America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (25 page)

Subsequently I saw a piece of war as a correspondent, and following that wrote Cannery Row. This was a kind of nostalgic thing, written for a group of soldiers who had said to me, “Write something funny that isn't about the war. Write something for us to read—we're sick of war.” When Cannery Row came out, it got the usual critical treatment. I was wasting my time in flippancy when I should be writing about the war. But half a million copies were distributed to troops, and they didn't complain. We had some very warlike critics then, much more bellicose than the soldiers.

In Mexico I heard a story and made a long jump back to the Tortilla Flat time. I tried to write it as folklore, to give it that set-aside, raised-up feeling that all folk stories have. I called it The Pearl. It didn't do so well at first either, but it seems to be gathering some friends, or at least acquaintances. And that's the list in this volume. It is strange to me that I have lived so many lives. Thinking back, it seems an endless time and yet only a moment.

RECENTLY I was asked by a University for a Rationale of the corpus of my work. I didn't know the word.

 

The Oxford Dictionary defines a “Rationale” as: 1. A reasoned exposition of principles, an explanation or statement of reasons, a set of reasoned rules or directions; and 2. The fundamental reason, the logical or rational basis for anything. Or in simpler words—what did you write and why did you write it?

There may be writers who before the fact of writing may have been able to do this. In my own case, I fear that a rationale might well be a rationalization, undertaken after the fact—a critic's rather than a writer's approach. It is like asking a prisoner, “Why did you commit murder?” His reply might be, “Let me think. I guess I didn't like the guy, and—well I was mad.” He can work out why he did it but he can't really remember the emotional pressure which drifted his hand toward the knife.

So in my work I can say, “It must have been this way or this”—but I am not at all sure that I remember. I can say of one book, “I suppose I saw things which made me angry.” Of another, “It was just an idea which amused me and I wrote it.” Of another, “It is possible that I was trying to explain something—something that was not clear to me. I may have felt that writing it would make me understand it better.”

My basic rationale might be that I like to write. I feel good when I am doing it—better than when I am not. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythms of words and sentences, and when these happily combine in a “thing” that has texture and tone and emotion and design and architecture, there comes a fine feeling—a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love. If there have been difficulties and failures overcome, these may even add to the satisfaction. . . .

As for my “reasoned exposition of principles,” I suspect that they are no different from those of any man living out his life. Like everyone, I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved. I think that writing may be simply a method or technique for communication with other individuals; and its stimulus, the loneliness we are born to. In writing, perhaps we hope to achieve companionship. What some people find in religion, a writer may find in his craft or whatever it is—absorption of the small and frightened and lonely into the whole and complete, a kind of breaking through to glory.

A lady of my acquaintance was asked by her young daughters where babies came from, and after making certain that they really wanted to know, she told them. They listened solemnly and at the end, the mother asked, “Now are you sure you understand?”

The oldest girl said, “Yes, we understand what you do—but why do you do it?”

The mother thought for a moment and then replied, “Because it's fun!”

And that could well be my rationale. My work is and has been fun. Within myself, I find no hunger to inquire further.

RECENTLY my publisher, with the best intention in the world, gave me a scrapbook of all or nearly all the criticisms of a volume of mine. On first reading this compendium was confusing. In many cases one critic canceled out another; while the exponents of the new criticism wrote a parochial language which was completely obscure to me. I became depressed after first looking into this scrapbook, for it seemed to me that there were no laws of criticism. Read all together one had an appalling sense of anarchy.

It is the convention that a writer should never answer a critic, no matter how violent or seemingly unfair the review. For example, when a New Yorker critic attacked a play of mine on the basis of parts and lines which had been removed in rehearsal I knew that he had not looked very carefully at the play and had refreshed his memory from a script which had been abandoned during production. It did not occur to me to protest. This piece is not a protest. It is rather an attempt to scrutinize and perhaps understand present-day American criticism as it is seen by a writer.

One thing we are prone to forget is that the critic is primarily a writer himself and that his first interest lies in his own career. This being so, is it surprising that he is prone to warp his piece in favor of his own cleverness? The critic is nearly always a creative writer or wants to be. Thus, we find him invariably with a novel or play in process or in mind and the critical process can by no means carry over into the creative process. A reviewer who hates dullness is quite capable of writing a dull book. A drama critic of inexorable standards can write, and within our memory has, a play which violated every standard his critical pattern set up.

We are likely also to forget that critics are people with all of the frailties and attitudes of people. One critic explained to me after the fact that he had given me a ferocious beating because he had a hangover. Another, with a reputation for blistering anything he touched, suddenly went enthusiastically appreciative of almost everything. The explanation was not hard to find. He had published three novels which failed and his fourth was well received and his whole approach changed. Another reviewer uses a neurosis stemming from his birth under unusual circumstances and from unusual parents as the gall in which he dips his pen. Still another critic of personal indecision, reviewing a novel with a homosexual theme, attacked it hysterically on points of grammar.

Here is a thing we are most likely to forget. A man's writing is himself. A kind man writes kindly. A mean man writes meanly. A sick man writes sickly. And a wise man writes wisely. There is no reason to suppose that this rule does not apply to critics as well as to other writers.

One might go farther into the effects of personal life on criticism. It is reasonable to suppose that the reviewer privately unloved will take a dim view of love; that the childless critic will be intolerant of children; that the failure will hate success; a bachelor be cynical of marriage; the tired and old find youth and enthusiasm intolerable; and the conservative be outraged by experiment.

In inspecting present-day American reviewers, one should also take into consideration the fact that the critic very rarely intended criticism as his career. It is in many cases a means of surviving until he can become novelist, playwright, or poet and if, in the course of years, he should become none of these he must, no matter how much he may resist, develop an anger against those who do.

 

Another thought that comes to me is that people get tired of their jobs, no matter what they are. I can well imagine that a man who is compelled for his living to read book after book after book might well grow to detest books; that a drama critic forced to go to plays, when he might rather have some private evening social life, could develop a fierce animosity toward the theater. This is more than a conjecture.

But let us consider success within criticism itself. It consists in building up a large body of readers, as large as possible. To do this the critic must attract attention, just as people are more interested in violence than in quiet, in murder and in accidents than in uneventfulness, in divorce than in marriage, so they read destructive attack with greater avidity than praise. Indeed, one critic made his whole reputation by denouncing Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare as literary hacks. He lived on that one for years. He was considered original.

There are generalized tendencies which emerge after much reading of notices.

A reviewer is prone to like the previous book or play of a writer better than the present one, but the previous one he didn't like as well as the one previous to that. Reading a course of reviews of a critic over a period gives a writer the idea that he started with nothing and got nowhere. In fact, is in a continual state of slipping back. Drama critics have apparently great power in determining whether a play shall survive or not. Book critics, on the other hand, seem to have little to do with the success or failure of a book. Some years ago a publisher placed a self-addressed postcard with checkboxes in every book sent out. The response indicated that 3 percent bought the book because of advertising, 2 percent because of reviews, and 95 percent because of word-of-mouth. A national magazine review section has, over a period of ten years or more, torn into every book of mine with a vehemence far beyond the call of duty or even of hatred. This magazine has enormous circulation, yet its campaign has had no appreciable effect on the sale of my books.

 

I have spoken to some extent of unfavorable reviews. I think a writer squirms much more at a favorable notice if the reviewer has missed the point. I remember some overwhelmingly flattering reviews which gave me great sadness because the critic had not understood one thing I was talking about.

What, from a writer's standpoint, is the function of a critic? Some critics seem to feel that they are the directors of writers. They show them the path they should take and punish them if they fall to take it. This has little value to a writer since he is not likely to repeat the book in question.

Should the critic, then, be a kind of intermediary between writer and reader? I don't know, but I suspect that if a writer cannot make himself clear to a reader a critic has little chance of making him clearer. Is the critic a kind of traffic cop of literature? Is he a separator of sheep from goats? Is he an interpreter? Perhaps different reviewers assume different roles. One dramatic critic who apparently must have had a fine time in Germany before the turn of the century has found no pleasure since. Another reviewer for a magazine prefers anything first written in French.

It is amusing to me how many critics are deeply involved with immortality. They threaten the writer with mortality. They have even convinced some of our best living authors that the immortality of their work is important so that they quarrel like children over the billing on a tombstone. A sad state for otherwise brilliant men who should know that literary immortality is a relative matter subject to unforeseen futures. It has occurred in the past too often not to be possible in the future that the writer most read fifty years after his death was unknown or unacceptable during his life. Our immortal of the future may be someone the present critics do not know about or do not consider important.

It would be very interesting for a good and intelligent critic to exercise his craft on a body of work of his fellow critics. If this should happen I think it would be found that the product of a reviewer is not objective at all, but subject to all of the virtues and vices of other writers in other fields. I don't think critics should change; only our attitude toward them. Poor things, nobody reviews them.

THIS IS THE AGE of the package. Everything from dressed and stuffed fleas to locomotives is packaged. And by a slow and steady process, the package is becoming more important than its contents. And why not, since your modern purchaser buys by package?

American books constitute packages and I imagine that the same rules which apply to pillboxes and canned food must apply to books. It seems to be true that if you put identical pills in yellow boxes and in white boxes, purchasers will buy the yellow boxes.

We have three kinds of packages for books—those which attract as flowers attract insects, those which establish their profundity with stern, dull covers (since profundity is generally believed to be dull), and finally, those which by illustration on their jackets indicate or lie about the contents. All of it is a fly-catching process.

It is generally understood by publishers that if a one-pound book is offered beside a two-pound book, the heavier, thicker article is more desirable. The same instinct applies which makes every child at some time or other trade his dime for a nickel. Thick heavy books are more in demand than light, thin books, regardless of the content.

This last fact once caused me to make two suggestions to my publishers which they have stupidly failed to follow. If leaden covers were used, the weight problem would have been overcome. And if the book were printed on rye bread it would be very much thicker. Further, your bread book would solve two problems. The reader would never lose his place since he would eat each page as he finished it; also the lost profit of the borrowed book would be eliminated. And people do like to read while they eat. A few years ago, a public librarian in Birmingham, England, earnestly requested the subscribers not to use bacon or kippers as bookmarks because the grease soaked through the pages and the odor might repel future readers. I feel that bookmaking is far from completely exploited—cellophane bags of marmalade or liver paste glued to the inside of the front cover, for example.

But I shall return to the business as it is practical. Recently some translations of my own work came in from France. The covers were not of cloth but of a black cardboard and the designs were bright and fresh and charming. One's first impulse is to say, “Why can't we do this in America?” The answer is that no one would buy them. We have conditioned our people to look for other values in their purchases.