The People's Choice
(as of
Oct. 23, 1938)
Mary McCarthy
The Herald-Tribune
Books,
which every Sunday tells America
What America Is Reading, last Sunday (October 23) announced
that
The Yearling, My Son, My Son!,
and ...
and Tell of Time
once
again headed the fiction best-seller list. Almost all summer and well
into the fall, this fiction triumvirate has .been reigning unchallenged
as the People's Choice. And the fact that two of these novels deal
with the post-bellum South and one with pre-war England would
seem offhand to confirm the opinion, held by many superior people
who never buy best-sellers, that the American public is finding in
its
reading matter an escape from contemporary social dilemmas.
It is doubtful, however, that the fiction best-sellers contain the key
to what America of 1938 is thinking, feeling, and wishing. America
of 1938, taken as a whole, is probably not reading novels at all, and
even that genteel America which feeds on fiction is reading the news–
papers, the news magazines, and the non-fiction best-sellers as well.
Indeed, the vogue for "escapist" novels, which followed the depres–
sion, is a far less remarkable phenomenon in the publishing world
than the rise of the news magazines and the unprecedented increase
in the sale of non-fiction, which occurred at the same time.
Gone
With the Wind
is not more American than
Life
magazine; it repre–
sents, in fact, the American novelist's retreat before
Life
magazine.
The romantic novel is not so much an escape for the reader from con–
temporary realities as it is an escape for the novelist from competition
in realism with the journalist and the photographer. Fiction, or, at
any rate, popular fiction is being compelled to specialize.
It is possible, of course, that the tale of far-away-and-long-ago not
only answers the needs of the novelist but the needs of the reader, too.
As journalism is an irritant, it may be a balm for the ache of the
times. Undeniably, these tales are being bought and read, but does
this testify to the reader's desire or to his docility? "Trends" in the
publishing business, as in the movies, are decidedly suspect, for\t trend
is more likely to originate in the mind of a publisher than in the heart
of the public. Just as the movies will follow one success on the subject
of, say, racket-busting with a series of variations on the same theme,
so the publishers will cap one
Gone With the Wind
with a hundred
outsize romances of the Old South. Publishers do not like to take
chances; they are forever on the hunt for recipes, for thought-saving
devices, and once they have found what they believe is a money–
making formula, they
will
plug it at the expense of everything else
on their lists. Comfortable temporarily in the conviction that it was
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