About Time

About Time by T. S. Matthews

126

The Warmongers by Victor Lange

128

130

The Peripatetic Reviewer by Edward Weeks

134

138

Action at Generation Gap by Dan Wakefield

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148

Short Reviews: Records by Herbert Kupfcrbcrg

153

Short Reviews: Books by Phoebe Adams

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by T. S. Matthews

THIS book is the first volume of Time’s official history of itself — which means that it was written, edited, lawyered, and anxiously overseen by a committee of Timeservers: a product of the “group journalism” that Time invented, tried to deny, and finally got stuck with.

It’s not a bad book, as books go nowadays, and anyone who was attracted in his youth to Horatio Alger may even find it inspiring. It’s written in the readable, colorless clichés that pass for good journalism, a cut above the language of an annual company report that spells it out to the stockholders in reassuring baby talk; but, like a company report, it’s guaranteed not to offend anybody except the disgruntled few who know where some of the suppressed facts are buried.

Why did Time bother to publish it? Well, it might prettify Time Inc.’s public image (you never can tell) or at least cover some warts with beauty spots. And it was a sound piece of business for the publisher, because Time Inc. has undertaken to buy enough copies to pay for the printing, and the book should certainly sell considerably more than that. I should think quite a lot of people would want to read it, hoping to find out something useful or revealing about that dream of success that drives every red-blooded American boy; or to reassure themselves that even if the American God is no longer visibly in the American heaven, at least the American snail is still firmly on the American thorn.

Something that costs a nickel to make and will sell for a dime, and is habit-forming: this ideal formula for a successful business applies to Time as well as to U.S. Steel, although the margin of profit is considerably smaller, and consumer habits have to be trained and encouraged by sales campaigns. Journalism, for all its fancy talk, is fundamentally a business. Even C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian admitted that a newspaper has to make money before it can be an effective preacher.

Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Great Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 by Robert T. Elson edited by Duncan Norton-Taylor (Atheneum, $10.00)

And this book is primarily the story of how a little magazine called Time became a big business called Time Inc. The inevitable hero, who looms Algeresqucly large in these pages, is Henry Robinson Luce. He was only the co-founder of Time, but in the begetting of Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, and so on, though he had scads of advisers and helpers, he took the sole responsibility, got the credit, and kept the control.

Luce was a shrewd businessman who had the gumption (some say it was luck, but surely mere luck wouldn’t have stayed with him so long) to surround himself with other shrewd and more specialized businessmen, almost all of whom regarded him as a genius, or at any rate as a man occasionally inspired. Was it because his interests were wider, his curiosity more far-ranging, his ambition more sleepless than theirs? He could “ideate” (as they used to say on Madison Avenue) at greater speed and frequency than they could, and some of his ideating turned into profitable ideas. Also he owned a controlling interest in the company; he was not only the boss but the owner.

“[Luce] . . . was reluctant to proclaim himself ‘the proprietor,’ a term which his associates often used in affection behind his back.” What’s wrong with that sentence? The same thing that’s wrong with the book: it’s an ad that’s partly true and essentially false. Every now and then, on occasions when it seemed necessary or good to him, Luce did proclaim himself the boss, the rover who was never dead on anybody, who could (and would, if he felt he had to) fire any of his “associates” out of hand. He never, so far as I know, admitted out loud that his boss-ship was backed by the overpowering fact that in effect he also owned the company, but he didn’t need to: everyone knew it. It is quite true that he was often called “the proprietor” behind his back — but “in affection”?

One of the writers on the Manchester Guardian, recalling his old editor, C. P. Scott, who was apparently an even colder proposition than Luce, said that in a list of men he would die for, Scott’s name would come last. A lot of Luce’s “associates” euphemisms in this book are “associates” or “colleagues”) felt the same way about him. Some of the comparatively few who had personal dealings with him developed a sort of fondness for him which was hard to explain but impossible to deny. As a tycoon he was frequently a terror, but as a person there was, sometimes, something that was singularly touching about him.

Yes, Time Inc. is first and foremost a business (part of the entertainment business, I always thought); and what’s wrong with that? Only that it pretends—just as this book does — to be what it isn’t: a missionary endeavor, “one of the ennobling and directive trades,” as Strothers Burt, a writer, used to describe writing. The book tries to palm itself off as an “intimate history,” but of course it’s no such thing. It’s the success story of “a Great Publishing Enterprise” as told by itself, from $86,000 borrowed (1923) to $45 million earned (1941). The only people in the story who don’t lie dead on the page are Hadden and Luce: they’re allowed to talk enough to make caricatures of themselves, though not believable human beings. Luce lasted much longer and did much more than Hadden, so his silhouette dominates the scene.

Of the minor characters, we get only occasional and sometimes tantalizing glimpses: Eric Hodgins, the only wit Time Inc. has produced; Manfred Gottfried, the solid, skeptical yeoman of the guard; Charles Stillman, the tongue-tied financial genius who would have made a great Secretary of the Treasury. But these and all the rest are Lilliputians to Luce’s Gulliver.

Any shading or perspective in this conventionalized portrait of Luce seems accidental; still, between the lines some significant highlights do sometimes appear, and even an occasional revealingly colored blurt. Here’s the ten-year-old Luce, writing home from his school in China:

“I am going to get into the fourth form. I do not care if I die for it. I must get inside. I must. I will. And God has, is, and will help me. Just take my 100% in Algebra. It was all God.” Throughout his life he was determined to get there, and also determined that God should damn well be on his side. That was the sort of cockeyed conviction that made him the essential ingredient in Time Inc.’s formula for success. Both Hadden and Luce, the two whiz kids from Yale who started Time, were conservatives from birth. They were uneasy partners from the beginning, and if Hadden hadn’t died at the age of thirty-one, most people who knew them think they would have split up, and then there might never have been a Time Inc. to write about. They never wanted to lead a revolution but to capture the Establishment. Or at any rate Luce did. We’ll never know what Hadden really wanted — except to compete with Luce. It was Hadden who got Time off the ground by the yowlings and somersaults of the notorious “Time style,” an effective advertisement which soon became ridiculous and whose embarrassing memory clung to Time’s coattails for years. This kind of thing: “A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon.”

Luce never wrote like that. And he was always putting pencil to paper: most of it was memos for “eyes only,” but sometimes he wrote for publication. The prospectus for Life which he wrote or is credited with writing shows what a hell of an inspirational advertising copywriter he would have made: “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things — machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work — his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. . . .”

In later years, when he got to be an all too frequent speechiher, he developed a lolloping evangelical manner (“There is today great need for great argument”), full of senatorial pleonasms like “must and will,” “in and through and with.”

Though this book bears the earmarks of having been committed by a committee, here and there something slips past the censor, with the effect of a quick wink from a deadpan face: “From time to time [Luce] made some efforts to free his colleagues from a sense of dependence on him, yet at the same time he was reluctant to yield an iota of personal authority.” Or a quote from Luce himself: “Free speech in confidence is essential to group journalism.”

It is never suggested in this book that Luce was as devious an administrator as FDR himself, nor that he was frequently a poor judge of men; but here is his written opinion of Laird Goldsborough, the foreignnews editor of Time who was famous for his twistiness and prejudice: “One word as to Goldsborough. His is a unique mind . . . whose uniqueness amounts almost to genius, and which respects Truth.” (Goldsborough, after being eventually eased out of his job and then out of Time Inc., jumped from his office window — the second Time Inc. suicide reported in this volume. There will be several more to report in volume two.)

In spite of its (understandable) omissions, this “intimate history” filled me in on some small facts I hadn’t known about; for example, that James Thurber wrote a piece (unsigned) for Fortune on New York City during the Depression. That Luce moved Time to Cleveland while Hadden was abroad, and that Hadden moved Time back to New York while Luce was abroad. That Ralph Ingersoll offered me a restarting salary of $10,000. (I thought he asked me to name my figure.)

When I think of the amount of work that must have gone into this book, I feel faint. Nevertheless, while it’s not a bad book as books go nowadays, it is not a good book either. It will partly satisfy some readers’ curiosity. It had better not reassure them, however — unless they can really believe that business success is the same thing as salvation. Millions of Americans do try to believe that, I know.