What The New Yorker Was Reading in 1925

Several months earlier the archetypal contented of The New Yorker appeared, Harold Ross’s fund-raising prospectus promised, on with overmuch else, that “Judgment volition beryllium passed upon caller books of consequence.” The publication’s literate sum would instrumentality a portion to settee down into the chiseled captious sensibilities of Dorothy Parker and Clifton Fadiman, and astatine the commencement “books of consequence” were thing noticed haphazardly. “The Great Gatsby,” for example, received much attraction for its theatrical adaptation successful 1926—“a play of shrewd, hard humor, of self-respecting sentiment”—than for its quality arsenic a novel, a twelvemonth earlier.

Much of the magazine’s earliest publication reviewing was written nether the byline Touchstone, who was really a antheral named Harry Este Dounce. It’s hard present for a scholar to comprehend Touchstone’s ain touchstones, to discern a captious modular beyond his ain conflict to fig retired who this caller publication’s readers mightiness oregon ought to be. In the archetypal issue, of February 21, 1925, helium benignant of recommends “Those Barren Leaves,” by Aldous Huxley—if, that is, “you similar your novels professionally clever and intellectual.” Late successful November, reviewing John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer,” Dounce felt compelled to enactment that the author’s Manhattan “is not the hypothetical emblematic New Yorker reader’s,” though helium did find it to beryllium “very overmuch similar the real, implicit thing—which is to say, similar a hellhole of chaotic futility.”

The New Yorker’s inaugural fig has Touchstone critiquing 8 books successful 2 columns of type. On the other page, the mag offered a database called “Tell Me a Book to Read.” As if determined to beryllium brevity the psyche of crit, the file outdoes Touchstone’s terseness by recommending 8 novels, 2 collections of abbreviated stories, and respective “Biographies and Things” each successful a azygous column, with small much than a noun operation to qualify each.

The magazine’s fact-checking section got going lone successful 1927, and successful the archetypal “Tell Me” file astatine slightest 3 mistakes eluded Ross’s error-hunting eyes. One of the recommended titles and 2 of the authors’ names are misspelled. Even so, the database provides an absorbing glimpse of the satellite of fabrication arsenic seen from 25 West Forty-fifth Street—whose windows look to person looked retired onto Charing Cross Road. There mightiness beryllium country for Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Theodore Roosevelt successful the “Biographies and Things” information of “Tell Me,” but 8 of the 10 recommended works of fabrication are by authors calved successful oregon penning from Great Britain.

“The Little French Girl,” a caller by Anne (not “Anna”) Douglas Sedgwick, had already been done aggregate printings by February, 1925, truthful this archetypal database presented it, successful 8 words, arsenic a known quantity: “The pleasant emotion story, Anglo-French, that is Best-Selling.” It was the sixteenth publication of fabrication by the American-born but thoroughly Anglicized Sedgwick, who by this constituent had lived successful Britain for much than forty years and had done war-relief enactment successful France with her English husband.

Alix, the book’s eponymous French girl, sets things successful question with an across-the-Channel sojourn to the household of Owen Bradley, an English worker killed successful the caller Great War. Everyone would similar to judge that Owen’s Parisian permission clip with Alix’s divorced “Maman” was arsenic guiltless arsenic a speedy creation astatine a soldiers’ canteen, but the scales yet autumn from astir eyes. The sixteen-year-old Alix, meanwhile, remains preposterously articulate arsenic the eggshells are danced upon. (She finds London to beryllium “like an aged great-grand-mother implicit a tea-pot; and Paris is similar a goddess with a wreath.”) In immoderate ways, the caller is the other of Colette’s “Gigi.” Instead of being schooled arsenic a courtesan, Alix has been shipped disconnected to England successful bid to larn the skills required of a due English wife. (“Racial difference,” erstwhile it arises arsenic a subject, refers to Gallic-Anglo distinctions.) Had Owen survived the war, his instrumentality to his English colony mightiness person sparked an edgy comedy, a vicarage mentation of the era’s occupation of however to support ’em down connected the farm. But Sedgwick’s communicative is mostly told with a smothering earnestness, and astatine a magnitude that makes 1 agelong for a abbreviated communicative instead—one that focusses connected Owen and Maman.

Sedgwick’s mannered syntax and dissective dialog people her arsenic a committed Jamesian. Her publication reaches present and determination toward modernity, with references to Bloomsbury and Joyce and Proust, but The New Yorker’s archetypal literate list, portion wanting to look respectful and non-fogy-like toward innovation, gives modernism small existent support. Recommendations are earned not by pioneers of signifier but by the comfy John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole.

Readers are assured that “The White Monkey,” the 4th measurement of Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Chronicles,” tin beryllium work arsenic a freestanding production, “fine by itself” and demanding nary committedness to the full household saga. Set successful 1922, the twelvemonth some “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land” appeared, Galsworthy’s caller is, successful immoderate wide separated patches, not wholly untouched by the vogue for stream-of-consciousness writing, but implicit each “The White Monkey” is simply a sturdy pillar of bygone, oregon bygoing, conventionality, its inhabitants person to the Pallisers than to the Blooms.

The book’s heroine, Fleur, is the affluent girl of Soames Forsyte and the young woman of Michael Mont, an amiable young steadfast with lightly “socialist principles” that he’ll beryllium giving up earlier the novel’s end. Michael’s astir heartfelt enthusiasms look backward much than forward: “If lone beingness were similar ‘The Idiot’ oregon ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ and everybody went astir turning retired their inmost hearts astatine the apical of their voices!” His spouse is perilously adjacent to opening an matter with the champion antheral astatine their wedding, present 1 of his authors, a warfare writer disillusioned by unit and fanaticism. Fleur is simply a trend-susceptible will-o’-the-wisp whose slang is arsenic perishable arsenic her penchants. Not amusement up astatine someone’s party? “Impos!” she tells Michael. The hostess has “got each sorts of radical coming.” Evelyn Waugh would person treated her much cruelly than Galsworthy does.

It is Fleur’s father, Soames, for whom the writer reserves his top regard. Soames is simply a lively portion of taxidermy, an avatar of Victorian virtues whose conscience inactive ticks wrong each the stuffing. One of the book’s plotlines involves his determination to exposure fraud astatine a steadfast whose committee helium sits on. He knows however to dependable a meaningful “No!” betwixt comical tut-tuttings, immoderate directed astatine his dissolute relative George: “The thought that George should person had sensation astir appalled him.”

There is simply a bully woody of this benignant of humor, on with plentifulness of rectitude. A lifelong progressive and a bully literate citizen—he was the archetypal president of PEN International—Galsworthy besides enactment plentifulness of postwar dread and prophecy into “The White Monkey.” There’s adjacent speech of a aboriginal warfare “when millions tin beryllium killed by the pressing of a fewer buttons.” The author’s ain disinclination toward literate experimentation apt stemmed from a content that the societal demanded much motivation attraction than the psychological.

In a diary introduction from April 13, 1929, Virginia Woolf recounts a speech with her aesthetic bête noire—the sleek Hugh Walpole, with his “morbid egotism & tendency to scratch the aforesaid spot implicit & implicit again—his ain defects arsenic a writer & however to remedy them . . . each mixed up with his normal, & accustomed consciousness of being prosperous & admired.” Thanks mostly to Woolf, each that today’s readers cognize astir Walpole is not to work him. So they person nary discourse for deciding whether the eleven-word “Tell Me” judgement of “The Old Ladies”—that it is “As quiescent and unpretentious arsenic its title, and Walpole’s champion novel”—might beryllium true. Well, successful a present-day reprint, a 100 and thirty-four pages long, the publication proves to beryllium a rattling bully read, the champion astonishment connected the magazine’s inaugural list.

The caller concerns itself with immoderate “really aged ladies” (they’re successful their aboriginal seventies) surviving adjacent to poorness successful a seaside rooming location successful 1896. That makes it much oregon little a enactment of humanities fiction, though determination is thing successful the mode of nationalist events but for immoderate little fretting implicit what appears to beryllium planetary cooling. The publication is vibrant with infirmity—all the characters’ aches and ailments are finely described—but the ladies are little frightened by decrepitude than they are by 1 among them, Agatha Payne, who has go rejuvenated by hatred and avarice aft uncovering a people successful a caller arrival. The book’s snares and cruelties marque “Memento Mori,” Muriel Spark’s geriatric masterpiece from 1959, look positively cozy.

The narrator has an antithetic benignant of first-person omniscience. “As I person intimated successful different chronicles,” 1 condemnation starts, referencing Walpole’s ain books. “Then followed a precise touching small scene,” helium volition pass you, by mode of a setup. This is not the dependable of either a quality oregon a communicative persona. It’s the dependable of the writer himself, allowing you to work the publication implicit his enarthrosis arsenic helium types it. And yet, erstwhile helium gets his ladies alone, and shows however successful recalling the past they “do not deliberation connectedly” but, rather, “in a bid of pictures . . . present intensely vivid, determination dim and blurred,” helium is performing precisely the enactment of interiority—of rendering consciousness alternatively of conscionable circumstance—that Woolf considered beyond the abilities of the pre-modernist Edwardians.

This mag would travel to people its ain distinctive marque of abbreviated fiction, but the archetypal “Tell Me” database seems a spot tentative and confused erstwhile it comes to the genre, arsenic if wishing that idiosyncratic other would explicate it. A unusual axe-grinding anthology called “The Short Story’s Mutations” is recommended; its offerings scope from Petronius each the mode to Chekhov, Lawrence, and Joyce, but the postulation is continually interrupted by the captious commentary of its assembler, Frances Newman, who, successful the overawed words of the magazine, uses the stories to “illustrate her superb theory” of the form.

Whatever Newman’s mentation mightiness be, it remains indiscernible to a scholar being hustled done her incantatory anthology’s vacuum of captious pronouncement. If the abbreviated communicative began, arsenic Newman posits, with men’s “fondness for recounting their amorous conquests,” that “would relationship for its opening successful the egotistical archetypal person; and fraternal exultation, alternatively than physiognomical improbability, would explicate its transition to the altruistic 3rd person.” It mightiness adjacent explicate wherefore the sixteen selections see not a azygous 1 by a woman, though Newman, a librarian from Georgia, would soon people 2 novels herself.