Below the Book
Shuster, George N.
BELOW THE BOOK By GEORGE N. SHUSTER EVEN Mephisto, pledged to a series of resounding nays, would hardly question the immediacy with which social phenomena and literature interlock. He might very...
...But, assuming that we do yearn for such a culture, can anything be done ? Unquestionably it can...
...It supplies a magazine-reading public with literature it cannot find in magazines...
...and though some of these are drowned out in the furious roar of print, the best grow futile and shaky in so brief a while that, one concludes, a subtle form of spiritual laryngitis must be at work...
...Then the crowds of people eager to live nobly, with their gaze fastened upon that image of sacrifice which Christianity proposes as a clew to the destiny of man, went out to buy newspapers...
...Years ago McCready Huston used to talk, in his nice enthusiastic way, of a change in "literary taste" which was bound to bring a finer idealistic realism back into favor...
...Perhaps these facts mean something...
...There must exist an antecedent core of spiritual earnestness corporately manifested...
...These people are very much alive, intelligent and magnanimous, uniting a dash of irony with a genuinely religious earnestness in the true manner of cultivated men and women...
...And the reason...
...Our country is industrial, its mind and its belly are fed by business...
...Whether we actually want a Christian culture in the United States, is, of course, a question I shall not attempt to answer...
...He might very properly observe, however, that the literary effectiveness of any given form of social pressure depends upon quite arbitrary gusts of fashion...
...And the answer is very simple...
...Now, granted a vigorous Christian group-or let us say more specifically a vigorous Catholic group-such an earnestness and such an urge can be developed...
...Canby, we are informed, is presiding over an office force...
...We got the beginnings of a Catholic criticism...
...Differing from the newspaper as such quite as distinctly as the run of secular journalism differs from cultural writing, it would at present meet with little virile competition...
...I was led to consider the matter in the wake of a contrast between many people I had met in a great middle-western city and the newspaper which they read of a morning...
...As for the newspaper, it is lowbrow and arrogant, materialistic and self-satisfied-an advertising medium sprinkled with crime news, household hints and biased editorials...
...Now all these have gone to join the shades, with the periodicals which summoned them forth...
...that others would spend the rest of the morning poring over papers from which all pretense to intelligence or beauty had been vacuum-cleaned...
...This journalism does tingle with vitality...
...And it has been decreed that during November 90,000 odd folk will read a novel piping hot from Moscow...
...Overwhelmed by bickering and bravado, by moral crusades sundered from humble contemplation, by merely smart apologetic which rankles in the other man's bosom like a scimitar, the struggling human soul might well be tempted to creep aside and marvel in its shell...
...In the United States, for instance, nearly a hundred thousand Christian clergymen influence in varied ways the population of about one-half the country...
...Sometimes the evidence against the presence of any such desire seems pretty strong...
...Omit that and nothing can be done...
...But their speech (and so the speech of Christian civilization) reaches a deaf generation...
...Never a week goes by minus its prodigal supply of philosophies which are good enough for successful chaps and so can be recommended without a qualm to the bookkeeper...
...Well, McCready Huston is still waiting for the change...
...One's friends buy the thing out of sheer magnanimity...
...Anybody could...
...Mencken is working a favorite old mine to the last chunk of ore...
...I therefore return to the charge...
...While the poor old publishers are waddling around in a sea of brand-new volumes, wondering how to get to shore, the book club fastens the spotlight upon some one tome and solves the problem...
...Nor is this, in the very least, personal advertising...
...Time was when an octavo volume could change the world, and I believe that once in a while a novelist or philosopher is still effective in Europe...
...It can be done only by following the counsel of history and creating a literary journalism dedicated to the kindred interests of civilization and religion...
...Grant to me an active audience of 100,000 people for this kind of writing (and the figure is not higher than it ought to be) and I will create a Catholic literature...
...It is, in the Catholic field, once more a case of "Catholic Action...
...one's enemies borrow a copy to see if microscopic scrutiny will not reveal something construable as error--of theology or grammar...
...Mencken was drilling away jovially in the Smart Set...
...Nor is this situation at all specifically Catholic...
...And we got, as a result, the first real Catholic "movement" in American poetry...
...Let us consider, however, the more general fields...
...Because the book is now absolutely unimportant...
...Here in New York, an earnest letter from the beloved Cardinal was being read from many Catholic pulpits, warning against the perils of obscene books...
...A great deal better than the English magazines of the nineties, it puts the 'lowbrow press" in France or Germany to shame...
...Some of them write manfully themselves, and are read by one another with reverence...
...and Mr...
...Squeezing hard has never made a culture any more than boiling hominy has produced wine...
...Enshackled individualism only survives from once corporate effort...
...When you consider the numberless fledglings of the campus, at least relatively eager for morsels of learning, you might well suppose that a volume by Professor Haskins, or a new essay by Joseph Warren Beach, would run through more editions than the daily ticker...
...But he realizes quite as fully that the clergy could do more in a week for such a cause than he can in ten years...
...There must accompany it a steady urge to ascend the ladder of convictions...
...Not either by evoking an isolated scholar, though the scholar is vitally needed...
...To me it is inconceivable, at any rate, that American civilization should be the first to combine virility with inexpressive-ness...
...The laws of writing are evident and eternal...
...Even the Harper Prize has latterly gone to Julian Green, a Frenchman of sombre inclinations, who can possess scarcely a notion of those Pittsburgh smokes and Carolina shooting-matches in which the nation ought logically to hunt for its portrait...
...And I think that, in the long run, this will prove to be true: the more remote the club's choices are from the normal magazine-reading interests of the American public, the more successful they will be...
...And somewhere, of course, an ardent young spirit will thrill in response, little dreaming that its yearning to write a similar book, some time, will lead it fatefully astray from that career in bonds for which all substantial citizens are born...
...All the good-will of the clergy and the laity-even the hypothetical appearance of a hundred masterpieces-will mean nothing so long as they are without roots in active public opinion...
...For why should anyone believe that 300 pages of text, neatly bound in green or red, were destined to be of the slightest importance...
...But the truth about this journalism is that it cannot endure the test of book publishing...
...Yes, the absolute foolhardiness involved in the attempt to bring out anything between covers which should express the vitality of Christianity in America...
...BELOW THE BOOK By GEORGE N. SHUSTER EVEN Mephisto, pledged to a series of resounding nays, would hardly question the immediacy with which social phenomena and literature interlock...
...By building up a magazine journalism the products of which can endure a literary test...
...He knows that granted sufficient time, energy and money he could "advertise" this journalism widely enough to guarantee for it at least a tentative existence...
...But not by dropping a book into a herd of bewildered books...
...How, you will ask, shall we get a literature...
...Every single one of these mediums brought to light not merely a series of good editorials and essays, but a virile tendency in criticism, a new direction in the art of fiction, a poetry renaissance, a fresh and independent intellectual position...
...Canby's organization will doubtless publish none but foreign authors, eventually, instead of issuing a native product now and then in the current patriotic fashion...
...That is one reason why the book club is an eminently necessary cultural phenomenon...
...And I went off to think of the folly of writing a book for these people...
...Money alone can never bring such a reality into being...
...And the novelists...
...Within two generations this state of affairs has made itself abundantly evident in literature through the creation of a magazine journalism which is one of the marvels of history...
...We even got a national poet hero- Joyce Kilmer...
...During the years centered round the war, the Bookman and the New York Times Book Review welcomed definitely Catholic participation, because- for one reason-Rheims had been bombarded and "lovely old French things" were being admired...
...It is all a journalism possessing a vast amount of decorum mingled with a consciousness of the delights of sin and a thirst for pseudo-scientific bilge...
...But after all, I shall not malign the Middle-West...
...and yet all of their interest and sincere effort cannot avail against a steady stream of pagan books...
...Put these machine-made serials and homespun doctrines between covers, and even a stenographer can tell she is not getting her money's worth...
...We listen to many voices hopeful of accent...
...For the present it must suffice to say that all hopes for the emergence of a triumphant Christian culture, and all dreams of the victory over antagonistic philosophies, converge upon this point...
...He will wait, as far as I can see, until doomsday...
...Not so many years ago, Stuart Sherman was writing for the Nation, Van Wyck Brooks and his group were editing the Freeman, the Dial was publishing verse, and Mr...
...But it is sadly a matter of fact that most eminent authorities continue to help defray publishing costs- quite in the manner of poets, though these are fortunate sometimes and hit upon a benevolent bookman...
...These are now things of the past...
...I think it averages pretty high...
...The American book, bluntly speaking, has no bottom...
...Its fiction portrays the problems which are bothering John Henry, and outlines colorfully the temptations with which Susan is now and then beset...
...Education is in much the same plight...
...At this point, however, the layman pauses...
...A Catholic book club will thrive, for instance, if it picks works which are not identifiable with any hitherto known forms of Catholic literature...
...And one saw that many took with them sheets which have literally introduced pornography into daily American journalism...
...It is, however, the especial mission of this magazine to present points of view interesting to Christianity...
...Supply the literary journalism, basic to the book, and the foundations of success have been laid...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 2
