The Year in Books

Six of the more than 10,000 books published in the U.S. in 1941 stood out in high relief:

Darkness at Noon ($2), Arthur Koestler's coldly incandescent novel about the ultimate moral dilemma of Russian purgers and purged;

Lanterns on the Levee ($3), by William Alexander Percy, a sensitive Southern aristocrat's assertion of stoic faith in the face of a world grown totally vulgar as well as totalitarian;

The Managerial Revolution ($2.50), James Burnham's blueprinting of why he thinks industrial managers will run the totalitarian world soon to come;

The Holmes-Pollock Letters ($7.50), the mellow, witty, 58-year correspondence between the late great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and British Jurist Sir Frederick Pollock; which might just as well have been published any other year;

Out of the Night ($3.50), Jan Valtin's sensational revelations of a Communist undercoverman, which, bristling with arson, murder, strikes, kidnappings, false passports, showed that the Russian fifth column was coterminous with the globe ;

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon ($7.50), Rebecca West's two-volume, 1,200-page philosophic travelogue about Yugoslavia.

A.D. 1941 was also:

> A year of great literary deaths -- James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Madox Roberts. It was also a year of valedictions: Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Madox Roberts spoke their last words as artists.

> A year when the foreign correspondents, technologically disemployed by advancing Fascism, swarmed back to the U.S. to write books that would have been timelier in 1939.

> A year when the German emigres, having stopped in France before being finally routed from all Europe, swarmed to the U.S. to write about what happens when men and nations fall apart.

> A year when conquistadors of good will swarmed back from Latin America (and out of U.S. libraries) to further a cultural exchange that might some day be mutually fruitful.

> A year so political that there was scarcely a book, no matter how literary, which was not also a political document.

For 1941 was above all the year when men were trying to readjust themselves in books to two years of political shocks, from Munich to Dunkirk, which challenged every value by which men had thinkingly or unthinkingly lived.

Greatest challenge was the triumphant emergence of a new human type, totalitarian man--superbly armed, deliberately destructive and dominant--at the very heart of what had been Europe's cultural sanctuaries. To this grim fact of 1940 men tried to readjust themselves in 1941 in books like Eugene Bagger's For the Heathen Are Wrong ($3); Gottfried Leske's I Was a Nazi Flier ($2.50); Hermann Rauschning's The Conservative Revolution ($2.75); William Henry Chamberlain's The World's Iron Age ($3).

On the beach at Dunkirk it ceased to be possible to take democracy for granted. In 1941 men tried to stem this fact in a flood of dollar books about democracy, which revived the art of pamphleteering, but cost persistently patriotic publishers easily foreseeable losses.

The fall of France challenged other values. France was more than a country. It was source and symbol of the most gracious, rational and rarified in Western civilization. In this sense, when France fell, night fell. To this dark fact men tried to readjust themselves in books like Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth ($2.50); Hans Habe's A Thousand Shall Fall ($3); Thomas Kernan's able and objective France on Berlin Time ($2.75).

Soon there was projected against the night of France the flames of physically burning London. To the fact of Britain's violent destruction and heroic resistance men tried to readjust themselves in books like Margaret Kennedy's Where Stands a Winged Sentry ($2); Blood, Sweat and Tears, Winston Churchill's Speeches ($3); John Strachey's Digging for Mrs. Miller ($1.25).

Yet the feature common to all these books was their inadequacy, the disparity between the scale of the political events and their literary reflection. Men still found it easier to understand Stalin's Russia from Dostoevski's The Possessed. Nowhere had the causes of the fall of France been described with the completeness and power of Flaubert's Sentimental Education or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Nothing the spokesmen for democracy said was as good as their quotations from democracy's founders, from Luther to Washington and Jefferson.

In part this inadequacy was due to the vertigo natural to the human brain in earthquakes. In part it was due to the fact that it was impossible to give all the answers when some of the basic questions were still to be asked. The chief value that remained to be appraised in the light of the changed world was the human value of man himself. What that value was in 1941 no book of 1941 told. Novelist Koestler came closest to doing it. His Darkness at Noon is laid in a Communist prison. In one scene an imprisoned Communist taps through his cell wall to ask why his neighbor, a Tsarist officer, has first refused, then sent him cigarets. The nameless, faceless, voiceless Tsarist, the type of the repudiated man, taps back his reason to the totalitarian who once thought he was the hope of the world: "Decency--something your kind will never understand."

The Correspondents. Best-seller among correspondents' books was William Shirer's Berlin Diary ($3), which by breaking down Europe's momentous years into momentous days gave his record the breathlessness of headlines. Runner-up was Virginia Cowles's Looking for Trouble ($3). Author Cowles, not one of the great by-liners, wrote current history with some of the fresh realism of the little maid who from answering doorbells and making up the beds, sees everybody, finds out every thing, at last knows more about what is going on in the house than the masters themselves. Other books by correspond ents: The Men Around Churchill ($3) by Rene Kraus; That Day Alone ($3.75 ) by Pierre van Paassen.

History. One effect of democracy's crisis was to start U.S. writers looking into U.S. history. In his somewhat rambling The Ground We Stand On ($3.50), Novelist John Dos Passos investigated the forces and men from Roger Williams to Hugh Henry Brackenridge (of Whiskey Rebellion fame) who influenced the special character of U.S. democracy. The book's important achievement: to show how the Cromwellian revolution in England and the American Revolution were parts of a single process. The book's greatest defect: a tendency to confuse a desire for social order with reaction, liberty with leftism.

Kenneth B. Umbreit's Founding Fathers ($3.50) was a collection of six brilliant biographical essays on U.S. revolutionists.

The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712 ($5) was a decoding of the secret journal of "the most accomplished Virginian of his time," who loved dinners and dances but used to get up at 5 in the morning to read Hebrew, Greek and Latin before breakfast. The Secret History of the American Revolution ($3.75) was chiefly the history of Benedict Arnold's betrayal, based on his treasonable correspondence, decoded and edited for the first time by Carl Van Doren. This book should put an end to attempts to rehabilitate Arnold, but it was duller than its subject deserved.

Bulky outgrowth of another of his continental barnstormings was John Gunther's Inside Latin America ($3.50), the year's potential best-seller in the field. Less ambitious, less gossipy, less colorful, but possibly more solid was Hubert Herring's Good Neighbors ($3). Other significant books about Latin America: Charles Wertenbaker's A New Doctrine for the Americas ($2); Margaret Culkin Banning's Salud! A South American Journal ($2.75); Stefan Zweig's Brazil, Land of the Future ($3); Young Man of Caracas, autobiography of Venezuela-born New York Timesman T. R. Ybarra ($3).

Fiction. While Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon is probably the best piece of fiction since Man's Fate, other good political or topical novels were surprisingly few. Mikhail Sholokhov's sub-Tolstoyan The Don Flows Home to the Sea ($3.50); Erich Remarque's Flotsam ($2.50), despite some sentimentality, caught the Procrustean limbo in which Europe's exiles wandered in the years before the war broke. This Above All ($2.50), Eric Knight's burlap version of A Farewell to Arms, dodged its issues just in time to be a bestseller.

The other fiction best-seller had nothing to do with the war. The Venables ($2.50), by Kathleen Norris, sold well for the excellent reason that it was by Kathleen Norris; so, for a parallel reason, did Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk ($2.50). George Stewart's Storm ($2.50), thanks to its superhuman subject, thorough research and the Book of the Month Club, had an advance sale of some 175,000 copies.

Of many costume novels, worst and most popular was Marguerite Steen's The Sun Is My Undoing ($3); its 1,176 pages raised the hope that Hervey Allen, who began the elephantine cycle, might also bury it soon with a forthcoming book he has been writing for three years. C. S. Forester, with The Captain from Connecticut ($2.50), proved that even in second gear he is better at costume adventure than most of his colleagues. But the most engaging of the adventure stories was Benjamin Blake ($2.50), by Edison Marshall, which gave four times the entertainment offered by most stylish-stout writers with one-fourth the waste of paper.

Best of the bestsellers, all told, was A. J. Cronin's earnest study of a clergyman, The Keys of the Kingdom ($2.50).

Of the elder masters none exceeded, or even quite equaled, his past performance. Jules Remains' Aftermath ($2.75) clarified the suspicion that he is not so much a major novelist as a major expert in the craft of fiction, impressive in proportion to the size of his immediate subject. Mann's evil misogynist comedy The Transposed Heads ($2), like his The Beloved Returns the year before, was obviously a vacation piece, but even in English it was the year's most elegant novel. Ida ($2) was one more immaculate exercise in Gertrude Stein's hieroglyphic brand of classical prose. The year was also distinguished by the first complete English translation of Roger Martin du Card's The Thibaults ($3), which is perhaps more searching if less elaborate than Remains' tremendous history of their generation.

None of the second-flight novelists surpassed himself, though some of them changed. H. G. Wells's All Aboard For Ararat ($1.75) got off to a fine start, pooped out sadly aboard the Ark. Ellen Glasgow added the stone-solid In This Our Life ($2.50) to her dozen other stone-solid studies of the South. Booth Tarkington's Heritage of Hatcher Ide ($2) was merely the competent work of an old professional.

James Farrell, having at last digested the lower-class Irish to his satisfaction, sat down to the middle class with Ellen Rogers ($2.75), using much the same table manners. Jerome Weidman, in I'll Never Go There Any More ($2.50), took pains to give each of his moral cretins some saving grace; the result was cruel and funny, but just as ugly and not so neat as his two first novels. James M. Cain, with Mildred Pierce ($2.50), tried his hand at a study of a suburban grass widow; like the rest of Cain it was engrossing while it lasted, pretty trashy in retrospect. The promising Australian Patrick White (The Living and the Dead; $2.50) remained merely promising.

Two younger writers did distinguished work. Eleanor Green's Ariadne Spinning ($2) endowed a U.S. small town, with beauty and certain of its inhabitants with moral dignity, and was one of few books in recent years to present infidelity as a painful rather than a merely barnyard phenomenon. Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye ($2), if no great advance over The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, proved at least that hers is no one-shot talent.

Of writers new this year, it seemed likely that few would ever ripen to replace those whom the year killed. Still, there were some good ones. I. J. Kapstein's Something of a Hero ($2.75) was an honest, compassionate image of a U.S. city and of the obligations and shortcomings of U.S. democracy. William Faulkner's younger brother John, in Men Working ($2.50), showed neither influence nor need of any. River Rat ($2.50), by Daniel Lundberg, showed a fresh comic talent; Felice Swados, in House of Fury ($2), showed remarkable sure-footedness with new and difficult material: adolescent emotions in a girls' reform school, highlighted by a race riot.

Two of the most promising of the year's new writers were Maritta M. Wolff and Eudora Welty. Miss Wolff's Whistle Stop ($2.50) was written with thumbs and overrated, but some passages showed an insight and a swift intensity which can develop into a good novelist. Miss Welty's A Curtain of Green ($2.50) showed brilliance of a sort which seems best likely to crystallize in small forms. A far greater talent than either of these, but also farther from crystallized, was revealed in

James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a nonfictional but highly imaginative account of three Southern tenant families.

There is another sort of birth, from year to year: the rebirth of a great name, or the slow filtering of a great mind into a new age or country. The year's best-publicized resurgence was that of John Donne, thanks to Ernest Hemingway's last novel. Less flukily the Oxford and Princeton presses between them brought out five volumes by Soren Kierkegaard, perhaps the least-known great mind of the 19th Century. The work of such minds enters the world silently, late, without ingratiation; but it helps restore the very values upon which human life now so conspicuously depends.

Biographies. A.D. 1941 brought no biography comparable to Lord Edward Christian David Cecil's Young Melbourne. Perhaps the most valuable which the English, despite their paper shortage, had the civilized perspicacity to print--was E. M. Butler's Rainer Maria Rilke ($4.50), the first full-length study of a great German poet. Others were Peter Quennell's arch Byron in Italy ($3.50) and Arthur Hobson Quinn's heavy, thorough Edgar Allan Poe ($5). Garrett Mattingly's Catherine of Aragon ($3.50) and Kenneth Allott's smart Jules Verne ($3).

The most notable autobiography was that of the Indian Nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru ($4); the most engaging was John Masefield's In The Mill ($2); and for those interested there was Editor in Politics ($3.50), second volume in Josephus Daniels' cracker-box marathon of total recall. Henry Mencken (Newspaper Days) also continued his memoirs.

Criticism. Probably the year's most important book of criticism was F. O. Matthiessen's exhaustive study of The American Renaissance ($5). More stimulating, when it was not making calf's-eyes at bathos, was Edward Dahlberg's violent Do These Bones Live ($3). Van Wyck Brooks (The Opinions of Oliver Allston; $3) was the year's prime example of one who, in the frenzy of his search for saving values, leaped before he looked, with both hands clamped to his eyes. His yoking of "optimistic" Thomas Mann and Whittier as "primary" artists, and his belittling with "self-interest" of such men as Joyce. Eliot and Proust, left serious readers sad and alarmed. Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow ($3) contained important amateur psychiatries of Dickens and Kipling.

Poetry. Most distinguished poem of the year was W. H. Auden's The Double Man ($2), a brilliant attempt to outwit the age's prevailing schizophrenia, and to focus at least a statement of the problem of evil and of the possibility of hope. All this it managed in verses as clear and casual as The New Yorker's, though wittier. Louis MacNeice published his collected poems ($2.50). The one durable translation was Robert Fitzgerald's Oedipus at Colonus ($1.50), which made clear that Sophocles was not, as other translations suggest, an unsuccessful Victorian imitator of Shakespeare. Richard Aldington's The Viking Book of Poetry ($3.50) was the year's best anthology.

Among the avantgardistes who ferment, sometimes germinally, at the thin edge of commercial publishing, the year's most notable were Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen. Miller continued with Michael Fraenkel his extraordinary correspondence about Hamlet ($3) and published The Colossus of Maroussi ($3.50), a freewheeling book on Greece. Patchen's privately printed The Journal of Albion Moonlight ($5) was a nightmarish image of the state of the human soul in the year 1940.

Year of the Clown. From all the appalling bulk of printed paper, only two books--Koestler's novel and Auden's poem --made a dead-center philosophical attack on the real problems of 1941. But sometimes the philosophies have not the last word. One writer who is less pretentiously touched with genius than any of them is Ludwig Bemelmans. His Ecuadorian travelogue, The Donkey Inside ($3), was the most delightful book of a far from delightful year. This month he published his even better-written Hotel Splendide ($2.50), a collection of waiters' eye-views of life in a great hotel.

Bemelmans seems to be as incapable of writing a sentence that lacks beauty as was Mozart. His materials, on their deceptive surface, are as transient and fragile as Christmas-tree ornaments, but the range of his sympathies and perceptions is greater than that of ten more "serious" books. He makes clear the fact that beauty, discipline, pleasure and kindness are not byproducts, but are at the source of human liberation. He makes clear, as the ambitious Auden half managed to do too, that an age of tragedy and of dementia is of all ages the proper one for a clown.

Other important books of 1941:

Allenby: A Study in Greatness--General Sir Archibald Wavell ($3).

Winged Warfare -- Major General H. H. Arnold & Colonel Ira C. Eaker ($3).

The Army of the Future--General Charles De Gaulle ($2).

The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937-1940--4 Volumes ($30).

Roosevelt: Dictator or Democrat?--Gerald W. Johnson ($3).

Free Speech in the United States--Zechariah Chafee Jr. ($4).

The Nature and Destiny of Man--Reinhold Niebuhr ($2.75).

The Opera--Wallace Brockway & Herbert Weinstock ($3.75).

Our Singing Country--John A. & Alan Lomax & Ruth Crawford Seeger ($5).

A Treasury of Gilbert & Sullivan ($5).

Dark Legend, A Study in Murder--Frederic Wertham ($2.75).

William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine--Simon Flexner & J. T. Flexner ($3.75).

Nature Notes--John Kieran ($1.50).

The Road of a Naturalist--Donald Cidross Peattie ($3).

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations --introd. by Carl Van Doren ($5).

The Story of Everyday Things--Arthur Train Jr. ($3.50).

The Children's Anthology--ed. by William Lyon Phelps ($3).

The Home Book of Christmas--ed. by May Lamberton Becker ($3).

The Longhorns--James Frank Dobie ($3.50).

Darwin, Marx, Wagner--Jacques Barsun ($2.75).

The American Sporting Scene--John F. Kieran ($5).

Tar Heels: A Portrait of North Carolina--Jonathan Daniels ($3).

Intellectual America: Ideas on the March--Oscar Cargill ($5).

Kabloona--Gontran de Poncins ($3).

Last Man Around the World--Philip Wiener ($3).

The Mind of the South--W. J. Cash ($3).

For Children (Ages 3-8)

Peter Churchmouse -- Margot Austin ($1).

Nothing At All--Wanda Gag ($1.50).

Amanda--Wolo ($2).

(Ages 8-12)

Broad Stripes and Bright Stars--Beatrice B. Grover ($1).

Leif the Lucky--Ingri & Edgar Parin D'Aidaire ($2).

The Matchlock Gun--Walter D. Edmonds ($2).

The Story of the Other America--Richard Gill & Helen Hoke ($2).

(Ages 12-16)

The Way of an Eagle--Sonia Daugherty ($2.50).

The Moffats--Eleanor Estes ($2).

Defending America--Creighton Peet ($1.50).

Sabina--Elizabeth Howard ($2.50).

Indian Captive--Lois Lenski ($2).

A Tree for Peter--Kate Seredy ($2).

The Long Christmas--Ruth Sawyer ($2.50).

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