The Peripatetic Reviewer

IN 1952 a group of American publishers and librarians set out to discover what could be done to enlarge the interest of the Muslim world in American books in translation. Cairo, the center of Arabic culture, was to be the testing ground, and here the American representatives, Datus Smith of the Princeton University Press, Francis St. John of the Brooklyn Public Library, and the late Malcolm Johnson, vice president of D. Van Nostrand Company, met with the Arabic leaders — scholars, lawyers, librarians, and publishers — to work out a tentative program. With it in mind, the Americans then extended their survey to other parts of the Muslim world. At Beirut, Lahore, or Djakarta, they sought for those who would sustain the undertaking. The program was appealing because of its directness. There was to be no forced feeding: the staff in each country — entirely composed of nationals — would determine the kinds of books which were most needed; they would indicate the author and the title which they wished to have translated.

The American headquarters, which had taken the name of Franklin Publications, Inc., would purchase the book for a nominal sum and bear the cost of the editing and translation; each participating country, as its share, would pay for the paper, the printing, and the binding. This was no giveaway: the books were to be sold at the lowest possible price, ranging from 23 cents, the price paid for volume one, an American-Arab edition of This I Believe, to James Bryant Conant’s Science and Common Sense, which was priced at $1.50. A royalty of 10 per cent was to be collected and returned to the American source.

The Egyptians had some initial difficulty in choosing the titles, for their knowledge of our publications was scanty. Accordingly, they were encouraged to pick categories, such as science, fiction, juveniles. Copies of the best books in each field were then sent out to the Egyptian publishers, who, after sampling, made their final choice.

The first book under Franklin’s imprint appeared in Cairo in October, 1953; it was, as I have said, an American-Arab version of Edward R. Murrow’s very popular This I Believe, containing twenty-five of the original American statements supplemented with an equal number by distinguished Arabs. The first edition of 35,000 copies sold out on the day of publication, and a second printing of 25,000 was quickly exhausted. The idea of publishing Asian and Western authors side by side between the same covers helped to break the ice. Sarah Bolton’s Lives of Boys Who Became Famous proved to be another successful pioneer. Half the biographies are of Americans like Franklin, Lincoln, the Wright brothers, and the Mayos. The other half are of Arab boys who rose to leadership. This is an adaptable format. In time an Iranian edition was edited with the stories of young Itanian leaders substituted for those of the Arabs and with the Shah himself contributing the biography of his father, Reza Shah, the first of the dynasty. Persian is also the literary language of Afghanistan, and so Iranian books were soon crossing the border.

The wisdom of the American consultants was to proffer, never to push, and it must have been gratifying to them to see the swiftness with which the program matured. Boys’ books and juveniles revealed the need for textbooks. The popularity of an autobiography like The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh, priced at 23 cents, opened the way for books on popular philosophy by Carl Becker, and so in time to the works of John Dewey, Robert MacIver, and Ralph Barton Perry. When they asked for Walter Lippmann, it was noticeable that they wanted his most recent and thoughtful book, The Public Philosophy. Books were sold by street peddlers, on newsstands, and in the occasional bookstore; in the provincial areas racks were placed in the food shops. The cult of the storyteller is strong in the East, and in the coffeehouse or village meeting place there is always someone who reads aloud. In Tehran, many chapters of Spock’s Baby and Child Care were read aloud over the air from a translation made by the Shah’s sister. Princess Ashraf.

Cairo continues to be the headquarters for the Arabic translations, and despite the anti-American manifestations resulting from our capriciousness about the Aswan Dam, the total sales in Egypt in 1958 were 75 per cent greater than those of the two preceding years combined. Tehran has become the headquarters for the publication of books in Persian: Lahore for the books in Urdu; Dacca for those in Bengali; and Djakarta for those in Indonesian. Through these outlets American authors are now being distributed in translation to twenty Muslim countries with a total population of 250 million.

It is fascinating to follow the preferences. As one might expect, the reconciliation of science with religion has been of constant interest to these deeply religious peoples, and a book as affirmative as Man Does Not Stand Alone by A. G. Morrison was destined to be widely read. The translation was submitted to a number of mullahs for their approval, and at their suggestion footnotes were added throughout the text quoting passages from the Koran to support the statements of the Christian author, an addition which brought home in a striking way the accord between the Christian and the Islamic ideals. Poetry sells best in Iran, where the Persian preference has been for Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Poe, Longfellow, Sandburg, and Whitman — who are being published, be it added, in editions of 5000 copies! Here again it seemed a natural affiliation to print these six American poets in uniform binding with the works of the six leading Persian poets. In Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia books on constitutional questions are eagerly devoured. Of the modern novelists, Thornton Wilder, Willa Gather, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, and William Faulkner are in translations (but not Hemingway; his lawyer wouldn’t play). The most popular novel thus far appears to be The Bridge of San Lius Rey by Thornton Wilder. And of the modern plays, Our Town, Beyond the Horizon, You Can’t Take It with You, and The Glass Menagerie are the favorites in Arabic and in Persian.

More than five million books have been purchased thus far, and the sales are rising. As the expenses of this nonprofit organization have increased, so has the aid: American universities and foundations, government agencies, research institutes, the Arab League, the Shah of Persia, the Afghanistan Ministry of Education, the Iranian Ministry of Education, each has made its contribution. Sometimes there are specific grants, as when the Princess Ashraf made her gift of $25,000 for the Persian edition of the Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia, which was matched by the Ford Foundation.

Naturally there are omissions, or what seem so to me. Although Louisa Alcott’s Little Women has been asked for, I can find no sign of interest in the writing of contemporary American women such as Agnes E. Meyer, Margaret Mead, or Agnes de Mille. I can find nothing about our racial minorities or the great fusing of our blood streams as depicted by the Harvard historian, Oscar Eland I in, in The Uprooted. I find seven titles by Will Durant, but nothing by Edith Hamilton. And it surprises me that there is not a single Negro author on the lists I have scrutinized. But after all, there is plenty of time, for Franklin Publications has only been five years in the building.

American readers have had a growing awareness of the English writer. C. P. SNOW; like the late Joyce Cary, he is a novelist whose excellence and special qualities we have been slow to appreciate. He was trained as a scientist and came to his fellowships and to his early teaching at Cambridge at the time when Rutherford and the atomic physicists with whom he was then working had made Cambridge a place of light and leading. He worked with Sir Henry Tizard in that desperate effort to prepare British atomic defenses before Chamberlain’s umbrella collapsed, and he was knighted for his services in the war.

But like Dr. Hans Zinsser before him, C. P. Snow had a second career steadily evolving within his outer preoccupation as a scientist. He tells us that he knew his vocation as a novelist before he was twenty and adds, ”I have spent a great deal of my working life sitting with scientists in the afternoon, as it were, and talking to writers at night.”He has rare powers of lucidity and of warmth, and he applies them with equal skill to what is transpiring in the laboratory or to the delineation of character. He is, it seems to me, uniquely qualified to reconcile the traditional nonscientific culture with the up-and-coming scientific one, and this he does to the queen’s taste in his novel, THE SEARCH (Scribner’s, $3.95), which was originally published in 1934 and which he has now revised.

The hero of The Search is an eager young English physicist, Arthur Miles. Arthur has to work his way, for his family has no means, and the boy himself is of limitless ambition. This is the story of his early, almost ascetic dedication to the laboratory; of his farsighted, almost prophetic advance in the field of crystallography; of his love for Audrey, who is as penniless as himself; of his friendship for Charles Sheriff, against whose cleverness he paces himself, and for Hunt, the schoolmaster whose humanism keeps bringing Arthur back to earth. It is the story of Arthur’s rise from prize scholar, to research worker, to scientist of renown; it tells us, as no other book I know, of the demands made upon a talented man as he becomes enmeshed in the industry and politics of big-time research.

The Search is a rewarding book in itself, and it should induce new readers to explore “Strangers and Brothers,” the series of novels with which Mr. Snow has been occupied this past decade.

In THE PROUD POSSESSORS (Random House, $5.95) ALINE B. SAARINEN, for more than a decade associate art critic of the New York Times, is writing about the origin and acquisition of the great American collections which have been built up in this country over the past seventy years. Her book, in its gay, vivid prose, is at once a portrait gallery and a vernissage, full of quaint and vivid detail, of prices that stagger one by their astronomical progression, and throughout it is graced by a presence cool, quizzical, and fascinating: I mean of course the presence of Bernard Berenson, whose exquisite taste and usually irrefutable judgment were relied on by many wealthy collectors.

The author opens with Mrs. Potter Palmer, presiding so regally over her Louis XVI salon in her cobblestone palace in Chicago, whose interest in painting began with the Barbizon School and then moved up to Monet, Manet, Courbet, and Degas under the coaching of Whistler and Mary Cassatt. This is followed, by way of comparison, with the liveliest account of Isabella Gardner and the building of Fenway Court that has yet been printed; Berenson figures prominently in these pages and in the description of those treasures which for one reason or another Mrs. Gardner missed. Mrs. Saarinen makes us feel the extraordinary scope and generosity of J. P. Morgan’s great bequest to the Metropolitan; we delight in the independent scouting of that Philadelphia lawyer, John G. Johnson, and are surprised by the more precious but no less tenacious quests of Charles Lang Freer. The book is alive with personality, and in the latter half I think I most enjoyed the wonderful clash between Leo and Gertrude Stein, the audacity of Peggy Guggenheim, the more homely but no less imaginative planning with which Mrs. Webb built up the Shelburne Museum, and the Rockefellers’ passion for primitive arts. The book is perceptive, fair in its pronouncements (though William Randolph Hearst would not have found it so), and felicitous in its appreciation.