The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

EVERY editor has his scouts. Some of my older scouts, soured perhaps by age, have been telling me that Americans don’t listen to the radio as they used to. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure because of my youngest scout, who begins to listen at 6.00 in the morning; who does his homework with the radio going full blast, and would skip dessert rather than miss his favorite programs. Before I begin to read my manuscripts in the evening, I go to the foot of the stairs and shout, “Turn it lower, Ted, turn it DOWN !”

In the ears of twelve-year-olds radio can do no wrong. Their rapture makes me wonder what they will do with broadcasting when they take it over.

I wonder how they will write for it and how they will bring out the American originality and inventiveness that are part of radio’s enormous potential.

For the present the worst enemy of radio is the man who never listens. In certain circles it is still a mark of superiority to exclaim, “But you see, Pol and I never listen. We really never turn it on!” These are the people who have never realized that radio saved American vaudeville from oblivion, and that the best farce, parody, and punning are to be found today, not on the stage, but in programs like Fred Allen’s, Edgar Bergen’s, Henry Morgan’s, and Jack Benny’s. These are the people who do not realize what the broadcasts of Toscanini, Koussevitzky, and the Metropolitan Opera mean to millions of shut-ins. These are the people who, because conscience does not prod them (and they won’t listen!), ignore the public opinion so vigorously aroused by George Denny of Town Meeting, by Theodore Granik in American Forum of the Air, and by the University of Chicago at its Round Table. These are the ignoramuses who have forgotten how much we all depended upon those penetrating reporters, Elmer Davis, Raymond Swing, Edward R. Murrow, and William L. Shirer in the days of crisis. These are the people with proud ears who know all the answers about radio — and most of them wrong.

On the occasion of the Peabody Awards this year I put forth six modest proposals for the industry. Here they are:—•

1. Avoid hardening of the arteries. Be wary of old patterns in old shows. The public will always love familiar favorites. But radio has got to make new favorites familiar.

2. The partnership between New York and Hollywood seems to result in block booking on the air from 7.00 P.M. to 10.00. Is this in the public’s interest?

3. Repetition is the pernicious anemia of radio. The repetition of mysteries, of quizzes, of soap operas and rowdy breakfasts results in $64 morons.

4. The best local stations today are operating on the policy that the public is more intelligent than you think. As the networks harden, the local stations constitute the best outlet for originality. Watch them.

5. Remember what radio lost when Alexander Woolloott died? Be everlastingly on the outlook for men whose intelligence, whose storytelling, and whose poetry will make the air delightful.

6. Be willing to gamble: don’t always bet on the sure thing. Remember what a struggle it was to launch the symphony orchestras, the forums— what a struggle it was to find even Woollcott an early sponsor. Radio expects the public to gamble two to three billions on new receiving sets within the next few years: how much of that amount is it willing to gamble on originality?

As an editor I am particularly interested in that fifth point: I am eager to see more quality in what is said on the air. This year past, radio has made some audacious and highly effective adaptations from books and the stage. The Columbia Workshop with its presentation of the Old Vic Company and its adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the Theatre Guild on the Air with its feature performances of Ingrid Bergman and John Gielgud, and Robert Saudek’s four-part presentation of John Hersey’s Hiroshima are examples of what I mean.

But while radio borrows literary effects, it should seldom be judged as literature. When you write for the air; you use a special vocabulary, a vocabulary of short rather than long, blurring words, a vocabulary which stresses the vowels (“kick,” “bite,” “shriek,” “love,”,) and which avoids words heavy with consonants. (Try “successive” with a drying tongue!) Woollcott was an artist with this vocabulary. He spoke with style and he used the pause, the parenthesis, and the slow accentuation to give full play to those few long words, those arresting and amusing adjectives and adverbs which were the spice of what he said. We need more practitioners of his skill and versatility.

In Kingsblood Royal, Sinclair Lewis lets go both barrels at the most troublesome domestic problem on the horizon. Not since It Can’t Happen Here has he written with such indignation, such power, and such accuracy of accusation. The book is a social document rather than a work of art, a thesis which acquires life because of the case histories which have gone into it, and despite a number of rigged and stagey effects.

The story is laid in Grand Republic, that selfsatisfied city in our North Middlewest which Mr. Lewis has already described for us in Cass Timberlane. Grand Republic had grown to 90,000 during the war, a prosperous little city in which the Scandinavian and English strains predominated over the French and Negro from across the border. By December, 1944, it was beginning to welcome home its wounded veterans, one of them redheaded Neil Kingshlood, who had had one leg shortened as a result of his wound in Italy and who comes back with immense relief to his wife, his four-year-old daughter, and his duties as teller and counselor to veterans in the Second National Bank.

Neil is handsome, likable, right-minded, and naïve for a man of thirty. His father convinces him that their family can be traced back to the royal blood of Britain. (This is the first of the stagey devices.) As gullible as a spaniel, Neil bounds off on the scent, and he is still gullible when the trail leads to the proof that he is not of royal lineage but, on his mother’s side, is one thirty-second Negro. The records show that his great-great-great-grandfather, Xavier Pic, was a full-blooded Negro trapper who married an Ojibway and passed as French along the border.

Many Americans, as indeed many islanders from the West Indies and the Pacific, faced with this same discovery and, as Neil is, passably white in fealure and upbringing, would have quietly gone their way. Not so Neil. With Mr. Lewis’s hand on his shoulder, he turns back to find his people, to see for himself how the Negroes of Grand Republic, some of them his own classmates in high school, live; what they are really like, and whether his lot belongs with them or with the white majority. This is the second implausibility. I accept it as a necessity to get the story in motion. Not till the reader has turned this corner will he feel the full force of the novel’s vitality.

Still naïve, still questing, Neil discovers to his amazement what the Negroes — even a decent family like the Woolcapes—have to submit to in the crowded segregation of the Five Points. He nerves himself up to the admission that he is part Negro, and with this admission he gains their confidence. “You’ll be too shocked,” they warn him, “when you find out what our real opinions are.” Then in words of one syllable they proceed to enlighten him. From Dr. Brewster, the rugged Baptist minister, from Sophie, torch singer and now a nurse, from Dr. Ash Davis, the chemist, from Ryan Woolcape, the belligerent young veteran, and from Clem Brazenstar, the agitator, he learns of the terrible racial choice of “whether to go North and get frozen out or stay South and get burned out.” Segregation, Discrimination, White Supremacy — these come to have a different meaning in Neil’s mind. With his eyes open and the zeal now furious in his blood, he makes Ins choice. And his wife makes hers.

The purpose of this novel, the reason it was written, was to make every reader more aware of the Negroes he encounters, to let us know at second hand the fear, the aspiration, and the hatred which inhabit those dark islands in our communities from which we so readily avert our thinking. It preaches no “ isms” or miscegenation, it simply contends with what is. The truths which Gunnar Myrdal has brought out in his profound studies and which have been hammered home by Richard Wright, in Native Son and by Ann Petry in The Street are made to blaze in the white light of Mr. Lewis’s didactic story.