Books: The Year In Books, Dec. 18, 1944

Asked how he was handling the 1944 buying rush, the manager of Scribner’s Manhattan bookshop replied (according to Bennett Cerf in Try and Stop Me): “Oh, at 9 o’clock we just open the doors and jump out of the way.”

The wartime book boom which began in 1942 burgeoned to new peaks this year. Almost every published book was sold, and many a title would have sold far more copies if paper had been available to print them. Despite competition of movies, magazines and radio, more U.S. citizens were reading more books than ever before.

Was it the start of a new cultural era in the U.S.? The prognosis was favorable.

Escape. More than ever, in the stress & strain of war, people were reading to be entertained, to escape from their everyday worries. Reprints, marketed at 25¢ by newsstands and drugstores, remained the prime phenomenon of the boom. Mystery stories bulked steadily larger in the reprint publishers’ output. And comic books far outsold the mysteries.

There was plenty of trash in this torrent. But in the good mysteries there was good writing—considerably better than that in most current straight novels. The reading of mysteries and comics was no longer necessarily a sign of low literary taste. Turning away from the turgid, plotless “problem” novels of the 19303, both readers and critics were rediscovering the literary values of good storytelling.

Storytelling was at a premium in straight novels as well as mysteries. It was the story (plus plenty of sex) that sent lush young Kathleen Winsor’s lush Restoration romance, Forever Amber, rocketing to the top of best-seller lists despite the author’s mediocre craftsmanship.

Information. U.S. readers wanted to be informed as well as entertained. War books continued in strong demand, with such human-interest and eyewitness accounts as Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War and Brave Men, and Robert Sherrod’s Tarawa, in the lead.

Postwar books were popular. Nothing but a wide and deep national interest could account for the extraordinary popularity of Sumner Welles’s authoritative but ponderously written treatise on world organization, The Time for Decision, which week after week stayed second only to Bob Hope’s I Never Left Home (1,250,000 copies) on the nonfiction best-seller lists and finally topped them.

Merit Rewarded. The Time for Decision was only one of a heartening number of books which combined solid intellectual or literary merit and unusual popularity. Some others:

The World of Washington Irving, by Van Wyck Brooks, tells of a period in American history comparable to the present, when Parson Weems hawked books from his spring wagon and the people were avid for learning. Part of its value is that, in a time when there are not enough new books of quality to satisfy the demand, it directs readers to many excellent, forgotten U.S. writers.

Gettysburg to Appomattox, by Douglas Southall Freeman, is the third & final volume of Lee’s Lieutenants. Its portraits of the able, good-natured men who contributed to Lee’s greatness are masterly. Its clear, detailed battle accounts read like chapters of good novels.

Persons and Places, by George Santayana, is the famed philosopher’s unfinished autobiography. It tells of his boyhood in Spain and the tragic loneliness of his Spanish family in alien Boston, with a very brief account of his years at Harvard—a stoic recital of intellectual hardships written with epicurean felicity.

Joseph the Provider, by Thomas Mann, is the final volume of Mann’s story of Joseph which tells in 2,005 pages what the Bible version tells in 21 pages. It contains Mann’s usual solid, overlong discussions of history, religion and art, but its portraits of Pharaoh and Jacob are characterizations that the great novelist has never excelled.

U.S. War Aims, by Walter Lippmann, is the popular pundit’s realistic appraisal of the weaknesses of U.S. foreign policy (or of its lack of a consistent policy). It advocates U.S. alliance with Britain and Russia and eventually with China.

Yankee from Olympus, by Catherine Drinker Bowen, a biography of Chief Justice Holmes, remained on the list of popular books all year by virtue of the wisdom, the knowledge of law, the humor and the span of American history embodied in its hero.

Anna and the King of Siam, by Margaret Landon, is a digest and condensation of the writings of Anna Leonowens, an English officer’s widow who in 1862 was hired to teach English to the Siamese monarch’s numerous wives and children. Always interesting and sometimes charming, it is surprisingly unsensational for a story of life in a harem.

Merit Unrewarded. Not all good books of 1944 won the public they deserved. Friedrich A. Hayek’s brilliant exposition of the perils of collectivism, The Road to Serfdom, Hans Kohn’s timely historical study, Idea of Nationalism, and Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal’s profound analysis of the U.S. Negro problem, An American Dilemma, won high critical praise but comparatively few readers. And much of the year’s most intelligent poetry suffered the usual neglect: W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being, E. E. Cummings’ I X I, Robert Fitzgerald’s A Wreath for the Sea, Marianne Moore’s Nevertheless. But 1944 also witnessed the emergence of a new popular poet of high quality. Russell Davenport’s My Country, a simple, eloquent, sometimes patriotically overcharged paean to American destiny. ran up the astonishing (for poetry) printing total of 30,000 copies.

War books from the fighting fronts appeared steadily; they were generally competent, rarely outstanding. Among the favorites after Ernie Pyle’s homespun anthologies; Jack Belden’s frank, often bitter Still Time to Die; Target: Germany, the admirable, official story of the Eighth U.S.A.A.F. ; Captain Herbert L. Merillat’s detailed report of the battle for Guadalcanal, The Island; Charles Wertenbaker’s Invasion! For warmly personal reasons, Mina Curtiss’ Letters Home, 254 samples of the billions of letters that U.S. service men have written home since they went to war, became a public favorite.

History, past and current, was also a steady seller. Will Durant, the U.S.’s out standing popularizer, completed the third volume of his monumental history of civilization, Caesar and Christ. Charles & Mary Beard ended their long and fruitful collaboration with The Basic History of the United States. Britain’s D. W. Brogan produced one of the most discerning studies of American life ever written by a foreigner, The American Character. Only a step below in popularity were John Dos Passos’ State of the Nation, a brilliant survey of the U.S. home front; Dixon Wecter’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home, a thoroughgoing survey of U.S. veterans after four wars; An American Program, the late, great Wendell Willkie’s last statement of his credo.

Biography. Few of the many biographies of 1944 had American heroes. Gene Fowler’s Good Night, Sweet Prince (John Barrymore) outsold them all, but the best books were about Europeans. Wittiest and deftest was Jean Burton’s Heyday of a Wizard, the story of the Scottish-born medium, Daniel Dunglass Home. Most significant for today was H. Chang’s massive, official Chiang Kaishek. Most unexpected was the abundance of works on the lives and writings of British authors of the 18th and 19th Centuries, including Joseph Wood Krutch’s Samuel Johnson; Sheila Birkenhead’s Against Oblivion (a life of Keats’s friend Joseph Severn); Will D. Howe’s Charles Lamb and His Friends.

Novels of Religion. Insofar as a pattern emerged, it was in the persistence of Biblical and religious themes like that of Joseph the Provider in the year’s popular writing. Zofia Kossak’s Blessed Are the Meek, based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, was one of the most popular novels, and Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe, a 508-page novel of primitive Christianity and a veteran of 1942, outstripped all rivals with a sale of 1,500,000 copies to date. A. J. Cronin’s The Green Years, a study of a young Scottish boy’s spiritual growing pains, got a prodigious first printing (100,000). British expatriate novelists in the U.S. appeared to be following a similar trend — with the difference that they turned toward Eastern religious philosophy and the transmigration of souls, strictly in modern dress. Two examples popular with U.S. readers : W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, in which a youthful American picks his way to the Absolute through a maze of delectable temptations; Aldous Huxley’s sophisticated but mystical Time Must Have a Stop.

Women and Romance. But romance was by no means neglected; women novelists wrote more than half of the year’s bestsellers. Firm favorites were Elizabeth Goudge’s Green Dolphin Street (winner of the $125,000 M.G.M. prize), Mazo de la Roche’s The Building of Jalna, Margery Sharp’s Cluny Brown, Betty Smith’s holdover from 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Two of 1944’s most somber best-sellers were also by women: Lillian Smith’s Boston-banned story of miscegenation in the South, Strange Fruit (475,000 copies), and Gwethalyn Graham’s homely rebuff to Canadian antiSemitism, Earth and High Heaven (125,000 copies). So were three books that lagged in sales but scored with the critics: Katherine Anne Porter’s collection of highly finished short stories, The Leaning Tower; Virginia Woolf’s posthumous collection, A Haunted House (published three years after the author’s suicide); First Novelist Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure, a stately, neo-Proustian examination of New England family life.

Good war fiction was scarce; the postwar flood was still to come. First Novelist John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano made a clear sweep of critical and popular honors. Runners-up were Joseph Pennell’s The History of Rome Hanks, a blood-&-guts story of the Civil War that proved too much for some stomachs, and, in complete contrast, Harry Brown’s quiet, sensitive A Walk in the Sun.

Fiction surprise of the year was Charles Jackson’s study of dipsomania, The Lost Weekend, which was both a warm and human (if terrible) story and a shrewd, meticulous case history. Even farther off the beaten track were Philip Wylie’s Night Unto Night and Ludwig Bemelmans’ Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (both with epileptic heroes); Painter Salvador Dali’s first, richly insane venture in fiction, Hidden Faces; Robert Graves’s attack on the venerable Poet John Milton, Wife to Mr. Milton; Dangling Man, Saul Bellow’s tense study of the pins-&-needles period between a draftee’s classification and induction; Australian Christina Stead’s poignant story of feminine frustration, For Love Alone.

For many Old Faithfuls, 1944 was just another year, another stage of work in progress. In Everybody’s Political What’s What, 88-year-old Bernard Shaw demonstrated that his wit, if not his judgment, is as sharp as ever. Jules Romains published Work and Play, the 13th book of his vast, panoramic novel of France between wars, Men of Good Will; Upton Sinclair lifted Lanny Budd (who first appeared in World’s End in 1940) to the stature of Presidential Agent; with Bedford Village, Hervey Allen completed Vol. 2 of his massive sextet on Colonial America.

Will It Last? World War I produced no U.S. book boom, but publishing slumped badly at war’s end. Will the end of War II and gasoline rationing bring a slump in the present enormous and growing U.S. appetite for books? Presumably some G.I.’s who read now for lack of a better way to kill time, some civilians who read because gas rationing keeps them homebound, will turn to other pleasures in the peace. But the reading habits acquired by millions of others are unlikely to be broken. And the public appetite is certain to be fed and stimulated by mass production and distribution of books on an unprecedented scale.

The publishing revival of the early 1920s began with the appearance of the Modern Library and other modestly priced reprints. Today, in addition to the immense success of paperbound reprints, paper rationing has accustomed readers to cheaper books, with thinner paper, smaller type, narrower margins. And keen competition in the cheap-book field has been further assured this year by Multimillionaire Marshall Field’s purchase of Simon & Schuster (including a 49% interest in Pocket Books), countered by the purchase of the old reprint house of Grosset & Dunlap by a syndicate composed of Random House, Book-of-the-Month Club, and Harper & Bros.

Postwar U.S. readers may get not only more and cheaper books but better ones. Wrote Publisher Bennett Cerf (Random House) in the New York Post last fortnight: “The creation of a great reprint and chain-store market simply means that a deserving book will earn far more than it ever did before. The added bait may even dim the siren song of Hollywood in young authors’ ears and persuade them to concentrate, as they did long, long ago, on making their every book the very best that they know, how to write.”