Part 3

Mr. BOYNTON: Just as I feared. My dear fellow, while we should like to be helpful and will endeavor to give you advice to that end it must be done unobtrusively ... current reviews ... we’ll compare your work with that of Hawthorne and Hardy or perhaps a standard Frenchman. That will give you something to work for. But you cannot expect us to say anything definite about you at this stage of your work. Suppose we were to say what we really think, or what some really think, that you are the most promising writer in America to-day, promising in the sense that you have most of your work before you and in the sense that your work is both popular and artistically fine. Don’t you see the risk?

Mr. HERGESHEIMER: I do, and I also see that you would make your own reputation much more than you would make mine. I write a story. I risk everything with that story. You deliver a verdict. Why shouldn’t you take a decent chance, too?

Mr. FOLLETT: Why should I take any more chances than I have to with my contemporaries? I pick them pretty carefully, I can tell you.

Mr. HERGESHEIMER: I shall write a novel to be published after my death. There was Henry Adams. He stipulated that _The Education of Henry Adams_ should not be published until after his death; and everybody says it is positively brilliant.

Mr. FOLLETT (_relieved_): That is a wise decision. But don’t be disheartened. I’ll probably be able to get around to you in ten years, anyway. (_Mr. Hergesheimer bows and retires._)

CLERK PHELPS: John Galsworthy!

Mr. FOLLETT (_brightening_): Some of the Englishmen! This is better! Besides, I know all about Galsworthy.

Mr. GALSWORTHY (_coming forward_): I feel much honored.

COUNSEL FOR THE PROSECUTION: If the court please, I must state that for some time now Mr. Galsworthy has been published serially in a magazine with a circulation of one digit and six ciphers. Or one cipher and six digits, I cannot remember which.

Mr. BROWNELL: What, six? Then he has more readers than can be counted 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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