Books That Are Milestones

by HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

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OPINIONS, tastes, behavior, most of all interests, constantly alter as society flows on like a river. Books sometimes explain this, and they always record it. They are the reporters of history, especially of the always changing mind of a generation. In my twenty-five years as a Book-ofthe-Month Club judge, the alteration has been rapid, and the reporters have had plenty to say.

First of all, there has been a general change in interest in the type of books read. It was like a shift from a limited table d’hôte menu to a far-stretching à la carte. The public taste and the public interest shifted, not away from fiction so much as beyond fiction toward nonfiction of every kind. The broadening of direction was emphatic. At least one publisher of seasoned judgment told me at the beginning of the era that the intelligent general public offered a choice of books would at the most take one nonfiction book out of twelve offered, and I knew from my own experience that this had been generally true. Yet the list of titles upon which I am basing this essay runs rapidly into an average of not far below 50 per cent nonfiction, and sometimes the choice touches a higher figure. The cause may have been in part a much increased accessibility of books of many kinds. Yet surely the public had already in 1926, and increasingly afterward, developed a far wider range of interests than had been expected. The old days, which I remember well, when the same general intelligent, readers had read apiece, say, a dozen best-selling novels a year, and little else, were going forever. The new swing to nonfiction among popular books gave to both publishers and writers an impetus of ihe greatest value and importance.

With widely read books, like those of our list, the most obvious reporting of what was going on among us who were readers should be of morals — morals in the broadest, sense of the word. Charles Dickens’s novels, for instance, in addition to being great and readable books, were impressive records of the new humanitarianism of England. Have American morals fundamentally changed during this quarter of a century? I do not know. But American moral attitudes certainly have, and the books show it.

Let me begin with language. It is not a very reliable indicator of fundamental morality, but it is a guide to certain tendencies on the shifting border line between morality and immorality when writers begin to make them forceful as well as articulate. Common report has it that Ernest Hemingway was the first reputable author to use a fourletter English word in the dignity of print. Only half a dozen years ago another four-letter word, used by a Negro in a novel where he most probably would have used it, caused a furor throughout the country. It has been three quarters of a century since sexual relationships, regular or irregular, have been taboo in American novels. And anything like a literal description even when devoid of vulgarity was still taboo at the beginning of our twenty-five years and most of all if the words used were realistic. Words, it will be found, offended us much more than acts. Henry James was in no sense the prude that he is supposed to have been. He thought that the “sexuality” of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles was notable for its absence, but his language was “vile.” I believe that he was alluding to a reference to the softness of female flesh, for I can find nothing else that would attract the attention today even of a postmaster. Writers for the inferior “ pulps ” of our own first years of the quarter century became expert at describing with warmth suggestive scenes without the use of one “frank” word, and without rebuke.

Here the books on our list, whether scientific or psychological nonfiction, or novels, have registered a wide change, which has swung so far as to invite the charge of immorality (by which, usually, the accuser really means vulgarity, and is sometimes right). In any case, (he books of Hemingway, of Steinbeck, of Richard Wright, or such books as The Hucksters, Raintree County, The Egyptian, could not have been put upon our list in the first years of the record, and chiefly, though not always, because of language. Dates must be generalized, but I should say that at the beginning of our quarter century the public had admitted sexual scenes as essential to the whole story. Now descriptions are being made articulate, with an advance in truth, and also with a danger to good taste, by a vulgarity that often reveals the author’s own lack of artistic feeling.

Have our wars been responsible for this new freedom of printed speech? I do not think so. The books that came after the First World War, even the frank and realistic variety, like All Quiet on the Western Front, were, except for “cussin’,” what the censor would call clean. More respectable men in wartime heard more dirty language. That is about as far as you can go. The change in the mores of writing may also reflect a more tolerant attitude toward sexual irregularity. It is more probable that it is a reaction against Victorian prudishness, which in itself was a violent reaction against the unrefinement, the roughness, the licentious descriptions of the eighteenth-century novel, and of English life in the days of the late Georgians. Whatever the cause, the change is here and probably irreversible unless sheer vulgarity brings its own reaction.

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THERE is, however, another change which is unquestionably moral, and is better represented in literature than anywhere else. Here the twenty-five years of books show, in many examples, a wide swing of the compass. We have in recent years admitted a new type of hero, and in certain books made him dominant. He is not the villain, he is not (as with older books) an object of satire. Walt Whitman used a queer invented word for hero which explains exactly what I mean. He called him (or her) the eidolon, the ideal figure, which embodied, or should embody, what the best people of the period admired, or should admire. It was the kind of person they wished, or should wish, to be like, and used as a standard for morality (I do not mean goodness) in the best sense compatible with a full life. There are plenty of books built upon such an eidólon in our list. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth, that great pioneer story of the old Northwest, is an example of one kind; the Lincoln of Benét’s John Brown’s Body is another — to which one may add Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling, Anthony Adverse (a different variety), Joseph in Egypt, and to carry up to our own day, John Hersey’s The Wall, John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return, or (outside of the novel) Kon-Tiki and that charming satire on what happens to extremists when they turn human, The Little World of Don Camillo.

Yet the readers as they think back will realize that a new type of eidólon began to enter our books in, say, the thirties. Hemingway was one of our first innovators, though with a very different show from what was later put on. His brutal men, cruel, scornful of respectable living, were often softhearted, with a core of idealism, as Hemingway evidently is himself. But the emphasis is always on toughness and a contempt for sexual morality, which was to be a characteristic aspect (one only) of our period. Steinbeck is not unlike him. He has deep sentiment combined with a passion against respectability, and a feud against women who protest desires which it is well known they possess. He is right in feeling that it was this unbalance which often made the Victorian novel limp with one boot and a slipper. But he overdoes the boot. For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Wayward Bus will illustrate from our list.

The world-upside-down of manners which such books profess to mirror is different — and one suspects more healthy - from another and more recent change of hero. Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters (1946) is a good example, but there have been dozens since. The scene is usually in New York, the situations usually contrived in the relatively new professions of the radio, moving picture, magazine, or advertising business. The heroes (and heroines) all seem to parallel the new school of candid photography. Everyone looks his worst. They resemble each other in moral attitudes, and are supposed to resemble well-known living characters whom they candidly, and usually most unfavorably, represent. Compared with the novels of the twenties, these books give the impression of being intensely local. New York contracts rather than expands them. They are all defeatist, and their environments are full of jealousy and hate. It is only fair to add that, like the advertisements and promotion which is the business of so many of their characters, they are expertly and sometimes brilliantly written.

Now here is a new type of eidolon. No one wants to be like him. And yet his portrait is not pure satire, for no one in the novel, not even the author, seems to be fully aware of what the trouble is which makes the hero hate his life but be unable to do anything important about it. The hero who would by Henry James have been sympathetically analyzed to the core, by Thackeray given elements of greatness, as in Becky Sharp, by Swift or Pope satirized into nothingness, remains a local phenomenon. Something, whether the roar of fast living, or the pressure of the power to spend, or a nervous sexual urge, has given us a literary type which warns us but does not enlighten.

Fortunately our list shows also that this has been a quarter century of extraordinary widening of interests, so that there never has been a wider choice in reading. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the old stock from which so much great fiction has grown is at least as vigorous as the specialties I have been discussing. If it were only excellence of which I were writing, there are dozens of novels where the old themes, good as long as human nature remains basically constant, are as successful as ever. For adventure, for studies of manners (with which the novel began), for romance, for the story of simple folk in a local environment, for penetrating realism, for high comedy, where the subject is not as in this essay a change in mores, but new personalities in a new scene, I can supply from the list under my hand instances of quality not generally surpassed in any literary period. In fiction alone let us record Sinclair Lewis, Sigrid Undset, J. B. Priestley, Willa Gather, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, W. Somerset Maugham, Thornton Wilder, Ellen Glasgow, Margaret Mitchell, Walter D. Edmonds, Kenneth Roberts, Thomas Mann, C. S. Forester, John P. Marquand, Arthur Koestler, Esther Forbes, Sholem Asch, Evelyn Waugh, to add to others mentioned before, or afterward, with different references.

Another instance of fertility in the novel is what might be called the further expansion of the form itself, which now in many instances can only be distinguished arbitrarily from nonfiction (and vice versa). Saint-Exupery made in his Night Flight what was really a novel of man’s adventures in a new medium, the air. Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh went back to The Iliad for its pattern of a novel of courageous defense. Thornton Wilder’s stories begin as character sketches, such as Heaven’s My Destination, but work themselves out indirectly into highly charged novels. The infinitely subtle narratives of Isak Dinesen, in Seven Gothic, Tales, will leave readers differing as to what is meant, but not as to their fascination. Margaret Mitchell in Gone With the Wind (I do not think she meant to) swung from old-fashioned sentimental romance to modern realism, and so straddled both the old and the new South, playing hob wit h literary definitions. Richard Wright chose autobiography to tell the story of his race in Native Son and Black Boy, but wrote both as novels. And John Hersey in The Wall has frankly used the reporting of a journalist to write one of the great tragic novels of our time. Finally George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four went back to Plato and Looking Backward to write a satire where Utopia is reversed — a novel of the Russian “paradise” made into a story of the future that only fanatics of the Kremlin can read without horror, disgust, and a shudder of fear.

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ONE of the most successful books on the list, was H. A. Overstreet’s The Mature Mind (1949). This popular but excellent psychology is a study of how Americans especially have been slowly developing from a youthful, immature people into an adult nation. Their judgments broaden, their reason balances their emotions, their handling of experience grows sharper and wiser. His material is drawn from a far wider range than books, but its emphasis upon change is like that in this essay. Another book on the list, Gerald W. Johnson’s Incredible Tale (1950), shows much the same development, although here it is the American growing up in political maturity both at home and in relations abroad.

Yet for a full consideration of American growingup, we should be familiar with the long list of what might be called international and national books in these twenty-five years. In James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America, of 1931, the historian remarked, with an accent of surprise, that the history of the United States seemed to be of an internal development constantly interrupted by involvements with European revolutions of power, of economies, and most of all of thinking, for which we were not responsible. By 1951 these interruptions of what we regarded as our normal growth had become chronic, and had become a part of our own history, which we disregarded at our peril.

The books which indicate this go far beyond the limits of what was happening abroad. In the early years there is an inrush of semifictional biographies of great European figures of the past — Napoleon, Disraeli, Henry the Eighth, Marie Antoinette, Cervantes, Leonardo da Vinci — as if the interest of the general reader had been suddenly kindled in the old Europe from which we had come so far, and which was at the back of our new embroilments. Russia began to appear on the list.

Yet through all these years is a parallel outpouring of books on America and Americans. After the First World War the American biographies are of a belittling kind, which was called debunking, after William E. Woodward’s Bunk, in which the term was invented. The idea seemed to be to become “realistic” with our great national figures, which usually meant to take them off the schoolroom walls and make them human — all too human. It was a. false start for a new kind of biography, and a careful critic could have noted that deeper studies of America were revealing by social history a United States in the making for two hundred years that was a unique experiment in the long human story, with no parallel in Europe or the past.

Such books on our own past as Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, Charles and Mary Beard’s America in Mid passage, Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision: 1846, or the biographical-critical series of Van Wyck Brooks were to make a restatement of our history, in more, not less, important terms, and to respond to the sharp and sudden contrasts with Europe which our education in conventional American backgrounds had not prepared us to understand. Such admirable autobiographies as Hans Zinsser’s As I Remember Him; such surveys of the present as Frederick L. Allen’s Only Yesterday; such matured and back-and-forward pointing biographies as Catherine Drinker Bowen’s John Adams and theAmerican Revolution, are instances that we had come of age in our own introspection, as elsewhere.

Perhaps humor is the best of all commentators on human nature, and it is interesting to note how the growing maturity which has inspired these writers appears also in striking fashion on our list. I do not mean the jolly books, the funny books, the comic adventures and laughable characters. These are perennials as old as civilization, and only a sourpuss would call them immature. I mean such books as Cheaper by the Dozen, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Father of the Bride, or Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. However, there is a new kind of humor come into our American reading in this quarter of a century — or, if not new, richer, mellower, and with more tang because it is subtly flavored with irony and comes from a profounder philosophy. It is really a new America, if an earlier one as seen by a modern, that Clarence Day tells about in Life with Father (1935) and his earlier God and My Father. His books have had scores of imitators but none has equaled his special blend of maturity. The approach to humor is characteristically American, the family atmosphere is affectionate, good-natured (when not explosive), and prosperous. And yet the irony is obvious for the Big Businessman — the know-it-all of his day. It is a new and more matured America for which E. B. White is writing in his Other Men’s Meat and Here Is New York. There is a faculty only to be found in ripe civilizations, the power to attack with restrained violence the most serious problems of the times, while toujours gai like Don Marquis’s alley cat. It illustrates Mark Twain s thesis that there is only one weapon against irrationality and evil laughter.

This article upon books as reporters of change might depend for its argument upon war books alone and be very convincing. The continuing Industrial Revolution and war in particular have been the two chief promoters of change in our generation. If the reader is old enough to remember the flood of books which was a by-product of the First World War—books autobiographical, poetical, descriptive, fictional — he will be struck instantly by this fact of change. Those published in wartime itself and intended to touch the imagination were all at least tinged with romance, even if a horrid romance; they were rich with heroism, even if it was a little man’s heroism, and were based upon a conviction (at least the Anglo-Saxon ones) that we were lighting a kind of crusade. They stated in so many words that war was a tremendous experience and, in spite of danger and boredom, an enviable experience no matter how much one hated it. I can recall no marked exception aside from Le Feu of Barbusse.

Except for the poetry, little has survived from these multitudes of books. And it is noteworthy that the one major poet of the decade after the war, Stephen Vincent Benét, whose John Brown’s Body was on the list in 1928, chose an earlier war which still seems romantic, and figures like John Brown and Lincoln of heroic proportions for his cast. The very next year a new writer and a new kind of book is on the list. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front gave a different tone to war literature which has persisted. It was the ignoble that figured here, and unhappy common man caught in a slaughter for which he was not responsible, living like a beast while maintaining his loyalty to such ideals as he had. No romance in this war, but a gross realism still fascinating in its novel interest; and no glamorous deeds, but only the powerful hope to escape. In 1927 the delightful The Case of Sergeant Grischa of Arnold Zweig showed that there was still humor in war, even if pathetic.

Before the time of the next great war, little humor and less romance are left, except the blend of such love and lust as one finds in the desperate passion in a sleeping bag of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and by the Second World War there was no pretense of glamour, unless of duty well done. From that war there are no great novels yet, although an abundance of brilliant journalism, recounting with an almost objective detachment the incidence of fighting. If there were books that stirred the emotions they came from the secondary results of war, such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Since then, for uplift and the sense of heroic struggle we have had to go to the splendid periods of Winston Churchill, himself a survivor from an earlier time.

In short, war in the last years of our quarter century appears no longer as patriotism, nor heroic. In fact, one hears in the new books the low rumble of revolt against war itself as something the common man will not always endure, though he does not know what to do about it. In fiction war is becoming merely a theme, and the dramatis personae contain neurotics, paranoiacs, fanatics of slaughter, who are not so much victims of war as types of unstable minds which exhibit its horrid excesses. The best recent war novel I have read is not about war itself at all, but the story of life in our regular army before Pearl Harbor, where professional soldiers expect war and its preparations to be their life. Their language is a jargon of slang terms and four-letter words, their habitat off duty is the bar and the brothel, since family life is denied them. They live and suffer by codes as strict as the Greek tragedy. And for all the complexity of civilian life is substituted a loyalty to their group and, generally speaking, a hatred of their officers and their parasites. This book, From Here to Eternity by James Jones, is not on our list, but has been offered, with due warning, as an alternate selection. War thus is being presented, like labor, or farming, or the entertainment business, or the pursuit of women, as a staple for books, a standard expectation of modern living. We are tough enough now to take it, as the books we are reading show.