The Peripatetic Reviewer

In the light of its success it is amusing to recall what a hard time the Times had getting on its feet. Beginning in 1813 seven different proprietors struggled to establish in Manhattan a paper with this name at the masthead, and seven times they failed. The eighth to try was Henry Jarvis Raymond, a wiry, energetic, politically active editor who got his Times off to a solid start in 1851, a conservative penny paper in a two-eent market then dominated by Horace Greeley’ s Tribune, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, and James Watson Webb’s Courier and Enquirer.

Long-lived periodicals have their ups and downs and the Times’s circulation had shrunk to 9000 copies when in August, 1896, Adolph S. Ochs became its owner. There were then fifteen newspapers in the city, with Pulitzer’s World, in its morning and evening editions, leading the field with a total circulation of 600,000. The Times was in last place, and no one could then have suspected that Ochs would live to see the day when all but the Times had died or been absorbed in mergers.

He was the son of a German immigrant, and his success story is better than anything out of Horatio Alger, because, as I remember, Alger’s heroes did not perform their miracles with huge debts on both shoulders. “Mooley” Ochs, as he was called, quit school at fourteen to become a chore boy for the Knoxville Chronicle, He lived on a shoestring; he was tireless, he impressed people with his direct honesty, and he never backed down on a promise. By twenty he had risen from printer’s devil to be the publisher and editor of the wobbly Chattanooga Times, then selling barely 250 copies a day. He needed loans, and big ones, to install new machinery and to build up the paper. But loans, however sizable, never fazed him or watered his judgment, either in the South or in the crucial days in New York when, after the building of the new Times Tower in 1905, he had to put up 51 per cent of the Times stock for a loan of $800,000.

When he took control of the New York Times, he made certain small changes which were characteristic and lasting. He threw out the cheap backstair fiction; he made the formal more readable, widening the space between the lines of type and using better newsprint and ink to obtain a sharper reproduction. He chose the slogan “All the News That’ s Fit to Print,” and he added an illustrated half-tone Sunday supplement and a book review section. He had an inexhaustible curiosity about the unmapped areas of the world and the unknown in science. Over the years he built up the largest, most capable news-gathering staff in the country, and at its head was Carr Van Anda.

There never has been a Managing Editor to touch Van Anda, and the twenty-one years in which he set the tone and the pace of the Times is an epic Story in itself. It was Van Anda who deduced from the first fragmentary wireless message the fact that the Titanic was not only in trouble but that she had sunk. Where other editors played it safe, awaiting confirmation from the While Star Line, he acted on cold reasoning. He immediately planned a round-up of the survivors’ stories with sixteen reporters operating from a field office close to the Carpathia’s dock. Years later when Van Anda was visiting Lord Northcliffe, the London editor pulled open a desk drawer. In it lay the New York Times for April 19, 1912. “We keep this,” he said, “as an example of the greatest accomplishment of news reporting.”

It was Van Anda who in 1908 secured a blistering, belligerent interview with the Kaiser, and then had the sense of honor and good faith not to let it be published, for in those preVishinsky days such flaming words might well have brought on war; it was Van Anda who refused to follow Roy Howard s premature Armistice story of November 7, 1918; Van Anda who monopolized the only two phones out of Plymouth, Vermont, the night Cal Coolidge took the oath.

The policies and traditions of the Times attracted the best: Caret Garrett, Wythe Williams, and Charles Grasty in the First World War; Hanson Baldwin, the ace military commentator, backed by an incomparable team of correspondents, in the Second. Alexander Woollcott and Brooks Atkinson on the theater, Waldcmar Kaempffert and William L. Laurence in science, Arthur Krock and James B. Reston in Washington, John H. Finley, Lester Market, and Charles Merz as editors, Simeon Strunsky and Anne O’ Hare McCormick on the editorial page—these are a few of the many who poured their talents into the impersonal eminence of the Times. Other papers — the Tribune, for instance— have encouraged a more individual style. Hearst in his short hard-bitten paragraphing set a pattern that could be more easily read and more highly colored. The Times, on through the present regime of Arthur H. Sulzberger, President and Publisher, has maintained its sovereignty by a comprehension of detail, an unflurried judgment, and a stvle as quiet as it is authoritative. There can be wastage In such writing, and the Times’s stories sometimes run to excessive length. There is also a tendency to be aloof, so that the picaresque or bizarre doings of New York are recounted m the same manner as a report of opinions handed down by the Supreme Court. But these arc minor matters in an era of highly tempered and angled news.

Meyer Berger, one of the humblest and most distinguished members of the staff, has told the story as a great reporter would tell it — graphically, selieffaeingly, and with a warmhearted enthusiasm for the great undertaking which soon kindles the reader’s sympathy. His book is a masterly achievement in thoroughness, authority, and readability. It makes me live again in the high points of the half century; it makes me feel the spell, the excitement, and the hardheaded pursuit of truth which is journalism at its best.

The Literary Supplement of the New York Times has been the Bible of the book trade for as long as I can remember. To celebrate their part in the Centennial, the literary editors have gone back to their files to reprint with contemporary illustrations the Times reviews of the most famous books of the past century, more than one hundred volumes, as they were judged in their First flush of publication. What strikes me at once is the justness, the permanent common sense of the Times’s attitude toward these books that made history. To us, of course, these novelists like Joyce and Proust, these men of ideas like Darwin and Marx, these poets like Whitman, Kipling, Amy Lowell, are known quantities — labeled and in place. Me read with hindsight what these critics were writing with foresight, and the result is to me a competitive and fascinating commentary on modern literature well worth the 25 cents the Times will charge you if you ask for a copy.

Here, for instance, is Joseph Collins, with his two superb reviews of Ulysses and Swann’s Way, both published in 1922; brand-new experimental interpretations of a way of writing utterly strange to most of us then, however familiar it may have become since. Collins had what seems to me the essential qualities for a first-class reviewer: a fresh, open, sensuous, associative mind; taste, sympathy, and a good sense of proportion. Ulysses he rates as “the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the Twentieth Century.” It took courage to say so and he was right.

The appraisals of Darwin’s Origin of Species, of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, and of Mein Kampf seem to me equally laudable. Naturally you would expect good things when Brander Matthews in 1919 gives you his opinion of Henry Mencken’s The American Language, or when Mencken gives you his of Dreiser’s novel, The Financier. But most of these come from anonymous pens.

The most spectacular misses occur in the fields of political economy, morality, and poetry. The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes is dismissed as an “acrimonious party pamphlet,” and Das Kapital as resulting from an excess of spleen. Dickens is praised for his acceptance in a cheerful spirit of things as they are”; Zola is solemnly told that his novel, Les RougonMacquarts, “may become an agency of immorality without being immoral itself”; Thomas Mann that he isn’t in a class with Galsworthy, and Taino that he is “specious and fanciful.” Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell (“her whole book is of the veritable stuff of dreams”) are praised to the skies, while Baudelaire, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot are scanted. The philosophers fare the best: Bergson, William James, Spengler, Nietzsche, and John Dewey are well described and accurately weighed.

On the evidence, these reviewers are writing for a public that has grown in sophistication. There is an increasing use ol descriptive shorthand, an increasing awareness of clichés, more terseness and more directness. These of course are picked reviews of major books; and as you mull them over, you are reminded of the flaws in contemporary reviewing: the tendency to turn the review into a news story, or if it be of a novel, the temptation to skeletonize the plot; the tendency of young reviewers to be cleverly disparaging of older writers, and, most incredible of all, a kind of guarded deference when a big book appears that really needs to be scorched. The best critics on the Times were never deferential.

The Fortune Tellers (Lippincott, $3.75) is Berry Fleming’s most serious and most skillful novel of the South. It is the story of what the flooding waters of the Savannah River did to the little town of Fredericksville, Georgia; it is the romance of Cleveland Barfield, the town’s selfmade industrialist and a widower, who has become infatuated with Hannah Winans, the young wife of the engineer who comes to the rescue of the Levee; it is a revelation of “Southern Justice” to an inquisitive Yankee reporter who has come down on the scent of a scandal and who wises up as he watches the emergency; it is a study of the Southern temperament under stress and strongly individualized in such people as “Miss Alice” Macartan, the town’s editor; Malcolm Trafford, the aristocrat; and Walter Clewis, the amorous scribe.

Barfield is the central character — strong, wellrounded, very appealing in the loneliness which has led him into his October romance, very human in the anger which he feels toward Hannah’s husband and toward Vitner, the prying Yankee with his “ tenderer-than-thou ” philosophy. The attraction between the lovers is beautifully realized in the snalched-at moments and the half-spoken promises they share in private. But their world is broken into by the flood; Barfield against his will is made head of the Emergency Committee and finds himself working hand in hand with Winans, whose engineering may save the town.

It is a long novel and purposefully so, for Mr. Fleming must first show us the leaks in ihe dike, the casualness of the citizens, the honeyed accents of the Mayor as he broadcasts complacency, and the brief letup in the rain when momentarily the river falls — all of which contribute to the vulnerability of the community. Barfield, the hero, is a daydreamer and the author uses this fact as an excuse for some transitions which seem to me confusing. Barfield is also dreadfully haunted by the scandal which has attracted the roving reporter, but I confess that I am more mystified than scandalized by this family skeleton: I am never quite sure what all the shooting is about. These little puzzlements are forgotten, however, as the story moves into high gear and as we see the really frightened community rally in its self-defense. That is strong, exciting narration with a lesson in it for us all.