Books: The Year in Books, Dec. 16, 1946

It was a big book year—according to the adding machines. The grand total of titles published would come to something like 7,500 in 1946, including about 1,500 works of fiction, 300 histories, 400 biographies. The quality of the books, of course, was another matter.

Critics generally kept their hats on, and their praise well-modulated. In the New York Times “outstanding-books-of-the-year” poll of critics, not a single book got the votes of all reviewers. The best that could be said was that 1946 furnished spectacular cash-register successes. Betty MacDonald’s cackling (1945) hen epic, The Egg and I, went to some 1,200,000 copies; Peace of Mind, Joshua Loth Liebman’s “blue skies” book (the trade name for a consoling self-help handbook) sold over 250,000 copies, largely on its title. A string of novels (see box), most of them with gaudy jackets and tinny texts, sold extravagantly, some of them over 1,000,000 copies apiece.

No one knew exactly to what degree such sales were due to faith, hope and advertising, and to what degree to U.S. book clubs. The clubs’ tremendous sales machines, oiled with the prestigious praise of people like Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Christopher Morley, were built to sell literary goods whether they were silk purses or sows’ ears. In the marts of trade, if not of letters, 20 or 30 book clubs were in bustling operation, and the top two—Book-of-the-Month and its tawdrier sister, Literary Guild—together claimed nearly 2,250,000 “members,” i.e., consistent buyers of wares. Among 1946’s newest sales organizations: the Family Reading Club—”will appeal to the finer instincts . . . the sanctity of the home,” and The Executive Book Club—”for every businessman . . . lawyer . . . banker.”

If You Can’t Print, Reprint. The fat figures in 1946’s sales ledgers were still below the wartime, all-time highs. Through the year U.S. publishers and booksellers were plagued by strikes and paper shortages. There was little first-rate writing of any kind; it was no accident that anthologies, reprints and new editions of classics were thick on the counter.

HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY

Inevitably, the sound of World War II echoed loud through the year’s biography and history, though marketwise publishers insisted that readers were sick & tired of the war. In nonfiction, the Civil War was still the favorite battleground of the antiquarians—and the prospective horrors of World War III was the stock in trade of most special pleaders, who now blatantly showed the name of the only potential enemy in sight, a practice not considered good manners at the start of the year. Only a few of 1946’s substantial histories were wholly above the battle, among them Joseph Dorfman’s two-volume The Economic Mind in American Civilization (1606-1865); Sylvanus G. Morley’s The Ancient Maya. In a class by itself was Yale Professor F. S. C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West, a study of international cultures.

The specter of World War III was conjured up by writer after writer on the atomic bomb, notably John Hersey in the laconic, harrowing Hiroshima; and also by the New Yorker’s E. B. White in his earnest tract, The Wild Flag; by Sumner Welles in Where Are We Heading?; by a long series of pro-or anti-Soviet special pleaders. Probably the standout pro-Soviet pleading of the year was Soviet Politics by Williams Professor Frederick L. Schuman. The most widely read (75,000 copies) attack: I Chose Freedom, by disillusioned Soviet functionary Victor Kravchenko.

Of World War II histories, the shrillest (and most adeptly plugged by the press-gents) was likewise one of the most widely read: Ralph Ingersoll’s bitter Top Secret, a boiling-mad assault on British wartime policies and “politics” which told more about Author Ingersoll than it did about the British. No top-ranking general told his own story, though Katherine Tupper Marshall told her husband’s, Ike Eisenhower had a tactful Boswell in his naval aide, Harry C. Butcher (My Three Years with Eisenhower), and General Lewis H. Brereton published his diaries, which made him out a far duller man than his fellow flyers knew him to be. The war in China was presented from an anti-Chiang point of view by Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby in Thunder out of China, which sold like hot cakes.

Perhaps the most readable personal war reporting of the year was by Britain’s Captain George Reid Millar, who described in Horned Pigeon and Waiting in the Night his hair-raising escape from a Nazi P.O.W. camp and subsequent undercover work with the French Maquis. Among correspondents, the New York Times’s Drew Middleton and Australia’s Alan Moorehead were the best of the I-witnesses. Among the unit combat histories already published: those of the 24th, 83rd, 84th, 103rd, 104th Divisions.

After Lincoln, F.D.R. The U.S. Civil War, in contrast, seemed remote, almost mythical, virtually genteel. But Clifford Dowdey’s Experiment in Rebellion, ‘Roy Meredith’s Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man, Burton J. Hendrick’s Lincoln’s War Cabinet and a corporal’s guard of books dealing with Lincoln himself testified to the apparently fathomless curiosity of the U.S. reader in the events of 1861-65.

The year also saw able new biographies of Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, Zachary Taylor, et al, but only Franklin Roosevelt seemed likely to become a biographers’ favorite in the way Lincoln was. The first books were by his friends: former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins’ warm The Roosevelt I Knew and White House Physician, by Vice Admiral Ross T. Mclntire, each of which was admiring and modest. But Son Elliott, in As He Saw It, and Louis Adamic in Dinner at the White House, attempted debatable projections of Roosevelt’s international views.

More Industry Than Skill. In the rich field of literary biography, Americans had a thin year. In Leo Tolstoy, Columbia Professor Ernest J. Simmons made use of much new material, and his book seemed likely to become a standard text. Matthew Josephson’s Stendhal was the most thorough work in English on the French novelist, but its qualities arose more out of industriousness than skill.

European biographers did little better. Biographical surprise-of-the-year was Britisher Margaret Lane’s admirable The Tale of Beatrix Potter, the story of the eccentric lady who fashioned and illustrated the children’s beloved Peter Rabbit. Charles Dickens, by Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, cast no light on Dickens’ working manners, much on his bedside manner. Stefan Zweig’s posthumous, unfinished Balzac might have said more if Zweig had lived to finish the telling. Hesketh Pearson’s Oscar Wilde was a sober, intelligent study of a man—and type—who is rarely treated with either sobriety or intelligence. Three literary autobiographies rated notice: Communist Playwright Sean 0’Casey’s Drums under the Window, which stirred personalities, poetry and politics into a uniquely Irish stew; Liberal Franz Schoenberner’s Confessions of a European Intellectual, which touched more gaily than profoundly on the soul of European man; Tory Poet-Essayist Osbert SitwelPs The Scarlet Tree, which drew pay-dirt from the inexhaustible lode of English aristocratic peculiarities.

Almost silent, on both sides of the water, were the essayists and belles-lettrists: Lord David Cecil’s monograph, Thomas Hardy, was intelligent and informative, but not in a class with Cecil’s The Young Melbourne. Two books by George Orwell—Animal Farm, a penetrating satire on Soviet dictatorship, and Dickens, Dali and Others, a collection of essays—introduced many Americans to a vigorous British critic who observes life and literature with an eye that is usually more sharp than bloodshot.

FICTION

In 1946, good novels were as rare as vacant apartments. U.S. novelists had nothing to offer more controversial than Charles (Lost Weekend) Jackson’s frank, unsubtle study of homosexuality, The Fall of Valor, nothing more successfully satirical than John Marquand’s B. F.’s Daughter, nothing more socially rebellious than James T. Farrell’s Bernard Clare, or Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters, a now-gamey-now-gooey protest against the kind of ad man he had been.

The gap between high sales and highbrows was wider than ever—a difference due, in large part, to the fact that the popular writers seemed to dramatize without thinking, and the unpopular writers to think without dramatizing. Nearest U.S. approach to a good combination of thought and drama was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a novel about the Huey Long regime. Among the best of the rest: Conrad Richter’s The Fields, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, Christina Stead’s Letty Fox, Sholem Asch’s East River, Jerome Weidman’s Too Early to Tell.

Old and young American favorites showed up short of wind, but still long-winded. The late Theodore Dreiser’s last novel, The Bulwark, had the weight, but not the distinction, of a Percheron. Upton Sinclair’s A World to Win did no more than mark another 600-odd pages in the improbable progress of Hero Lanny Budd. William Saroyan’s The Adventures of Wesley Jackson presented a moist and flaccid soul behind a bold front. Pearl Buck’s Pavilion of Women was not of great price.

Foreign favorites were no more inspiring. Septuagenarian Somerset Maugham’s Then and Now was a suave, shallow examination of the mind and lusts of Machíavelli. Jules Romains puffed slowly into the terminus, home at last, in the final volumes of his panoramic scrutiny of Europe from 1908 to 1933. Erich Maria Remarque gave middle-agedly of his bright-but-second-best in Arch of Triumph. The late Franz Werfel, famed for his Forty Days of Musa Dagh, eclipsed himself in a tortuous fantasy, Star of the Unborn, about interplanetary life 100,000 years hence. In Thieves in the Night, Arthur Koestler made the burning question of Palestine into one of the year’s best books, but he disappointed readers who had dreamed of another Darkness at Noon.

Theme: Religion. Like many an American best-seller—Gladys Schmitt’s David the King, Russell Janney’s shoddy Miracle of the Bells—some of the best foreign novels had religious themes. George Bernanos’ Joy, Francois Mauriac’s Woman of the Pharisees, Robert Graves’s King Jesus were all highly intelligent books, but none of them had the popular appeal of Evelyn Waugh’s Brides head Revisited, a novel that combined some of the best and worst writing of a brilliant career.

Of novels from abroad, Albert Camus’ The Stranger was interesting as the first novel to come out of France’s Existentialist school (TIME, Jan. 28). But its sad French killer-hero looked a little like an Ernest Hemingway character wearing the none-too-gay deceivers of Gallic pessimism. Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love was the gayest foreign novel of a solemn year. George Tabori’s Companions of the Left Hand stood head & shoulders above most “social-interest” novels.

Two of the most notable works of fiction were collections of short stories: Elizabeth Bowen’s sensitive stories of wartime England, Ivy Gripped the Steps; and New Yorker Critic Edmund Wilson’s clinically sexy Memoirs of Hecate County, which the censors helped sell.

The men who presumably are the most gifted U.S. novelists were wholly missing from the fiction lists in 1946: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passes, Glenway Westcott, John Steinbeck. Also missing: a first-rate war novelist. Perhaps the best of the war yarns, Thomas Heggen’s sardonic, episodic Mister Roberts, had no battle in it.

But readers who found fiction’s cupboard bare of new works could at least be thankful that U.S. publishers stocked their shelves with some of the best of the old. Chief among these was Viking—which added to its admirable list of $2 “Portables” selections from the writings of Mark Twain, Rabelais, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Emerson and Blake. It was a big year in the continuing revival of Henry James, Tolstoy and Franz Kafka. Publishers also hopefully reprinted little-known works—most of them little-known in the U.S.—of Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Zola, Gorky.

POETRY

Like the major U.S. novelists, the better-known U.S. poets stayed in hiding through 1946. The exceptions were Lyricist E. E. Cummings, who wrote a fresh, crystal-simple Christmas playlet, Santa Claus: A Morality, and William Carlos Williams, whose Paterson (Book 1) showed continued growth in the New Jersey poet-physician who rhymes for a hobby. Among the younger poets, only two appeared as serious claimants of attention: 29-year-old Robert Lowell (great-great-grandnephew of James Russell Lowell), whose 42 poems in Lord Weary’s Castle revealed a devout, talented craftsman, and thirtyish Elizabeth Bishop, whose North and South, her first book, placed her immediately in the ranks of the better poets.

For many—especially some younger writers—Robert Graves’s mature Poems, 1938-1945 was 1946’s finest importation. Runners-up: Irishman Denis Devlin’s, Lough Derg, the vigorous, pungent Selected Verse of Australian Poet John Manifold, the Welsh mysteries of Dylan Thomas.

The hoped-for postwar burst of fresh literary talent had not appeared. It was the fashion in the book trade to say it was “too soon after the war” to expect a renaissance. But people who tried to fob that off as an alibi apparently had forgotten the golden returns of 1919. In the output of that confused postwar year: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio; Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism; James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen; Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold; Joseph Hergesheimer’s Java Head; John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace; John Masefield’s Reynard the Fox; Eugene O’Neill’s The Moon of the Caribbees; and Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence.