Living With Books

...he tells us, "for the details are often entertaining, even though their function may be trivial...

...Much fiction reviewing is not relevant in any sense...

...It also seems reasonable to ask that a review be devoted to the book in hand, not to some other topic that happens to interest the reviewer, and certainly not to some other book that the reviewer thinks the author ought to have written...

...There are Suez and Hungary, after all, to say nothing of a thousand other matters about which we feel obliged, either professionally or simply as good citizens, to keep ourselves informed...

...My indictment is that all too many reviewers are too ready to award greatness and immortality...

...He seemed to think that the two situations have nothing in common, but I don't agree...

...But it is possible to tell a thoughtful, perceptive review, even when one disagrees with its conclusions, from a shoddy review or a non-review...

...It should be clear that I am neither calling for uniformity nor deploring severity...

...It may be naive, but I believe that a book review is a review of a book...

...Streamlining has its dangers, and Father Gardiner is not at the moment my favorite streamliner...

...Books headed for commercial success are frequently given more space than they deserve...

...Because they are snobbish, yes...

...Like everyone else mentioned in the piece, I was sent proofs in advance of publication...

...Father Gardiner wrote: "But my charge is different from Mr...

...The natural abode of serious literary journalism is neither the newspaper supplements nor the highbrow quarterlies, but the middlebrow monthlies and the weekly journals of comment...

...Because they are unfair, yes...

...I wrote an article for The New Leader on the state of literary journalism in this country, with particular reference to the book reviews in the New Yorker...

...Wagner has said and I have admitted, are obliged to devote much of their space to popular novels, both because these are the novels in which the majority of their readers are interested and because they are the mainstay of the publishing business, to which such media are necessarily closely linked...

...Some editors and some literary journalists push against the current, but they have tough going...

...If we were to have a dozen competent reviews of a serious novel—and what a happy event that would be!—there would be large differences of opinion...

...Many a review that begins intelligently comes to nothing because the reviewer, probably out of some frustrated creative passion of his own, fashions an image of a different book and falls in love with it...

...I was not complaining because the reviews in the New Yorker are too strict...

...Most publishers, bless them, are willing to take a chance on one or two serious novels a season, but the book that keeps the firm in business is the book that can be sold to a slick magazine, to a book club, and to Hollywood...

...As anyone knows who compares blurbs and reviews, countless reviews are written of books that have not been read at all...

...There is no ready-made solution...

...I dislike the situation, but I cannot get as upset about it as Mr...

...It is unrealistic not to recognize that the Times Book Review has to take into account the tastes of its hundreds of thousands of readers, just as I, when I am functioning as a member of the board of trustees of the local library, have to take into account the tastes of our couple of hundred borrowers...

...at the outset of their careers, are good risks...

...The intelligent editor of a monthly or a weekly is likely to wish that he had space to review serious novels, just as his intelligent subscribers are likely to wish they had time to read them, but, as he and they say, what about Suez and Hungary...

...From a conceivable point of view, the extinction of our library, and perhaps the extinction of the Times Book Review, might be a fine idea, but if we are to survive both of us have to accept the fact that the majority of readers want simply to be entertained...

...Faulkner, and 1 can see no reason why I should be asked to try...

...And when I talk with my busy acquaintances, I find that many of them will agree in principle...

...In a world in which so many matters call for comment, books in general receive less and less attention, and books on current problems are given preference over novels...

...I resist the temptation to ask why Mr...

...one has to say that the serious novel is a processing of experience...

...What do we have a right to ask of reviewers ? First of all, I repeat, that they read the novels they review...

...Woolf in small passages...

...who write out of themselves and not for the market, who recognize that there is a craft to be mastered and are determined to master it...

...I am a student of literature, not an anthropologist, and I have better ways of spending the few years remaining to me...

...But what are we to make of Yvor Winters, writing in the current Hudson Review on "Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature...

...We cannot quarrel with Mr...

...it is enough if the reviewer, having certain elementary qualifications, has read the book carefully, has thought about it, and has taken the trouble to state his thoughts clearly...

...West are too strict in judgment—snobbishly and unfairly strict...

...But in reality the novel exhibits the most obstinate kind of vitality...

...But," they inquire, "how do I find out what novels are worth reading...

...He thinks that these matters are handled better in England, and perhaps by and large they are: but when I observe how easy it is for an American publisher to hang a garland of really impassioned trans-Atlantic praise on any British title he chooses to import, I suspect that the differences between London and New York are not vast...

...What the serious novelist does, through some combination of will and insight and craftsmanship, is to transform experience in such a way as to give it meaning...

...Wagner calls "the gee-whiz boys...

...And when Father Gardiner, to prove that there is "no odium nationalisticum," that English reviewers aren't just plain mean to all American books, cites British praise for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, he fails to convince me that British reviewing is stricter than American...

...If there are novelists who have something important to say to us, how does it happen that the audience for the novel is shrinking...

...The answer, I suppose, has to be the obvious one—the distraction of attention...

...Wagner would like to hear more from the former and less from the latter...

...Reviewers for these magazines sometimes operate on a double standard...

...it may be allotted so little space that even a competent reviewer cannot do justice to it...

...Both Father Gardiner and Mr...

...Wagner does...

...Making a sharp and invidious distinction between critics and book reviewers...

...I have talked about many of these novelists in the pages of The New Leader in recent years and have tried to show why their work is important...

...We have been sliding down hill for quite a time now, and we can work our way back only if there are individuals who are willing to make the effort...

...To quote from my article: ''By "serious I do not mean highbrow or erudite or profound or any thing like that...

...Among the reverberations was an essay in America by its literary editor, Harold C. Gardiner SJ, called—by some hard-pressed editorial assistant, I hope ?Fainting with Damn Praise...

...Hemingway, nor the inarticulate (though doubtless profound) Mr...

...The backs are likely to be turned, different backs for different reasons...

...is rich in experience, so rich that for most of us everything is blurred...

...West and some of the New Yorker's anonymous reviewers is that, a good deal of the time, they simply don't review the books they are supposed to be reviewing...

...In short, there is a widespread belief that, for one reason or another, the serious novel is expendable...

...Much of what Mr...

...Wagner has to say is true...

...I think that anonymity would encourage the incompetent reviewers and do nothing, one way or the other, for the competent ones...

...I doubt it...

...Neither he nor most of the critics with whom be quarrels in the course of his long article will ever have anything significant to say about the contemporary novel because they will not take the trouble to find out what is in it...

...I cannot tell people to forget about Suez and Hungary and read the novels of Saul Bellow and Wright Morris...

...The reviewer who can communicate the excitement he has felt in reading a particular book doesn't have to call it "terrific," "colossal" or even "great...

...The major book-review media, as Mr...

...That the Times operates on two levels seems to me on the whole encouraging, for if it operated only on one that level would have to be the purely commercial...

...I can easily make a list of twenty Americans under 50 whose commitment to the novel is sure and strong and whose claim upon our attention has already been validated, and there must be twenty more who...

...By definition, a serious novel makes demands on the attention of its readers, and the reviewer who is unable or unwilling to measure up to those demands disqualifies himself at the outset...

...As things are, the Times prints many serious reviews of serious books, and if it managed to print more I would forgive it the lenient or equivocal reviews of the books intended for mass entertainment...

...the meaning is what Bellow has known how not only to discover but also to communicate...

...If a reviewer is never excited by a novel, he simply shouldn't review fiction...

...A devoted and talented young novelist once said to me, "Every body's back seems to be turned when my books are published...

...In argument with a newspaper publisher, who defended New Yorker reviews on the ground that they are amusing, I inquired how he would feel about a reporter who said there had been three people killed at a fire because it would be dull to report that the blaze had never been out of control...

...I am not thinking of TV, which competes chiefly with commercial fiction, but of the innumerable demands made upon people of intelligence...

...No wonder...

...The critics also, most of them, have other fish to fry...

...but about men and women who believe in the novel...

...Wilson's preference for the classics, even though we may regret that talents once so fruitfully devoted to contemporary literature are no longer exercised in a field that badly needs them...

...What is more important, there is reading and reading, and much of what passes as literary journalism is carried on under conditions that make careful reading virtually impossible...

...Having cleared up that point, I can only acquiesce in Father Gardiner's indictment: There is a great deal of sloppy, uncritical reviewing...

...and yet, as I remarked last spring, it is possible for a novel of substantial merit not to receive a single review that is serious in that modest sense...

...In this situation, the serious and presumably unpopular novel takes its chances: It may not be reviewed at all...

...Mam second-rate novels, on the other hand, serious in intent but not in execution, succeed in reproducing experience but do nothing with it: such novels may be interesting in the way the daily newspaper is but are almost as ephemeral...

...Wagner have an idea that book reviewing would be better if reviews weren't signed...

...He thinks, if I may streamline his argument a bit, that the New Yorker and especially Mr...

...Third-rate books are often highly praised in such influential periodicals as the New York Times Book Review and the Saturday Review...

...My charge against Mr...

...The desperation Saul Bellow describes in Seize the Day, the desperation of the blind alley, is an experience that millions of men and women have had without learning anything from it...

...So far as one can generalize at all...

...I am not talking about great novelists, rare enough in any age...

...So we come back to our starting point, to the assertion that the reviewing of books, especially novels, especially serious novels, is a job that by and large is not done well...

...So far as fiction is concerned, I would further suggest that the reviewer ought to be capable of responding to a good novel when he comes across one...

...many a conscience would be clearer if it were indeed dead and didn't have to be bothered with...

...There is no set of standards to which all literary journalists subscribe, nor do I think there should be one...

...Much popular fiction has nothing to do with experience but is merely a mechanical manipulation of stereotypes, popular precisely because it is a release into non-experience...

...Winters expresses himself in such terms, and merely nolo that he has departed, has got up and gone, is no longer with us...

...I can read the later Joyce and Mrs...

...it may be handed to an incompetent reviewer...

...Because they are strict, no...

...I wish I could reply, "By reading book reviews," but, without a lot of qualification, I can't...

...This does not seem much to ask...

...There can be no easy answer...

...True responsiveness is very different from the pumped-up enthusiasm of those Mr...

...But there the characteristic pressures of our time are at work...

...The reviewer may, of course, find nothing to say except that the book wasn't worth writing, but at least this is a comment on the book and relevant if true...

...and who have already demonstrated that they have talent enough to justify their ambitions...

...I can only suggest that novels are important, too...

...Other backs are turned as well...

...The question of the leniency of American reviewers has also been raised by Geoffrey Wagner, British-born but now a resident of New York, in the winter issue of the American Scholar...

...I make no attempt to keep up with the younger American writers.' Edmund Wilson observes in A Piece of My Mind, "and I only hope to have the time to get through some of the classics I have never read...

...But I cannot read the neat but simple Mr...

...I think both critics and reviewers have their functions, but in any case, so far as serious fiction is concerned, the suggestion hasn't much practical value, for nobody's back is more resolutely turned to the contemporary novel than that of the typical literary critic...

...We live in a world that, whatever else may be true of it...

...There have never been, I am convinced, so many serious novelists in the United States as there are today...

...If I voted only for the books I like, the library would quickly go out of existence...

...The real point, as I was saying last May, is that there is so little responsible literary journalism, so little serious reviewing, especially of fiction...

...Hicks's...

...We are more and more frequently told that the novel is dying...