The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

SPEAKING from Hollywood, Mr. James M. Cain would set up an American Authors’ Authority, which would include authors, dramatists, screen and radio writers, and to which authors would assign copyrights on all their material. Mr. Cain, whose soapbox is of Hollywood platinum, is unquestionably sincere in his protest that some writers do not receive their fair share, and like Pelrillo he wants “to help the boys.”

The first of Mr. Cain’s novels,The Postman Always Rings Twice, was sold to the movies, and the author was attracted to California, where as a scenario writer his earnings, I should guess, have been not less than $1500 a week. His grievance is directed not so much against his salary as against certain studio practices—for instance, contracting far in advance for the work of a promising newcomer, or refilming (without fresh royalties) a story which had been sold to the studio outright; and last but not least, he objects to the enormous discrepancy between the author’s fee and the box office receipts. (Mr. Cain has said that on three of his filmed novels he made $45,000 and the producers $13,000,000.)

According to theNew York Times there are between seven and eight thousand Americans who today live by creative writing. If Mr. Cain’s Authoritv is established, they would, all of them, be eligible for membership, and to it they would be expected to surrender copyrights on their new manuscripts. The Authority would then act as their business or literary agent, leasing but never selling outright the serial rights, the book rights, the radio, screen, and reprint rights.

It is quite possible that Mr. Cain’s Authority could secure a larger cut of the Hollywood profits. It is also quite possible that the Authority would exert ilself far beyond the limits now contemplated. Suppose that the union haulers in California do score a decisive victory in the studios, and that on the strength of this they are advanced to the national offices of the Authority. Suppose also that the Hollywood representatives are of Communistic persuasion, I hen what began as a local grievance could be inflated: the Authority would swell until it was imposing a party line on all writers. As a next step, the Authority might refuse to deal with magazine editors and book publishers who preferred to print the independents. In short, as Dorothy Thompson puts it, Mr. Cain is trying to out-Goebbels Goebbels.

There is, to be sure, an invidious comparison with anything that has to do with Hollywood, as Mr. Cain might have realized before he took up the cudgels for the other crafts. His inference that writers are generally underpaid, I think is hogwash. A good sensational novelist — Mr. Cain fils in this category — can net (before taxes) $30,000 for his serial, $15,000 to $30,000 lor his book royalties, and $15,000 to $30,000 for his film rights, not counting the chicken feed from his short stories. This does not happen every year, but if it happens only once in three it represents an average of close to $30,000 a year. The good sentimentalists like Temple Bailey and Lloyd Douglas far exceed this figure; so do the serious novelists like Hemingway, Marquand, and Steinbeck.

I venture the estimate that there are a thousand writers in this country today who are earning comfortably more than $10,000 a year. If you compare this to the $3500 salaries a well-to-do community pays the public school teacher, and concede that schoolteaching is only a step behind writing in its public influence, then writers such as Mr. Cain are not underpaid.

Publishing, which is more informal than a profession and more trusting than most businesses, is at its best when there is a complete feeling of confidence between the author and the editor. The record of a house like Charles Scribner’s Sons is the record of the friendships between Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Scribner (known in the office as “the Czar”), between the Czar and John Galsworthy, between Edith Wharton and W. C. Brownell, between Edward L. Burlingame and J. M. Barrie — the kind of friendship which made Maxwell Perkins, one of the ablest editors of our time, indispensable to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, James Boyd, and Ernest Hemingway in their early and most productive years. Of Making Many Books is the story of Scribner’s bookmaking for one hundred years, a story which Roger Burlingame, with access to a fascinating correspondence, has told so congenially and so fairly that I could wish the book in the hands of every beginning writer and as a source in our schools of journalism.

In The Lost WeekendCharles Jackson explored with surgical honesty the self-deception and degradation of the alcoholic. His was an unsparing, if painful, portrayal of an experience which has come home to too many American families since Prohibition. In The Fall of Valor Mr. Jackson with equal audacity attempts to characterize the emotional starvation of a college professor who gets tired of his wife and falls in love with a Marine. Making allowances for Mr. Jackson’s diagnosis of the arid Puritanism in our make-up and saluting him, as one must, for his courage in laying open a murky subject, I must still report that this is a dull story, about dull people, dully written. The theme, and I suspect we shall meet it more frequently, need not be narrowed down to the triangle of an anemic, dry-as-dust professor, his starved and expostulating wife, and a handsome, dumb baboon. Had Mr. Jackson written with the candor of Gide or the artistry of Thomas Mann we should not have had to plow through those sand dunes of dull repetitive conversation, nor endure the reactions of people about whom one can have neither excitement nor affection.

Mr. Mann calls The Fall of Valor “a work of striking fidelity to life.” In his praise he ignores, as he does not in his books, the obligation of a novelist to see the truth and to interest, the reader.

I think it is time to take off our hats to John Marquand; I think it is time that we acknowledged the increasing skill which he brings to his fiction: his shrewd observation, his true ear for dialogue, his humor, his mimicry, and his satire. I think if is time that, people stopped disparaging his books because they are so darned easy to read.

I put B.F.’s Daughter at the head of Marquand’s shelf and count ii a far better novel than The Late George Apley. B.F.’s daughter, Poll, is one of those strenuous, acquisitive women whom we have bred in our prosperity and whose dominance is so wearing to the husband. She is fully alive, a person who is growing steadily in the reader’s mind from the first page to the last. The two protagonists in the book, B.F., the self-made tycoon, and Bob Tasmin, the well-bred family man, are a pair whose humanness rises above clever disparagement. The relationship between them is, I think, oversimplified at the outset, but as the story matures, so do they. And their reaction upon each other is something to watch in its sure, consistent revelation.

Mr. Marquand’s satire, whet her of New Dealers, of the Pentagon, or of the brass hats in the Pacific, as his devastating take-off of the Intellectual, is fresh, timely, and engrossing. The three themes which give his story its force — the father-daughter relationship, American acquisitiveness, and the Iover-come-back-to-me — are much more germane to American life than, shall we say, homosexuality.

The book reads like a breeze, and rereading il will discover glints one missed in the rush. Mr. Marquand is skilled in arresting the contemporary moment (Bob’s homecoming is a single instance), to make it stand still in perspective while he illuminates its humor, its folly, and its pathos.