What The New Yorker Was Reading in 1925
Several months before the first issue of The New Yorker appeared, Harold Ross’s fund-raising prospectus promised, along with much else, that “Judgment will be passed upon new books of consequence.” The publication’s literary coverage would take a while to settle down into the distinct critical sensibilities of Dorothy Parker and Clifton Fadiman, and at the start “books of consequence” were something noticed haphazardly. “The Great Gatsby,” for example, received more attention for its theatrical adaptation in 1926—“a play of shrewd, hard humor, of self-respecting sentiment”—than for its appearance as a novel, a year earlier.
Much of the magazine’s earliest book reviewing was written under the byline Touchstone, who was actually a man named Harry Este Dounce. It’s hard now for a reader to perceive Touchstone’s own touchstones, to discern a critical standard beyond his own struggle to figure out who this new publication’s readers might or ought to be. In the first issue, of February 21, 1925, he sort of recommends “Those Barren Leaves,” by Aldous Huxley—if, that is, “you like your novels professionally clever and intellectual.” Late in November, reviewing John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer,” Dounce felt compelled to note that the author’s Manhattan “is not the hypothetical typical New Yorker reader’s,” though he did find it to be “very much like the real, complete thing—which is to say, like a hell of chaotic futility.”
The New Yorker’s inaugural number has Touchstone critiquing eight books in two columns of type. On the opposite page, the magazine offered a list called “Tell Me a Book to Read.” As if determined to prove brevity the soul of crit, the column outdoes Touchstone’s terseness by recommending eight novels, two collections of short stories, and several “Biographies and Things” all in a single column, with little more than a noun phrase to characterize each.
The magazine’s fact-checking department got going only in 1927, and in the first “Tell Me” column at least three mistakes eluded Ross’s error-hunting eyes. One of the recommended titles and two of the authors’ names are misspelled. Even so, the list provides an interesting glimpse of the world of fiction as seen from 25 West Forty-fifth Street—whose windows seem to have looked out onto Charing Cross Road. There might be room for Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Theodore Roosevelt in the “Biographies and Things” portion of “Tell Me,” but eight of the ten recommended works of fiction are by authors born in or writing from Great Britain.
“The Little French Girl,” a novel by Anne (not “Anna”) Douglas Sedgwick, had already been through multiple printings by February, 1925, so this first list presented it, in eight words, as a known quantity: “The pleasant love story, Anglo-French, that is Best-Selling.” It was the sixteenth book of fiction by the American-born but thoroughly Anglicized Sedgwick, who by this point had lived in Britain for more than forty years and had done war-relief work in France with her English husband.
Alix, the book’s eponymous French girl, sets things in motion with an across-the-Channel visit to the family of Owen Bradley, an English soldier killed in the recent Great War. Everyone would like to believe that Owen’s Parisian leave time with Alix’s divorced “Maman” was as innocent as a quick dance at a soldiers’ canteen, but the scales eventually fall from most eyes. The sixteen-year-old Alix, meanwhile, remains preposterously articulate as the eggshells are danced upon. (She finds London to be “like an old great-grand-mother over a tea-pot; and Paris is like a goddess with a wreath.”) In some ways, the novel is the opposite of Colette’s “Gigi.” Instead of being schooled as a courtesan, Alix has been shipped off to England in order to learn the skills required of a proper English wife. (“Racial difference,” when it arises as a subject, refers to Gallic-Anglo distinctions.) Had Owen survived the war, his return to his English village might have sparked an edgy comedy, a vicarage version of the era’s problem of how to keep ’em down on the farm. But Sedgwick’s tale is mostly told with a smothering earnestness, and at a length that makes one long for a short story instead—one that focusses on Owen and Maman.
Sedgwick’s mannered syntax and dissective dialogue mark her as a committed Jamesian. Her book reaches here and there toward modernity, with references to Bloomsbury and Joyce and Proust, but The New Yorker’s first literary list, while wanting to appear respectful and non-fogy-like toward innovation, gives modernism little real support. Recommendations are earned not by pioneers of form but by the comfortable John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole.
Readers are assured that “The White Monkey,” the fourth volume of Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Chronicles,” can be read as a freestanding production, “fine by itself” and demanding no commitment to the whole family saga. Set in 1922, the year both “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” appeared, Galsworthy’s novel is, in some widely separated patches, not entirely untouched by the vogue for stream-of-consciousness writing, but over all “The White Monkey” is a sturdy pillar of bygone, or bygoing, conventionality, its inhabitants closer to the Pallisers than to the Blooms.
The book’s heroine, Fleur, is the rich daughter of Soames Forsyte and the young wife of Michael Mont, an amiable young publisher with lightly “socialist principles” that he’ll be giving up before the novel’s end. Michael’s most heartfelt enthusiasms look backward more than forward: “If only life were like ‘The Idiot’ or ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ and everybody went about turning out their inmost hearts at the top of their voices!” His spouse is perilously close to beginning an affair with the best man at their wedding, now one of his authors, a war poet disillusioned by violence and fanaticism. Fleur is a trend-susceptible will-o’-the-wisp whose slang is as perishable as her penchants. Not show up at someone’s party? “Impos!” she tells Michael. The hostess has “got all sorts of people coming.” Evelyn Waugh would have treated her more cruelly than Galsworthy does.
It is Fleur’s father, Soames, for whom the author reserves his greatest regard. Soames is a lively piece of taxidermy, an avatar of Victorian virtues whose conscience still ticks inside all the stuffing. One of the book’s plotlines involves his decision to expose fraud at a firm whose board he sits on. He knows how to sound a meaningful “No!” between comical tut-tuttings, some directed at his dissolute cousin George: “The idea that George should have had taste almost appalled him.”
There is a good deal of this kind of humor, along with plenty of rectitude. A lifelong progressive and a good literary citizen—he was the first president of PEN International—Galsworthy also put plenty of postwar dread and prophecy into “The White Monkey.” There’s even talk of a future war “when millions can be killed by the pressing of a few buttons.” The author’s own disinclination toward literary experiment likely stemmed from a belief that the social demanded more moral attention than the psychological.
In a diary entry from April 13, 1929, Virginia Woolf recounts a conversation with her aesthetic bête noire—the sleek Hugh Walpole, with his “morbid egotism & desire to scratch the same place over & over again—his own defects as a writer & how to remedy them . . . all mixed up with his normal, & usual sense of being prosperous & admired.” Thanks largely to Woolf, all that today’s readers know about Walpole is not to read him. So they have no context for deciding whether the eleven-word “Tell Me” judgment of “The Old Ladies”—that it is “As quiet and unpretentious as its title, and Walpole’s best novel”—might be true. Well, in a present-day reprint, a hundred and thirty-four pages long, the book proves to be a rattling good read, the best surprise on the magazine’s inaugural list.
The novel concerns itself with some “really old ladies” (they’re in their early seventies) living close to poverty in a seaside rooming house in 1896. That makes it more or less a work of historical fiction, though there is nothing in the way of public events except for some brief fretting over what appears to be global cooling. The book is vibrant with infirmity—all the characters’ aches and ailments are finely described—but the ladies are less frightened by decrepitude than they are by one among them, Agatha Payne, who has become rejuvenated by hatred and avarice after finding a target in a new arrival. The book’s snares and cruelties make “Memento Mori,” Muriel Spark’s geriatric masterpiece from 1959, seem positively cozy.
The narrator has an unusual kind of first-person omniscience. “As I have intimated in other chronicles,” one sentence starts, referencing Walpole’s own books. “Then followed a very touching little scene,” he will inform you, by way of a setup. This is not the voice of either a character or a narrative persona. It’s the voice of the author himself, allowing you to read the book over his shoulder as he types it. And yet, when he gets his ladies alone, and shows how in recalling the past they “do not think connectedly” but, rather, “in a series of pictures . . . here intensely vivid, there dim and blurred,” he is performing exactly the work of interiority—of rendering consciousness instead of just circumstance—that Woolf considered beyond the abilities of the pre-modernist Edwardians.
This magazine would come to publish its own distinctive brand of short fiction, but the first “Tell Me” list seems a bit tentative and confused when it comes to the genre, as if wishing that someone else would explain it. A strange axe-grinding anthology called “The Short Story’s Mutations” is recommended; its offerings range from Petronius all the way to Chekhov, Lawrence, and Joyce, but the collection is continually interrupted by the critical commentary of its assembler, Frances Newman, who, in the overawed words of the magazine, uses the stories to “illustrate her brilliant theory” of the form.
Whatever Newman’s theory might be, it remains indiscernible to a reader being hustled through her incantatory anthology’s vacuum of critical pronouncement. If the short story began, as Newman posits, with men’s “fondness for recounting their amorous conquests,” that “would account for its beginning in the egotistical first person; and fraternal exultation, rather than physiognomical improbability, would explain its passage to the altruistic third person.” It might even explain why the sixteen selections include not a single one by a woman, though Newman, a librarian from Georgia, would soon publish two novels herself.
