on the fingers of one hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I
think this is conclusive.
Mr. BOYNTON: Oh, decidedly.
Mr. FOLLETT: But I put him in my book on modern novelists, all of whom
were hand picked.
Mr. GALSWORTHY (_with much calmness for one uttering a terrible
heresy_): Perhaps that’s the difficulty, really. All hand picked.
Do you know, I rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to
withdraw. (_And he does._)
THE CLERK: Herbert George Wells!
Mr. WELLS (_sauntering up and speaking with a certain inattention_):
Respecting my long novel, Joan and Peter, there are some points that
need to be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah by Joan. Petah
is a sapient fellow. He is even able to admire the Germans because,
after all, they knew where they were going, they knew what they were
after, their education had them headed for something. It had, indeed.
I think Petah overlooks the fact that it had headed them for Paris in
1914.
The point that Oswald and I make in the book is that England and the
Empire, in 1914 and prior thereto, had not been headed for anything,
educationally or otherwise, except Littleness in every field of
political endeavor, except Stupidity in every province of human
affairs. And the proof of this, we argue, is found in the first three
years of the Great War. No doubt. The first three years of the war
prove so many things that this may well be among them; don’t you think
so?
Without detracting from the damning case which Oswald and I make out
against England it does occur to me, as I poke over my material for a
new book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eating so the proof
of a nation at war is in the fighting. Indisputable as the bankruptcy
of much British leadership has been, indisputable as it is that General
Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns and vast
stores of ammunition, it is equally indisputable that the Australians
who died like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the Tommies
who were shot by their own guns at Neuve Chapelle went forward like
heroes, that the undersized and undernourished and unintellectual
Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders gave up their immortal
souls like freemen and Englishmen and kinsmen of the Lion Heart.
And if it comes to a question as to the blame for the war as
distinguished from the question as to the blame for the British conduct
of the war, the latter being that with which _Joan and Peter_ is
almost wholly concerned, I should like to point out now, on behalf of
myself and the readers of my next book, that perhaps I am not entirely
blameless. Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the terrible
responsibility which I have showed some unwillingness to place entirely
and clearly on Germany.
For after all, it was Science that made the war and that waged it; it
was the idolatry of Science that had transformed the German nation by
transforming the German nature. It was the proofs of what Science could
do that convinced Prussia of her power, that made her confident that
with this new weapon she could overstride the earth. I had a part in
setting up that worship of Science. I have been not only one of its
prophets but a high priest in its temple.
And I am all the more dismayed, therefore, when I find myself, as in
_Joan and Peter_, still kneeling at the shrine. What is the cure for
war? I ask. Petah tells us that our energies must have some other
outlet. We must explore the poles and dig through the earth to China.
He himself will go back to Cambridge and get a medical degree; and if
he is good enough he’ll do something on the border line between biology
and chemistry. Joan will build model houses. And the really curious
thing is that the pair of them seem disposed to run the unspeakable
risks of trying to educate still another generation, a generation
which, should it have to fight a war with a conquering horde from Mars,
might blame Peter and Joan severely for the sacrifices involved, just
as _they_ blame the old Victorians for the sacrifice of 1914-1918.
Mr. HOWELLS: In heaven’s name, what is this tirade?
Mr. BROWNELL: Mr. Wells is merely writing his next book, that’s all.
(_As it is impossible to stop Mr. Wells the court adjourns without a
day._)
BOOK “REVIEWING”
IV
BOOK “REVIEWING”
On the subject of _Book “Reviewing”_ we feel we can speak freely,
knowing all about the business, as we do, though by no means a
practitioner, and having no convictions on the score of it. For
we point with pride to the fact that, though many times indicted,
a conviction has never been secured against us. However, it isn’t
considered good form (whatever that is) to talk about your own crimes.
For instance, after exhausting the weather, you should say pleasantly
to your neighbor: “What an interesting burglary you committed last
night! We were all quite stirred up!” It is almost improper (much worse
than merely immoral) to exhibit your natural egoism by remarking: “If I
do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday was a particularly good job!”
For this reason, if for no other, we would refrain, ordinarily, from
talking about book “reviewing”; but since Robert Cortes Holliday has
mentioned the subject in his _Walking-Stick Papers_ and thus introduced
the indelicate topic once and for all, there really seems no course
open but to pick up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful
way.
2
Book reviewing is so called because the books are not reviewed, or
viewed (some say not even read). They are described with more or less
accuracy and at a variable length. They are praised, condemned, weighed
and solved by the use of logarithms. They are read, digested, quoted
and tested for butter fat. They are examined, evalued, enjoyed and
assessed; criticised, and frequently found fault with (not the same
thing, of course); chronicled and even orchestrated by the few who
never write words without writing both words and music. James Huneker
could make Irvin Cobb sound like a performance by the Boston Symphony.
Others, like Benjamin De Casseres, have a dramatic gift. Mr. De
Casseres writes book revues.
3
Any one can review a book and every one should be encouraged to do it.
It is unskilled labor. Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a
week, working only in their spare time, like the good-looking young
men and women who sell the _Saturday Evening Post_, the _Ladies’ Home
Journal_ and the _Country Gentleman_ but who seldom earn over $100
a week. Book reviewing is one of the very few subjects not taught by
the correspondence schools, simply because there is nothing to teach.
It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect safety. Write for
circular giving full particulars and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567
standard phrases indispensable to any reviewer--FREE.
In reviewing a book there is no method to be followed. Like one of the
playerpianos, you shut the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or
write) _by instinct_! Although no directions are necessary we will
suggest a few things to overcome the beginner’s utterly irrational
sense of helplessness.
One of the most useful comments in dealing with very scholarly volumes,
such as _A History of the Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical
Enterprises_ by Jacob Jones, is as follows: “Mr. Jones’s work shows
signs of haste.” The peculiar advantage of this is that you do
not libel Mr. Jones; the haste may have been the printer’s or the
publisher’s or almost anybody’s but the postoffice’s. In the case of a
piece of light fiction the best way to start your review is by saying:
“A new book from the pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome.” But
suppose the book is a first book? One of the finest opening sentences
for the review of a first book runs: “For a first novel, George
Lamplit’s _Good Gracious!_ is a tale of distinct promise.” Be careful
to say “distinct”; it is an adjective that fits perfectly over the
shoulders of any average-chested noun. It gives the noun that upright,
swagger carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have.
4
But clothes do not make the man and words do not make the book review.
A book review must have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than
the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a backbone and a bite. It
must be able to stand erect and look the author in the face and tell
him to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the Authors’ League
will build one of these days after it has met running expenses.
Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary book in four lines and
a semi-colon. Unusual books drain his vital energy to the extent of a
paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square inch.
He makes it a point to have one commendatory phrase and one derogatory
phrase, which gives a nicely balanced, “on the one hand ... on the
other hand” effect. He says that the book is attractively bound but
badly printed; well-written but deficient in emotional intensity; full
of action but weak in characterization; has a good plot but is devoid
of style.
He reads all the books he reviews. Every little while he pounces upon a
misquotation on page 438, or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do
not read the books they review may chance upon such details while idly
turning the uncut leaves or while looking at the back cover, but they
never bring in three runs on the other side’s error. They spot the fact
that the heroine’s mother, who was killed in a train accident in the
fourth chapter, buys a refrigerator in the twenty-third chapter, and
they indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the heroine’s mother’s
whereabouts after her demise. But the wrong accent on the Greek word in
Chapter XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological impulse which
led the hero to jump from Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July they
miss it entirely and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding
to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The fact is, of course,
that he did a Steve Brodie because he found something obscurely hateful
in the Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking to his work on
the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the
buildings limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept asking: “Why
_don’t_ they get a gold filling for that cavity between the Singer and
Woolworth towers?” And he would ask himself despondently: “Is this what
I live for?” And gradually he felt that it was not. He felt that it
might be something to die about, however. And so, with the rashness
of youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas Hardy irony came into
the story when he was pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda’s
affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the magnificent steam yacht
_Chuggermugger_.
So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put backbone into it. Read
before you write. Look before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial;
and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and when you praise, praise
with faint damns. Be all things to all books. Remember the author.
Review as you would be reviewed by. If a book is nothing in your life
it may be the fault of your life. And it is always less expensive to
revise your life than to revise the book. Your life is not printed from
plates that cost a fortune to make and another fortune to throw away.
“Life is too short to read inferior books,” eh? Books are too good
to be guillotined by inferior lives--or inferior livers. Bacon said
some books were to be digested, but he neglected to mention a cure for
dyspeptics.
5
But when we say so much we have only touched the surface of a profound
matter. The truth of that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be
plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It can only be written
about or around. It is insusceptible of such handling as is accorded a
play, for example.
A man with more or less experience in seeing plays and with more or
less knowledge of the drama goes to the first performance of a new
comedy or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him in speech and
motion and color. It is acted. The play, structurally, is good or bad;
the acting is either good or bad. Every item of the performance is
capable of being resolved separately and estimated; and the collective
interest or importance of these items can be determined, is, in fact,
determined once and for all by the performance itself. The observer
gets their collective impact at once and his task is really nothing but
a consideration afterward in such detail as he cares to enter upon of
just how that impact was secured. Did you ever, in your algebra days,
or even in your arithmetically earnest childhood, “factor” a quantity
or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91, but after some mental
and pencil investigation you found that it was obtained by multiplying
13 by 7. Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was produced; it was
produced by multiplying 13 by 7. You had reviewed the number 91 in the
sense that you might review a play.
Now it is impossible to review a book as you would factor a number or
a play. You can’t be sure of the factors that make up the collective
impact of the book upon you. There’s no way of getting at them.
They are summed up in the book itself and no book can be split into
multipliable parts. A book is not the author times an idea times the
views of the publisher. A book is unfactorable, often undecipherable.
It is a growth. It is a series of accretions about a central thought.
The central thought is like the grain of sand which the oyster has
pearled over. The central thought may even be a diseased thought and
the pearl may be a very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at
least, for all that. There is nothing to do with a book but to take
it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs, scalpel and curette, chisel
and auger--smashing it to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and
cleaving through the layers of words and subsidiary ideas and getting
down eventually to the heart of it, to the grain of sand, the irritant
thought that was the earliest foundation.
Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and wickedly destructive;
it may uncover something worth while and it may not; naturally, you
don’t go in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a general thing
you take a book as it is and not as it once was or as the author may,
in the innocence of his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have
intended it to be.
6
Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human being, for a book is
alive; ordinarily the only justification for it is the chance of
saving life. If the operator can save the author’s life (as an
author) by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The fate of one
book is nothing as against the lives of books yet unwritten; the
feelings of the author are not necessarily of more account than the
screams of the sick child’s parent. There have been such literary
operations for which, in lieu of the $1,000 fee of medical practise,
the surgeon has been rewarded and more than repaid by a private letter
of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks. No matter how hard up the
recipient of such a letter may be, the missive seldom turns up in those
auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph Letter with Signature)
sometimes brings an unexpected and astonishingly large price.
7
There is a good deal to be said for taking a book as it is. Most books,
in fact, should be taken that way. For the number of books which
contain within them issues of life and death is always very small. You
may handle new books for a year and come upon only one such. And when
you do, unless you recognize its momentousness, no responsibility
rests on _you_ to do anything except follow a routine procedure. In
this domain ignorance is a wholly valid excuse; no one would think
of blaming a general practitioner of medicine for not removing the
patient’s vermiform appendix on principle, so to say. Unless he
apprehended conclusively that the man had appendicitis and unless he
knew the technique of the operation he would certainly be blamed for
performing it. Similarly, unless the handler of new books is dead sure
that a fatality threatens Harold Bell Wright or John Galsworthy or Mary
Roberts Rinehart, unless the new book of Mr. Wright or Mr. Galsworthy
or Mrs. Rinehart is a recognizable and unmistakable symptom, unless,
further, he knows what to uncover in that book and how to uncover it,
he has no business to take the matter in hand at all. Though the way of
most “reviewers” with new books suggests that their fundamental motto
must be that one good botch deserves another.
Not at all. Better, if you don’t know what to do, to leave bad enough
alone.
But since the book as it is forms 99 per cent. of the subject under
consideration this aspect of dealing with new books should be
considered first and most extensively. Afterward we can revert to the
one percent. of books that require to go under the knife.
8
Now the secret of taking a book as it is was never very abstruse and is
always perfectly simple; nevertheless, it seems utterly to elude most
of the persons who deal with new books. It is a secret only because it
is forever hidden from their eyes. Or maybe they deliberately look the
other way.
There exists in the world as at present constituted a person called
the reporter. He is, mostly, an adjunct of the daily newspaper; in
small places, of the weekly newspaper. It is, however, in the cities
of America that he is brought to his perfection and in this connection
it is worth while pointing out what Irvin Cobb has already noted--the
difference between the New York reporter and the reporter of almost
any other city in America. The New York reporter “works with” his
rival on another sheet; the reporter outside New York almost never
does this. Cobb attributed the difference to the impossible tasks that
confront reporters in New York, impossible, that is, for single-handed
accomplishment. A man who should attempt to cover alone some New York
assignments, to “beat” his fellow, would be lost. Of course where a
New York paper details half a dozen men to a job real competition
between rival outfits is feasible and sometimes occurs. But the point
here is this: The New York reporter, by generally “working with” his
fellow from another daily, has made of his work a profession, with
professional ideals and standards, a code, unwritten but delicate and
decidedly high rules of what is honorable and what is not. Elsewhere
reporting remains a business, decently conducted to be sure, open in
many instances to manifestations of chivalry; but essentially keen,
sharp-edged, cutthroat competition.
Now it is of the reporter in his best and highest estate that we would
speak here--the reporter who is not only a keen and honest observer but
a happy recorder of what he sees and hears and a professional person
with ethical ideals in no respect inferior to those of any recognized
professional man on earth.
There are many things which such a reporter will not do under any
pressure of circumstance or at the beck of any promise of reward. He
will not distort the facts, he will not suppress them, he will not put
in people’s mouths words that they did not say and he will not let
the reader take their words at face value if, in the reporter’s own
knowledge, the utterance should be perceptibly discounted. No reporter
can see and hear everything and no reporter’s story can record even
everything that the observer contrived to see and hear. It must record
such things as will arouse in the reader’s mind a correct image and a
just impression.
How is this to be done? Why, there is no formula. There’s no set of
rules. There’s nothing but a purpose animating every word the man
writes, a purpose served, and only half-consciously served, by a
thousand turns of expression, a thousand choices of words. Like all
honest endeavors to effect a purpose the thing is spoiled, annulled,
made empty of result by deliberate art. Good reporters are neither
born nor made; they evolve themselves and without much help from
any outside agency, either. They can be hindered but not prevented,
helped but not hurt. You may remember a saying that God helps those
who help themselves. The common interpretation of this is that when
a man gets up and does something of his own initiative Providence
is pretty likely to play into his hands a little; not at all, that
isn’t what the proverb means. What it does mean is just this: That
those who help themselves, who really do lift themselves by their
bootstraps, are helped by God; that it isn’t they who do the lifting
but somebody bigger than themselves. Now there is no doubt whatever
that good reporters are good reporters because God makes them so. They
aren’t good reporters at three years of age; they get to be. Does this
seem discouraging? It ought to be immensely encouraging, heartening,
actually “uplifting” in the finest sense of a tormented word. For if
we believed that good reporters were born and not made there would be
no hope for any except the gifted few, endowed from the start; and if
we believed that good reporters were made and not born there would be
absolutely no excuse for any failures whatever--every one should be
potentially a good reporter and it would be simply a matter of correct
training. But if we believe that a good reporter is neither born nor
made, but makes himself with the aid of God we can be unqualifiedly
cheerful. There is hope for almost any one under such a dispensation;
moreover, if we believe in God at all and in mankind at all we must
believe that between God and mankind the supply of topnotch reporters
will never entirely fail. The two together will come pretty nearly
meeting the demand every day in the year.
9
Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem to hear murmurs. What
has all this about the genesis and nature of good reporters to do with
the publication of new books? Why, this: The only person who can deal
adequately and amply with 99 new books out of a hundred--the 99 that
require to be taken as they are--is the good reporter. He’s the boy
who can read the new book as he would look and listen at a political
convention, or hop around at a fire--getting the facts, getting them
straight (yes, indeed, they do get them straight) and setting them
down, swiftly and selectively, to reproduce in the mind of the public
the precise effect of the book itself. The effect--not the means by
which it was achieved, not the desirability of it having been achieved,
not the artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not
anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or a deduction, however
obvious--just the effect. That’s reporting. That’s getting and giving
the news. And that’s what the public wants.
Some people seem to think there is something shameful in giving the
public what it wants. They would, one supposes, highly commend the
grocer who gave his customer something “just as good” or (according to
the grocer) “decidedly better.” But substitution, open or concealed, is
an immoral practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobility of intention
can take it out of the class of deception and cheating.
But, they cry, the public does not want what is sufficiently good, let
alone what is best for it; that is why it is wrong to give the public
what it wants. So they shift their ground and think to escape on a high
moral plateau or table land. But the table land is a tip-table land.
What they mean is that they are confidently setting their judgment of
what the public ought to want against the public’s plain decision what
it does want. They are a few dozens against many millions, yet in their
few dozen intelligences is collected more wisdom than has been the
age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the other sons of earth.
They really believe that.... Pitiable....
10
A new book is news. This might almost be set down as axiomatic and not
as a proposition needing formal demonstration by the Euclidean process.
Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we shall demonstrate
accordingly.