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RICHARD CHASE
tential (female) reader, and made himself a consistent place on the
best-seller list. Nor have I any thoughts about the anonymous "Let–
ter to a Young Man About to Enter Publishing"-except that it has
nothing to do with writing in America.
John Fischer's piece called "Writers and Their Editors" strikes
me as a bit of folklore out of the Romance of Editing. Mr. Fischer,
though an editor of long standing and one who doubtless knows his
business, seems to have been reading too much Tom (as he calls
him) Wolfe. He describes the typical editor as a sort of long-suffer–
ing mother-father figure, a large part of whose destiny is to put up
with authors' "tantrums and change their emotional diapers." Al–
though ignorant about publishing, I'll hazard the guess that this
isn't true. I don't know what to make of Fischer's assertion that the
readers' reports to editors on unpublished manuscripts "are prob–
ably the best literary criticism being written anywhere." But I re–
fuse to believe his quotation from
The New Yorker
to the effect that
if the written editorial opinions of the late Wolcott Gibbs "could be
released to the world (as they most assuredly can't be) , they.would
make probably a funnier and sounder critique of creative writing in
the late twenties and early thirties than has ever been assembled."
This too sounds to me like folklore, of the sort believed in by the
Ross-was-one-hell-of-an-editor school of literary theory. And unless
reliably informed that Mr. Gibbs's editorial opinions are a whole lot
funnier and sounder than his theater reviews in
The New Yorker
were, I'll settle for, among others, Edmund Wilson's critique of
creative writing in the late twenties and early thirties.
Which reminds me that a look into
Shores of Light,
Mr. Wil–
son's chronicle of the writing of 30 years ago, shows us how much
has been lost on the literary scene. Relatively at least there was a
real coherence (as opposed to mere accommodation) of purpose and
spirit among writers 30 years ago. And a book published in 1930
and called
Writing in America
could scarcely have helped being
less shallow and haphazard than this one is.
Richard Chase
