Why I Gave Up Being a Literary Editor

A One-Time Chronic Book-Reviewer Reveals the Secret Tragedies of His Soul

JOHN V. A. WEAVER

THREE years in succession—and fortytwo weeks each year. An average of ten books reviewed each week; four hundred and twenty books in a year—twelve-hundred and sixty books, more or less—probably more, pored over and analysed during what are popularly known as "the best years of your life". The mere figures, there in black and white, cause me the most acute distress as I look at them. And what these figures connote—

When I became Literary Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, I congratulated myself. "Such a delightful position—working among things I like—books; just reading them and saying whether I think they're good or bad; only three columns a week to write, a little executive work—plenty of time left to do my own stories, poems and all the rest of it. Weaver, my boy, this is what is technically known as easy fruit."

HERE are the details of my disillusionment!

I selected for my literary column, the title, "Personally Conducted"—not a bad one, I thought. It was to be an individual expression of my individual reactions, "the adventures of a soul among written masterpieces". What it actually became was a series of reviews, interlarded with literary nifties and bits of personal news about the authors of the day. Not a difficult program.

But—

The strain of trying to be honest, of not allowing personal acquaintance with Gerald Soandso or Mary Whosthis to influence me, either by a desire to say something flattering about a friend, or to put an enemy upon the pan! Many a page have I torn up and re-cast entirely, through fear that the author's personality might have swayed my typewriter ever so slightly. And then—the variety of books treated! In one week three or four novels, all dealing with utterly dissimilar subjects and from completely different points of view; a book of adventures in wildest Africa; another dealing with the mountains of Southern Hindustan; a collection of literary essays; a Broadway stage success in print; the memoirs of some old English backstairs gossip; the joys of hunting sagehens in Northern Michigan; a volume of verse by a lad—who was palpably copying Edna Millay, Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay;—and another volume of verse by a Greenwich Village maiden—imitating Vachel Lindsay, Sandburg and Edna Millay.

Yes, that paragraph was full of dashes, a sure sign of hysteria. And who would not be hysterical at the remembrance of that daily effort for three years to maintain a fresh point of view, to permit neither the manner nor the material of one author to be carried over into the consideration of the next; the nerve-racking task of giving each man his due; of measuring, solemnly and fairly, and then expressing myself sensibly and, if possible, entertainingly. Oh, that catch-word, "the personal touch"! To analyse a book from a cool, impartial, critical standpoint and then express my views in a "style of brilliant informality".

To be bright without being flippant; smart without being smart alec. How many hours of agony have I spent in painfully wading through Harold Bell Wright or Zanc Grey, determined to conquer my conviction that their novels are more or less tripe, seeking in them that something which assures them devotees by the million; endeavouring vainly to say a good word about them which might remove from my own conscience the uncomfortable suspicion of being a "literary snob".

And, on the other hand, when confronted

with the deep rhythms, the great tenderness of a.man like Conrad, to wrestle with the longing to instill into that dimly-perceived creature, "the average reader", some of the lift that the Polish writer brought to my own soul.

TO be "bright"—and yet fair. That was the greatest problem of all. Many are the struggles I have had with myself to explain at decent length just why a certain piece of work was really bad, rather than to clench my teeth and dismiss a whole novel with the savage remark, "James Oliver Curwood has written another story of the great Northwest. Why?" Or, on the other hand, to limit the number of "greatest novels of the year" to one a month, and to manufacture new ways of saying it.

One of my co-labourers once pleasantly remarked that the publisher's advertising men always left the phrase "The best book of the season: John V. A. Weaver" set up in standing type and then merely substituted the name of their new book for their old one. I hope that my friend was merely facetious; and yet I realise that, in about every thirty, a book would come along which would afford me such a thrilling relief from mediocrity, that I launched into wild hosannas of praise. Thank heaven, I do not need to curb my enthusiasms now.

Of course I do not mean to say that there were no oases in the desert. Even though my life, outside of the time spent writing and "having a good time", was filled with books,— books on the subway, propped against the waterbottle at lunch, in bed, before closing my eyes, yes, and even books carefully placed in the soap-rack during the bath—I do not mean that there were not numerous rewards, quite other than the occasional detection of an entertaining or worth-while story.

There were the letters from authors.

Every so often I would receive a few lines from some author whose book I had recently discussed; more often than not I had written a review which approved in part, but disapproved, perhaps, even more. But he, or she, would say, "Even though you didn't like my book as much as I had hoped you would, it is immensely pleasant to discover someone who understands what I'm driving at and who sees through the words to me". Something like that would make me catch my breath and send a glow through me. I would know that a mysterious contact had been established, beyond any which could happen through actual personal acquaintance, because of what the author had written and of what I had felt about his work.

AND the letters of denunciation!

If authors who mail to critics virulent missives of the "You big bum—what tha hell do you know about books?" order (expanded into three pages) only knew the savage joy they furnish to one who has earnestly and painstakingly tried to give them a square deal, they would turn their efforts into other channels.

Then, there were the protests from members of the culture-trust, who said I was an ignoramus because I did not like the products of the Dial-Little Review group; and the protests from dear old ladies who, because I considered Cytherea not a bad piece of work, and Ben Hecht a writer of some importance, accused me of fostering "all that is rotten in literature".

There were the advertising managers—several of them—who blandly refused to give our paper any advertising unless I first gave visible proof that I liked the books they published.

There was the poet of whose works I confessed an abysmal ignorance who thereupon sent around to every newspaper and magazine in greater New York a lengthy attack on me, with requests for publication in full. This particular incident brought me no end of publicity; for it happened that the poet was a great favourite among the devotees of a certain highly organized religion; and I found within two weeks violent editorials in five sectarian organs with large circulations, which editorials demanded in full chorus the "removal of this upstart who boasts that he is unfamiliar with the works of our great Brooklyn poet, whose ode on the commemoration of the Soldiers and Sailors monument will never die". (I purposely withhold names in gratitude for the large laugh I was handed by this little occurrence.)

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But the prize note, the one which I keep pressed between the leaves of my thesaurus, I received after I had reviewed a book by Thomas Dixon—a wild outcry against the Ku Klux Klan.

As I remember it, my review attempted a jesting note; the theme of it was that the best way to treat the Klan was to laugh at it, since it seemed to be an organization of bad little men who just wouldn't grow up, who loved to dress up in pillow-slips and frighten Hebrews and cullud pussons. Well, sir, only two days elapsed before I received a hand-printed letter, stating that since I was a miserable hackwriter who would never get anywhere, anyway, I was trying to gain some notoriety by attacking the only constructive organization in America; obviously I wanted the country to be run by an alien minority; and, dirty foreigner that I was, why didn't I go back to where I came from? This billet doux was signed "Kamerican".

I resisted the impulse to point out in print that my ancestors on one side were burghers of the village known as Nieuw Amsterdam, back in the late sixteen-hundreds, and on the other side were recruited from some Scotch-Irish who fled religious persecution and helped to found a settlement called Carolina.

I remained silent and treasured the note.

There were other thrills—the privilege, as representative of a great newspaper, of talking with Masefield, Swinnerton, and Conrad, and many other famous personages. And the scramble over discoveries. The fun it was to print the first review ever printed of Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise under the heading, A New Star on the Horizon. Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence, and Guedella's Napoleon III—these are three among the dozens of books for which, I believe, I banged the first American drum. The row with Mencken over his excellent work, The American

Language, (it is to the discussion of that book, and the subsequent encouragement of that irritable but charming critic—still to my mind, the finest influence in contemporary native letters) that I owe the needed impetus for my work as a versifier. Contacts, and meetings of that sort were high spots in my life and these I shall miss sorely.

I shall be sorry too not to be holding a critical position when another American poet comes along—if such a happening is possible—comparable to Edna Millay. What genuine joy it was, (those how many years ago?) to march along with F. P. A., Louis Untermeyer and Frank Crowninshield, and blare blast after blast of praise for her, until the chorus had grown to include the public at large, and Miss Millay was established where she rightfully belongs, at the head of American poetry today.

Also I shall miss the kick of coming across, after days of searching among the week's literary junk, golden nuggets like the Galapagos of William Beebe, the So Big of Edna Ferber, Hergesheimer's Balisand, Thomas Beer's Stephen Crane, Dale Collin's Ordeal, Talk by some Emanie Sachs, another Julie Cane from some rival of Harvey O'Higgin's. These remembered blessings come to my thoughts out of last year's books, and there were many more.

It is all past and gone now. There are plays, novels, articles and short stories which I have sworn a great inward oath to pound out, for better or worse.

I shall now no longer spend my energy in perusing the works of other authors. I shall hereafter, praise be to Allah, talk about no man's work but my own.

I shall in short become an author.

So, dear readers and book lovers, to others I must leave the task and the glory of becoming your literary mentors. To your Sainte-Beuves and your Brouns; your Macaulays and your Canbys; your Taines and your Prousts; your Croces and your Menckens I commend you.

Me? I am on my way to the great open-mouthed spaces, where men are realtors.

California, here I come!