What's Wrong?

Two novels with a great deal in common perched last week at the top of the best-seller list: Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement and Sinclair Lewis' Kingsblood Royal. Both were earnest, pamphleteering tracts on the U.S. race problem. As novels, they were not very good. Below them, the fictional bestseller list was studded with historical novels of a type which has become so standardized that even their book jackets look alike: an open-bosomed beauty in the foreground, a frigate in the distance.

Most of these best-sellers would fail to outlive the month in which they were published. Where were the writers of solid reputation, and what were they up to? TIME found some of them, asked them some how-now questions (see box).

Writers at Work. ERNEST HEMINGWAY is in Cuba, working on a novel which he has already spent five years on. He is reluctant to talk about it. In Ohio, Pulitzer Prizewinner ROBERT PENN WARREN (All the King's Men) was deep in a long ballad about the frontier, and also writing a novel "about a man who undertook a deed of light, but who, because he undertook it without understanding its context, performed in the end a deed of darkness." Another Pulitzer Prizewinner, JOHN P. MARQUAND, didn't believe that "a writer's apt to evolve very much after he's 40," but at 53 he was off to the marshes near Newburyport, Mass. to work on a new novel. At Santa Monica, Calif., KATHERINE ANNE PORTER had finished two-thirds of No Safe Harbor, a parable on fascism based on a diary she kept of a boat trip in 1931 from Veracruz to Bremerhaven.

JOHN DOS PASSOS is working on a novel about New Deal Washington politics, alternately putters about the Library of Congress researching a book on U.S. history. WILLIAM FAULKNER is raising corn and cotton on his Oxford, Miss. farm, writing for Hollywood "only when I run out of money," and working on a new book "off & on." In San Francisco, cocky WILLIAM SAROYAN has a novel in the works titled He Knew the Truth and Was Looking for Something Better,* but added: "This summer I plan to eat watermelons."

The "Verge" of Significance. Warren could think of 14 writers (half of them poets) who, he thought, were doing "good work." Book-of-the-Month Club Judge Marquand, whose job is to find books he can extol, finds that "the older writers have said about all they can be expected to say. The younger writers have something inside themselves that's new and different . . . . They aren't trying to write like Hemingway . . . . Lately things have been picking up . . . . Our literature is just on the verge of getting significant." He singled out as the best of the young writers Jean (The Mountain Lion} Stafford, Thomas (Mister Roberts) Heggen, A. B. (The Big Sky) Guthrie Jr., and shared Robert Penn Warren's enthusiasm for Eudora (Delta Wedding) Welty.

Said Katherine Anne Porter: "The Hemingway 'school' has run its course. Renunciation of moral ideas, belief in violence and love and fear of death can only go so far. [Serious writers] are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster which has taken place, to a point where it seems the individual voice doesn't matter. So many write small novels of bewildered souls trying to figure their way out. The trouble with proletarian novels is that they're written from the outside looking in. And what Freud has done! Those little case histories. Freud is a great man, but we mustn't swallow him whole and not be able to digest him."

Hollywood's Temptation. A favorite complaint of the writers is that Hollywood's big money is the ruination of many a promising writer. Warren, whose All the King's Men was passed up by the movies until it got the Pulitzer award (and now will fetch Warren up to $200,000), thought that "the odds are probably against a writer doing good work in Hollywood." Added Marquand, a graduate of the slicks: "The slicks and Hollywood and radio--though not so much radio--do their best to stifle ideas and originality. They're very dangerous to a promising writer. By the time he has got himself the technical skill and enough money to be independent, he has been divorced from literature."

The movie version of Marquand's own The Late George Apley "had nothing to do with what the book intended to convey. . . . When you tie up $2,000,000 in a movie, you become awfully careful not to offend very many people. . . . Movies wear me out. I'd rather sit at home and look at the sunset."

No other question provoked such strong feeling among the authors. Dos Passos declared he wanted no part of Hollywood, bluntly accused it of "trashifying literature." Along with Hollywood he lumped "the best-seller system and the book clubs which tend to standardize reading tastes on a mediocre level. Writers go to Hollywood thinking they can improve the medium. They can't. The medium destroys them. The compromise always works to their detriment. This is particularly bad for talented young writers who can't resist Hollywood gold at a time when they would normally be struggling along on a shoestring. Money corrupts them. They are not free. Finally they settle down to the Hollywood formula."

White-haired Katherine Anne Porter had her first bid from Hollywood 25 years ago; she turned it down, but changed her mind 2 1/2 years ago, when the movies tried a third time to get her. She spent 40 weeks working on two scripts; both have now been shelved. Says she: "I'll never do it again. The movies are no good for me. What I hate most is the misuse of the medium, and there's no use putting the blame on the twelve-year-old intelligence of the public. Rather it is the utter ignorance of the people who make movies. They create in perfect cynicism what they think will sell . . . . I have no word to say of what I think of their [the movies'] evil. I don't go; I can't take the beating."

Though most writers agreed that the Hemingway influence had spent itself, they were less sure of what is to come in U.S. writing. Said Robert Penn Warren: "I know that it had better not be the cozy and vulgar version of sweetness-and-light longed for by the friends and relations of Oliver Allston [Elder Critic Van Wyck Brooks] or by complacent tinhorn patrioteers. The times we are heading into shouldn't give much encouragement for that guff except in the lending libraries." Added Dos Passos: "Young writers who believe in themselves should be willing to starve in a garret once more."

*Saroyan's deadpan description of its plot: "The story of a man who spends all his life in penitentiaries while society tries to determine his guilt, which appears to be that he was born out of wedlock. When his innocence is established, he is 80 years old and eager to find a wife and raise a family. On the first day of his freedom he dies in the arms of a girl of eleven who is placed in a house of correction where she dies in childbirth. Her infant son is placed in a foundling home where he is killed by a boiler explosion."

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