Of Book Reviewing and Brotherly Love

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Brothers,” a teacher, during the annual school play, watches a student, Henry, watch his younger brother, John, up on the stage. John, an “imp” and “brass-bold,” is quite without stage fright:

He had no work to hold

His heart up at the strain;

Nay, roguish ran the vein.

Younger brothers are like that, sometimes. And sometimes it is the serious older brother, watching from the shadows, who dies a thousand deaths. Henry is clearly that kind of older brother. As for the teacher, he finds Henry a far better show than John. Watching Henry watch Jack is in fact quite literally enough to restore the teacher’s faith in human nature.

Taken on its own terms, “Brothers” is a lovely, touching poem, and yet I confess that I have, for years, taken this poem on special terms of my own. I am, yes, an older brother, with one younger brother a congenital daredevil and another a professional musician, but those are not the special terms. They are, essentially, the same terms and account for, at most, a susceptibility.

The special terms are those, first, of book publishing and, second, of book reviewing. Book publishing can be a crass and bruising business. And yet during the 10 years I spent in it as an acquiring editor, I found it ever and again touched by the kind of secret love that Hopkins calls “tender byplay.” For the “young dog,” strutting his stuff merrily on stage, substitute an author. You can’t be an author without a healthy ego, and you can’t be an author’s publisher if you can’t bear the sight of ego on display. You have to believe that the display is indeed a sign of health and proceed to enjoy it. But this is just the beginning.

For the “heart-forsook” young spectator, substitute the reader, lifted out of his own life, his own mind, and lost for a time in another’s. Publishers may be faulted for thinking too much of the market, too little of the intrinsic merits of the work, but imagine a market made up of real human beings, some of them as ardent and vulnerable as Henry, and the thought is redeemed. Finally, for the teacher watching the two boys, substitute the publisher. The teacher is undeceived about the quality of the play (“Two tedious acts were past”). His pleasure is not in the play but in the tender byplay--in making it happen and then watching it happen. Sometimes, at least, the pleasure of book publishing is quite like this.

Hopkins’ teacher, his narrator, knows that if there were no school, there would be no school play and no “love-laced” transaction between the two brothers, one on stage, the other off. The publisher knows that if there were no publishing house, there would be no book and no similar transaction between writer and reader. In either case, nature, “bad, base, and blind,” would lose a rare chance to show herself unexpectedly and improbably kind.

“Parasites,” Ernest Hemingway called publishers, and we know what he meant. Publishers live off books they don’t write. Who can deny it? Such pleasure as a publisher may take in an author’s success stops, as often as not, at a merchant’s pleasure in goods sold. My claim is simply that it doesn’t always stop there. A publishing house, watching as the world responds to one of its authors, can forget money as completely as, in the last stanza of “Brothers,” Hopkins’ teacher has forgotten tuition payments.

Nearly six years ago, when I stopped editing books for a book publisher and started editing book reviews for a newspaper, I missed those moments of collective, quasi-parental pride and joy. What I was to discover was a new kind of byplay. The acquiring editor in a book publishing house will know perhaps 20 or 30 writers extremely well. He may know the texts of their works as no one but they themselves ever will. And yet the readers of those works will remain for the editor a large, undifferentiated mass (large if he’s lucky, small otherwise).

These proportions are reversed for the editor of book reviews. Now it is the authors, thousands of them, who remain strangers, while a select group of readers-in-public--his regular reviewers--become his collaborators and, in a way, his intimates. It is as if at Hopkins’ school play, two teachers are in attendance, one watching the performance of the boy up on stage, the other monitoring the reactions of the boy down in the theater.

Two kinds of attention, two kinds of hope, two kinds of “tender byplay,” but neither will be mine during the coming 12 months of my leave from the Book Review. I will write during the leave, and much more than I now do, but at this moment that change seems less profound than that I will have become for the year an ordinary reader. No longer engaged in either variety of readerly byplay, I will try to be again, and simply, at play. The Book Review byplay, meanwhile, is safe in the hands of the Book Review staff and Kenneth Turan as book editor. To them and to the faithful readers of this smallest section of The Times, my best wishes for a year, as Hopkins put it, of comfort and salt.

Brothers

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

How lovely the elder brother’s Life all laced in the other’s, Love-laced! --what once I well Witnessed; so fortune fell. When Shrovetide, two years gone, Our boys’ plays brought on Part was picked for John, Young John; then fear, then joy Ran revel in the elder boy. Their night was come now; all Our company thronged the hall; Henry, by the wall, Beckoned me beside him; I came where called, and eyed him By meanwhiles; making my play Turn most on tender byplay. For, wrung all on love’s rack, My lad, and lost in Jack, Smiled, blushed, and bit his lip; Or drove, with a diver’s dip, Clutched hands down through clasped knees-- Truth’s tokens tricks like these, Old telltales, with what stress He hung on the imp’s success. Now the other was brass-bold: He had no work to hold His heart up at the strain; Nay, roguish ran the vein. Two tedious acts were past; Jack’s call and cue at last; When Henry, heart-forsook, Dropped eyes and dared not look. Eh, how all rung! Young dog, he did give tongue! But Harry--in his hands he has flung His tear-tricked cheeks of flame For fond love and for shame. Ah Nature, framed in fault, There’s comfort then, there’s salt; Nature, bad, base, and blind, Dearly thou canst be kind; There dearly then, dearly, I’ll cry thou canst be kind.