The Peripatetic Reviewer

A GOOD many changes have occurred in the American newspaper since 1900, and some of them are as familiar as the invention of the electric light bulb. Let me enumerate them very briefly.

The first and most irresistible change is the tendency toward bigness and consolidation. Forty per cent of the American newspapers in existence in 1929 have either closed up shop or have been consolidated into a newspaper chain, and the end of this process is not yet in sight. Ten years from now, one can predict with regretful certainty, there will be still fewer newspapers, still less competition among newspapers, and those which survive will have even bigger circulations.

The second change flows out of the first. The more newspapers are consolidated, the more uniformity you are bound to have in point of view, in content, and in appearance.

The third change is the loss of power of the editorial page, and the increased employment of columnists who with their differing points of view compete to fill that vacuum.

A fourth and certainly a major change is the wide use of syndicated material and the increasing power of the wire services. This has resulted in less individual newsgathering by the big metropolitan dailies. The Chicago Daily News is this month closing up its London office. The Christian Science Monitor is the only one of the profitable newspapers in Boston to maintain a Washington bureau today.

A fifth change is the general acceptance of the news handout, and the carefully controlled mass press interview as a prime basis of newsgathering. It is the lazy way of dishing up what you are expected to print, but I think we all sometimes wonder if it is the clearest way to the truth.

A sixth change is this: no matter how large the headlines may be, news stories and extras will never be as urgent as they were in 1900. Radio and television will always beat the press with the spot flash.

There have been a multitude of other changes in terms of popularity. Think of the enormous pull of the sports page, and of how the sports page has grown. Think also of how many people turn first to the comic strips. Do you know what a single, widely syndicated comic strip now earns for its artist? $250,000 a year. Again, think of the never ending speeches that have to be quoted and commented on today; yet when Lincoln was President, the Gettysburg Address was, I think, the only speech he made away from Washington.

Teddy Roosevelt discovered the emphasis of the Monday morning release; and I guess it was the Hearst papers which discovered that if you use banner heads day after day, as they did to alert us for the invasion of Europe in 1944, you eventually run out of words. When at last our troops hit Omaha Beach, you may remember that the Hearst papers were reduced to this simple headline: “THIS IS IT.”

Finally, there is the change which is still in progress, and still meeting with resistance — I mean the unionization of the editorial staff, a movement which the late Heywood Broun initiated in New York. I believe that history will regard this both as important and as progress.

A single example will show why I think this development was inevitable. In the final ten years of the Boston Transcript, the paper lost many millions. Even in “good” years it was running a loss of $1000 a day. The one reason — above all other reasons — why the Transcript was unable to survive was the abrupt ending of its financial advertising in 1930. It was an interesting revenue situation, in which the paper was deriving almost its sole support from the advertising of new securities issues. The business paid so well and was so easy to get that other advertising revenues, and important circulation problems, were more or less neglected. When its financial advertising dried up, there was simply nothing left.

In the lean years that followed, the editorial and news staff of the Transcript took one big pay cut after another: a single cut of forty per cent across the board on one occasion, a twenty per cent, and several tens. Men worked for whatever they could squeeze out of the arrangement, and a $35 a week salary was big money. But while all this was going on, the typographical unions took no pay cuts whatever, and there was not a single person in the whole news and editorial department, at one stage, who was getting as much money as the linotypers, and this included the editor of the paper. The wonder is not that the staff tried to protect itself by organizing, but that it waited so long before doing it.

I miss something else in the journalism of today, something which was gay and spontaneous. I mean the exciting, effervescent enthusiasm of the 1920s. I remember once seeing Bob Benchley, Aleck Woollcott, Heywood Broun, and Robert Sherwood walking together along 44th Street toward Fifth Avenue. Presumably they had been lunching together at the Round Table and were now on their leisurely way to work. “There,” said my friend, “goes the venerable body of criticism.” He was right. Those four could do more for the success of a book or a play or a film than any reviewers I can think of today. The times were serene; they wrote with gusto of what they liked and with equal devastation of what they didn’t.

It might be added that they were more successful with their likes than with their dislikes. When Woollcott went “quietly mad ” over James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the novel, which up to then had sold less than 5000 copies, went onto the best-seller list. So did Mr. Chips. But when Benchley did his best to squelch Abie’s Irish Rose he got exactly nowhere. The play ran for six years, and throughout that period Benchley s brief comments in Life held these nosegays: “Just about as low as good, clean fun can get”; “Where do the people come from who keep this going? You don’t see them out in the daytime"; “A year old this week, in Spite of all we could do.”

This “body of criticism,”together with F.P.A., the two Pembertons, Harold Ross, Peggy Wood and her husband John V. A. Weaver, Marc Connelly, Jane Grant and Ruth Hale, George and Bea Kaufman, Neysa McMein, and Dorothy Parker, formed the habit of lunching together at the Algonquin. Frank Case, who ran the hotel, reserved for them a large table toward the rear. Out of this at first casual but soon regular meeting place came the Vicious Circle and later its sporting annex, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, a poker game which began on Saturday afternoon and often ran straight through Sunday. The stakes were so high that Johnny Weaver, who had long begged to play, lost the entire royalties of his book In American in a single evening. And when someone had made a foolish play it was customary for the other players to stand up and, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “He Remains an Englishman,” solemnly warble, “He rema-AINS a goddam fool.” All this and other details (which I shall be quoting for some days) have been garnered from Margaret Case Harriman’s entertaining volume, The Vicious Circle (Rinehart, $3.00), which Al Hirschfeld has illustrated and which I have read with nostalgia, some familiarity, and almost continnous chuckles.

The use of the divining rod goes back centuries. Scientists scoff; skeptics cry “hokum,” “superstition,” “delusion”; but thousands believe that in t he hands of certain sensitive individuals a forked stick will turn downward, sometimes violently enough to break, when the dowser walks over underground water. Geologists explain the phenomenon by saying that if you dig far enough you are bound to hit the water table. Psychologists attribute the motion of the stick to subconscious muscular contractions in the dowser. Physicists suggest that water dowsers may be human radio sets that pick up electromagnetic waves and fields of force. Despite all the unbelievers, Kenneth Roberts is sure that in the hands of a skilled dowser the rod is invariably accurate. He does not know why or how the rod works, but he knows that it does; and in Henry Gross and His Doicsing Rod (Doubleday, $3.00) he gives a documented account of the fantastic success of his game warden friend from Biddeford, Maine.

Henry Gross first discovered that he could find water at the age of twelve. The school he went to in North Salem, New Hampshire, needed a well, and Henry offered to help the school committee find a good spot. The diggers were skeptical but humored the boy, and sure enough, they hit water just where Henry said they would. When Henry was eighteen he moved to Biddeford. Word got around that his rod worked pretty well, and by the time he had been a game warden for ten years, he had dowsed hundreds of wells throughout southern Maine.

In the summer of 1947 when the forest fires were sweeping down from the north in the midst, of a severe drought, Kenneth Roberts asked Henry to help him find a water supply sufficient to enable him to fight the fire when it hit his Kennebunkport farm. Over the next two years Roberts followed the development of Henry’s skill with increasing interest. Henry could tell you not only where to dig for water, but how deep you had to dig, and how much water your well would produce. And he was always right. From Biddeford, in 1949, he found a permanent, unlimited water supply in Bermuda, while geologists steadfastly maintained that there was no uncontaminated fresh water anywhere on the island; from Bermuda he located water in Vermont; from Roberts’s Kennebunkport home he dowsed for water on the Isle of Capri. “What difference does it make why the rod works as it does?” Roberts asks. “It does work, and it’s high time that scientists accepted that fact and put it to proper use.”

The detective-story technique makes this a frustrating book at times, and I think Roberts is unnecessarily testy about what he calls the Closed Mind. But even so, Henry Gross’s incredible adventures with the dowsing rod are exciting reading, and Kenneth Roberts has made them wonderfully persuasive.

Ireland, that oasis of delightful country living, is the scene of James Reynolds’s romantic novel, The Grand Wide Way (Creative Age Press, $3.00). The author calls it a happy novel about happy people and so it is. Back from India where he has been playing polo and gathering materials for his first book comes Johnny Lassitter, a six-foot bachelor in his late twenties. Glanoran, his grandmother’s lovely house in Connaught, is his beacon and he returns to a life of horses, hunt balls, giddy servants, tinkers, and gypsies, to the wise guidance of his grandmother, and to the love of pretty Honor Bellcastle. He is in love with Honor in a week; they picnic, buy tweed for their trousseaus and horses for their fun, go to steeplechases and dances it is like a happy ballet, with never a thought of war.

Mr. Reynolds is a master architect of these Irish country places. He brings them alive. His book is full of Irish humor, informed with affection, and musical with a dialect which makes English conversation seem stiff and mannered in comparison. The plot has little propulsion; it is the characters who draw you forward: the snoopy, kindly, ruddy butler, Tomas; the wicked little cairn terrier Bridgie, who throws things into thesea; the heavenly twins Mark and Maeve; the beautiful steeplechaser, Accolade; Kitty, Honor’s trull of a sister; and, dominating the story, Mrs. Gillshandon, Johnny’s grandmother.

Jenkins’ Ear (Macmillan, $3.50) is an elaborate and leisurely historical novel cast in the eighteenthcentury style by Odell and Willard Shepard. The story comes to us in the form of an extended letterchronicle from Horace Walpole to his intimate friend, the Reverend William Cole, and it tells of the people and events which took Strawberry Hill by surprise during a week in October, 1755. “Horry” is entertaining his friend John Chute, the keen, elderly Whig, his cousin General Conway, George Selwyn, the clubman and wit, and Kitty Clive, the actress, when suddenly their circle is disturbed by the appearance of some strange horsemen and a mysterious Parson Blandison who imposes himself on the party with dark hints that he is the Young Pretender. Blandison and his boys stay for a week telling many adventurous tales about the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and Horry, as he listens, wonders if all this is real and treason. So do I. I think the story, which has much of natural vigor, is handicapped by a lack of direction and slowed by the too self-conscious mannerisms of the narrator.