THE DIAL: A RETROSPECT
55
"Hawks should not prey upon hawks." And an ostensibly formal humor·
esque of our own, concocted by Kenneth Burke, recurs to me,-the answer
to an advertising manager who complained that if books which had re–
ceived long reviews and unanimous approbation elsewhere, were to be
damned at
The Dial
by brief notices and faint praise; might they not be
damned somewhat more promptly? To this complaint from an acquain–
tance of Mr. Burke's who had not foreseen that someone he knew might be
answering it, Mr. Burke said, "... Why not give
The Dial
credit. As you
have said, under our silence the book went through five editions. Now
that we have spoken there may never be a sixth. Further, we are happy to
learn that whereas we had feared that our 'Briefer Mention' was a week or
two late, the continued success of the book has kept our comment green.
We are, you might say, reviewing a reprint-a courtesy not all gazettes
will afford you.... And are you, after all, so sure that a book benefits
by having the reviews all let off at once like something gone wrong in the
arsenal, followed by an eternity of charred silence."
And we were not without academic loyalty in the guise of reproof,
one complainant who has been writing some very good verse, taking us to
task about a review which he considered "unfair to the author" in being
"nothing but a warped summary" and "dangerous'' as "a bad piece of
work ... sponsored by a magazine of
The Dial's
reputation." Almost
simultaneous with this letter, we received from the ill-treated author, one
that said in conclusion, "And may I tell you how much I was pleased
with A.A.A.'s review of -- --? Quite apart from the fact that
it
was
kind, it seemed to me an almost miraculous 'summing-up.' I have always
wondered if A.A.A. was a nom de plume. Will you extend my thanks to
him or her?"
Occasional inadvertences, moreover, at the expense of the acting
editor·were not wanting; sundry inquiries requesting the attention of the
Active Editor; a letter from one of our Spanish contributors beginning,
"My respectable Miss:" and resulting from statements about the
Dial
Award as acknowledging a contribution to "letters," offers to provide
whatever sort of letters we required.
It was an office truism that declined manuscript accompanied by a
printed card had been read as carefully as manuscript returned with a
letter. But occasionally there was the compliment of anger from those
whose grievances were imaginary and whose grudges were real; who were
so incurious in their reading as to accuse us of anti-Semitism, or hid salt
between pages to test the intensiveness of our reading. But not all "con·
tributors who were not allowed to contribute'' bit the hand that had not
fed them. One to whom Alyse Gregory had given advice, replied that
before submitting work to
The Dial
he had not known there was such a
thinp; as editorial reciprocity, that he had rejection-slips enough "to paper
the Washington Monument inside and out"; that at last, however, as the
result of
The Dial's
encouragement, he was appearing regularly in the
XYZ,-(a fiction magazine of robust circulation). And I recall the gener·
