Books: The Morn Was Shining Clear

PARNASSUS CORNER by W. S. Tryon. 384 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $7.

In the end, a publisher is judged by the durability of his geniuses, not by the health of his balance sheets. There are no comparative statistics on these matters, and perhaps the native geniuses who made Boston’s James T. Fields the most influential American publisher during the middle years of the 19th century were not abnormally fragile. Yet of Fields’s list, Holmes, Emerson and Hawthorne are honored but widely unread; Harriet Beecher Stowe is a historical curiosity; the realist William Dean Howells is read chiefly by thesis writers; Longfellow and Whittier are snickered at; and Edwin P. Whipple, Henry Giles, John G. Saxe and a shelfful of others are wholly forgotten. Only Thoreau’s reputation is still alive, and Thoreau is more often revered than read.

Bearded Eminence. Still, Fields’s Old Corner Book Store at one time seemed like Parnassus. Authors and editors gathered there daily to exchange puns and peanuts, to speculate, perhaps, about the success of Dickens’ proposed lecture tour, and to gibe wittily at the shoddy products of the rival literary capital in New York. On the same morning a junior clerk might receive an elaborate good morning from Longfellow and an impersonal purchase order from the shy Hawthorne. In either case, the great man would soon wander to the rear of the store to join the crowd in Fields’s cluttered office.

There he would be greeted with royal flattery by a bearded eminence whose own genius was that he was perfectly suited to his job and his times. Fields was a first-rate business man, a fourth-rate poet and a tenth-rate moralist. One of his poems, “The Ballad of the Tempest,” is worth quoting: “We are lost!”—the Captain shouted, As he staggered down the stairs.

But his little daughter whispered,

As she took his icy hand, “Isn’t God upon the ocean,

Just the same as on the land?”

Then we kissed the little maiden, And we spoke in better cheer,

And we anchored in the harbor,

When the morn was shining clear.

Pure Hearts & Percentages. Although not all Fields’s contemporaries thought such stuff sublime, he was nevertheless able to convince anyone that he was a poet who happened to be a publisher, not a publisher who played at poetry. The result was that authors felt Fields was on their side. But some of Tryon’s best scenes show the lofty-minded Fields and his purehearted poets haggling about percentages.

Most of the book reviewing done in the past century was outright puffery. Fields was especially adept at planting puffs. He would write reviews himself and mail them to editors (“It may serve your tired brain some purpose. No one need know that I wrote it”), or he would ease a reviewer’s critical burden by explaining that “the moral of the story lies at the bottom of page 168.” Journals in which Fields advertised were expected to discover rare qualities in Fields’s authors, but on one notable occasion the system of back-scratching broke down. The Boston Traveller panned Hiawatha and Fields canceled his advertising.

If Fields was less pure than he pretended, he was a better publisher than most. Fields instituted the practice, revolutionary before the international copyright law was signed, of paying royalties to British authors. And the reader is rather fond of him when he retires from the book trade to lecture yokel audiences on “cheerfulness” and his recollections of Whittier. Historian Tryon treats his subject gently in a placid Victorian prose that is almost too well suited to his subject.