THE NOVEL DEHYDRATED

...I wish that some publisher would be foolish enough to contemplate bringing aut these same ten books, uncut, with .Henry James' Art~~o] Fiction as a ait face, so that a few more readers t.ight learn how close to each other lie the .artistic sense and the moral sense, .t.-.ght contemplate the call to another a.-der of success in James' words: "Be generous and delicate...

...Indeed, all this prefabricated skipping condescends not only to the reader, but to the author...

...Melville's* great work encourages downright silliness, but this I think is unapproached in the annals of whacky interpretation...

...We are face to face with the traditional English English concept of "art" as somehow tricky and harmful, passed on from hand to hand in an underground tiadition of middle-brow "criticism," from the author of the Orange Girl to the writer of The Razor's Edge...

...Of that difficult uneven but irnmerfsely intriguing Pierre...

...He wants finally to convince us that they are all Bestsellers—to reduce their particularity, their achievement to an inexpiable accident, having no relation to devotion ( r craft by insisting only on the qualities they share with Gone With the Wind...

...Maugham's cutting...

...The text of the preface is: "the wise reader will get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them [the ten great novels] if he learns the useful art of skipping...

...There must then be another, deeper purpose behind Mr...

...IT IS AT THIS POINT that he is most blatantly disingenious...

...Maugham is not satisfied however, to tell us that the greatest writers < f novels have no art...

...I dare quote from James' essay, for surely if it were known as well as it deserves to be, so shameful a performance as this could, never find a pubished or reader...

...He has contributed short stories and crticism to Partisan Review, New Directions, and other magazines...

...We remember uncomfortably that ours has not really been an age which preferred the slim volume...

...Maugham tells us in passing, that it "might be the invention of a schoolgirl of fourteen who had nourished her neurotic mind on the worst kind of romantic fiction...

...It does not appear that they ever sought to impress by their subtlety or startle by their originality...

...The novelist, in this simple view, becomes the yarnspinner...

...Of the discourse on the whiteness of the whale central to the whole meaning of Moby Dick, we are told it is "absurd" and should be cut...

...HERE IS AN EGREGIOUS CASE in the history of the decline of a culture—a book purportedly written to persuade a larger public to read ten good novels, which is in actuality an apology for betraying serious literature and a dissembled revenge upon it, by a man who has turned deliberately to the manufacture of best-sellers...

...Walter - Besant, the well-known author, it may not be remembered even by those who know that Maugham wrote CataUna, of The Orange Girl...

...the advocacy of skipping implies an active contempt for the "art" of fiction, a distrust of form...

...The great novelists] . . . have narrated events," explains Mr...

...Everybody skips...

...WE ARE PARTICULARLY disturbed, if we check his critical qualifications by examining closely his remarks on any of tho authors he proposes to chop down to size...

...Melville will do as an example...

...What a sense of power he must enjoy, the court of no appeal, the supereditor before whose blue pencil the great dead silently assent...

...Maugham, "delved into motives and described emotions without recourse to any of the literary tricks' which make some modern novels tedious...

...and they are moreover priggish and paradoxical and superfluous...

...Read as a confession, this is a terrible and pitiful book for all its superficial possibilities of comedy, a commentary on the irony of literary success in our time, which can live at ptece with itself only by mutilating and parodying the eminent figures of the past...

...Not only are the books straightforward, but their authors, too, re (like Maugham himself one assume 0 normal straightforward men...

...Johnson ct d in disgust one hundred years Of'o, "Nothing odd can long endure...

...His publishers have already begun to bring out under his auspices a series Of ten pre-cut books...

...They were, he says, explaining their lack of initial success, toe original for their public, but three pages later'he tells us that great books never seek originality...

...Mr, Maugham tells us, "but to skip without loss is not easy...

...THE SCISSORS is not always mightier than the pen, however...

...Maugham notes in passing that he has had to drop Protest's Remembrance of Things Past from his original list, for even with its psychology and philosophy removed (much of it, we are informed has already been proved "erroneous...

...Between a foreword and post-script are sandwiched ten superficial biographies and fen thumb-nail estimates of the "ten greatest novels...

...and preferred his luxury in home-cobbled boots...

...Sixty-five years ago, Henry James wrote a prophetic rejoinder to this book, Mr...

...One would prefer to believe that this is all a deliberate hoax, some clumsy, well-intensioned scheme to kid the large public that reads Mr...

...But a moment later he is admitting that The Red and the Black, Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick began as dead failures, doubtless hoping that we have already forgotten that he has previously put the latter two books t.long with The Brothers Karamazov in a special sub-class as the best of the best...

...and we are warnjed, in advance, of what will go under the knife: "unnecessary discriptions", incidental narratives, and, of course, philosophy...

...Leslie A. Fielder teaches at Montana State University...

...in light of the popularity of such overgrown monsters as Anthony Adverse, Gone With the Wind and Raintree County...

...it still remains tpo long for the effort of which Maugham thinks the lay reader capable...

...in a snobbish aside, that he himself has read Don Quixote through without a single omission three times though he is quite prepared to cut it drastically for the "ordinary reader", who is looking only for "delight...

...Maugham's position lie various hoary and perilous assumptions, chiefly the strange concept of the detachable story"—for the denial of organic form implies the denial of integrity to the novel and encourages the removal of descriptions or "ideas" like so many diseased tonsils: while the absorbing story", in the most vulgar sense of the word, comes to be thought of as something discrete and independent of characters, tone etc...

...Trist'm Shandy is already dead...

...Once the great works of the past have been reduced from their sloppy oversize to a sleek and "reasonable" bulk, they will once more become the best-sellers we are elsewhere told they always were...

...and pursue the prize" Due to the length of Ely Culbertsch's review of lf Russia Strikes, by George Fielding Eliqt, it will be necessary to feature it in a later issue...

...Behind Mr...

...Maugham's point of view then being represented by Mr...

...Maugham has discovered that contrary to all previous opinion, Moby Dick has a happy ending, since Good (the White Whale) triumphs over Evil (Captain Ahab...

...Maugham is not, notice, merely urging us to skip as -we have to, to preserve our own precarious delight but he is ready to do our skipping for us, being as he modestly puts lit, "someone of taste and discrimination" . and therefore better able to do the job...

...one thinks of the "healthy" Tolstoy who desired his good times without tobacco, liquor and copulation...

...But the "critical" meat of the volume is in the two flanking essays: the first a defense of hacking down to "reasonable size" the masterworks of fiction...

...no ideas, no subtlety, no originality...

...Ti < y all 'puting aside the inconvenient > cttptions of Charlotte Bronte and Dostotvsky) relished nothing more than luxury, desired nothing more tl an1 hiving a good time...

...He does not really hiean quite everybody, for he tells us...

...or perhaps we are to take Xrisi n Shandy, which makes the second n of Mr...

...he begins, "have been best-sellers...

...The question of what "critical" means in this context is an intriguing one...

...All these books...

...the latter an attempted proof that all great works despise originality, eschew technique, pursue simplicity and are, in short Best-sellers...

...Maugham's theory seems absurd...

...It is difficult, however, to resist the conviction that Maugham is chiefly kidding himself, desperately driven to falsify the greatest literature ^nd its writers in an attempt to justify his own career...

...Artistic pre-occupations] . . . are too serious to be diverting...

...But to crown his insights...

...No novel, he argues, is perfect, an assertion we are all prepared to grant—but the corollary that Somerset Maugham is capable of perfecting with his little knife what the pen of Dostevsky or Flaubert could not achieve is more difficult to accept...

...In rather typical fashion, Maugham has smuggled it in between disavowals of any intent to discuss the "allegorical or esoteric" meaning of the book, for he is always eager to seem a plain man...

...Let us disregard the initial dishonesty of the jacket blurb which tells us that this is "perhaps one of the most critical literary works ever written...

...Sixty-five years later, the' skippers hare at last become articulate in this book, and we are not surprised to discover Henry James' analysis confirmed...

...That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself it were to become articulate...

...At least, thty nre always straightforward and "astonishingly simple"—as straightforward, one supposes, as Moby Dick, with its false starts and endless self-interruptions...

...Maugham into turning to those other great novelists, under the impression that they -are not queers after all, but good, solid fellows whose chief interest is making a buck...

...What the editor of Renders Digest feels free to do to the casual work of the run-of-the-mill hack, Maugham proposes to do to the greatest of all fictionists...

...Maugham, as a model, that simple book of which Dr...