'Everyone Believes He or She Could Write a Book'

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and editors, and presumably readers, find interesting and important? Taste is notoriously transient. Most of it is rooted in fashion and peer pressure, what other folks like.

The July 14, 1956, issue of The Saturday Review, published seventy years ago, opens with the “Trade Winds” column of Bennett Cerf (1898-1971). As a kid, I knew him as a panelist on the quiz show What’s My Line? Later I learned he was cofounder of Random House, publisher of the Modern Library I relied on for my education. Cerf published Faulkner, John O’Hara and Whitaker Chambers’ Witness. We can blame him for publishing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cerf’s column is feeble stuff: 

“Hard-pressed publishers have come up with a lucrative and relatively new gimmick in recent months: histories of great corporations, financed by the corporations themselves. The publishers usually supply the author, edit the text, and make a token distribution in bookstores after publication; the corporation buys between five and fifty thousand copies at a stipulated price, thus assuring the publisher a profit before he begins. . . There is nothing wrong with business of this sort—provided the public is let in on the essential details.”

 

Well, yes – and no. Next up is “The Literary Life at Seventy-Five” by a name new to me, William McFee (1881-1966), a prolific writer of sea stories. Judging by his article, McFee was a cultivated man with a sense of humor. He makes observations I have also  made:

 

“Writers are not highly regarded in America. I know this sounds odd, but it is true. Everyone uses a pen, and everyone believes he or she could write a book if there were only time. Recently I heard the expression, ‘I could write a book about that place.’ Another person, after reading a book about his own profession, said he could write a better book. The point is, each assumed as a matter of course he could write a book, but he would never claim to be able to carve a statue or compose music or paint a picture or design a building. Even if they do not offer to write a book they have a plot for a novel, which they present to a writer, free.”

 

Of all the book reviewers I recognize the names of William Peden, Edmund Fuller, Paul Arthur Schilpp and Meyer Levin. Of the writers under review, even fewer names. A pleasant surprise is the byline of Whitney Balliett, who would soon become a staff writer and jazz critic for The New Yorker. His piece is titled “Billie, Big Bill, and Jelly Roll” – that is, Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy and Jelly Roll Morton, all of whom had recently had their autobiographies published. Balliett is honest and never patronizing:

 

“Three quite different, though complementary, autobiographies have recently been published here and in England, and taken together, they provide an invaluable reflection of the Negro jazz musician. All three books are products of collaboration and as a result they vary as much in quality as content.”

 

Of the three, I remember Morton’s book being the most interesting. He was a raconteur, a one-time pimp, a storyteller and a brilliant composer. He had died sick and broke in 1941. Balliett’s verdict: “Morton gave the American Dream an awful pummeling before it cut him down.”