Books: The Year in Books, Dec. 21, 1942

For reasons ranging from purest merit to merest popularity, ten books stood head & shoulders above the madding crowd in 1942:

The Raft, by Robert Trumbull ($2.50), and They Were Expendable, by W. L. White ($2), came closest to catching the adventure of war without scooping up too much of its bitter dross.

Conditions of Peace, by Edward Hallett Carr ($2.50), a highly intelligent study of the elements necessary to set up a stable post-war world, was the nearest thing to required reading.

Victory Through Airpower, by Alexander de Seversky ($2.50), of all the books grinding special axes of war, was the most provocative, the clearest, the most popular and in ways the most exaggerated.

The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers ($2.50), was the exciting story of escape from a German concentration camp and of the nature of those from whom the escapist seeks help.

Dialogue With Death, by Arthur Koestler ($2), was a description of the thoughts and actions of a man (Koestler himself) condemned to death in a Fascist prison.

The Seed Beneath the Snow, by Ignazio Silone ($2.75), was a searching, spiritual novel written around the lives of villagers in contemporary Italy.

Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by Samuel Eliot Morison (2 vols., $10), was a biography of Columbus by the distinguished man who has been named by the U.S. Navy to write its official history of the war.

Victor Hugo, by Matthew Josephson ($3-50), filled — with 514 eminently readable pages—a gaping hole in U.S. biographical writing.

Parts of a World, by Wallace Stevens ($2), stood with the finest published poems of the year.

During the year: > Many writers, some despairing of interpreting war during a war, found themselves in uniform. Among them: Novelists James Gould Cozzens, Julian Green, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Knight, F. Van Wyck Mason; Playwrights Sidney Kingsley, Thornton Wilder, Laurence Stallings, William Saroyan; Poets Christopher La Farge, Karl Jay Shapiro, Harry Brown; ex-New Yorkers John Cheever, Geoffrey Hellman, Edward Newhouse; Autobiographer Vincent Sheean; Historian Samuel Eliot Morison; Newshawks Jimmy Cannon, Marion Hargrove, Hartzell Spence.

> Less directly involved in war, but caught in its vortex, were Novelist-Biographer Stefan Zweig, dead by his own hand in Brazilian exile (“The artist has been wounded in his concentration. . . .”); sensationalist Richard Julius Herman Krebs (alias Jan Valtin, hero of under-coverman Krebs’s 1941 best-seller Out of the Night), imprisoned by the Justice Department for deportation to Germany at war’s end; Author Waldo (“I love Argentina. . . .”) Frank, who gave a repeat performance of the mauling he received in Kentucky’s Harlan County in 1932 by getting attacked by young Fascists in Buenos Aires.

> Apart from war casualties in 1942, the following went to their deaths: Historian Guglielmo Ferrero; French journalist and political theorist Count Raoul de Roussy de Sales (The Making of Tomorrow); Poet William Alexander Percy, whose prose work Lanterns on the Levee was one of 1941’s most substantial contributions to American letters; Poet Alan Porter; dog-lover Albert Payson Terhune; popular Novelists Rachel Field, Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller (The White Cliffs).

By & large literature went to the wars in 1942, and came back looking more like journalism than literature. In the year’s list of 9,000-odd titles, the center of gravity shifted more sharply than ever toward the topical and away from the monumental. For A.D. 1942 was a year in which men & women everywhere groped for moorings in the storm, for truths, for explanations, for consolations. A.D. 1942 was also a year of many defeats and readers wanted some talisman for victory. A.D. 1942, above all, was a year of discovery: the U.S., which had been essentially isolated if not isolationist, discovered the world through war.

Men & Death. The mind, like a trapped animal, sniffed and rooted for cause and cure in every frenzied corner of its predicament. The heart and the spirit, more intensely than at any previous time within this generation, turned upon the thought of death.

Of those who were nearest death and who survived it, few as yet were capable of saying much about it, and few ever would be. By far the most eloquent were those fragmentary statements of simple men which found their way occasionally into the news and into such volumes as The Raft, They Were Expendable and .Stanley Johnston’s Queen of the Flattops ($3). Of the two attempts to give the experience permanence in words, neither was by an American. In Dialogue With Death the Hungarian Arthur Koestler’s clinical notes on the subject of life & death were perhaps the maturest writing of the year. In Flight to Arras ($2.75), French Airman Antoine de St. Exupery gave the subject a treatment which was more daring, in certain mystical respects more profound, but which was also fogged with rhetoric and made dubious by the over-insistent preaching of a personal experience.

Men & Fellow Men. Without recent experience in either international intrigue or war, Americans groped for clues in the unhappy experiences of their fellow men.

There were plenty of nefarious experiences to be reviewed in Germany and Japan, there was surprising, deep-rooted strength in Russia, and there were worrisome problems elsewhere — and readers wanted to check these against the state of being at home:

> Top honors for German coverage went to youthful Howard K. Smith, whose Last ‘Train from Berlin ($2.75) gave a detailed picture of gloomy conditions in the German capital following the first Nazi setbacks on the Russian front.

> On Japan, perhaps the most curious document was Japan’s Dream of World Empire ($1.25), a dusting-off by Carl Crow of the Tanaka Memorial, notorious statement of anti-Chinese policy concocted in 1927 by aggressive Baron Tanaka.

Sad or angry notes on the same theme of Japanese ambition and ruling-class unscrupulousness were struck in With Japan’s Leaders ($2.75), by onetime adviser to Japan’s Washington Embassy Frederick Moore, and Government by Assassination ($3) by top-ranking New York Times Correspondent Hugh Byas. Other top-notchers on the Asiatic problem: Hallett Abend’s Ramparts of the Pacific ($3.50), Pearl Buck’s American Unity and Asia ($1.25), Nathaniel Peffer’s Basis for Peace in the Far East ($2.50), George E. Tay lor’s America in the New Pacific ($1.75).

> John Scott, onetime steelworker in Rus sia, scored two hits: Behind the Urals ($2-75), an eyewitness account of the building of Russia’s mighty steel city, Magnitogorsk; and Duel for Europe ($3-50), a study of Russo-German relations since Munich. Most interesting Russian study: Eugene Tarle’s description of the last great battle for Moscow, Napo leon’s Invasion of Russia, 1812 ($3.50).

> India symbolized perhaps more than any land the dilemma of Britain and in directly of the U.S., and yet she received small attention from U.S. authors. Kate L. Mitchell’s India Without Fable ($2.50) sounded a call for United Nations intervention in the settling of the problems of the Raj. But to many E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) was still able to point up more eloquent facets in the Empire’s crown jewel than did even such news events as the failure of Sir Stafford Cripps. Honors for the hardest-hitting book by a correspondent went to Cecil Brown’s angry criticism of British leadership in Malaya: Suez to Singapore ($3.50).

Men&the Past. As in all times of stress, men looked for relevance in history, and found it. Outstanding among the year’s successes was a 70-year-old novel by a 14-year-old author, Count Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace ($3). A reissue of Harriet Martineau’s Retrospect of Westert Travel (2 vols., $4), first published in 1838, ran away with top honors as best travel book of the year. Other survivals-of-the-fittest: George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior ($1.25); the second volume of William Byrd of Westover’s sage, spicy Secret Diary ($5) Mr. W. and I ($2.75), Caroline Webster’s newly discovered journal of her trip abroad with her triple-threat husband, Daniel; the Oracles of Nostradamus (95¢), still holding its place as U.S. readers’ favorite bookworm’s-eye view of the future.

How the War Began. No two historians would agree yet on the causes of World War I, but book publishers rushed into print with suggestions as to the causes of World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s volume of unedited speeches on foreign affairs, Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy 1933-41 ($3-75), was preceded by How War Came ($2.50), Ernest K. Lindley’s & Forrest Davis’ chatty, half-inside story of the Administration’s efforts to postpone a Pacific crisis while giving the utmost aid short of war to Britain. Sharp-tongued Liberal Professor Frederick L. Schuman bitterly attacked the Franco-British appeasement record in Design for Power: The Struggle for the World ($3.50).

More solidly grounded: Rohan D’Olier Butler’s scholarly Roots of National Socialism ($3); exiled Economist Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, The Structure and Practice of National Socialism ($4); Principles of Power ($3.50), by the late Guglielmo Ferrero. Patents for Hitler ($2.50) was Economist Guenter Reimann’s patient unraveling of the many threads that had tied U.S. technical developments to the German war machine.

How the War Will End. Hardly had the bombs ceased to fall on Pearl Harbor when lay strategists set to work to plan the “proper” course of war. Naked, overwhelming air power was Seversky’s dream. Lieut. Colonel William Fergus Kernan made a stirring and, history has proved, almost too timely plea for the use of offensive tactics against the Axis from bases in North Africa, in Defense Witt Not Win the War ($1.50). Attack on Japan through the Aleutian Islands was the strategy of Alexander Kiralfy in Victory in the Pacific ($2.75). Attack was the keynote of Max Werner’s The Great Offensive ($3), of William Ziff’s The Coming Battle of Germany ($2.50), of Hanson Baldwin’s Strategy for Victory ($1.75). Behind the lines Liberal Herbert Agar called on civilians for the same show of fighting belief, in A Time For Greatness ($2.50).

Controversy. Angriest disagreement of the year was over Novelist John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down ($2). Author Steinbeck’s portrayal of morally superior Norwegians gradually sapping the rigid militarism of their Nazi conquerers drew criticism on the grounds that it gave people the idea that guilt was enough to undermine the Germans. Said Humorist James Thurber: “This little book needs more guts and less moon.” Said New Yorker Critic Clifton Fadiman, in one of the year’s most mixed metaphors: “It seduces us to rest on the oars of our moral superiority.” Fadiman himself believed that “the only way to make a German understand is to kill him. . . .” Nevertheless, The Moon Is Down has sold almost 500,000 copies, including Book-of-the-Month Club sales.

“This May Hurt a Little.” Blandest suggestion of the year came from matted, bell-tolling Novelist Ernest Hemingway.

Said Hemingway, in his preface to the impressive collected stories Men at War ($3): “Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years, or … forever. This can probably only be done by sterilization [of] all members of Nazi party organizations.” The virile, well-equipped novelist admitted that his suggestion should not be advocated now, as it would provoke “increased resistance” by the would-be victims. But, he pointed out, with an air of self-possession: Sterilization is “little more painful than vaccination.”

Fiction for a Cause. Several other authors, though they were less controversially absorbed in the basic questions of life & death, were clearly interested either in helping the war along or in getting a boost from it, or both. Pearl Buck’s best-selling Dragon Seed ($2.50) was a heartfelt poster depicting a Chinese peasant family under the impact of invasion. In Put Out More Flags ($2.50), one of the year’s funniest, most brilliant and more questionable books, Evelyn Waugh affectionately satirized England’s upper classes, murderously satirized her artists, leftists and poor, and wound up among the Commandos waving every non-satiric flag in sight. In his foaming You Can’t Be Too Careful ($2.50) H. G. Wells sometimes arrestingly sketched the recent history of Homo subsapiens, offered pathetically oversimple rationalistic methods by which man might be brought to his senses.

Further from the Furnace. Most of the year’s novelists worked a little further from the furnace, but many of their pages were warm with essential relevance. The Song of Bernadette ($3) was an act of piety inspired by Franz Werfel’s escape from the Nazis. In his somewhat faltering The New Day ($3) Jules Remains examined Communism during that time, two decades ago, when much of Europe did its reading by that “great light in the East.” In Dragon’s Teeth ($3) Upton Sinclair fed his kind-hearted historical marathonists into the champing maws of Herren, Hitler, Göring and Goebbels. With Josephus and the Emperor ($2.75) Lion Feuchtwanger concluded his Roman yet topical trilogy on the amphibian difficulties of the international Jew.

To Conrad Richter, in his novel of Arizona in the early 1900s, Tacey Cromwell ($2), fell the privilege of saying more in 208 pages than most novelists manage in 1,000. In his novel about lawyers, The Just and the Unjust ($2.50), James Gould Cozzens tried to create an organic image of U.S. democracy in practice, and achieved one of the season’s most interesting disappointments. In Go Down, Moses ($2.50), a complex novel disguised as seven stories, William Faulkner tried to capture for non-Fascists some of the more fiber-building meanings of the words “blood” and “soil.” In Only One Storm ($2.75) Granville Hicks tried to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the more humorless type of leftist liberals and managed, inadvertently, to write their Tobacco Road. With his second novel Dollar Cotton ($2.50), John Faulkner lost the odd, suspect comic impetus of Men Working but continued to carve out a South distinct from his brother’s and one worth cultivating.

The most interesting debutante was Gladys Schmitt, whose The Gates of Aulis ($2.75) was an arduously written, passionately ambitious, very gifted and inadequate attempt to focus the death-drives of a pathic world within the trouble of some provincial U.S. intellectuals. In The Company She Keeps ($2.50) Mary McCarthy betrayed various friends & foes of the literary-leftish ’30s, herself, her cold considerable talent for psychosocial analysis, and the considerable limitations of that talent. All but neglected by the public was another first novel by a woman, Rose Kuszmaul, whose Nobody’s Children ($2.50), a simple, striking study of boys in an orphans’ home, rated with the best novels of the year.

Popular Fiction. Of the popular novels Howard Fast’s The Unvanquished ($2.50) was best, in its straightforward brevity, rare in historical novels, and in its startling attempt to portray George Washington as if he might actually have lived.

Paper & Poetry Shortage. The aggregate title pages of the year’s harvest of escape fiction would doubtless have sufficed to print all the year’s poetry worth perpetuating, but that did not mean that all of it was printed. Edna Millay’s The Murder of Lidice (60¢), a somewhat less indestructible monument to that village than was its own destruction, had no trouble finding a publisher. Notable were an Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry ($3.50) edited by Dudley Fitts, and a striking volume of poems, Awake! ($1.50), by young Ulsterman W. R. Rodgers.

Parts of a World ($2) and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction ($3), by Wallace Stevens, were outstanding works of poetry; and small presses were responsible for the appearance of The Second World ($2.50), by the remote and excellent poet R. P.

Blackmur, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme ($1), by Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson’s Notebooks of Night ($2.50), with its famous parody of Joyce and its famous garroting of MacLeish.

Stephen Spender’s Ruins arid Visions ($2) gave proof that war and writing are by no means necessarily incompatible in a civil ized nation. Other notable volumes were The Witness Tree ($2) by Robert Frost, dean of U.S. poets, and Person, Place, and Thing ($2) by Karl Jay Shapiro.

Charity Begins at Home. Much U.S.

criticism followed — and on the whole lagged behind — the nationalistic lead which the late Constance Rourke set a generation ago. She took her last steps in this year in the profound inquiry into the U.S. past entitled Roots of American Culture ($3). Miss Rourke herself some times colored her valuable findings with somewhat parochial opinions; some other critics, last year, rather overdid their overnationalism. Ferner Nuhn’s The Wind Blew From the East ($3) contains often very perceptive studies of antidemocrats Henry Adams, Henry James and T.S.

Eliot, but seems hardly aware of the dangers a democracy incurs which too readily rejects its skeptics and suspects its individualists. Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds ($3.75) recreates, enthusiastically, the climate of U.S. letters from the 19th Century to the present but loses, thanks to its enthusiasm, an urgently needed power of discrimination between the excellence of some contemporary authors, the hearty good intentions of others, and the mere jingoistic opportunism of still others. In Writers in Crisis ($3) Maxwell Geismar acutely dissects the U.S. writers of the past two decades, but keeps up a kind of smart patter which is apt to put off the more intelligent of his readers.

More concerned with letters than with immediate life was William Gaunt with The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy ($3), a witty history of the famous group of British Victorian painters. Virginia Woolf also, in her posthumous Death of the Moth ($3), showed her most delicate skill as a literary escapist. Harry Levin’s James Joyce ($1.50), blind though it was to Joyce’s grandest and plainest virtues as an artist, furnished plain readers with useful X-rays of much that was most abstruse in Joyce’s genius.

Packages. It was a good year for anthologies, a better one still for popular dictionaries. American Harvest ($3.50), edited by Allen Tate and John Peale Bishop, proved that many U.S. contemporaries have achieved a broad and respect able mastery of literature’s one sure preservative: form. In properly honoring formal accomplishment, the editors were inclined to undervalue literary vitality. A Treasury of the Familiar ($5), edited by Ralph L. Woods, usefully disregarded taste and value in favor of collating hundreds of literary tags, good, bad & in different, which lie, on the literate tongue, just between tantalizing half-memory and ready reference. H. L. Mencken’s A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources ($7.50) was as rich a book for ruminators as the year brought; and The American Thesaurus of Slang ($5), edited by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark, came about as near completely corralling the living, dead and deathless in native idiom as could be humanly expected of one volume. The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music ($3.95) was the most comprehensive book of its kind ever assembled.

Biographies. Bulkiest biography published in 1942 was Douglas Southall Freeman’s massively academic Lee’s Lieutenants ($5), first of a projected three-volume study of the men who fought the battles of the South’s lost cause. Most amusing was Hesketh Pearson’s G.B.S. A Full Length Portrait ($3.50), which recorded many unfamiliar details of George Bernard Shaw’s childhood and lovelife. Others were Esther Forbes’s conscientious, overlong Paul Revere and the World He Lived In ($3.75); Hugh 1’Anson Fausset’s erratic but illuminating Walt Whitman ($3); Poetess Muriel Rukeyser’s fervent celebration of the famously forgotten great man of science Willard Gibbs ($3.50) ; Franz Werfel’s Verdi: the Man in His Letters ($3.50).

Look Homeward Angels. Close to the contemporary U.S. were two roughly similar books by two totally dissimilar writers — Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ best-selling Cross Creek ($2.50), Essayist E. B. White’s sane and salty One Man’s Meat ($2.50). Ludwig Bemelmans, a first-rate light storyteller with a surpassing light style, criticized human foibles with a sweet smile in I Love You, I Love You, I Love You ($2.50). But it remained for Humorist James Thurber, reporting on A.D. 1942!s general state of affairs in My World — And Welcome to It ($2.50), to pay the year off most succinctly and devastatingly. “Man,” he said, “would seem to be slowly slipping back to all fours.”

FOR CHILDREN

(Ages 3-8)

The Little House — Virginia Lee Burton ($1.75).

The Man Who Lost His Head— Claire Huchet Bishop ($1).

Watch the Pony Grow— William Hall ($1).

The Tall Book of Mother Goose —Feodor Rojankovsky ($1).

(Ages 8-12)

Herodia, the Lovely Puppet — Katherine Milhous ($2).

Tree in the Trail — Holling Clancy Holling ($2.50).

The Doll Who Came Alive— Enys Tregarthen ($2).

Snow Treasure — Marie McSwigan ($2)

(Ages 12-16)

Ludwig Beethoven and the Chiming Tower Bells— Opal Wheeler ($2).

Adam of the Road — Elizabeth Janet Gray ($2).

America Sings — Carl Carmer ($3).

The Four-Story Mistake — Elizabeth Enright ($7.75)-The Blue Hills— Elizabeth Goudge ($2).

Ail-American — John R. Tunis ($2).