The Year in Books

It has become fashionable in recent years for critics to sigh for the lost glories of the good old days. Most of them could still remember the tingle of the '205. Where today was anything to compare with Hemingway, Dos Passes, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and the rest of that brave band, young & strong? Actually, the years were few when all these writers were at their best. And the fact is that 1948 has been a pretty good literary year. For the first time since the end of the war, U.S. letters has shown signs of revival.

In 1948 a new crop of talented young novelists appeared (always a good sign), and there was a fair showing from the old hands; non-fiction was sounder and solider than in 1946 or 1947. Historical novels still dominated the bestseller lists most of the year, but serious fiction, especially war novels, was giving them a run for their money. As the summer drew to a close, the late Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman's Peace of Mind, after months of leadership, had been replaced by Dale Carnegie's more practical guide to the same end, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Even so, a surprising number of better books had climbed up among the top moneymakers.

Yet as the books (on the whole) got better, book sales got worse. Sales were off as much as 15% from 1946. Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead topped the fiction bestseller lists for 18 weeks, but sold only 130,000 copies.

One literary event pleased just about everyone: T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize. Long admired by fellow writers, Eliot was honored for "pioneering work in modern poetry." Most agreed that he had more than earned the honor.

FICTION

Nobody wrote the "Great War Novel" that everybody has taken for granted ever since V-day. But a few writers did try to record their personal experiences, particularly young (25) Norman Mailer, a Pacific veteran whose The Naked and The Dead, a rugged, stormy first novel, whirled straight to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions also made a great splash, though with far less literary justification.

Appreciated but less popular were John Cobb's* scrutiny of U.S.A.A.F. men & manners in wartime England, The Gesture (also a first novel), James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor, an admirable study of base life at a U.S. flying field, and Theodor Plievier's gruesome Stalingrad, a broad-scale battle picture whose forceful "documentary" slant made it more fact than fiction.

Unsuccessful Hunting. Nobody harpooned the even more mythical white whale known as the "Great American Novel." Indiana's Ross Lockridge (who later committed suicide) made a stab at it; he brought home a huge, Ulysses-like animal named Raintree County, which was hailed by critics as a monumental attempt and then floated away in an embarrassed silence. Silence was the kindest treatment of Remembrance Rock, Carl Sandburg's large, muddled, impassioned effort to learn lessons for the future from a study of the American past.

Veteran William Faulkner was still mapping the deep, dark South, this time with Intruder in the Dust, a novel whose tangled threads of murder, racial hatred and nocturnal conspiracy, wound together in his elaborate, strongly colored prose, made some critics tear their hair and others hail it as Faulkner's (and 1948's) finest. Disappointing (after All the King's Men) were Robert Penn Warren's short stories, The Circus in the Attic, which made the South's decayed mansion duller than tragic. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, a newcomer named Truman Capote indulged in another preoccupation of Southern writers (sexual abnormality), and convinced even his detractors that his prose was talented as well as purple.

In general, it was not a year in which the older novelists made their reputations securer. Ernest Hemingway's long-awaited new novel was still in his typewriter; John Dos Passos' was due to appear next month. Thornton Wilder's Ides of March, an imaginary document built around the assassination of Julius Caesar, was a scholarly tour de force and not quite successful. John Steinbeck (The Pearl) and Erskine

Caldwell (This Very Earth) showed again that their best was undoubtedly behind them--and so, to a lesser degree and with much more polish, did Aldous Huxley (Ape and Essence) and W. Somerset Maugham (Catalina). In Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann proved that he alone remained to uphold the fallen standards of the great German tradition; his restatement of Marlowe's and Goethe's great theme was anything but easy reading, but its best passages were remarkably good.

Imported Goods. Europe's yield showed some of her well-known novelists at the top of their bent and introduced some highly talented strangers and newcomers. Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, which made a new evaluation of that much neglected virtue, human pity, became deservedly one of the most discussed books of the year--along with The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's most unpitying, inhumanly humorous assault on Hollywood's attitude--and, by implication, the American attitude--toward love and death. Two other British writers at last got a foothold in the U.S.: Joyce Gary, with his fine, psychologically tuned Herself Surprised, and I. Compton-Burnett, whose dully brilliant Bullivant and the Lambs showed clearly why she has become one of England's most antiquated but most distinguished novelists.

Other noteworthy books from the British Isles included Humphrey Slater's Conspirator, a political spy novel whose unlagging melodrama was both its triumph and defeat (it never paused to look below the surface), Jon Godden's story of human loneliness, The House by the Sea and two excellent collections of short stories: Frank O'Connor's The Common Chord, which showed its Irish author in high form, and 31-year-old A. L. Barker's Innocents, studies of far-from-innocent English children that reminded some critics of Richard Hughes.

Merits and Morals. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, a heartfelt story of South African racial problems, was admired as much for its merits as for its morals. So was the strangest parable of the year: Ernst Juenger's On the Marble Cliffs (published in Germany in 1939), in which, under a cunning mythological disguise, a talented former disciple of Hitler had denounced the Fuehrer and all his works. In World Without Visa, a story of Marseille under the Vichy regime, France's Jean Malaquais wrote. perhaps the year's best political novel.

But the cream of the novels from the Continent was unquestionably Albert Camus' The Plague, a study of human behavior in the face of death,-Readers might justly disdain the gabby slickness of The Chips Are Down, Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel; but in Camus (often regarded as one of existentialism's fellow travelers, though he denies it), they could recognize the true novelist's capacity for translating philosophy and faith into the vigorous language of human conduct.

NON-FICTION

As World War II receded, its outline seemed to become clearer--in non-fiction as in fiction. First had come the journalists--putting down history on the run. Now came the participants with their memoirs. Though the.r reticences and their partisanship inevitably left plenty of work for the future historian, the generals and the statesmen were responsible for some of this year's best books.

Most valuable of tlie books on the shooting war itself was General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, a lucid account of Allied strategy, written in serviceable Service English. To be assured of just how good it was, readers had only to turn to Field Marshal Montgomery's soldierly but dry-as-dust Normandy to the Baltic, which covered much of the same ground as Crusade. There were official and semi-official Service histories by the score, but the best to set beside Ike's book were Fletcher Pratt's expert, well-written and exciting The Marines' War and Professor Samuel Eliot Morison's The Rising Sun in the Pacific, third volume of his comprehensive history of the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Two books helped to explain Germany's military collapse from the German side: Defeat in the West, by Milton Shulman, a former Canadian intelligence officer, and The German Generals Talk, by British Captain B. H. Liddell Hart. Both concluded that the German army's biggest handicap in the field was Adolf Hitler's personal direction of the war. Of special interest and excellent of their kind were A. D. Divine's Dunkirk, a brilliant recording of the cross-Channel rescue of Britain's beaten army in 1940, and Memoirs of a Secret Agent of Free France by Remy (Gilbert Renault), the most exciting story of espionage in World War II.

Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm was the first dramatic volume of what promises to be a great history of the war and Churchill's stewardship. Best of such U.S. books was Dramatist Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins, perhaps too worshipful of both men, but the clearest view yet of the war at the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin level. Overshadowed by these two, but important for the record, were The Memoirs of Cordell Hull and Henry L. Stimson's On Active Service in Peace and War.

The vanquished cried their denials and excuses, some of them from the grave. In the posthumous The Fall of Mussolini, II Duce swore that he had been betrayed and that his army wouldn't fight (the last being true enough). Also posthumous was the obstinate apologia of the master collaborator in The Diary of Pierre Laval, while the career of a vain little mountebank was credibly but inexpertly traced in Curt Riess's Joseph Goebbels.

Readable and thoroughly documented was Herbert Feis's The Spanish Story, a former State Department man's expert statement of General Franco's devious wartime role.

With the exception of Sherwood's history, most of the 1948 books on F.D.R. were from the embittered That-Man-in-the-White-House camp. Historian Charles A. Beard's last book was President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941, an old isolationist's angry, distorted effort to blame U.S. entry into the war on the single-minded efforts of the President. Jim Farley's Story was a peevish denunciation of the President for refusing to play politics Farley's way all the time, and The Roosevelt Myth was the kind of apoplectic hymn of hate that readers could expect from onetime liberal Journalist John T. (Country Squire in the White House) Flynn.

There was a letup in Lincolniana, that familiar old publishing standby. The Lincoln Papers, edited by David C. Mearns, were chiefly valuable as proof that Son Robert Todd Lincoln had unaccountably been sitting on a hoard of material that was primarily of interest only to the footnoters. Most valuable Lincoln contribution of the year was Lincoln and the War Governors, by Professor William B. Hesseltine.

The most definitive biography of the year in any field was Douglas Southall Freeman's George Washington (two volumes out, four yet to come). Nearly as ambitious but more pedestrian were Irving Brant's James Madison (Vol. II) and the first volume of Dumas Malone's scholarly but routine Jefferson. Eugene Lyons' Our Unknown Ex-President was an embarrassing attempt to clothe Herbert Hoover in warmth and grace. For pure dramatic interest, Antonina Vallentin's Mirabeau, a study of the liberty-preaching rake against the background of the French Revolution, was one of the year's best.

U.S. historians were still hacking away at the still mountainous detritus of the Civil War. E. Merton Coulter's The South During Reconstruction and Charles S. Sydnor's The Development of Southern Sectionalism were plainly required reading for students, the first two volumes of a ten-volume history of the South. John William De Forest's acutely observant A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, a reissue of a contemporary book, proved to be still wonderfully readable. Carl Van Doren's The Great Rehearsal was a cool, competent picture of the Constitutional Convention at work. John Tebbel did a good journeyman's job (the first) of cutting down to one volume Francis Parkman's still great 13-volume France and England in North America.

The U.S. came in for some sharp criticism, notably from two British writers. After seven years in the U.S., Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer decided that its people were terribly lonely and everlastingly fearful of looking like sissies. He came about as close to the mark as gadabout anthro-pologists-on-grant usually do. More pretentious was leftish Harold Laski's American Democracy, a glib, fat examination of the U.S. with capitalism as its aboriginal villain.

Of. the numerous peeks behind the Iron Curtain, the most candid and observant was Sam Welles's Profile of Europe. In down-to-earth pictures of daily living, he showed that Russian Communism is still a burden borne on the patient backs of the overworked and undernourished Russian people. In I Saw Poland Betrayed, onetime U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane wrote a blunt, forceful account of the means by which the Kremlin (with little resistance from the U.S. Government) took over the Polish state. Political pundits had a sure-fire topic in Russia v. the Western democracies. Most crisp and provocative of a spate of books on the subject was bright, British Barbara Ward's The West at Bay, in which she argued that Western Europe must have Western Union or "we are for the dark."

Arnold Toynbee, whose Study of History (a one-volume condensation of his work-in-progress) was a surprise bestseller of 1947, again was listed with an even more unlikely candidate, Civilization on Trial. In 13 scholarly essays he reaffirmed the large, calm view of history, taking the position that man might be destroyed but other formS of life would carry on.

More alarmed and alarming were William Vogt, who warned the world in Road to Survival that its growing population was rapidly using up the earth's substance, and Fairfield Osborn who, in Our Plundered Planet, lectured man for destroying the fertility of the land. Poet Thomas Merton, now a Trappist monk, lent poetic excitement to his autobiographical account of a worldly young pagan's conversion to Roman Catholicism, in Seven Storey Mountain. And, in a category all its own, there was Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a continuing bestseller in spite of its statistical dullness, and gave rise to more bad jokes and pseudoscientific claptrap than any book in recent years.

POETRY & CRITICISM

Some very good poetry was written in 1948, most of it by the older and established writers. No bright young poet blazed a sensational new trail--not even as narrow and hard to follow as the one Robert Lowell blazed in 1946.

Ezra Pound, godfather-emeritus of modern verse, came through in his old age with some of the best--and worst--poetry of the year. In his Pisan Cantos he ranted, as of old, about usurers, Churchill and Mussolini; but a new, touching note of sadness and humility crept into his verse.

To the relief of his literary admirers, Archibald MacLeish dropped his wartime role of political soothsayer and returned, in some sections of Act five, to the personal lyrics he had once sung so well. From England came the apocalyptic chants of Edith Sitwell, who had journeyed a long way from her early preciosities. Her Song of the Cold contained some good war poetry. (It was a year in which America became Sitwell conscious, and the touring Sitwells discovered America. Osbert Sitwell sketched an acid portrait of his delightfully eccentric father in Laughter in the Next Room; Sacheverell, youngest of the literary family, celebrated the minor arts of peace in The Hunters and the Hunted.)

Other books of verse by older writers: Robinson Jeffers' crabbed The Double Axe, which most critics resented for its arrogant, unyielding isolationism; Paterson, Book II, a homey description of small-city life by William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey doctor who versifies between paying patients; Mark Van Doren's pleasant New Poems.

A few younger poets were worth reading: Randall Jarrell's Losses, an honest try at putting wartime experience into verse; John Berryman's The Dispossessed, technically impressive but marred by self-pity ; Peter Viereck's Terror and Decorum, flippant and satiric.

In literary criticism, the ambitious new "American Men of Letters" series began a restudy of the country's major writers with Joseph Wood Krutch's well-balanced Henry David Thoreau and Emery Neff's Edwin Arlington Robinson. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: the American Years, Robert Cantwell gave an unorthodox interpretation and filled in the background of Hawthorne's time with a rich mass of detail. Randall Stewart's Hawthorne was a more conventional biography.

It was also a year in which literary figures were allowed to speak for themselves: Andre Gide's Journal, Vol. 2, rich with evidence of the creative mind's way of work; Franz Kafka's morbid Diaries; Anton Chekhov's plain, warm Private Papers; Edwin Arlington Robinson's letters in Untriangulated Stars which told the painful story of an American poet's struggle for survival.

*Real name: John Cobb Cooper.

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