Looking Backward

To celebrate its 25th birthday last week, the Saturday Review of Literature (circ. 92,000) rounded up a literary team of heavy hitters led by Robert Sherwood, John P. Marquand, Lewis Gannett, Christopher Morley, Maxwell Anderson. They obligingly tried to knock the cover off the ball, but it was SRL that slugged out the homer, circulation-wise. Even at the new price of 20-c-, up a nickel, it sold out a record press run of 150,000 copies in three days. Then it ran off another 10,000 copies, and contracted with a publisher to bring out the star-studded issue as a book.

In its 188-page anniversary edition, SRL gave book lovers a nostalgic look at news events all the way back to 1924. But what most SRL readers would like best were the reappraisals of books of the past quarter-century--though they would not necessarily share the harshness of most of SRL's critical judgments.

Delirious Denunciations. Re-reading Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, the New York Herald Tribune's Lewis Gannett asked: "Is this the book that launched a thousand quips, and stirred the orators to deliriums of denunciation? Main Street doesn't read like a crusading book today. Maybe it never was as much'a crusading book as some of its readers assumed." Francis Hackett found Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has been made "trite" by time and another war. Hackett's conclusion, which would call many Hemingway fans to arms: "[This] lyrical novel, for all its excellences, shows how sterile the primitive protest really is."

John P. Marquand, now leading the bestseller list himself, took a hard look at one of 1920's bestsellers and shrugged his shoulders: "What made [F. Scott Fitzgerald's] This Side of Paradise an immediate [hit] was no doubt its ... expose of the immoralities of the younger generation . . . Unfortunately, things have progressed so far that [today] one wishes that one's own children behaved as sensibly and nicely . . ." But Paradise was still "an exceptionally brilliant piece of work."

Punchy Prose. Clifton (Information Please) Fadiman thought that an impressive--and depressing--fact about the past 25 years was the decline in reader "attention." Readers refused to read anything except "the shortened paragraph, the carefully measured column, the 'punchy' sentence." The whole thing had reached its climax, he thought, in the new Cowles-published Quick--"a news digest of news digests." Wrote he: "One can easily imagine a digest of Quick (Quicker) and finally one of Quicker (Quickest). From Quickest to the nonreading of the news seems a logical next step . . ."

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