The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE mortality rate in magazines has always been high, and veterans which led the held in their heyday, like Godey’s Lady’s Book, The Century, and the Youth’s Companion, lost their hold partly as the result of unalert, editing and partly because of the ever changing taste. Our newspapers, on the other hand, have been cut down by the process of consolidation since 1929, 40 per cent of the newspapers in the United States have either closed up shop or been merged into newspaper chains. The hazards of publication were never greater than they are today; and while the publisher must contend with rising costs and the ever perplexing problem of circulation, his editor must contend with a volume of news and a complexity of ideas demanding the most careful interpretation. In the face of this challenge it is good to be able to salute two great journals which have the distinction of a century of uninterrupted publication: the New York Times, which began its hundredth year on September 18, and Harper’s Magazine, which celebrated its Centennial in its special issue for October.

The approach of the Times’s birthday first occurred to the printer when he came to set the type for the volume-number line on the front page and found he had to use the Roman numeral C. It might be amusing to take a look at Volume 1, No. 1, that four-page sheet which went on sale in New York City on September 18, 1851. The first issue of the Times had no foreign news on the first page, and the entire financial news, including Stock Exchange transactions, filled less than a quarter column. What really was important was the story from Boston about the lion. Daniel Webster; Phineas Barnum was in Rochester exhibiting Jenny Lind and his circus elephants; preparations were being made for a hanging at the Tombs; and a Bloomer Costume had made its appearance in Sixth Avenue. The editorial page after apologizing for uneven printing expressed this modest intention: “We publish today the first number of The New York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come.”

It was in just such an atmosphere as this that the Harper brothers published the first issue of their new monthly in 1850. The Centennial Issue of Harpers Magazine is a large-scale performance which was planned months in advance: the editors were to have two hundred pages for text and illustration, and one of the ablest of the staff, John A. Kouwenhoven, set himself to read the 1205 back issues of Harper’s to note the shifts in the editorial policy. Meantime the Advertising Department was working to fill a quota of one hundred pages, and fill it they did, with copy keyed to the occasion and often as interesting as the text. When the Santa Fe System reprints its timetable of 1876, or when we see the first letter Mark Twain punched out seventy-six years ago on a Remington Model 1, or the jingle Sapolio used in its advertisement in 1901, we read every word with amusement.

Frederick Lewis Allen, the editor, has been on the staff of the magazine since 1923; be was serving as an assistant to Lee Hartman when in 1930 he began the writing of his first book, Only Yesterday, a new form of social history as entertaining as it was sensible. Mr. Allen has a refreshing gift for reappraising the past, and this he has capitalized in developing the themes of the Centennial Issue.

The first theme poses the question. What were the most notable and human changes in American life, 1850 to 1950? Russell Lynes examines the changes in Taste, and Mr. Allen himself makes a superlative analysis of the biggest change of all: the coming and the disciplining of American industrialism. Mrs. Roosevelt in her pithy article shows that “Women Have Come a Long Way”; Hartley Grattan sifts through the century of books with a pleasant blend of authority and guesswork, and his preferences are stimulating; Gerald Johnson, the new sage of Baltimore, reminds us of the Villains of the era; and Wolfgang Langewiesche, the magazine’s articulate aviator, describes the changes on the American contour, seen from the air. In the mid-section are seventy-nine old-fashioned illustrations drawn from earlier issues and showing the phases through which the country and the magazine have passed.

The secondary theme is of course the development of Harper’s as an expositor and leading spirit in American thought. Here there was the danger that the extolling of a long record might grow monotonous, and to avoid it the editor called on two contributors who could not possibly write a dull or insincere paper: Elmer Davis, who as a boy recovering from a long illness had been educated on the bound copies of the magazine, and Rebecca West, who is admirably qualified to tell us how the magazine has looked to the English. Her essay is a beauty, appreciative and in some points critical. She observes that “the issues published between 1861 and 1865 contain fewer references to the Civil War than one might expect,” and that “it was possible to open an issue published during the first year of the first world war and find no single reference to the crack which had split time from side to side.” The defense for the first is that Harper’s Weekly, rather than the Monthly, was assigned to the graphic coverage of the Civil War. But the only explanation for the second charge is that the editor, Henry Mills Alden, had been kept in office far too long. -Just as age brought Scribner’s to the graveyard, so the fifty-year editorship of Mr. Alden brought Harper’s to its lowest point in 1919. Wo who are in the saddle take note.

There are questions in my mind as I look up from this handsome big issue, questions which apply to the Atlantic too. From 1850 to 1865 Harper’s climbed to a circulation of 110,000 copies; today it averages 150,000. Has the loyal intelligentsia in America increased so little proportionately? Harper’s, like the Atlantic, has been consistently nonpartisan, and I applaud the independence of its editors. I realize that they continue to be so in these high-tempered days at the risk of losing subscribers and advertising. One hears today of capital in search of a publication which will bespeak the conservative view and nothing else. Is a magazine then to feed but never disturb the complacency of one’s convictions? Are we as a people beginning to lose our keenness for the competition of ideas which made this country great? With all my heart I hope not. I hope that Harper’s will never lose the strength to criticize, to be independent, and to be loyal to those standards Fred Allen has defined so well. I hope that, like the New York Times, it will pledge itself to live on for an indefinite number of years.

Novels about artists and writers, in particular, are hard to bring to life. Somerset Maugham is one exception who has proved the rule in our time, in The Moon and Sixpence, he based his story on Gauguin’s life in the Pacific, Critics and readers of Cakes and Ale mistook his character Edward Driffield, “the grand old man of English letters,” for Thomas Hardy, but rightly saw Hugh Walpole in Alroy Kear, the popular novelist and lecturer in the book. Nevertheless, Cakes and Ale is so alive, the satire in it so sure, that the story can he enjoyed with or without malicious twists of identification.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the personification of the Jazz Age and the author of The Great Gatsby, the best novel of the Prohibition era, has come back into critical favor; during the thirties he was demoted as a gilded writer with no “message,” whom it was almost immoral to read. But this midwinter will see the publication of a remarkably fine biography of Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener, and now in a new novel. The Disenchanted (Random House, $3.50), Budd Schulberg tells the story of a reckless, romantic American novelist with many of the’ aptitudes and misfortunes of E. Scott Fitzgerald. The swift success of his stories and the expensive adventure of his marriage were followed by his hard drinking and his fast-piling debts. His life and talent became disorganized and he ended in Hollywood, pegging away on scripts and repaying old debts at the rate of $800 a week.

This is the tragic deterioration which Mr. Schulberg depicts for us at the Hollywood end. Only in flash-backs do we glimpse that Byronic quality and that dynamic egotism which Manley Halliday, the hero of The Disenchanted, brought with him to New York. Instead, what we see is a gray-faced and very tired man who is old before his time, who is trying to keep away from alcohol, and who has little patience and no interest in the chores for which Hollywood is paying him. Halliday, is teamed up with a young collegian writer, and they go East to collaborate on a picture to be called “Love on Ice,” which has something to do with the Carnival al Webster. (For Webster, road Dartmouth.) On the plane. flying East, HAlliday begins to drink. In New York, now well lit, he has a gruesome, pitiable scene with his ex-wife, and so continues on his last long party, which is to end in the hospital. It is indeed disenchanting, not to say depressing.

Mr. Schulberg has a ferocious knowledge of Hollywood, and his satiric portraits of Milgrim, the producer, and Al Harper, the agent, are sharp and amusing; so too is his rendition of Hollywood sweettalk. But these incidents cannot divert the mind from the realization that this is essentially a dreary story. Personally I never really believe in Halliday is ability as an author: the novels he is supposed to have written are mere confect ion, their lilies are meaningless, and the interpretation of their content leaves me cold. Secondly, I believe it was a mistake to begin the story with a character so far gone. Ilallidav is so defeated, so world-weary in his final stages, that I had to whip up my determination to read about him. Before the book begins he has lost the power to evoke our sympathy, and the young collegian who explains him to us never had it.

I, who delight in animal stories, recommend as the most affectionate and remarkable of this year’s crop Elephant Bill by Lieut. Colonel J. H. Williams (Doubleday, $3.00). In the First World War, Colonel Williams learned a great deal about camels in the Camel Corps and a good deal more as a transport officer in charge of mules. After this advanced course in animal husbandry, he signed up with the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, who did their lumbering of teakwood with a herd of two thousand elephants. In time he came to be elephant doctor and trainer of these quick and intelligent creatures and of the Herman oozies who sit on the elephants’ heads.

Colonel Williams gives us a fascinating picture of the Asiatic elephant at work, at play, and on the loose. He tells of the courtship, “the maternity ward,” and how it is that tigers still kill 25 per cent of all calves; he tells of the six years it takes to educate an elephant; he compares men and elephants (“They live about as long as one another and come to maturity at much the same age”); he shows what a twenty-five-year-old can do in the teak forests; he tells us of their speed, their wonderful sureness of foot, their humor when they are deliberately teasing their masters; he tells how the elephants soldiered in the Burma Campaign against the Japs and of how, like Hannibal, he himself led forty-five of them on an incredible trek up and over 6000-foot mountains. A book like this is balm for the mind.

Sequels are seldom as good as the original, especially in comedy. But I must say I have had a very amusing time reading Belles on Their Toes by Frank B. Gilbreth. Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (Crowell, $3.00). ’Their first book. Cheaper by the Dozen, was the family chronicle of the twelve children and of Dad and Mother Gilbreth, who were the originators of motion study and who applied their efficiency system to their own youngsters with unexpected results. Mr. Gilbrelh died in 1924, leaving Mother to carry on the firm and the education of the clan, and so, in the second volume, we are treated to the children’s efforts to economize while they were doing for themselves at Nantucket, bossed by Anne, the eldest (she was eighteen), and Tom, their resourceful Irish cook. Tom disliked the English, and the day on which he walloped the fat behind of the neighbors’ English cook was a golden one in his calendar. Such scenes as Tom’s day in court, Ernestine and her first cigarette, Martha’s homemade bathing suit. Mother outfitting the six boys before they go off to school (“Let’s see,” she said, reading from Ernestine’s list, “five suits, fifteen neckties, twenty suits of underwear. . . .”), were made to be read aloud for the delectation of other, smaller families.