The Year in Books

The problems of 1947, of the soul as well as of the mind, were bigger than the abilities of the writers who grappled with them. It was fashionable to indict writers for this condition, but how just was the indictment?

Citizens of their time, they lived in a nation that had both prosperity and peace, but enjoyed neither. If others felt bewilderment and despair, was it strange that the writers did too, and showed it not only in what they wrote, but in what they proved incapable of writing? Most writers were unable to see life whole, and unsatisfied with illumining only fragments of it. Even the humorists, who were few, wrote as if they had solemnly resolved: humor must and shall be preserved.

No bright and overwhelming genius appeared in 1947 to light the way and apostrophize the age.

Except for English Historian Arnold J. Toynbee's massive summation of the world's experience, which is a best-seller in a one-volume condensation, most of the year's non-fiction was written by men stranded on shallow isles of postwar political journalism--and how often and how quickly the fleets of history passed them by! Others, more aware of present dilemmas tried to find answers in the American past. The year saw an extraordinary number of new books on American history, some of them solid scholarly achievements.

It was a year in which the flight into the past was accelerated in fiction and nonfiction. But current anxieties broke through. A book called Peace of Mind was the biggest non-fiction seller of the year, a reflection not so much of its own merit as of the numbers of Americans seeking the assurances and affirmations of religion.

It was a year in which lovers of history and biography could add a few books to their libraries, but good fiction, poetry and criticism were even rarer than in arid 1946. There was no U.S. novel as good as last year's Pulitzer Prizewinning All the King's Men, no new poet as gifted as Robert Lowell, whose Lord Weary's Castle had also won a Pulitzer Prize. Many publishers said frankly that they couldn't take chances with untried talent: their production costs were 75% higher than in 1941, and they needed surefire books. Quality, which is not always surefire, was not much in evidence.

FICTION

Worst off was fiction.

Willa Gather died, and readers recognized the passing of a true artist. Theodore Dreiser's final novel provided reminiscent readers with more of the honest pulp into which that slow, bewildered mill of meditation converted the tough timber of life. Booth Tarkington's last unfinished story faintly echoed the springtime tones that he caught from young middle-class voices in another era.

Sinclair Lewis produced a novel that outsold anything he had ever written, including much better novels. Kingsblood Royal, his 19th novel, a crudely black & white dramatization of racial prejudice in a Midwestern town, hit an exposed nerve of U.S. society. So did a rash of other race-relations novels (led by Laura Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement). They were no doubt well-intended, but most were conscientious catastrophes, shrill and thin-blooded.

Upton Sinclair, his radical grip long since relaxed, continued to dream up out of newspaper files further scenes from modern history as witnessed by his ubiquitous wonder boy, Lanny Budd.

The Middle Men. Most of these big names were names of the '20s; what of the strong men of the '30s? Ernest Hemingway, perfectionist in style and poet of action, was sweating out a new novel in Cuba. William Faulkner lay fallow, having produced from the rich river bottom of his imagination enough circumstantial fantasies to keep students of the novel and the South in a daze for years. John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus displayed his sensory gifts and grasp of underdog U.S. types, but these qualities failed to counterbalance a cheap plot. In The Pearl, published in book form at year's end, Steinbeck reworked an old Mexican folk tale with over-deliberate folksiness. Lion Feuchtwanger's novel of 18th Century France had all the solidity and splendor of an old Orpheum Theater backdrop of Versailles. And Ben Ames Williams, old Satevepost standby, was delivered of a 1,514-page Civil War novel.

The New Novelists. Far more ingratiating as a creation of the U.S. past was A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky. It had its faults of structure, but its characters--Indian scouts and hunters in the early West--were soundly imagined and pungent as hickory smoke.

The war no longer made fashionable copy but remained like a departing storm cloud, high above the year's fiction. One of the better pieces of writing about it was Allen R. Matthews' The Assault, a terse account of hitting the beach at Iwo Jima. Worth reading were John Home Burns's The Gallery, a novel of a G.I.'s experiences in Naples, Charles Christian Wertenbaker's story of the French Forces of the Interior (Write Sorrow on the Earth), Godfrey Blunden's novel of Moscow and Muscovites in their grim winters of war and political despair (A Room on the Route). William Wister Haines's Command Decision, a tense story of hard choices at an A.A.F. headquarters, was made into a hit play on Broadway. The Steeper Cliff, David Davidson's novel of a search for the meaning of intellectual courage in postwar Germany, was the best fictional attempt to treat of the problems of peace.

As always, commercial fiction writers hammered out their fables according to formula, exploiting the daydreams of the young ("This girl might have been YOU") and the complacencies of the self-deceived. Sexual pandering in the form of the novel had its usual quota of professional and amateur practitioners. As always, however, a few hundred young men & women, fascinated by the charms of art and the oddities of real experience, tried to write honestly and well.

The Foreigners. It was also a year in which many well-known French novelists were brought to U.S. readers in translation. Three novels by Franc,ois Mauriac acquainted U.S. readers with the painful penetration and classic structural quality of this eminent Catholic writer. The first two novels of Jean Paul Sartre's trilogy on France before World War II were studies in demoralization. Andre Gide reached All Hallows with the Nobel Prize and U.S. publication of the first volume of his Journals.

When the Mountain Fell, a tale of utter simplicity and symbolic depth by the late Swiss Novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, reminded some readers and writers of the value of perfected style. So did The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster, England's dean of novelists.

Among the few U.S. novels that did not suffer from paucity of style as well as poverty of theme was Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, a funny and tragic little story of children in the West. Another was Bend Sinister, Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant nightmare novel of European life at the advent of dictatorship. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, an ambitious effort to analyze a modern type of disintegrated personality and to make it universal, failed in the second aim; but his descriptions of a Mexican setting were memorable. The finest short stories of the year were perhaps V. S. Pritchett's It May Never Happen and J. F. Powers' sketches of Catholic clergy in Prince of Darkness. Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey was a thoughtful but disappointing study of New York liberal intellectuals. Saul Bellow's The Victim, for the most part a well-controlled blend of realism and parable, was the year's most intelligent study of the Jew in U.S. society. Bellow's method recalled--without aping--that of the Czech genius, Franz Kafka.

NON-FICTION

World War II was being refought in books, while in another corner writers debated the possibilities and prospects of World War III.

Dozens of divisional and regimental histories were in print or preparation. Many were dedicated to the proposition that "our outfit won the war single-handed." A pretentious quickie with this theme was Newspaperman Robert Allen's Patton-worshiping history of the Third Army, Lucky Forward. Patton's own War As I Knew It was much better written, naturally more authoritative, a rich mine of precepts-into-practice for students of warfare. A superior war book of a different kind was the late John Gilbert Winant's Letter from Grosvenor Square, a moving account of wartime faith that was a reproof to postwar disillusionment. Other solid achievements: the first two volumes of Samuel Eliot Morison's massive History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Professor William Langer's approving examination of Our Vichy Gamble, Major General John Deane's illuminating story of U.S. difficulties with Russia as a wartime ally, The Strange Alliance.

There was a whole shelf of books on Russia and the Russian problem, ranging in viewpoint from Earl Browder's pro-Soviet War or Peace with Russia? to ex-Communist James Burnham's The Struggle for the World, which regards compromise with Russia as dangerous folly. Hal Lehrman went to the Balkans as a pro-Soviet correspondent, had his eyes opened by the totalitarian steamroller in action, described it convincingly in Russia's Europe.

Only readers whose interests were professional or personal could keep up with the year's output on Germany and the Nazis. Most important, as a historical document, was The Nuremberg Case as it was presented by U.S. Chief of Counsel Robert Jackson. Throughout the trial Captain G. M. Gilbert, a U.S. psychologist, had access to the prisoners 24 hours a day. Nuremberg Diary, written from his daily notes, was the best composite picture of Goering & Co. Most persuasive of the speculations about Hitler was H. R. Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler, a skillful reconstruction, from evidence that was necessarily circumstantial but convincing, of the bunker Goetterdaemmerung. Those who thought there were no '"good" Germans might have changed their minds after reading Allen Welsh Dulles' Germany's Underground and To the Bitter End, a history of the German plots against Hitler, by Hans Gisevius, one of the plotters. In End of a Berlin Diary, William L. Shirer warned that the Germans hoped to get even for defeat when the U.S. and Russia squared off. Unlike his first Diary, Shirer's latest was stuffed with news gone stale.

Far more frequent on U.S. bookshelves were new books about American heroes, past & present. There was the usual swelling of Lincolniana. The most compact was Paul Angle's The Lincoln Reader, the most controversial was J. G. Randall's Lincoln, the Liberal Statesman. The other myth amaking, the Roosevelt myth, was being shaped by varied hands, including F.D.R.'s bodyguard. Son Elliott edited a fat volume of his father's letters written between the ages of five and 22, and the President's Vatican representative, Myron C. Taylor, brought out the platitudinous Wartime Correspondence Between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII.

Both scholars and wide-eyed popularizers dug around in the roots of the nation's past, but when they came to write about it, rarely got off the ground. Most ambitious of the professional jobs was Allan Kevins' Ordeal of the Union, winner of the $10,000 Scribner Prize in American History, which devoted 1,183 detail-packed pages to the brief but politically stormy period 1848-56. Five more volumes are to come. Bernard De Voto's Across the Wide Missouri covered another brief period, 1833-38, dealt lovingly, almost lyrically, with the American fur trade, the Rocky Mountain trappers and their breath-taking country. Mason Wade, biographer of Francis Parkman, did a good job in finding, and carefully editing, the historian's missing Journals.

The American Past, by Roger Butterfield, was an eye-opening collection of 1,000 pictures, the best one-volume pictorial history of the U.S. around. The accompanying text was almost of necessity an oversimplification of U.S. history. In the field of nostalgia, I Remember Distinctly, another big picture book, by Frederick Lewis Allen and his wife, showed the nation with its manners down between wars. After seven years in Mexico, Ralph Roeder turned up with Juarez and His Mexico, possibly the best written and ablest history of the year.

In Speaking Frankly, former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes bluntly recorded Russian intransigence in diplomatic dealings. Bronx Democratic Boss Ed Flynn talked about his powerful political machine with sentimentality, self-righteousness and partial candor in You're the Boss. Russell Lord missed badly in The Wallaces of Iowa at a time when a critical study of Henry Wallace would have been most useful. There were new biographies of Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, Taylor and Wilson, but only Arthur Link's Wilson: The Road to the White House was better than passable. Some of the year's best reading showed up in Henry Adams and His Friends, a collection of unpublished letters written by the wry and crotchety historian.

No $5 book had ever sold so well as John Gunther's Inside U.S.A., a mountainous repository of quick looks, hurried judgments and bright portraits, shot through with glibness, but for all that, highly readable.

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