Books: The Year in Books, Dec. 20, 1943

Nineteen forty-three was the most remarkable in the 150-year-old history of U.S. publishing. It was the year when U.S. readers:

>Bought 80,000,000 novels, biographies, and books about war and politics, 70,000,000 textbooks, 40,000,000 children’s books, 45,000,000 technical books, 15,000,000 Bibles and religious books—a total estimated at between 250,000,000 and 350,000,000, and from 20% to 30% more than in 1942.

>Swamped the small, clannish, secretive book industry, with its 274 firms and 4,000 highly organized, well-informed employes. Said Random House’s President Bennett Cerf: “It’s unbelievable. It’s frightening.” Pocket Books, which at 25¢ apiece sold 5,000,000 copies in 1940, 10,000,000 in 1941, 20,000,000 in 1942, sold 38,000,000 in 1943. Even the ponderous university presses reported sales up 20-30%; in one month (October), sales of the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia jumped 1,500%.

For 1943 seemed to mark the second year of an epoch that sober, responsible publishers and all the carriers and custodians of U.S. culture had hoped for all their lives: a time when book-reading and book-buying reached outside the narrow quarters of the intellectuals and became the business of the whole vast literate population of the U.S.

Big Best-Sellers. No. 1 publishing success of the year was a political book—Wendell Willkie’s One World ($1). The Republican candidate’s record of his trip around the world was expected to sell 150,000 copies, actually sold 1,530,000 (total sales of Gone With the Wind 3,000,000).

A runner-up (550,000 copies) was another publishing surprise, Under Cover ($3.50), in which U.S. Journalist John Roy Carlson recounted his experiences through the four years he worked as a one-man, self-appointed secret agent, lived with the thugs, shysters, crackpots and brazenly scheming native U.S. fascists.

The War Books. The year was also pre-eminently the year of war books. Some of the best-sellers were written by soldiers. Sample: God Is My Co-Pilot, by Robert L. Scott Jr. ($2.50). Many were written by newspapermen—e.g., Guadalcanal Diary ($2.50), by Correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who was wounded last month in Italy. Author Tregaskis, a Harvard-educated newspaperman who was 25 at the time of Pearl Harbor, reported the hour-by-hour, day-by-day life in the Pacific Islands and the Battle of the Tenaru River—a life of jungle and Indian warfare, machine guns, snipers, accidents, wounds and Japanese tracer bullets making bright red networks of visible death overhead.

Also outstanding among war books were W. L. White’s report on the crew of a doomed Flying Fortress, Queens Die Proudly ($2.50); The Battle Is the Pay-Off ($2), by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, ex-editor of New York City’s leftist PM; Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo ($2), Captain Ted Lawson’s report (written by Journalist Bob Considine) on the Doolittle raid; Eve Curie’s North African Journey Among Warriors ($3.50); Commando Lieut. Colonel Robert Henrique’s The Voice of the Trumpet ($2); Ira Wolfert’s Torpedo 8 ($2) and Battle for the Solomons ($2); John Hersey’s Into the Valley ($2); Jack Belden’s Retreat With Stilwell ($3); Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War ($3); Hilary St. George Saunders’ Combined Operations; the Official Story of the Commandos ($2).

There was scarcely a war book which did not have, like bits of precious metal buried in piles of scrap iron, its passages of eloquence and emotion. There was not one which, spanning the fronts in all their global immensity, and the millions of individual tragedies, encompassed the war in a single definitive work. Piecing the accounts together, editing out irrelevancies, readers could compose their own history of their own time from the almost limitless supply of fair-to-good material for speculation and inquiry.

Most Shocking. Possibly the year’s most shocking war book was not written by a soldier, described no battles. It was Thérèse Bonney’s photographic record of what World War II has done to Europe’s children. Privately printed (after rejection by ten publishers), Europe’s Children is now completely sold out. Duell, Sloan & Pearce is publishing a new edition.

Also valuable war books, though not battle books, were: Tokyo Record (Otto Tolischus, $3); In Peace Japan Breeds War (Gustav Eckstein, $2.50); Japan’s Military Masters (Hillis Lory, $2.50); Paris—Underground (Etta Shiber, $2.50) The Serbs Choose War (Ruth Mitchell, $2.75); They Shall Not Have Me (Jean Hélion, $3).

Startling Dearth. In startling contrast to the spate of military books was the dearth of competent political books that could provide U.S. readers of 1943 with some clue to the background of conflict from which they might appraise the turbulent changes of the year. The geopoliticians were busy. Andreas Dorpalen’s The World of General Haushofer ($3.50) and Derwent Whittlesey’s German Strategy of World Conquest ($2.50) examined the basic ideas which German Geopolitician Haushofer has contributed to Nazi grand strategy. Still a strong seller was Democratic Ideals and Reality ($2.50), by aging British Geopolitician Sir Halford Mackinder. There was also G. A. Borgese’s Common Cause ($3.50) and a timely reissue of Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society ($2).

New Field of Literature. A new kind of book made its appearance in numbers 1943. Books on the postwar world, becoming almost as numerous as books on the war, were so exhaustive and detailed that they constitute a new field of literature in themselves. Among the most readable postwar books: Make This the Last War (Michael Straight, $3); Let the People Know (Norman Angell, $2.50); U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Walter Lippmann, $1.50); Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (Harold J. Laski, $3.50); Between Tears and Laughter (Lin Yutang, $2.50).

Books which dealt with the future in terms of past history were: Historian Charles Beard’s distinguished examination of U.S. democracy, The Republic ($3), Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision: 1846 ($3.50), Hamilton Basso’s Mainstream ($2.50).

Religious Novels. Nineteen forty-three was also a year in which religious novels crept into the top brackets of fast-selling fiction. Lloyd Douglas’ The Robe, published the year before, was the No. 1 U.S. fiction best-seller for eleven months, was then nosed out by John P. Marquand’s So Little Time (sales of The Robe to date: 680,000 copies). Sholem Asch’s The Apostle is now No. 4 bestseller.

The Robe ($2.75) is a simple, 700-page novel laid in the time of Christ, by a prolific writer of moral tales whose messages are so direct and earnest that they embarrass most reviewers. The Apostle ($3) is a fictional reconstruction of the life & times of St. Paul.

New Novelists. It was a bumper year for best-selling first novelists (most of them women) and writers with one or two books already published who switched from the remainder lists to the best-seller lists. Among the former were: Betty Smith, whose A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ($2.75) sold 460,000 copies in four months, Ilka Chase (In Bed We Cry, $2.50), Elizabeth Janeway (The Walsh Girls, $2.50), Helen Howe (The Whole Heart, $2.50), Allan Seager (Equinox, $2.75). Notable among the second group were Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, $3) and Christine Weston, who with two unknown novels to her all but unknown literary credit, turned out Indigo ($2.50), which reviewers compared with E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

Old-Timers continued to grind out novels in 1943. John P. Marquand published So Little Time ($2.75), a sad, bland tale of a polished but warm-hearted literary hack whose success cost him his self-respect. Upton Sinclair’s Wide Is the Gate ($3), his 63rd book, carried his almost legendary Lanny Budd through the corrupt vicissitudes of Europe between wars. Sinclair Lewis’ Gideon Planish ($2.50), a withering blast at phony philanthropists and do-gooders, awoke pale memories of Elmer Gantry. With The Forest and the Fort ($2.50), Anthony Adverse’s Hervey Allen hewed out Vol. I of a projected six-volume epic novel about American life from Colonial days to the Civil War. In Thunderhead ($2.75), Mary O’Hara told, with delicate feeling for animals, a very human life story of a horse, a sequel to her My Friend Flicka. Martin Flavin’s Harper ($10,000) prize novel, Journey in the Dark ($2.75), described the degrees by which social success disillusioned a social climber. William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy ($2.75), lit with occasional passages of warm humor, became insipid with its determined intellectual baby talk.

Most striking example of the shortcomings of U.S. fiction in 1943 was Jesse Stuart’s Taps for Private Tussie ($2.75), in which a story of a Kentucky mountain child’s uncanny poetic observation was curdled by a burlesque-show farce of life among his elders. The brilliant portraits of anti-Soviet Author Mark Aldanov’s Russian novel, The Fifth Seal ($3), were blurred in the diffuse and incoherent story.

High-ranking among 1943’s novels, less by its own accomplishment than because of the mixed quality of the year’s fiction, was Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure ($2). By no means equal to his Darkness At Noon, Koestler’s latest novel was a graphic account of the sufferings of an ex-Communist for whom a sardonic psychoanalyst tries to provide an easy way out of the struggle against Fascism.

Biography. In 1943, only biography, once a profitable publishing torrent, became a trickle. Richard Aldington’s The Duke ($3.75), a life of the Duke of Wellington, Henry Seidel Canby’s Walt Whitman ($3.75), Maisie Ward’s Gilbert Keith Chesterton ($4.50), Joseph Hone’s W. B. Yeats ($4) topped the biography lists, chiefly for lack of competition. But there were four exciting autobiographies: the best-selling Burma Surgeon ($3), Dr. Gordon Seagrave’s unself-conscious heroic record of a nervous, self-sacrificing medical missionary and his wife who retreated with General Stilwell in Burma; Connecticut Yankee ($5), ex-Governor Wilbur Cross’s shrewd, rambling record of his rise from a clerk in a general store to dean of Yale Graduate School and four-time Democratic Governor of traditionally Republican Connecticut; Crusade for Pan-Europe ($3.50), Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s lively account of his Austrian boyhood and his lifelong struggle to achieve Union Now among Europe’s traditionally disunited, warring peoples; The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon ($3), Harold L. Ickes’ fulgurous fable of his political career.

Poetry and Essays. In poetry, 1943’s most notable event was the publication of Poet T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets ($2), religious poems which many critics considered the finest works of a distinguished lifetime and compared, for their rare quality of art distilled from mysticism, with the quartets of Beethoven. Poet Eliot also led the essayists with his A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, With an Essay on Rudyard Kipling ($2.50). Poet Eliot’s reappraisal of Kipling’s verse as the work of a great Briton stirred up an indignant wing-rattling in the critics’ pigeon-loft.

The Book. It was also the year in which U.S. readers bought so many Bibles that bookstores in Manhattan and elsewhere had to ration Bibles. Symptomatic of this new interest was the Modern Library’s publication of the complete King James version of the Bible. In it was the most inspired and inspiring writing seen in 1943: the Biblical telling of the story that embodied man’s greatest hope:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.