The Year in Books

Critics may know what readers should read, but it is the booksellers who are sure they know what readers want. Last December, glooming over low fiction sales, Retail Bookseller bluntly expressed a credo of the trade: "The truth is that the public really doesn't want books worth buying so much as books that everybody is talking about ... a book like Forever Amber, a book that the righteous and the literary will deplore . . ."

Four months later, as though in answer to this prayer, came Kathleen Winsor's potboiler about an amoral woman, Star Money. The critics deplored it, all right, but even with that advantage Star Money failed to give the book business a shot in the arm. By July, Bookseller had decided that "perhaps the general public is weary of literature"; and in the August doldrums it came to the irate conclusion that "we [U.S. readers] are too lazy to think for ourselves."

The year 1950 had no old-fashioned runaway bestseller, and Publishers' Row was ready with explanations: television, public apathy, the Korean war, or just one of those off years. But the public was not as book-weary as it looked. It bought close to 200 million paper-backed reprints, paying $50 million for them. In a year when a new regular-priced novel could be a leading bestseller with less than 75,000 copies, many of the reprints were doing five times as well--and with books often considerably more worth reading. Among the popular books in the reprint market were George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, and James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Even The Iliad and The Odyssey sold about 100,000 copies apiece this year. Perhaps the weary, lazy public just wanted good books at a low price.

The trade found that, even in a world heaving with troubles, books promising solace for the soul or a cure for the demoralized were not as surefire as they have been in other years. One book, Mr. Jones, Meet the Master, claimed to do neither but pointed a way toward both. Published in 1949, after its author's death, this volume of sincere, plain-spoken sermons and prayers by Senate Chaplain

Peter Marshall became a steady bestseller. Books with such titles as The Art of Real Happiness did well but set no records.

One of last year's solid successes in the know-thyself field, The Mature Mind, picked up steam in 1950 and remained a bestseller all year. It gave way, finally, to Dianetics, a gelatinous porridge of poor man's psychoanalysis which was originally dished out, appropriately enough, in Astounding Science Fiction. Equally astounding, and to many critics equally fictitious, was Immanuel Velikovsky's pseudo-scientific Worlds in Collision, an explanation of mythological and Old Testament miracles that turned academic scientists from coast to coast purple with wrath. It made bestseller lists along with Gayelord Hauser's irresistible promise, Look Younger, Live Longer (by eating vegetables, yogurt, etc.).

FICTION

Through most of 1950, sales of fiction lagged behind nonfiction. It was a reversal of the usual order, but a look at the novels provided at least a partial explanation. The Costains and the Yerbys had their moments, but not the gaudy ones of old, and even the Du Mauriers and the Cronins issued invitations to boredom. British Critic V. S. Pritchett feared that leisure had become so rare and expensive that creative writers no longer had a chance to do good work. But more than a lack of leisure was responsible for the famine: there was a lack of commanding talent among the new writers, and a drop in performance among the old.

The real disappointments of the year were among the big U.S. men of letters. Ernest Hemingway was still fuming at the critics who turned thumbs down on Across the River and into the Trees, but the critics were right (even though the book was currently selling between 2,000 and 3,000 copies a week). Its tone was that of a man who has had eight Martinis (or Montgomerys), who thinks the world is both terrible and wonderful, is surprised by his own brilliance and can't understand why slightly soberer people consider him appallingly dull.

John Steinbeck fared even worse, but made less fuss about his failure. His novelette, Burning Bright (produced also as a play that flopped), was a slick but transparently thin plea for universal love. Robert Penn Warren went back to his native Kentucky for a frontier novel of violence and tortured emotions, World Enough and Time. It had power and murkiness in about equal proportions.

At 71, Upton Sinclair showed that he was capable of a change of pace. Sticking to his promise to ditch his ubiquitous, ten-novel hero, Lanny Budd, he wrote Another Pamela; or, Virtue Still Rewarded, a sly gibe at rich, talky parlor liberals seen through the wide eyes of an ingenuous housemaid. His literary model: 18th Century Novelist Samuel Richardson's famed Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded.

Among U.S. top-division writers, Mississippi's William Faulkner had the best year. Over the protests of at least one Mississippi editor, the Jackson Daily News's Frederick Sullens, who still insisted that Faulkner belongs to the "garbage-can school," he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature. His Collected Stories, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, demonstrated again that, at the top of his form, Faulkner is one of the very best U.S. writers of his generation.

Cardinals & Crackups. The year's most popular book, fiction or nonfiction, was a fat, slick novel about a young priest's spectacular rise in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Commonplace, often dull, Henry Morton Robinson's The Cardinal nevertheless found nearly 600,000 customers, of whom about three-fourths chose the paper-covered edition at $1.

John Hersey scored one of the year's popular successes with The Wall, a fictional-documentary study of the extermination of Warsaw's Jews under Hitler. Though its reporting devices got in its way as a novel, The Watt's story mosaic gave it a strong cumulative impact. In The Town, Conrad Richter finished a trilogy of fine, craftsmanlike novels about the Ohio Country pioneers. The trilogy put Richter in the first rank of historical novelists, though it started no stampede to the bookshops by fans of the frigate-bustle-&-bosom school.

One young U.S. novelist, Budd Schulberg, tackled a tough fictional theme in The Disenchanted: the crackup of a hard-drinking, gifted novelist (candidly patterned on F. Scott Fitzgerald), too weak to discipline himself or his gifts. It was only partially successful, but at the end of the year Disenchanted headed the bestseller lists and was overtaking the sales lead of the Hersey and Hemingway books.

The year's best fiction came from Europe. Britain's George Orwell died just as three of his early books were brought out, all of them showing his hatred of humbug, his bare, sharp prose style. Burmese Days is still one of the best novels ever written about the Far East, more than ever readable against 1950's headlines. Joyce Cary and Henry Green, having already made the grade with U.S. readers after a slow start, each had two books published during the year. (Two more Green novels, Caught and Concluding, are due before year's end.) Cary's The Horse's Mouth, the story of a rascally artist, was one of the richest comic novels in many a year. A Fearful Joy was not in quite the same class, but its zestful account of a woman who met an adventurous life head on still made most of the year's books seem anemic. Green's Nothing was an airy cuff at solemn young Britons who have plenty of social conscience but nowhere near the sense of fun and life of their sturdy elders. Back, a story about a wounded vet's search for happiness, showed a dip in Green's talent.

Evelyn Waugh's small stint for the year was Helena, a short, somewhat aimless novel about the saint who is credited with discovering the True Cross. Helena pleased no one so much as Waugh, who admits that, since publication, he has read it 20 times.

Irony & Puddings. Three Frenchmen sent over good little novels, full of Gallic irony and penetration, which did not get the readers they deserved. Franc,ois Boyer's The Secret Game was a slight but deft exploration of the effect of war on the minds of children. In The Company of Men, Romain Gary wrote a bitterly pessimistic and effective novel about the difficulty of remaining simply human in the scrambles of postliberation France. Best of the three was Marcel Ayme's The Barkeep of Blemont, a cool, compassionate inspection of small-town suspicion and political hatreds by one of the best French writers alive.

Meanwhile, a dead French writer who wrote in the great tradition of the novel had to wait 115 years for the English translation of his "third masterpiece." Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen, unfinished at his death, is a powerful dissection of French social disintegration, the year's windfall for admirers of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Another good novel, though a minor one, was French Canadian Germaine Guevremont's affectionate and affectingly simple story of life in a Quebec farm hamlet, The Outlander. From France, though written first in Rumanian, came the Continent's fiction bestseller. Virgil Gheorghiu's The Twenty-Fifth Hour was a bitterly ironic description of the author's own misadventures in concentration and P.W. camps. Its fatalism and its blatant hostility toward the U.S. helped to explain its interest for some European readers.

Italian novels were still being imported, but in diminishing number and quality. Best of a thin lot was Alberto Moravia's Two Adolescents, two fine, perfectly turned long stories about difficult boyhood. Worthy but dull, at least in translation, was Riccardo Bacchelli's ambitious, much-praised historical novel, The Mill on the Po.

One of the most fascinating novels of the year was Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a chilling account of inhuman Soviet bureaucracy by a man who knew it well. U.S. readers left it virtually unnoticed in their rush to make a bestseller of a fat Finnish historical pudding, The Adventurer, by Mika Waltari, author of last year's bestselling The Egyptian.

War novels were fewer, and the better ones came from abroad. Best of the lot, and the best of all World War II novels of infantry fighting, was New Zealander Guthrie Wilson's first novel, Brave Company, a book that most writers of war novels could read with profit. Briton Alexander Baron showed that he, too, understood his infantrymen in The Wine of Etna, a novel about British troops in Sicily.

Nightmares & the River. Most of what was interesting in U.S. novels came from the younger writers, most of them first novelists.

In A Woman of Means, Peter Taylor wrote a mature and modest first book about a difficult boy-stepmother relationship. Hans Ruesch tried an offbeat background and brought off a vivid story of Eskimo manners & morals in Top of the World. Most polished of the preciousness school novels was A Long Day's Dying, by Frederick Buechner, a 23-year-old disciple of Henry James. There was nothing precious about young (24) John Hawkes's The Cannibal, a sometimes powerful experimental novel that tried to capture the nightmarish quality of Germany's disintegration in defeat. The Harper Prize of $10,000 went to Debby, Max Steele's sentimental first novel about a bemused little woman with a big heart and a feeble mind. A shirt manufacturer from Iowa, Richard Bissell, wrote A Stretch on the River, a first novel about Mississippi River boatmen, and got as much tang into his account as anyone since Mark Twain.

One of the solidest and best of the year's firsts was The Encounter, Crawford Power's portrayal of a parish priest's struggle with pride. Another was The Trouble of One House, in which Brendan Gill made a civilized, gently ironic comment on the trouble that can blow up in the wake of unselfish love.

NON-FICTION

People looking for final answers in books found disappointingly few in the 1950 crop--though there was plenty of advice on the market and plenty of expert individual testimony of the I-came-to-realize variety. Actually, the non-fiction book that most people carried home from the bookstores was The Baby, the latest of the wacky $1 picture books to break into the big money (325,000 sold to date).

The year produced a whole clutch of books on the nature of Communism and Communists, how hard it was to get along with them, what a relief it was to get away from them. The titles told most of the story, and little of it was new, though much of it could stand retelling: The God That Failed, by half a dozen celebrities who had swallowed the Marxist hook but didn't have the wit to gag until they got to the sinker; General Walter Bedell Smith's saga of ambassadorial frustration, My Three Years in Moscow; General Frank Howley's account of day-to-day business with the Russians, Berlin Command; Vladimir Petrov's My Retreat from Russia; ex-Leftist James Burnham's The Coming Defeat of Communism, which blueprinted a strategy for Western victory with the brilliant assurance of a man who could say "I was wrong" or "I told you so" with equal blandness. In a time when treason and charges of treason were becoming commonplace, Alistair Cooke's report on the Hiss-Chambers case, A Generation on Trial, was a conscientious and uncommonly well written courtroom report, but its title was a misnomer that suggested indulgence toward traitors.

A grimly wait-&-see but unpanicked public gave no more than passing notice to half a dozen books on the implications of atomic warfare, was more curious about Frank Scully's mess of conjecture and hearsay on Behind the Flying Saucers. A more legitimate curiosity about six men on a raft in the Pacific elevated to best-sellerdom a rousing record of adventure in Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki. In the midst of the new confrontation of East & West, books about World War II had somewhat the quality of mislaid telegrams, now found and opened but no longer urgent. Yet some were important for the record and others still generated excitement. Easily the most exciting and important were Winston Churchill's third and fourth volumes of his great history of the war, The Grand Alliance and The Hinge of Fate. Together with his amiable Painting as a Pastime and a book of speeches, Europe Unite, they established Churchill as one of the busiest writers of the year as well as one of the top royalty earners.

Cloak & Dagger Missions. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy's Was There, while dry and cautious, belonged on the shelf of must reading for the history-minded. So did Admiral Frederick Sherman's Combat Command, General Mark Clark's spirited Calculated Risk, and General Bob Eichelberger's straightforward story of the Eighth Army in the Pacific, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo. Several of the personal-adventure books made excellent reading. Best of the lot was British Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean's Escape to Adventure, a lusty, well-written narrative of daring and luck in carrying out cloak & dagger missions in Russia, Persia and Yugoslavia. Eric Williams' The Wooden Horse and Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape were both rattling good stories of daring British breaks from the same German P.W. camp.

One book that gave the look of things just as they happened was LIFE'S Picture History of World War II. Though it was officially ineligible for bestseller rating (since most copies were sold direct and not over bookstore counters), Picture History, with half a million copies sold, was the year's real non-fiction bestseller.

Captains & Gamy Confessions. It was true again in 1950, as in almost every recent year, that the readers of history and biography had the best pickings. Lloyd Lewis died with only one volume of his biography of General Ulysses S. Grant completed, but Captain Sam Grant was a fine, thorough book, the best job ever done on Grant's early years. Another big job done with care and spirit was Margaret Coit's John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, a sympathetic and fair study of the great diehard South Carolinian. Catherine Drinker Bowen put too much fictional gloss on solid John Adams and the American Revolution, but it was the first biography to make him seem wholly human. Irving Brant finished the third volume of his massive James Madison, and William Harlan Hale wrote a fresh, readable Horace Greeley.

Roosevelt in Retrospect was a fast, typical John Gunther look at F.D.R.; Louis Fischer looked longer at Gandhi but had more trouble trying to tell what he thought he saw, in his slogging, monotonous Life of Mahatma Gandhi. One of the year's best biographies was Amy Kelly's scholarly and readable Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings; another was Yale Professor Roland Bainton's exhaustive life of Protestant Martin Luther, Here I Stand. Louise Hall Tharp, a writing housewife, dared to try a delicate job and brought it off successfully in a spirited three-woman biography, The Peabody

Sisters of Salem. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas told his own off-the-bench story in Of Men and Mountains, one of the most satisfying self-portraits of the year. From another century and another kind of man came Boswell's London Journal, a gamy confession that many readers tackled with more relish than they ever had for Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.

Historians went on doing solid work, but the year's big launching was Princeton's first volume of its projected 52-volume The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Allan Nevins completed his two-volume Emergence of Lincoln, which examined as if for the first time the crucial years 1857-61. Stewart Holbrook had the fine idea of tracking down the pioneers whose home towns were in New England, and produced a fascinating piece of Americana in The Yankee Exodus, while John Bakeless reproduced the look of the country as its first explorers saw it in The Eyes of Discovery. Civil War fans got their richest informal serving in years in Henry Steele Commager's The Blue and the Gray, a feast of documentary evidence from actual participants on both sides, military and civilian.

From U.S. writers, there were few outstanding literary biographies, little notable poetry and even less first-rate literary criticism. Newton Arvin's Herman Melville was the best critical study of the year, brief, intelligent and splendidly informed; Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials was a good, stimulating collection of minor pieces by the best of U.S. working critics. Poet Robert Frost was much honored, but no poetry was published that promised a likely successor to him. Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems contained 72 newly collected ones that showed the same minstrel's virtues and poetic limitations of his earliest work.

Two of the events of the year were verse plays good enough to become reading hits as well as stage successes. T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party was a sophisticated, impeccably literate lesson in the need for understanding and faith in human relationships. Its sale of more than 50,000 copies put it in the bestseller class. And another Briton, Christopher Fry, showed in The Lady's Not for Burning that the English language can still sing and shine and that poetry can speak the common tongue with humor as well as compassion.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.