The Peripatetic Reviewer

It sounds exacting, and it is. It is also pleasant and very stimulating—up to the day before his departure when the manuscripts of short stories, novels, and travel books (never have a people produced so many travel books as the British) have to be given their final decision and most of them a polite return.

You need a timetable for such an existence, and as I look back over mine for the past ten days, I remember the pleasure of lunching with Daniel Macmillan at the Garrick. I remember the delicious food and the delight to the eyes which were awaiting my wife and me when we lunched with Sir Osbert Sitwell, whose house in Carlyle Square is also a miniature resplendent museum of art. Personally, I’d rather take in a few paintings in a leisurely fashion than go roller skating past the acres of art in a great museum. In Sir Osbert’s comfortable little sitting room with its long French windows one can revel in the glorious Tiepolo in oils hanging over the fireplace, then turn to the Brueghel Judgment Day with its infinite detail and sardonic humor. On the side wall hangs one of the loveliest Raphaels in London; and of the drawings, the many, many drawings, I shall never forget Tiepolo’s Death of Punchinello and Piper’s exquisite wash draw ings of Montegufoni.

I remember my friendly hours with Jock Murray, whose publishing offices in Albemarle Street are more historic and full of character than any others I have seen. The brass name-plate says simply MR, MURRAY, and as one climbs the sweeping stairs to enter the Directors’ Room and Library, nothing seems to have changed since the days when Byron came here. The walls are covered with portraits of distinguished authors — Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Lockhart, Washington Irving, Disraeli, Charles Darwin—but Byron’s is the spirit which predominates: you see him in bust and in portrait; you see his boots with the pathetic leaded lining for his game foot; you see his letters and accounts and the yard-long tress of Teresa’s hair, still lustrous after more than a century.

I remember my first impressions of White’s, where I had been taken by Philip Astley, and where the ghosts and legends of the past blend with the gay vitality of the present. I remember the wonderful good humor of my lunch with Stephen Potter at the Savile; his incomparable book, Gamesmanship: The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating, has soid over 35,000 copies here, and he is now at work on a second volume, from which I have chosen two chapters for the Atlantic, one on Woomanship, the other on Conversationship.

I remember my leisurely, illuminating talks with my friend Dick Creswick, the University Librarian at Cambridge; with John Carter, the bibliophile who did such a brilliant job in tracking down the forgeries of Thomas Wise; and with John Hayward, the literary adviser to the London Sunday Times, and an editor who can be at once critical and encouraging.

Meantime I have been reading manuscripts. First The Scarlet Sword, H. E. Bates’s new novel, which is laid in the Vale of Kashmir — a story of the violence which descends upon a tiny Catholic mission as the Pathans swoop down on the Hindus and whites who have gathered for sanctuary within its stucco walls: a story which has had its counterpart in fact. The book, of course, will not be published for some months either here or in America; yet it is so timely that I look forward to its appearance under our imprint.

Next came the rumor that John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, was at work on an account of his experiences as a writing man, and after some scouting I heard his voice on long distance, and was given the assurance that the manuscript would be on its way to my London hotel.

Stephen Spender stopped by to leave with me the hundred manuscript pages of the autobiography which he has in progress, and from which I hope to draw some striking episodes for the Atlantic. And from Collins, the publishers, came the page proofs of Robert Henriques’s new big novel, Through the Ealley, a capacious, warmly-lit story of England before the war and after, which will be a Book Society choice for June, and which I shall review next month in these columns.

In London, as at home, the same forces and difficulties are to be felt in the world of letters. There has been a marked overproduction of books: last year Britain published a total of 17,034 titles, of which only 5000 were reprints. This is the largest number of English books ever to be printed in a single year, and far exceeds the number which we have produced for a population three times that of Britain.

I must add, alas, that many of these English books were printed in editions which have not found anything like the demand expected. Here there is not such a marked concentration on the best-sellers as handicaps American publishing. Actually, there are no lists of best-sellers published in England, but I notice that certain of the big newspapers — the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail — make much of the Book of the Month, and I am sure that a good deal of prestige and sales value is attached to Lord Kemsley’s annual award of a thousand guineas made through the Sunday Times for the “most outstanding contribution to English literature.”

The first award was conferred upon Sir Osbert Sitwell for The Scarlet Tree; last year it went to Winston Churchill for his history, and a subsidiary award was made to Alan Pat on for his novel of South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country. For the unestablished author, I think the best incentive is held out by the Somerset Maugham Awards, which enable a writer to live and write for a year away from England, and which thus far have signalized that remarkable collection of short stories, Innocence, by A. L. Barker, the novels by P. H. Newby, and the grim, powerful short stories by Nigel Kneale, who comes from the Isle of Man.

At the moment four volumes of nonfiction are being read here with steadily increasing interest: Eastern Approaches by Brigadier Eitzroy Maclean, a soldier-traveler whose audacity reminds me of T. E. Lawrence; I Leap Over the Wall by Monica Baldwin, a spirited, sincere account of a return to the world after twenty-eight years in a convent; Sir Kenneth Clark’s perceptive book on landscape painting; and the admiring biography of Rommel by Desmond Young, which has sold 150,000 copies and which reflects the undying interest of every British household in the North African campaign.

Thus far, I have found only one children’s book which I wish I could bring back home with me for publication: it is Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor by Mcrvyn Peake—this story of a gay, disreputable pirate and how he was captivated by an endearing Yellow Creature makes irresistible reading-aloud for children from five to eight.

I have also had a number of very happy moments with A Guide to the Use of English by Sir Ernest Gowers, entitled Plain Words. It is a small pamphlet put out by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, and has been reprinted ten times since April, 1948.

Like Sir Ernest I as an editor have had to deal with many kinds of English: United Nations English, punctilious and diplomatic; Psychiatrist English, which employs for the simplest thoughts the longest words; Sports Page English, which I relish and which Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune writes better than anyone else; Professorial English, which can be very lugubrious; and Legal English, which is too often shop talk for a vested interest.

Sir Ernest Gowers has himself a good time prying into the elements, the correctness, and the absurdity of such idioms. Like the brothers Fowler and Ivor Brown, he brings sanity back to the use of words. He reminds us of Edward Lear’s prayer to “the gods who keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads,” and he adds, “Why do so many writers prefer pudder to simplicity? . . . Children show no signs of it.” Here, for example, is the response of a child of ten to an invitation to write an essay (its genuineness is guaranteed) on a bird and a beast: —

“The bird that I am going to write about is the Owl. The Owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

“I do not know much about the Owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the Cow. The Cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cowdocs it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a line sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

“The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not cat much, but what it eats it cals twice, so that it gets enough. When if is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.”

Gentlemen, let that be your model!