Books: Funny Editor

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THE LITERARY LIFE AND THE HELL WITH IT— Whit Burnett—Harper ($2.50).

One of the few Americans who is an editor, a humorist and a man with a beard is Whit Burnett, co-editor (with his wife, Martha Foley) of Story Magazine. Last week Editor Burnett published his catch-all memoirs, a 276-page volume called The Literary Life and the Hell with It, gleefully illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans.

Blond, 39, Balkan-bearded, poker-faced, enthusiastic. Whit Burnett is a hypochondriac ex-newspaperman, formerly of Salt Lake City, Vienna and Majorca, now solidly repatriated and a leading godsend to U. S. short story writers whose stuff he publishes when all others refuse. He is also one of the few people who seem to be as fascinated by writers' doings as some are by the orbits of movie stars.

In a book which is as anecdotal as a Walter Winchell column. Whit Burnett discourses on the traditions of U. S. humor, jumps to an account of "Graebisch University," a joke institution which met at a Manhattan attorney's house for semi-scatologic and pedantic wisecracking; of moving Lewis Gannett's lake in Connecticut; the history of Story Magazine from its mimeographed inception (67 copies) in Vienna in 1931. He transcribes the cute sayings of his son David, letters from Saroyan, wisecracks about his appendectomy and tonsillectomy (even his surgeon was literary), hypochondria on two continents, occasionally throws in an after-dinner joke.

Like many humorists. Editor Burnett has a few subjects he wants to write about in dead earnest. The result—as when, for example, he praises Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine (TIME, April 5, 1937), or denounces fascism—is that his language, instead of acquiring gravity, stiffens with awkwardness, like a comedian at a funeral.

The test of an editor's humor comes, of course, in his attitude toward manuscripts. Editor Burnett's advise to authors: do not write farm novels, family chronicles, trilogies, books about childhood, adolescence, abortions; do not write about neurotics ("self-love's labor lost"), and, if you are a young Armenian, stop writing imitations of Saroyan.