Books: Editor’s Elegy

LAMENT FOR A CITY (371 pp.) — Henry Beetle Hough — Atheneum ($4.75).

A truth that most newspapermen would hoot at in a barroom is one in which most of them also privately believe — that a newspaper is the soul of its city. To Cornelius Tyler, the narrator of Newspaperman Hough’s dour novel, the truth is evident, and so is the fact that like other souls, a newspaper can be sold. Well into his 80s and a touch liverish, Tyler writes bitterly — but with enough sense to know why he is bitter — about the decay of a New England newspaper that he once edited, and of the deterioration of the town it served.

The town is Hindon. The old editor does not delude himself that Hindon’s old days were ever glorious, but the town once did have strength and reasonable expectations. Today, for reasons that are only partly economic, it has turned sick and sour. When Connie Tyler, fresh out of Harvard, came to Hindon in 1900 as a cub reporter for the Courier-Freeman, the reigning Yankees — the old-line whaling and rum-trading families which regularly produced one Harvard professor, one state Governor and one well-bred alcoholic in each generation — had only begun to abdicate. Jostled from political control by their own Irish and Italian mill hands, they retreated to the banks and sulked. One by one they ran their family businesses into the ground, draining off profits and refusing to replace worn-out machines.

What bothers Tyler most about the regional ills and national ailments — the Depression, the rise of mass man and the industries that sustain him — is the change they work on the Courier-Freeman. When he first knew the paper, it was a respectable and fairly honest sheet that printed news without fear or favor, as editorials always put it. Then the Courier’s owner died, and his nephew was finally forced to sell out to a West Coast moneyman. The paper passed from the control of a publisher who is also a businessman to that of a businessman who is only incidentally a publisher—the sort of change, the author clearly implies, that is responsible for much that is wrong with U.S. journalism.

Before long, the Courier merged with its opposition paper, trimmed its payroll, cut down on news, started printing reams of comic strips and syndicated columns.

Author-Editor Hough (Country Editor, Thoreau of Walden} has published the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard since 1920. and knows both New England and newspapering well enough to talk of them with fondness and disgust. He writes of a great American theme that Marquand treated more broadly in The Late George Apley and Santayana with more subtlety and depth in The Last Puritan. But Hough gives it the unique flavor of printer’s ink and an old editor’s green-eyeshaded wisdom. His novel, written in good journeyman’s prose, is an effective polemic and an unsentimental elegy.