Compton Mackenzie
AREMARK of mine that a review in the Spectator had stimulated the circulating libraries into increasing their original subscription for my first novel evoked an Interesting comment from the Bookseller: - "Nowadays, I am told, although I do not hold it to be altogether true, librarians aqd others concerned in the mass rrovision of reading materil are very little influenced by eviews and prefer their own judgments.' The question then posed to myself was whether that was due to the lessened authority of reviewers and periodicals, or to 'the increased ability of librarians and such. I shall try to answer it.
The literary world was a much smaller place in 1911 and there were many more journals and weeklies to keep it in- formed than exist now. For my first novel I received thirty reviews within a month and another forty during the next two months: a young ' first novelist' of today may read such a statement with justifiable incredulity. I still add that The New Machiavelli of H. G. Wells was published on the same day as The Passionate Elopement, and that, shortly before. The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol had appeared, which, being an eighteenth-century romance like my own book and an early example of the ` best seller ' into the bargain, was a formidable rival.
At that date the only chance a beginner had of really impressing the circulating libraries and bookshops like Bumpus and Hatchards was for the Spectator to make it the novel chosen each week for a lengthy review, for the Times Literary Supplement to make it the first of one of their three novels chosen each week for special notice, for the Westminster Gazette Kalas for the old sea-green incorruptible!) to give it favourable attention, and finally for Punch to mention it at all. The ',Athenteum was no longer a force in criticism; the brilliance of the Saturday Review had grown dim; the Daily Chronicle was fast losing the literary reputation it had gained; the Standard was already doomed.
Two years later I was consulting William Heinemann about the possibility of bringing out my novel Sinister Street in two volumes, with an interval between•them. He was pessimistic about the prospect because he had published a novel by. William de Morgan in two volumes without the response from the reading public for which he had hoped and with the obstructive disapproval of the circulating libraries. In the course of our `Conversation I happened to congratulate him upon the success One of his novels had enjoyed that season. i " Yes," he said, " with the little London clique. But what use is that to a publisher? " And I realised how small was the actual circulatiOn of a novel only talked about in Mayfair, Kensington, Chelsea and :Hampstead. Yet it was from there that Mudie's and the lately 'started Times Book Club derived their chief support. Smith's and Boots' required the support of the provinces as well. Best 'sellers, however, were not made by circulating libraries; it was 'essential to persuade the public to want to read a book so !vmuch that they would buy it rather than be kept waiting for weeks by the libraries.
1 This potent influence was wielded by the Daily Mail. The ordinary review in the Daily Mail was not much more effective than a review in the Daily Express, which in those days was from any point of view negligible. However, very rarely, that is to say about once in two years at the most, the Daily Mail picked out a book and gave it a column review on the leader page. When this happened the fortune of that book was secure, and it says much for the superlative editing of the late Thomas Marlowe that, within my recollection, the -Daily, Mail never made a mistake. I do not suggest that the review itself was necessarily a percipient piece of criticism, but if the Daily Mail decided to offer its laurel wreath not even the most priggish critic of the Manchester Guardian or Aberdeen Free Press ventured to ignore that book. When I talk of the ` best seller' before 1914, readers must not suppose it was anything comparable with the epidemic type of `best seller 'with which we are familiar today.
After the First War the Evening Standard, which had been rescued-by Lord Beaverbrook from a state of dull—I hesitate to say " decay," because the Evening Standard had never attained a position from which decay was possible—of dull nonentity rather, gave Arnold Bennett an opportunity to pontificate about new books, and for a while Bennett was able to ensure success. He was, in fact, an excellent judge of the reasonably good book that would please the public, but neither he nor any other critic could or can force a book on the public, whatever its merits.
No doubt, this is what libraries and booksellers have real- ised, and no doubt the multiplication of personal criticism, under a more or less well-known signature has persuaded them to use their own judgment more than perhaps they used to in the past. The late James Agate did as much as any indi- vidual reviewer to bring the job into disrepute. He had a large following as a dramatic critic, and many, of whom I was not one, considered him a good dramatic critic. I never heard of anybody who thought him a good literary critic, for to an extensive ignorance of literature he added a lazy dishonesty. I have said as much in print about him while he was alive. and am not prepared to 'retract my opinion of him now that he is dead. James Agate was unable either to make or mar the success of a/book, for he was usually much more anxious to show off with facile wisecracks what a clever fellow James Agate was-than to present his readers with a considered opinion. Moreover, he committed 'habitually the cardinal sin for a reviewer of writing about a book he had not read from cover to cover.
In the old days of anonymous reviewing, for the return of which I sometimes sigh, the critic was often more savage than he is today above his own signature, but he did not bother to show off his own cleverness. That is what invalidates much of the signed reviewing by clever young men today. The impression too often left upon the reader is that they are more anxiously concerned to advertise themselves than the books, to pass judgment on which they are being paid. Such anxiety is intelligible because the opportunity for self-expression is more restricted now and there are many more clever young men than there used to be. However, librarians and book- sellers cannot afford to pay attention to such criticism. They are called upon to try to guide a much more diversified and an immensely larger public than forty years ago, a public for .whom the novel has nothing like the importance it had once upon a time for those securely genteel subscribers in Ken- sington to Mudie's Library.
When I was on the advisory committee of the Book Society I used to wonder what effect a recommendation had, and I came to the conclusion that it was only effective in the case of a new or little known author. One could then presume that booksellers noted these recommendations. A Book Society Choice is another matter, and ensures for a book a Wider circulation than it might otherwise have had.
My answer to the Bookseller is that libraries and book- sellers are undoubtedly much more efficient today than forty years ago and that reviewers have less influence, one reason `being the small amount of space available for them and another being the exhaustion of laudatory epithets. But note that I am talking about reviewers. I shall return later to the bell-wether critic today who is thriving on the ovine docility of the public that longs to bleat in ' cultured ' unison.
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