The New York Sun
From the American Mercury, Dec., 1924, pp. 505–07.
A review of MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR, by Edward P. Mitchell; New York, 1924
Permit me, gents, an exultation and a sentimentality. Reading, the other evening, Mr. Mitchell’s charming volume, I came, on page 381, to a few words that sent a thrill through me from glabella to astragalus. The editor of the New York Tribune is thrilled no more when he gets a picture postcard from H.M. King George, nor King George when he beats the chaplain of Windsor at parcheesi. And what caused all this uproar in my recesses? Simply the bald mention of my name—a line and a half of pleasant politeness—by the editor of the old New York Sun. I doubt that I can make you understand it. For you were not, I take it, a hopeful young newspaper reporter in the year ’99, and so your daily food and drink, your dream and your despair, was not the Sun. Dana was dead then, but Munsey had not yet come in to make a stable of the shrine. The reigning editor was Edward P. Mitchell—scarcely a name to the barbarians without the gates, but almost a god to every young journalist. I would not have swapped a word from him, in those days, for three cheers from the Twelve Apostles. He was to me the superlative journalist of this great, heroic land, as the Sun itself was the grandest, gaudiest newspaper that ever went to press. I have suffered much from heartache and heartburn in the years that have passed since then, and in consequence my store of wisdom has increased so vastly that my knees begin to buckle under it, but I still believe that my judgment of Mitchell and the Sun was sound, and I herewith ratify and reiterate it in the solemnest tones I can muster. The one is retired now, and puts in his mornings communing with Habakkuk, his prize turkey-gobbler, and in watching the deer come out of his woods; the other is a corpse hideously daubed to make it look like a respectable groceryman with fashionable aspirations. This Republic will be luckier than it deserves if it ever looks upon their like again.
The dull professors who write literary histories never mention the New York Sun. It is not even listed in the index to the Cambridge History of American Literature, though the Baltimore American and the New York Staats-Zeitung are both there. Nevertheless, I presume to believe that its influence upon the development of American literature, and particularly upon the liberation of the younger writers of its time from the so-called American tradition, was incomparably greater than that of any of the magnificos hymned in the books. What Charles Dana and his aiders taught these youngsters was double: to see and savor the life that swarmed under their noses, and to depict it vividly and with good humor. Nothing could have been at greater odds with the American tradition. The heroes of the Stone Age were all headed in other directions. The life of their place and time interested them very little, especially the common, the ordinary life, and depicting things vividly was always far less their purpose than discussing them profoundly. Even Holmes and Walt Whitman, despite their superficial revolts, ran true to type: they were philosophers long before they were artists. The only exceptions were the humorists, and all the humorists were below the salt: even Mark Twain had to wait until 1910, when death was upon him, before the first American of any academic authority accepted him ungrudgingly. It was the great service of Dana that he stood against all this mumbo-jumbo. From its first issue under his hands the Sun showed a keen and unflagging interest in the everyday life of the American people—in the lowly traffic of the streets and tenements, in the tricks and devices of politicians and other zanies, in all the writings and cavortings of the national spirit. And it depicted these things, not in a remote and superior manner, but intimately and sympathetically, and with good humor and sound understanding. To Dana such a man as Big Tim Sullivan was not a mere monster, to be put in a barrel of alcohol and labeled “Criminal”; he was, above all, a human being—imperfect, perhaps, but still not without his perfections. And so, at the other end, were the communal heroes and demi-gods. Dana saw through all the Roosevelts, Wilsons and Coolidges of his time; they never deceived him for an instant. But neither did they outrage him and set him to spluttering; he had at them, not with the crude clubs and cleavers of his fellows, but with the rapier of wit and the bladder of humor. Long before “Main Street” he had discovered the street itself, and peopled it with a rich stock company of comedians. And long before “Babbitt” he had paved the way for all the “Babbitts” that remain to be written.
Mr. Mitchell notes with some surprise that the Sun, at least in its earlier days, was not read by the Best People—that it was barred, for example, from the reading-room of the Century Club. I see nothing surprising in that. The Century Club, at that time, was a sarcophagus of petrified brains; its typical member was a man of immense dignity and no intelligence. The Sun, to the end of the Dana-Mitchell-Laffan dynasty, was never popular among such dull pedants; not until Dr. Munsey added it to his chain of journalistic grocery-stores did they begin to read it. To this moment, in fact, the paper it once was seems to be but little esteemed by the decayed editorial writers and unsuccessful reporters who teach in schools of journalism. Such stupid fellows, when they were in practise, did not admire the Sun; they admired the New York Times, the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post. But the Sun had plenty of other customers, and many of them were converted into disciples. It was at the hands of these men, I believe, that American literature was delivered from its old formalism and hollowness. They were the young reporters who made the movement of the ’90s. They became the novelists, the dramatists and the critics of the new century. The Sun showed them their own country, and gave them eyes to see it clearly. It created among them a sophisticated and highly civilized point of view. It rid them of the national fear of ideas, the national dread of being natural.
How Dana accomplished all this remains a bit dim, even in Mr. Mitchell’s chronicle. There was apparently no formal instruction in the Sun office, and certainly none of the harsh discipline which makes the modern city-room like a school-room or a bank. Dana did his own work casually and easily, and seems to have let his men run on in the same way. He was extremely tolerant of drunkards, as he was, in his reception-room, of cranks. He gathered recruits wherever he could, and without too much care. But the massive fact remains that, once he had gathered them, he converted them quickly into journalists of a new and superior kind, never matched since. The commonest treadmill work on his paper was done in a lively and excellent manner; its very sporting news, on most papers frankly idiotic, was distinguished. All his men wrote good English; all of them gathered something of his shrewd wisdom. Many of them, graduating from his staff, went in for literature in the grand manner, and did work of importance. But more important still were the men who were taught their trade by the Sun without ever having worked for it. Think of all those who were influenced by the criticism of James Huneker, a thorough Sun man to the end of his days, never happy on any other paper. When the record is written at last, if it is ever written honestly, he will stand among the genuine makers of American literature, though his own books be forgotten. What Huneker had to teach was precisely what the Sun in general had to teach: the stupidity of pedantry and all formal knowledge, the charm and virtue of fresh observation and hearty joy in life.
The Baltimore Sunpaper
From the Baltimore Sun, Jan. 26, 1941. This was the last article, save two, that I wrote for the Sun until 1948. Early in February the paper began supporting Roosevelt II’s effort to horn into World War II in a frantic and highly unintelligent manner, and I withdrew from its editorial pages, after having cavorted there more or less regularly for thirty-five years. The Sun is always called the Sunpaper in Baltimore, and its evening edition, founded in 1910, is usually the Evening Sunpaper. The elder morning sheet was founded in 1837
When I hung up my hat in the Sun office, on July 30, 1906, the grandsons of Arunah S. Abell, the Founder, were in active control of the paper. They were Walter W. Abell, who died last Monday; Arunah S. Abell II, who died on July 26, 1914; and their cousin, Charles S. Abell, who is now living in Washington. I came to
the paper to edit the Sunday edition, which was then but five years old and still more or less vague in contents and aim, and in that capacity I naturally had constant business with the three Abells. They were all young men in that remote era, the oldest, Arunah, being barely past forty. They differed enormously in character and mien, and especially the two brothers, Walter and Arunah. Arunah, the treasurer of the A. S. Abell Company, was one of the most jovial men I have ever known, and I can’t recall ever seeing him in bad humor—not even when he caught an office boy stealing books from the Sun library. Charles S., the secretary, seemed almost austere by comparison, but he too was extremely amiable, and he got much closer to the members of the staff than the other two. But Walter, the president, was genuinely on the formal side, and there were not a few Sun men, including several of the older ones, who regarded him as unapproachable, and even forbidding.
He was, in fact, nothing of the sort, as I soon found by almost daily palavers with him. What gave him his false appearance of aloofness was simply a sort of boyish shyness—a charming weakness, if weakness it be called, that seemed to have been born in him, but got encouragement from the circumstances of his situation. He was in command over men who, in many cases, were much his elders in years and experience, and some of them had been trained under his grandfather. He was thus very diffident about pitting his judgment against theirs, but nevertheless he had to do it constantly, and so there was conflict between his native courtesy, which was marked, and his responsibility as captain of the ship. He solved the problem by concealing his authority beneath a grave reserve, and the impression got about that it was difficult to penetrate. There was another conflict, too, and that was between his filial devotion to the Sun tradition and his intelligent appreciation that when times change traditions must be modified. It was a day of revolution in journalism, largely due to the increasing efficiency of the linotype, and he had before him in Charles H. Grasty, of the Baltimore Evening News, a competitor who became more formidable every day. Mr. Abell never allowed that competition to hurry him, but he was acutely aware of it, and if he met it quietly he also met it boldly. Some of his reforms were so radical that, to the oldsters of the staff, they seemed almost catastrophic, but he put them through resolutely, and it is apparent today, looking back over a generation, that all of them were sound.
In this business he had the eager support of his cousin Charles, who was always for any novelty that was actually improvement, and the ready acquiescence of his brother, who preferred administration to grand strategy, and so kept rather to the sidelines. But there was active opposition in other quarters, and not infrequently it impeded the flow of events. Some of the old-timers, bred in hand-set days, were constitutionally unable to go along, and they had the zealous reënforcement of a large body of old subscribers, many of whom held as a cardinal article of faith that the Sun of 1887 could never be surpassed on this or any earth, and that any attempt to change it was a sin against the Holy Ghost. I well remember the uproar when the first large illustrations began to appear in the Sunday edition. It was not illustrations qua illustrations that out-raged the guardians of tradition, for a few had been printed even in the Founder’s time; it was their size. One column—yes; and maybe even two. But four, five, six—God help us all! When, on a fateful Sunday, Mr. Abell gave me pratique for one running the full width of the page, and dropping down to half its depth, there was a moan that reverberated throughout the Sun Building, and next morning the president’s office was jammed with complainants and objurgators.
But it was not only in the editorial rooms that the old Sunpaper suffered a face-lifting at the hands of that quiet and determined man; in the business office (then called the counting room) there were operations of even more serious nature and import. What Baltimore thought when the paper put its first advertising solicitor on the street should have been taken down in shorthand and embalmed in history, for it was surely aplenty. And when this revolution was followed by the publication of circulation figures (at first, to be sure, only confidentially, and to a select few) the whole town was aghast. It was almost as if the Johns Hopkins University had sent out sandwich-men whooping up courses in meat-cutting and chiropractic. But Abell, if he was deliberate, was also sure-footed, and I can recall none of his innovations that turned out, on trial, to be a mistake. Nor were any mistakes made during the administration of his cousin and successor, Charles S. The whole Sun organization was renovated from top to bottom, and not only renovated but also reoriented. When these youngsters took the paper in hand at the death of Edwin F. Abell in 1904, just after the great Baltimore fire, it still looked back toward the days of the Founder. When they handed it over to a new management in 1910 it was headed for the future, and well prepared for the notable advances, both in editorial enterprise and in business prosperity, which followed the World War.
Life in the Sun office in the era of the Abells was comfortable and leisurely, and I once described the atmosphere as that of a good club. There was a stately courtesy that is uncommon in the dens of journalism, and indeed in any other working place of busy men. All hands save the office boys were mistered by the proprietors, and no one was ever upbraided for a dereliction of duty, however inconvenient. The worst a culprit ever encountered was a mild expostulation, usually couched in very general terms. I recall with blushes a day when my own carelessness admitted to the Sunday Sun an unhappy sentence which made the issue a collector’s item in the barrooms of Baltimore the next day, with the price approaching $1. When I got to the office Monday morning a note was on my desk saying that Walter Abell wanted to see me. There was no defense imaginable, so I entered his office as jauntily as possible, saying, “I am not here for trial, but for sentence.” But there was no sentence, nor even any trial. Mr. Abell, in fact, referred to the matter in hand only obliquely, and with great politeness. All his talk was about the paramount necessity, on a paper as ancient and honorable as the Sun, for the utmost care in copy-reading. He discoursed on that theme at length, but always in broad philosophical terms. Finding his argument unanswerable, I offered no caveat, and withdrew quietly at the first chance.
The Pulitzer Prizes
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 20, 1926. Sinclair Lewis refused the award of the Pulitzer Prize for his Arrowsmith at my instigation. I believed and had often advised him that he should resolutely refuse all prizes, college degrees and other such empty honors, heaving them to the muckers who pulled wires for them. But the ambitious and go-getting Dorothy Thompson, his second wife, was avid for honors and attention, no matter how cheap, and when in 1930 they took the lordly form of the Nobel Prize, she naturally grabbed for it with loud hosannahs. If I had heard of this award in time I’d certainly have made some effort to induce Lewis to decline it, for I had long been convinced that the Stockholm Academy, which chose the recipients of the prizes for literature, was a diligent player of politics. Besides, Lewis knew very well that, if any American deserved to be chosen, it was Dreiser
Sinclair Lewis’s refusal to accept the $1,000 Pulitzer Prize, awarded to him for his novel, “Arrowsmith,” was a gallant and excellent gesture, and deserves all the cheers that it is getting. It is shocking to find Ralph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World and a member of the committee, hinting that the refusal was ground upon a desire for “self-exploitation.” This is preposterous, and Mr. Pulitzer should know it. Mr. Lewis stands in no need of “exploitation” of that sort. His position among American novelists is high and secure—so high and secure that it cannot be damaged, even, by an ill-advised and ridiculous effort to put him among the Pollyannas.
The Pulitzer committee, during the eight years of its existence, has shown a complete incapacity to distinguish between work that is sound and honest in the novel and work that is cheap and false. In 1918 it gave its first award to “His Family,” by Ernest Poole, a fourth-rate story, already long forgotten. That same year Miss Willa Cather published “My Antonia,” perhaps the finest novel ever written by an American woman. In
1922 it gave the award to Miss Cather’s “One of Ours,” her worst book—a thing of blowsy sentimentalities all compact, and disconcerting, to say the least, to her admirers. The same year Lewis published “Babbitt.” So in other years. In 1919, the year of Cabell’s “Jürgen” and Hergesheimer’s “Java Head,” it gave the award to a novel by Booth Tarkington. In 1920, the year of “Main Street,” it withheld the award altogether, on the ground that no work of sufficient importance to receive it had been published! Such imbecilities, repeated annually, cannot be accidental. Either the committee is bound by rules that prevent it making intelligent awards, or its members are incompetent. In either case a novelist of Lewis’s rank is certainly justified in spurning its highly dubious accolade, and in protesting against the damage that its approval does to his reputation.
The difficulties confronting such a committee are, of course, obvious. It is confronted by an immense mass of candidates, many of them vigorously supported by their publishers and other interested persons, and it faces the physical impossibility of reading all the books nominated. Thus its decision is bound to be more or less casual and arbitrary. When it seeks counsel, it apparently turns to men of conventional mind, not likely to be sound judges of works of genuine originality. The prize-winner is finally chosen, I daresay, as candidates for the Presidency are chosen—by gradually eliminating all those whose deviation from normalcy has made them enemies. So “Arrowsmith,” a work avoiding controversy, was selected, after “Main Street” and “Babbitt,” both of them far more important, had been rejected.
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