago, more or less, Billy Rose opened a cabaret which, as he says, “features the usual fifty girls in forty-nine costumes.” Unlike most businessmen, he himself wrote the advertisements of his Diamond Horseshoe, which appeared in the New York papers. The town began to look forward to “these pipsqueak paragraphs,” and it was Bernard Baruch who advised the producer to turn them into a newspaper column, which Mr. Rose promptly did, offering it for free to PM. Then a syndicate moved in. “Seeing my stuff in print,” he writes, “was like having my back scratched. And when the New York Herald Tribune took on the column, Rita Hayworth was doing the scratching.”After the syndicate came Max Schuster and a contract signed, as the author says, “with one of those fountain pens which write under a dry Martini.”

This book is alive with hundreds of stories which could only have happened in New York and been told by a New Yorker. These couldn’t be all his stories; some of them might, come from the teeming mind of his friend Ben Hecht, some of them from the streets or the bars or a gray press clipping, but Billy Rose has made them his and told them in an idiom which is his incontestable trade-mark. He knows the show business and so of course writes with a beautiful sense of timing, with an impeccable ear for dialogue, and with a sense of humor that never ceases to gibe at himself.

He is a little guy, standing five-three (“Why doesn’t my press agent lay off those tired phrases - The Bantam Barnum, The Gremlin of 54th Street, The Shorty with the Fringe on Top. And why doesn’t Eleanor stop telling people I wear a bow-tie because I trip on the other kind?”). He is also a kindly guy, compassionate, probably a soft touch, one who has talked his way through life with that slow ingratiating smile and has somehow found himself listening to the life stories — the bits of tragedy and humor—which people have been telling him because they liked his sympathy. Without this undertone of human nature, the wisecracks would just be farce.