My dear Walpole:
The facts, alas, confound you. During the past year I have reviewed
exactly 25 novels in “The Smart Set”, setting aside mere notices. Of
these, 7 were English and 18 were American. Of the English novels,
I anointed 3 with praise, or 43%; of the American novels, 9, or
50%. Two of the English novels I denounced as garbage, and 5 of the
American--28.5% and 27.7% respectively. Regarding two of the English
novels and four of the American I was in doubt--28.5% and 22.3%
respectively.
Certainly these figures show no chauvinistic bias. I receive about
350 novels every year--a great many more than any man could read. I
pick out for review those that seem most likely to be interesting or
significant. Is it remarkable that an American should find 2-4/7 times
as many of these among American books as among English books? What
English reviewer, in the other direction, shows a score so high, or
even half so high? Or so close a correspondence between the two series
of percentages?
The log-rolling I complain of has its chief scene in the United States,
not in England. It takes the form of extravagant efforts to promote the
American sale of books by Englishmen of a small group, most of them
bad. It is carried on partly by publishing houses dealing in English
goods, and partly by touring propagandists and literary bagmen. It is
aided by certain American journals that practise a puerile and slimy
Anglophilism. It has become a public nuisance, and when I deal with
it at all I treat it as such. The English opinion upon which it is
presumably based seems to me to be incompetent, and, in part at least,
disingenuous. It is a body of opinion that is ignorantly and incurably
anti-American.
I need not tell you, my dear Walpole, that when I chance to take a hack
at such a fraud it is done without the slightest messianic purpose. I
am entirely devoid of public spirit, and it would give me no more joy
to see log-rolling stopped than it would give me to see baptism by
total immersion stopped. But it diverts me to chase mountebanks, and so
I occasionally yield to the vice. Now you jump into the arena and get
in my way. Back to your place! Specifically, back to the bar under the
grandstand, where I’ll be delighted presently to join you and drink a
_Humpen_ with you, for you are not a mountebank but an honest artist
(as I have more than once declared in print), and you no more belong
among the zanies I pursue than I belong among the syndics of the Y. M.
C. A.
I refuse absolutely to talk about the American novel when I get to
England, or about anything else so depressing. But I have some amusing
scandal for you, and you may rest assured that I’ll not neglect your
Irish _Schnapps_.