Books: The Doldrums

“Do what we can,” sighed Ralph Waldo Emerson, “summer will have its flies.” In 1945, summer was having its perennial drought in readable books. “Along about every July,” cracked Random House’s bubbling Bennett Cerf, “publishers start crying into their $6 lunches at the Colony and $2 mint juleps at the Ritz Bar that business is awful. But by September 10, they’re again screaming that they’re in the 90% income tax bracket.”

1945’s drought was intensified by stringent wartime paper rationing and the absence, on military service, of a generation of would-be writers. Publishers who hoped that things would be better by fall were laying their potential best-sellers on ice, dishing up leftovers and scraps. There were tangible evidences of 1945’s summer doldrums:

¶ Publishers’ Weekly announced that there were 81 fewer titles published in the first half of the year than in the same period of 1944.

¶Reprints of past successes were on the upgrade. More & more of the reading public was demanding so-called “standard authors” (Henry James, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray were favorites).

¶ August best-seller lists were packed with tried-&-true favorites that had been published one, two, even three years ago. Still prominent in popular fiction lists were trusty epics (1942’s The Robe; 1943’s The Fountainhead); cloak-&-dagger tales set in more glamorous periods of history (Captain from Castile, Commodore Hornblower); fleshly garlands of love (“Oh!” sighed a harassed Manhattan bookdealer, “how tired I am of young girls whispering that they want Forever Amber.”)

¶ In Milwaukee, the sentimental citizenry was buying 10,000 copies a week of a book of photographs (enlivened with scant text and pen sketches) called The Story of “Gertie”—all about a duck who hatched six eggs in the heart of the financial district while thousands cheered.

Strongest indication of the general drought appeared in the July-August selections of the nation’s largest “book clubs.” The Book-of-the-Month Club desperately dug up Rickshaw Boy (Reynal & Hitchcock; $2.75), a translation of a seven-year-old Chinese novel by Lau Shaw about “a humble man’s dream of owning his own rickshaw.” It is a dream, said Clubster Lewis Gannett, filled with the “love of a steady run and a good sweat.” (As “dividend,”the Club tossed in the eight-months-old novel, The Green Years, by standard best-seller A. J. Cronin.)

Manhattan’s Literary Guild snapped up James Hilton’s So Well Remembered (Little, Brown; $2.50)—catching it on the fly to Hollywood, where such earlier creations as Lost Horizon have fattened Author-Scripter Hilton’s purse, made his characters familiar to millions. Other famed Hilton pictures: Knight Without Armor; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Random Harvest (see cut). British Author Hilton and Chinese Author Lau Shaw proved brothers under the skin. Both proffered an amiable, spotless husband married to a woman more harpy than human. Each seemed to feel his harpy-heroine typified the evil forces against which the modern, democratic civilized man must fight. Each had a tonic for America’s jaded summer nerves.