The Books Nobody Reviews
by PHILIP M. WAGNER
I
LET me begin by excusing the ladies and gentlemen of the “Atlantic Bookshelf” for their failure to notice my latest book, A Wine-Grower's Guide, containing chapters on the past and future of wine-growing in America, the management of a vineyard, and the choice of suitable wine-grape varieties. They also failed to review its several predecessors. I used to be a book-reviewer myself, and still am on occasion; and I know what they are up against. If these omissions were sins, let them take comfort from the fact that, save for a few inexplicable exceptions, they shared these sins with the editors of all the best Bookshelves from coast to coast. For them all, blessings and forgiveness.
I am thus free with my forgiveness because, in a sense, Mr. Knopf and I planned it that way. I had been badgering him for some years to let me write a book for him on the rosy future of wine-growing in America. I had facts and figures, and the evidence of my own small vintages, to show that the future is fairly rosé not only for California, where most of our present wines come from, but for many other parts of the country as well. Mr. Knopf had doubts that such a book would be a highly profitable venture (and so had I). Doubtless, over the years . . . but he couldn’t see much in the way of an immediate market. Nor could I.
But then, one day in the summer of 1944, he let slip a remark to me that proved his undoing. His besetting problem was paper. The paper shortage being what it was, he could imagine no calamity greater than to be caught with a howling best-seller.
“What I want,” said Mr. Knopf, “is good sound books, even brilliant books, that will have no sale in the beginning but will add luster to my permanent list and sell modestly but steadily for years to come.” I saw my opportunity. Once again I outlined the book on wine-growing which I had in mind, and assured him that it would (1) not embarrass him by becoming a best-seller, (2) add luster to his list, and (3) sell modestly but steadily for years to come.
Mr. Knopf reflected upon these arguments, and at length concluded that they had merit. “Touché!” he said, in French. So then it was up to me to write the book; and this, the subject matter being familiar to me in all detail, I did in a couple of months of noon hours. Mr. Knopf found a patient lady to correct my capitalization, my place names, and my literary allusions; and in due course the book appeared, nicely printed as all his books are, and containing only one typographical error that I know of. And in one respect, my most sanguine expectations have been exceeded, for I had feared a smattering of notices written by persons who didn’t know what they were writing about. Instead of a smattering of uninformed reviews, the book has had, practically speaking, no reviews at all.
Which brings us to the interesting question, Why do the book-reviewers not review the books that they do not review? Or, to put it in a sentence less confused by negatives, Why do they review the books that they do review?
No honest book-reviewer likes to answer this question, however it is put. He doesn’t even like to think about it. He doesn’t like it any more than the newspaper editor, confronted by the indignant representatives of a worthy but neglected cause, likes the recurring question, What is news? He doesn’t like it because, when he seeks to provide a rational or at least a plausible answer, he invariably finds himself involved in a mass of contradictions and inconsistencies and is driven ultimately to the unpalatable conclusion that he doesn’t know what he thinks — about book-reviewing or about much else. I can say this with some assurance, because for a space of five or six years I had to manage a weekly page of book reviews; and on the last day of this chore I was as unsure of my object as I was on the first.
A conscientious book-reviewer has many troubles. These troubles arrive in every mail, in neat brownpaper packages, from the publishers; and they have their ultimate origin in the mysterious impulse that makes people write books about so many different things. If only people would confine themselves to revaluations of Henry James and the Brontë sisters, and first novels, all would be well. But they don’t. And even when the reviewer has numerous assistants at his beck and call, apparently embracing among them every conceivable human interest, he is constantly being unhorsed by high-minded and deserving volumes on such subjects as, let us say, The Hormones in Human Reproduction.
I single out the excellent little book which bears that title because, as it happens, my own experience with it. (in the days when I had to put together that book-review page) throws some light on the troubles of book-reviewers generally. Its author is Dr. George Corner, the urbane and distinguished embryologist; and I agonized a good deal about his little book when it came in. After all, Dr. Corner is a Baltimore man; and one of the few fixed rules in the science of bookreviewing, provincial book-reviewing at any rate, is that books by local authors are News.
A month or two after his book had been published, Dr. Corner wrote me, more in sorrow than in anger, to inquire why it was that we had not noticed it. He had written it, he said, out of a firm conviction that responsible medical men could best counter medical misinformation by taking the trouble to write careful books themselves. Yet his book hadn’t even been noticed in his home town!
My reply was both courteous and candid. We had not reviewed the book because neither my fellow drudges nor I had felt competent to. I pointed out to him that we should be only too happy to publish reviews in the field of sound medical popularization if only we could persuade some sound medical men to write them. I ended with a tactful appeal to his better nature; which is to say that I invited him to become our occasional medical book-reviewing drudge. This he consented to do, with the result that for a number of years our book-review page was exceptionally strong in medico-biological subjects.
2
BUT only infrequently is there a Dr. Corner just around the corner. Thus it happens that most “special” books, including many a book which the reviewer himself suspects to be a very good book of its kind, are pushed aside to await the day when the public library is invited to haul the accumulation away. Having thrust these worrisome books out of sight, the reviewer then turns with a sigh of relief to the things which interest him — indeed which nine times out of ten first lured him into bookreviewing. We all know what these are: literary criticism, fiction, poesy, biography, philosophy of the easier sort, history, and an occasional crossroads book (Education at the Crossroads, Democracy at the Crossroads, Science at the Crossroads — books with titles like that) to give him the feeling that he, too, like other journalists, has his finger on the pulse of the times.
All honest book-reviewers will recognize this as a just statement. Most of them will admit that if they were deeply interested in the role of hormones in human reproduction, or in plant geography, or in the application of statistics to social research, they would not be book-reviewers. They are interested in writing as writing, and in books about writers and writing, and in books about books about writers and writing. These seem to them to be more important than books whose only connection with writers and writing is the fact of their having been written. Gradually, and quite unconsciously I am sure, the things which interest your book-reviewer become, not more important, but important tout court — and whatever else appears between covers becomes, therefore, unimportant. There is a book-reviewers’ category for such books. It is “miscellaneous.”
Perhaps I am unjust; but I think not. Let me illustrate by reference to an interesting list of books which was compiled and recently published in the Nation by that capable and conscientious bookreviewer, Miss Margaret Marshall. (I choose this list not for any lack of admiration for Miss Marshall but simply because it is at hand; any similar list would do as well.)
Miss Marshall’s list is compiled in response to the request of a soldier lately returned from the wars for a list of “the more important” books published during his exile. She compiled it on the reasonable assumption that “there must be many others who are wondering which books, of the thousands published since they went away, are worth their attention ” (Italics supplied.) She adds that the list “is limited to the humanities — after all, there’s a war off.” Then follows a carefully considered choice of titles, broken down into the usual categories but not including the category “ miscellaneous.”
Within its limits, an admirable list: on that, all who have seen it will agree. But do these categories represent the limits of the humanistic tradition? is nothing else in the way of books “worth the attention” of the humane ex-soldier? Or is it, perhaps, that all unconsciously Miss Marshall has come to identify the “miscellaneous” with the unimportant ?
“Literature” and “the humanities” are large words. As used by book-reviewers, too often they become synonymous with printed essays in the Higher Tripe. Properly considered, they embrace a whole lot more. What I drive at will be made clearer perhaps by reference to another list, a list of great books, or classics, which has had some attention in the press. This is the “List of Great Books” which was compiled for the use of students at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
St. John’s has come in for a good deal of criticism for being too narrowly “bookish” in its approach to education. A good many have found it hard to believe that youths who are fed on an exclusive diet of great literature can possibly develop into balanced individuals capable of assuming roles of leadership, and leading the Good life, in the Good Society which (they hope) is in the offing. Life is too miscellaneous for that.
But such critics only reveal that they have succumbed to the book-reviewers’ special notion of what is literature. If we take the trouble to examine the St. John’s list of the great books, conceived to be the clotted cream of all the literature which has nourished the tradition of humanism, we are driven to an astonishing conclusion. We are driven to conclude that a very large proportion of these books are not litcrature. A good many of them, if published today, would, I fear, be consigned by book-reviewers to the category “miscellaneous,” and forgotten.
Let us look at a few of the titles. There is Euclid, expounding geometry; and there is Strabo on geography. Would Miss Marshall have included these in her list if they had been published lately? Harvey writes On the Motion of the Heart and Gilbert On the Loadstone; Boyle contributes the Sceptical Chymist; Virchow his Cellular Pathology; William James his Principles of Psychology; and Galen his work On the Natural Faculties. All eminently miscellaneous subjects. The St. John’s list even has room for a piece of miscellany called the Constitution of the United States.
I venture to guess that not one of these titles, had it been first published last year, would have found its way into Miss Marshall’s list. Her list did not find a place for that contemporary document which is called, in English, “The Charter of the United Nations": how then can we suppose that it would have included the Constitution of the United States? She did not find room for the Smyth Report on nuclear fission; would she, as a book-reviewer, have judged that such miscellaneous items as On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, by Aristarchus, and On the Revolutions of the Spheres, by Copernicus, were worth the attention of those who value her judgments?
No. Her five-foot shelf of latter-day classics has room for Black Boy, and Mr. Henry Miller’s Sunday After the War, and l x 1, by E. E. Cummings, but not for the Constitution of the United Nations or the Smyth Report. Yet as the stream of literature flows grandly along, which will ride the crest and which will be stranded presently on the banks? The bookreviewer’s judgment does not accord with the judgment of the generality of humane men.
3
THUS it turns out that the book-reviewers, the professional fishermen of the literary stream, have as a class a rather narrow notion of what is worth fishing for. They concentrate their attention on the smelts and the sardines, the seasonal run of herring, and the endless shoals of cod, and disregard the rarer species as being too difficult to handle and requiring special equipment, until finally they forget the very existence of these rarer species. Sometimes they even overlook a Whale.
Can anything be done about this; Ought, anything to be done about this? Probably not. Our literary fishermen are not by temperament explorers. They are a body of modest and diligent craftsmen who stick to the fishing banks they know. Their calling is a hard one, their rewards are slender, and they dare not come back empty-handed. Let us not ask them, as they steer their craft through great billows of verbiage while the words of the last previous bestseller scream through their rigging, to desert the straight course for Gloucester. Enough if they can keep a firm grip on the tiller!
And besides, the rarer fish, the good “miscellaneous” books, have an uncanny way of reaching the people who want them. There is a curious tropism which turns the book to the man and the man to the book; and it is functioning constantly, quietly, between millions of volumes and millions of men. Publishers are aware of this phenomenon, and respect it: they are always discovering that a most unlikely little title needs only a reprinting to go quietly about its business for another five or ten years.
Any publisher will name you dozens of such books, well-fashioned, sturdy, pretty nearly indestructible — so nearly indestructible that, even when one of them is “superseded,” it has a good chance of survival. If it lives long enough it presently slips unnoticed from the category of “miscellaneous” to the category of “classic.” The oldest, connected work in Latin that is still extant is just such a miscellaneous title: Cato’s still-useful treatise on the management of a farm. Some of those books in the St. John’s list achieved their metamorphoses in this way.
But at the moment I am thinking less of those which have by their great age achieved classical respectability than of those books, infinite in number, which occupy a halfway ground between miscellaneousness and classicism. I will give you two such titles offhand. One is W. W. Rouse Ball’s Mathematical Recreations and Essays. It was published in 1892 and has been reprinted so often that the publishers have lost count. Is it still miscellaneous, or is it a classic?
Another, as rich in allusiveness and entertaining digression as it is in precise exposition: E. HeronAllen’s book on fiddle-making past and present. Anyone who habitually ventures in his reading beyond the Grand Banks of the book-reviewers can summon up his own examples of the kind of book I mean. Not a year passes but a few such books slip quietly into print, to stay there indefinitely. The reviewers rarely spot them. But it makes no difference whether they are noticed by the reviewers or not. If they have the sturdiness and vitality that I speak of, they find their readers and their readers find them.