222
DWIGHT MACDONALD
which the demand was as keen as the want was legitimate . . .
Is
it
not healthy to demand images of virtue, of courage, of
generous feelings, and ... to seek also to obtain instruction as to
historical customs and events? Scott had the genius to carry out
the commercial enterprise which supplied this want . . . One
has the impression, when reading his biography, that one is
reading about a hero of industry." And indeed the chief interest
is
his
enormous productivity,
his
big earnings, his baronial style
of life,
his
heroic struggle to payoff his creditors after bank–
ruptcy. "Nothing is said as to his inner life,
his
loves, his religion,
his
ideas; less than nothing about his spiritual struggles and
development," Croce continues. Any more than such topics
would occur to the biographers of Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller or
the present head of the U.S. Steel Corp.
For one has the impression, in reading even the greatest of
the nineteenth century popular novelists, that the demands of the
market pushed them too hard. So Dickens, so Balzac, so Mark
Twain. Today the pressure for production comes under the head
of physics rather than of esthetics. In the 1955-1956 season, a
long-forgotten TV program called "Matinee" put on five
original one-hour plays a week every week, or 260 a year; it took
100 writers, 20 directors and 4,000 actors to keep these Molo–
chian fires stoked. The rate at which TV uses up comic talent
has been described by Fred Allen, a notable victim; one has
merely to see a TV comedy show to realize how tragically right
he was. A big publishing house like Doubleday must have hun–
dreds of titles a year to keep its presses busy; the overhead goes
on, the more books produced the cheaper to produce each one,
and the fear that wakes publishers in the night is that the presses
may for a moment stop. Such birth-control as there is for some
reason is exercised at the expense of original and distinguished
manuscripts. Anything that is sufficiently banal is sure of a
kinder hearing, on the assumption that a bad book
may
sell
whereas a good one definitely
won't.
The vast amount of un–
profitable junk the publishers issue every year might be expected
