The American Scene; Job Hor: Fine Arts

27 at Midway, 30 in Grant Park, 24 at O 'Hare, WMAQ and WMAQ FMNBC in Chicago. The American Scene, a series of pre -recorded programs, providing a closer look at those things which form our contemporary society. Produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology and Cooperation with WMAQ, the discussion today will consider job horizons in the Fine Arts. Now here's our host, Don Anderson. Good morning and welcome to the American Scene. My name is Don Anderson. The Fine Arts today seem to be growing popular. Culture is booming. Artistic expression is a sought -after commodity. In 1952 there were some 800 symphony orchestras in the United States. Today there are over 1200. In 1950 Americans ambled into art museums some 20 million times.

In 1962 they elbowed their way in 60 million times. And in between listening to music and looking at art they bought and presumably read over 1 billion books in 1962. The trend is up, art is in. But growing popularity for the Fine Arts does not mean that every young artist with brush or typewriter or baton will immediately find his fame and fortune. The law of supply and demand has little meaning in the field of the arts. The chances for eventual renown and reward may be up, but the same rules of talent, desire and a long apprenticeship still apply. In many cases the Fine Arts is an old man's profession. Rarely does a painter, serious writer, poet or dramatic actor achieve wider claim before he is in his late 30s, 40s and even 50s. There can be exceptions but only from a rare genius who can overwhelm the public with the sheer force of his raw young talent.

Growing popularity for the Fine Arts also raises some questions and problems. It may be true that the young developing artists faces a more interested and larger market for his efforts. You might be able to achieve a degree of income from his work at an earlier age. But this could produce a false sense of accomplishment because relative wealth can only be assured the recognized, established and acclaimed artist. And it still happens that the greatest rewards may come posthumously. In addition, the artist freed from the conditions of poverty may find himself caught up by a different master, the demands of commerce and popular opinion. To help us better understand the field of the Fine Arts and its job horizon, I am pleased to welcome this morning Mr. Jack Conroy, who is an author and senior editor of the New Standard Encyclopedia. Jack, thank you for coming with us this morning. And I think since you are an author we will naturally slant the program this morning dealing with the Fine Arts primarily towards the writing phase of it. But I think

we can give an indication and an idea of what conditions are in the total field of the Fine Arts, painting, music, acting and so forth. And I wonder if the picture that I painted here in the beginning of the climate for the acceptance of art is pretty true as you see it. Yes, I see it that way. There certainly are more books being published than ever before, but certain demands are being made on writers. There is the business of the mom book, you know, the give me the book with a gimmick that will sell and change stores, that sort of thing. And then there is the constant demands from the sales department. There are certain changes that will be made in the ideology or the way books are developed. Albert Van Nosten, a year or so ago wrote a book called the denatured novel. And which he points out that even the eminent authors are forced to submit to

the demands which he says originate in the sales department. You know, because there is a climate for more books, more reading and so forth, the sales department begins to suggest themes and topics and ways of increasing sales. And with the present preoccupation in that area, more sex. A famous novelist, I know whose name I won't mention, sent in the outline of a novel and a chapter or two. He had every reason to suppose he'd get a good contract on it because his previous works had been successful. But the editor sent it back with the demand that he put more raw, sacco sex in the very first part of the book. Did he? So while I don't know, the book hasn't been issued yet, but I presume it was published it will have. Well, people are reading more. People certainly are buying more books when we assume that they are reading more so that it would seem that the climate

for the serious author with some exceptions, some effect, would be good. There is opportunity to write and to publish and to be read. Well, yes. Now, the publishers have always a sort of a genuine reflection toward the arts and that sort of thing. They've always published a number of books on which they can't reasonably expect to make a lot of money. A verse, for example. Any guest in the state of Vincent Malay are the only successful American poets. The other financialists. Yes. We're talking about finance. And they'll do the same thing with a certain number of novels. Although they're not doing so much of that as they used to. I know an excellent novelist called Madison Jones, who, like many other novelists, serious novelists, has to have another kind of job in order to make a living. He teaches at Auburn Polytech

Institute, which came into the newspapers down in Alabama, which came into the newspaper headlines when the lone Negro student was ushered in, you know. He's written three good novels, it seems to me. One's called The Innocent, The Second, The Fars to the Night, another called A Barried Land. Well, for the first two novels, he had the same publisher, but they sold very poorly. The second one sold only 500 copies. Although it had excellent reviews, not extensive reviews, but very favorable ones. And as he pointed out to me, it's very discouraging for a man to work three or four years on a novel as he does and have it earn you five or six hundred dollars or something. That's interesting. What about the function of the review? You often hear of good authors who have low sales, but excellent reviews. Don't people pay much attention to the reviews or don't they? Do they read the review as a piece of literary work rather than as a review? Well,

being on both ends of the business, as you know, I review books for the sometimes, quite regularly. And I'm not at all sure. Sometimes a book that's been thoroughly condemned by the reviewers becomes the best seller. But sometimes for other than literary reasons, you know, it has a shock value like Mrs. Matallius, who by the way tried to go farthest north and sex in this new novel, and was hardly condemned by the reviewers. And although it didn't have the success of patent place, it still will sell better than Madison Jones, the excellent novels of the South. Well, that sort of indicates that the serious author with, I don't know if the phrase is worth using a burning message or something that he wants to say for himself and not to please the public may not have such a good chance of getting published or getting read. Yes, you know, Milton call it that one talent which were death to hide. And those authors who have that have always had a hard time, it isn't anything

new. There are the stories of Zola having to trap sparrows on the roof, you know, in order to live. And there's a story which may or may not be true, but it sounds as though it might be about a discourage young author who went to the up to see one of the Putnam's when the Putnam Publishing House first started. To receive his royalties for three or four books which had been published in the course of a year and a half, and the royalties amounted to something like $136 for that time. So the Putnam editor thought that he'd give him a lecture about the art of writing or how to write. And he pointed out to him a book called Wide Wide World by Susan Warner which they had also published and for which they'd paid royalties of something like $6 or $7 ,000 within the same period. And he advised him to go out and write like Susan Warner if he wanted to be a successful author. And the disgruntled young author whose name was

Nathaniel Hawthorne went away with a sort of a biting hatred of what he called a dem, the host of scribbling women. I suppose that can happen today too. Do publishers give advice to new authors that they find interesting and offer suggestions on how they think they might become more successful financially? Oh yes, that's quite common as I said. That still happens to them. The new author, if he sends in something which seems to have some promise from the commercial standpoint, gets more encouragement, I should say, than one who is a new Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolf. The trend has tarred this thing that Albert Van Nosten condemned in his book, the denatured novel, the sales department, you're serving the functions of the editorial department. Van Nosten calls on the editors to fight back and to defend their

prerogative of selecting the literary material. And he has a faithly encouraging note in saying that some editors actually do do that. That there is a sort of resistance movement setting in against the sales department dictating to the editorial department. You mentioned a figure of the number of new titles that are published in the year and the number of those that are financially successful or will make a profit for the company. Well, ordinarily, there are about 10 ,000 new titles published in the new United States each year. That is new books. And of these, it's been estimated that approximately a hundred or not much more than a hundred will make any large sum of money for either author or publisher. Well, that seems to indicate, well, I suppose the older titles are the ones that keep them financially successful, but it would seem to indicate that the new author has some hope of not having to be commercial to begin with in order to be published or at least a new title, perhaps, of an established author. There are a lot of new authors being published, but the trouble is they don't last long. I mean, they

have one book published and then there's a sort of vicious practice going on in editorial offices, which I don't think used to be general. That is, if an author submits a book, the publisher, and has had a previous book published by another publisher, they compare sales figures, which they didn't used to do. Although he wrote what critics thought was a masterpiece, and then it soles say anything less than 5 ,000 copies, why the second publisher's favorable estimate would go way down. Now, I think that's a comparative new thing, I should say, since World War II, in the publishing business. Is there a trend of publishers growing larger as well, and necessity, and economic necessity? Well, there's a trend toward consolidation. Look at all the curious names attached

to some of the venerable old houses. I think they certainly looked funny to look at their inference now. Harbor Row and Peterson for a long time. Now Row and Peterson, I think, perhaps, no, I think Row and Peterson was the one house or headman, probably the effect of an earlier consolidation, was a textbook publishing house. I think here in Chicago, I think they have offices here. And that's the sort of thing that's going on. Older houses are finding it necessary to consolidate. Now, Random House has consolidated several. It has the distinguishable house of Knot, although Knot still has the same imprint. It's old imprint. And by the way, I think that Knot still prints about the handsomeest books in the United States. I like that colophone at the back where they tell what kind of type it's set in and the sort of paper and who manufactured the paper and that sort of thing. And in addition to this dignified old

house of Knot, they have that hotshot house called Burner Guys Associates, who they made a big killing with sex and the single girl. Well, the big houses then contain both the prestigious side of it and the commercial side of it and are able to continue because of that. What about other areas, other markets for publication today? The book publisher is not the only market, is there? Oh, no, of course, there are still the magazines now. Perhaps we ought to say something about the Gurley magazine. And their yearning stirred a cultural life, you know. Particularly in the case of Playboy, since they imported the AC Spectorsky, you know, as their cultural front. And in between the naked gurls, they have something of a more literary flavor. But if you notice in great many cases, these are short stories that have been previously published in book form, ordinarily. Then there are those, that sort of magazines, which I understand play, pay handsomely. I was never

approached by any of them because kind of stories that I wrote 20 or 30 years ago don't fit into the modern scheme very well. There are those magazines, and then there are the large popular magazines, like Saturday Meep Post, for example, Collier's is dead, you know. That was one of the big markets for short fiction. Saturday Meep Post is going in more and more for nonfiction. And there are the old magazines like Harper's and Atlantic, which too seem to be published less and less fiction. So if we're thinking of fiction or the creative, there are not so many markets as there were, say, 20 years ago. But for writing, there certainly are more markets, aren't they? And it seems that even some of the outstanding writers of fiction are turning to the area of nonfiction. Yes. I think in general, I think there's a general friend toward nonfiction that has been

persistent, perhaps since World War II. That is, we're living in such parless times, you know, threats of having a hydrogen bomb dropped on our heads and hell being raised in Zem Zabar and all that sort of thing, a president being assassinated. We like to read about these things. Well, not that we like to read about them. I suppose some of them, but we're more interested in them. I've seen fiction sometimes seems kind of a pallid substitute for what's actually going on. And I think the creative writers are in a measure to blame for that in that they don't obey the equipment's injunction to verify the contemporary fact. They're writing well. They're writing about a certain introspective part of human experience. It seems to be most of them are. And not the larger issues. Malcolm College had something a few years ago to the effect that writers anymore rarely write about any social

organization larger than the family. That's about the largest concern and very often not that. That we have a challenge during these immensely popular chronicles of the glass family. As Kali said, then the motivations of characters and models have changed. He said that it used to be assumed that a boy who went wrong was somehow conditioned by his environment. Or he didn't have enough to eat or he lacked opportunities to get a job or something like that or education. But he said in the modern fiction more often, if the things that he does have been motivated by the fact that his mother weaned him too soon. There's some other factor of that. A complete change in emphasis in attitudes and ideas. Well, it's good for the field of nonfiction to have creative writers enter it, isn't it? Both for the field of

nonfiction because nonfiction is now more interesting to read. Well, yes, and they do. Some of the nonfiction fiction is very creative, of course. There's John Hershey, the novelist, who has done some, well, his book about the atom bomb, which originally ran in the New Yorker. I forget exactly what he called it. But it had the creative touch that, you know, for nonfiction that is put into his novel. And because there is a growing market for nonfiction, it's healthy for the author to consider this as an area of endeavor because the financial gains might be found there. Well, the novel, of course, has been declared dead at various times throughout the whole literary history of the United States. I remember in about 1935, when there was such a concern with the issues of the depression and the things that were going on, Kyle Christian, who was a writer for Carter. I wrote an article in which he delivered an obituary for the

novel. He said it was on his last go -round and couldn't survive at most more than a few years. But it's still here. You recently had republished a novel that you wrote in the 30s called The Disinherited, and this was brought out in the paperback. Yes, and this was a social novel of the era of the depression. Yes, it's largely autobiographical about my own experience. It's just when I thought, sure, I was going to starve today. So it puts some of that immediacy in it, I think, which should be put into writing, something that the author feels very, very keenly. Well, the fact that this novel would be republished today, I think, as an indication that the novel is not dead. Well, nor the novel of the 30s. No, it wasn't dead all this time. It was just sleeping. I had to see the resurrection.

Are there any other markets for the author today besides the novel and the popular magazines that we've mentioned? I'd like to say a word about the little magazines. These have been with us for quite a while. And I have a very appealing letter here from Mrs. Chattanoire, the publisher of that. You know this, my French is like that, it studs turd. It means black cat, I think. And I have a characteristic letter from one of the editors of this, Mr. Elizabeth Dryser, in which she points out, and this sounds familiar, this is the history, a lot of the little magazine, many of which published the first work of a writer since eminent and who gave them their first start. Ernest Hemingway, for example, was first published in a magazine published in New Orleans called The Double Deer, a sort of sentimental allegory, which I'm sure he tried to suppress later. But it did give him courage to keep on. And this middle paragraph of this letter in which she appeals for some sort of publicity

or help is familiar in the history of the little magazines. And having just published its first book, The Laughing Loot, by Emil Glenn, Chattanoire is without funds and without a printer. No one is really aware of the existence of the publication. The future issues may have to be memographed, which will cause many fine posts to drop out of the magazine. Well, as you indicate that this is rather typical of publications of this sort, and yet they've had a great effect in the literary world of America because they have given so many authors an opportunity. Yes, what? The late Keith Preston, a Chicagoan, said, the graves of the little magazines that died except verse -free. They serve a useful purpose, not so much nowadays, for experimentation. I mean, we've long since fought the Battle of the World. We could say anything we want to now, you know. All the old Anglo -Saxon words are not to say they are on

television. The press, we better not mention any of them here. But they certainly are not in the popular novels like, let's say, the $100 misunderstanding by Robert Gover and John Richie's City of Night, which has been on the best -seller list for a long time. But the little magazine didn't really offer the author a large audience or a large public. Was it prestige to be selected by a particular magazine? Well, I was the editor of several little magazines including the Anvil. And here's one way that it does help the beginning author. And some concrete results came from this sort of thing. Publishers, I assume they still look at the little magazines for New Talent. Despite what you may hear, publishers are looking for New Talent. They're looking for new writers. For one thing, because most of the old writers eventually lose

what Browning called that first fine careless rapture and begin repeating themselves without mentioning any names. And another thing, the new writers are more tractable. I mean they don't demand so much. And in this day, they're more tractable about revision and that sort of thing. Thomas Wolff, as you know, for a look homeward angel, since he was just getting started, submitted to a lot of what proved to be wise revision. It wasn't for the sales standpoint in this case, but actually made it more readable and enhanced its literary value. But as he became more successful, he became more obterate about what he thought should be left in his book. So the function of the little magazine, or even the publisher in first publications, would be to point out whatever failings the author has in his literary style or effectiveness. Yes, and I said publishers often write to the little magazine

contributors through the publisher. I fired up many sets of letters and some of them resulted in contracts for novels and other happy results. Well, briefly, what about modern day sponsors of art? We mentioned very early in the program the role that the university is now playing in having artists and residents, authors and residents, poets and residents. Is this the major source of the modern day sponsor today for an artist? Well, that can only account for, you know, we don't have many Robert Frost now. And usually as a poet or some distinction who was made in a poet and resident, I'm thinking of poets and residents, I think that Frost was the first at the University of Michigan. And what I consider the pleasant customer since spread, that takes care of quite a few creative artists and gives them some sort of patronage, which is more generaled in the European countries into this here. The United States is sadly lacking in sponsorship of the arts. England is much

better. It gives pensions to writers, you know, and the Scandinavian countries do. Although there are a great number of awards to writers, I was just consoling the yearbook of the encyclopedia Britannica just today. And I counted over 50 awards and prizes that are given to writers to encourage them to help them in their work. And of these awards and prizes several are for more than one artist. I think Google Nine Fellowships, which usually take care of four or five writers and four or five artists. The American Academy of Arts and Letters do that sort of thing. I was thinking in terms of the university, I was thinking as well as chairs or residency that many artists have positions on the faculty as well as conducting their creative work on the side. Yeah, well, you know, a great many of the novelists writing today are teaching at one or the other the universities and some critics maintain that has an emasculating effect on their work. I mean,

they all tend to sort of sickly door with a paled cast of sameness in their writing that the necessity of holding their jobs is sort of fosters a kind of timidity in their writing. What kind of advice would you give to a young person today who was interested in becoming a creative artist and specifically an author? Is it worth taking the plunge? I think it's worth taking the plunge, but although I think that the beginning writers should prepare to put himself on our invasions like Thoreau did when he said, you know, he went to the woods deliberately to reduce life to its closest terms and to live what was not life. Too many writers today are beguiled by the not life of Hollywood. They think in terms of selling a story to the movies and buying a hundred dollar pair of shoes and going out to Hollywood and buying a place with a swimming pool in the rear. And that's often been the death of a promising

talent. I'm thinking of particularly of Clifford O 'Deaths who wrote the play which had such a large effect in the American theater called Waiting for Lefty and how he is gradually deluded the social content of his work until even George Gene Nathan who God knows was no radical or even liberal exclaimed to one of O 'Death's Broadway plays, oh, that's where is thy sting? And in the latter part of his career, we find O 'Deaths apologizing for Hollywood and said that he thinks that creative writer has a better opportunity in Hollywood than he does on the Broadway stage. Well, this has been most interesting, Mr. Conroy, and I certainly appreciate your coming here. And I think the picture we've painted is of a climate of popularity for the fine arts, but the artist is going to have the same problems that he's had in the past. And it's going to take a long period of hard work and determination to make it, but it's worth getting into it if you have the desire.

And thank you very much again, Mr. Conroy, and this is Don Anderson saying good morning for the American scene. This has been the American scene. Today's discussion, job horizons in the fine arts had his guest, Mr. Jack Conroy author, host on the series is Don Anderson. The American scene is pre -recorded and is produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology and Cooperation with WMAQ. Next week's topic will be job horizons in the performing arts, and we'll be discussed by Mr. H. Nutt and Mr. J. Marshall as we continue our investigation of the American scene. Today, more than ever, blind persons need an education so that they can live up to their abilities rather than down to their handicap.