REVIEW POTPOURRI: Editor Clifton Fadiman

Clifton Fadiman

by Peter Cates

Clifton Fadiman

In his 1941 anthology Reading I’ve Liked, editor Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) wrote why he felt that so many children’s books are terrible:

“The trouble with these juveniles is that their authors are greatly interested in children and not at all interested in themselves.”

Having enjoyed many of the Golden Books, basal readers, etc., between six and nine years old, I was particularly fascinated by picture storybooks depicting life on a farm with a variety of two- and four-legged creatures and vividly remember one such book from second grade entitled Farm for Sale – it dealt with a married couple fed up with city life who take a ride in the country, find a ready-made farm, purchase it and live happily ever after. The drawings of the animals, pond, pasture and the farmhouse, especially after nightfall, drew me into its spell and fed into this three-year enthrallment with farms in the Vassalboro of my childhood.

And I never stopped to notice whether these authors were interested in me or themselves.

Until sixth grade, the only other reading that interested me were books and magazines where the pictures outnumbered the words.

Such examples were a Classics Illustrated edition of Gene Stratton Porter’s Pollyanna with illustrations from the 1960 Walt Disney production starring Hayley Mills, Jane Wyman, Adolf Menjou, Agnes Moorehead, etc.; A Pictorial History of the American Presidents by John and Alice Durant; and issues of Life, Look, TV Guide and American Heritage magazines.

During sixth grade, my first novel without any pictures was Penny Nichols and the Knob Hill Mystery, which I read twice. But I don’t remember its author. And, again, I never noticed whether the authors were interested in children or in themselves, my only concern being to continue reading the books and magazines.

During seventh and eighth grade, I gradually discovered the joys of collecting books through the Scholastic Book Club and local outlets such as Waterville’s long gone Farrow’s Bookstore, later renamed Canaan House at Main and Temple Streets and devoured George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, numerous Hardy Boys mysteries, Horatio Alger rags to riches novels and Reader’s Digest magazines and condensed books.

Now 60 years later (with a few thousand titles too numerous to mention during the intervening decades), I am reading Alfred Kazin’s Journals , Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, Joseph Conrad’s Letters and Michael Korda’s biography of Eisenhower while dipping into numerous other volumes.

Collecting both books and records have become lifelong addictive hobbies impossible to break. And, with reference to Fadiman’s comment, I still could care less whether the authors are interested in us adult children or in themselves, only that they are interesting.

For what it’s worth, I did slog through Fadiman’s anthology of more than 900 pages from April 22, 2000, to August 11, 2002, and its mix of classic writers with long forgotten ones, along with Editor Fadiman’s comments, proved a very interesting, at times long-winded, experience, along with at least five or six other books I had going at the same time.

The classic writers included Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, Maine’s own Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.B. White.

Fadiman himself was a judge for more than 50 years for the Book of the Month Club, reviewed books for such publications as the New Yorker, was the host of Information Please on radio and later television, and edited several additional anthologies, including The Lifetime Reading Plan.