Thomas L. Masson

For nearly thirty years Tom Masson was the Managing Editor of “Life”. He watched it through various phases of humor and propaganda. He knew the writers of light and of heavier verse, the artists of gay or of poignant sketches, the fashioners of new anecdotes, the cullers of old. This short, slight, wiry Connecticut Yankee, who peers at you through large and heavy spectacles, has probably read, written, and planned more jokes than any other living human being. His voice is as dry and as sharp as his wit. Now, when he is not editing his department, “Short Turns and Encores”, for “The Saturday Evening Post”, he sits out in New Jersey and busily writes essays and short stories. For such a quiet little man to have been the cause of so many riotous laughs seems odd. I have never heard him laugh loudly himself—just a soft, short, nervous, almost apologetic laugh, as if it seemed to him a sin really to laugh at a thing which might not be as funny as it should be. However, there is always the twinkle behind the glasses. Like “Surrender Books” his essays are often quiet bookish observations, usually with a quaint viewpoint, developed and explained by several thousand rambling but delightful words. His acquaintance among American writers is unlimited, for there is no man so dull that he does not like to consider himself funny; and I fancy many a lay reader of these paragraphs will look back with a blush to the time when Tom Masson rejected, or perhaps accepted, a whimsical or at least a would-be amusing manuscript.

SURRENDER BOOKS

There is a class of books that nobody apparently has ever thought of grouping before. Yet they have a very definite place in the mind of each one of us who is devoted to reading, and to know what they are is to have information of great value. They are what I may term surrender books. And presently I hope by example to explain them very definitely.

Of course, lists of books that one ought to read always vary according to taste, and nothing indeed has involved so much controversy as what these books should be. There cannot in the nature of things be any uniform method of selection, this always depending upon individual taste, previous education, heritage, environment, etc. But it seems to me that it is possible to create a new standard which deals with surrender books alone, and I should think that lovers of books generally would be fairly well agreed as to what these are. We may expect differences, but not the violent differences we have observed among those who just make lists of the best books.

What then is a surrender book?

By “surrender” I mean that power a book has over you to make you surrender yourself to it completely. There are plenty of good books that do not have this power. It is also true that many of the books that do have this power are not necessarily novels. The surrender books indeed are in a class by themselves—as I have hinted, a unique class quite apart from anything else in literature. I possess a few of them, and I would not part from these books for anything in the world that I can think of. I cannot, however, explain them definitely all at once. I can do so only little by little. If I should attempt to make a complete definition of a surrender book, you would immediately begin to qualify it; yet it is quite definite, when you understand the conditions.

A surrender book is one that carries with it a complete atmosphere. It is just as if the author had the power to invent a world of his own, in which there is nothing superfluous, and from which, when you once get into it, you do not want to part. Furthermore, all the outside world has left you; nothing else matters. The power to do this is a distinct power; it appears to me to be a peculiarity of some authors. It may not be the highest power. But there it is—a quite definite thing.

A surrender book is one that we are quite content to be let alone with. It is not necessarily an exciting book, which, so to speak, acts upon us like a disease. It may have that quality, and yet it may not. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is a surrender book; it has its imperfections, but it qualifies. And also, in my experience, so does James Ford Rhodes’s history of the United States. Mr. Rhodes first got together the materials to make his world, then he assimilated them, and after that, by the peculiar power I have referred to, he created his illusion. When you step into the first volume, you are living over again, with him, the history of your country. He has made an atmosphere for you; you are carried along by it, it envelops you completely. You don’t care much what happens outside. I suppose, indeed, that it may be said of a surrender book that it has the power of hypnotizing you. Now the same thing is true of Jane Austen as of Mr. Rhodes. I am aware that there are people who don’t like Jane Austen. Mark Twain couldn’t abide her. He ranted when he mentioned her name. He said that any library would be a good one without the works of Jane Austen in it. But Mark Twain’s literary judgment wasn’t worth a whoop. There is nothing superfluous about Jane Austen. She has the power of making you feel that you are there, moving about, guided by her fairy wand, and not caring to be anywhere else.

I should say after all that the quality which enables an author to produce this illusion is one in which he is able to inspire our immediate confidence. If you are at the circus and you see a trapeze performer hesitate over his act, you are at once filled with nervousness about him. Every moment that you view him is an agony. But if he shows that he is perfectly able to control himself, you view his performance with pleasure and serenity. This surrender power is due to the care with which the author has written his book; but this is by no means all. Many an author who has taken infinite pains is deadly dull, and irritatingly accurate. Neither is it due to a dramatic quality. Some authors, who have this dramatic trick, are constantly leading up to climaxes which absorb you at the time, and yet you have not surrendered as a whole. You still retain your self-possession, you are still looking and have one eye on the outside world.

I confess that I have often tried to define this surrender quality in such a manner that I would cover it altogether and have not succeeded. The best thing I can do is to give examples.

“Vanity Fair” for instance is not a surrender book; there are parts of it altogether too detached. This does not detract from its glory; only, it doesn’t happen to be that kind. For surrender value I should much prefer “The Newcomes”, but Thackeray is not a perfect type of a surrender author. Neither, on the whole, is Dickens. He carries you off your feet; he bangs you up against the wall; he certainly absorbs you; he is like a contagion. But think of Parkman and his stories of conquest and Indians. Here, by that subtle alchemy of which I have spoken, you are immediately carried into another world, with swift and sure touches. After you have once read, as an instance, “Conspiracy of Pontiac”, how different is everything. To me the supreme pleasure of reading, after you have gotten through a surrender book, and it has become a possession, is to want to live it all over again. Nothing but high genius in writing has the power to enable you to do this.

Perhaps the biggest books in the world are not the surrender books. Neither Shakespeare nor Plato nor the Bible could qualify. There is a sense in which they are too big. There are, of course, stories in the Bible that have great surrender value. A reading of Shakespeare may easily be an absorbing occupation. I remember when, as a boy, I read his plays for the first time, their story value fascinated me, held me. But to meet these three works and come finally to enter into them and understand them requires a long experience with life. Indeed, it is not until we approach the end of life that, as we ponder over them, their great beauty and their profundity almost overawe us.

If you are a natural born reader, however, you can begin at almost any time to collect surrender books. “Les Miserables” is one of them. This is what Walter Scott might call a big bowwow surrender book. You must lead up to it almost with fasting and prayer; especially in these days, when a snatching of newspaper headings, and a fitful flitting from magazine page to magazine page, weakens one’s sense so of true literary values. I read “Les Miserables” when I was convalescing from a long illness, when my mind had been swept clean. It was a wonderful experience. But I suppose the most wonderful surrender experience in the world would be to have nothing to do but to read Balzac through.

And think of some of our modern authors in comparison with these surrender books I have mentioned! They make one shudder with their mosaic qualities, with their utter inability to transport you anywhere without your sinking on the ground and resting every few moments. I have in mind some of our more recent books where I felt as if I were obliged to hold up the author’s words all the time, as I went along.

You say of some books: “It takes him so long to say anything.”

But that isn’t quite it.

It took Victor Hugo long to say some things, but how well he said them! And while he was saying them you forgot that he was saying anything. You were moving along with him, almost without being aware of it. Think of the flight of Jean Valjean! Has the surrender value of that part ever been equaled?