The Year in Books

This year American literature marked time: U.S. authors produced little that will be read with excitement in 1961. But for the general reader, alive to his time and looking for books that reflect it, 1951 was a good year. Even the publishers cast off their long faces, and began to smile. Their break-even point on a new novel stood at around 7,000 to 10,000 copies--anything below that point usually meant red ink. But thanks to the lusty sales of nonfiction, and the royalties from reprints and other sidelines, most publishers did better than in 1950. Most of them also stopped fretting about television, and began to live with it. During the year, they published more than 11,000 titles, about 2,500 of them reprints, an average of more than 30 a day. The output was a shade below the alltime record of 1940 (11,328)--and far less than the 17,500 which the British brought out this year under their lower costs--but it reflected, nonetheless, the most active U.S. publishing year in a decade.

Two of the best books of the year found the large public they deserved. As 1951 drew to a close, Rachel Carson's triumph of popular science, The Sea Around Us, headed the nonfiction bestsellers, and Herman Wouk's clear-eyed novel about the war at sea, The Caine Mutiny, topped the fiction list. But the biggest single phenomenon was the success of the paperbound reprints. With about 100,000 drugstores, newsstands and bookstores displaying them, the paper-bounds sold the staggering total of 231 million copies--or about two for every man, woman & child in the U.S. over the age of ten. Reprints of serious novels did better than ever in this two-bit market; even the Dialogues of Plato sold nearly 150,000"copies. And next year, say the reprint men, they should do considerably better. For one thing, they are dickering for a lot more rack space in the nation's supermarkets.

FICTION

Wherever publishers and editors gathered, the question of the year was: What is going to happen to the novelists? One worried answer was that they would soon stop writing novels and take to better-paid magazine stories, or quit fiction entirely. For the fact was that many a good novel, even when kindly reviewed, was far from being a moneymaker. Apart from book-club distribution, only about three or four novels sold more than 100,000 copies. Many young writers seemed to be aiming for the popular market and making a botch of it, or trying to build novels out of private despairs and ending by being precious bores. For the first time since it was set up in 1922, the Harper Prize ($10,000, richest in the U.S.) was not awarded. Of the 599 manuscripts considered, only two were judged even worth publishing.

The year's bestselling novel was James Jones's From Here to Eternity, an aggressively immature first book, powerfully but poorly written, that voiced the gripes of the pre-Pearl Harbor regular soldier. By some it was credited with being a reaffirmation of human dignity; it was, at least as much, an exercise in uncontrolled resentment. Another first novel, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, showed more accomplished writing, but its tired theme of Southern disintegration and its synthesis of several.identifiable styles left Styron a doubtful quantity. Less ambitious in scope but more certain in their intent were two original novels of genuine talent. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was a sketchy but endearing study of an adolescent. In many ways, Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman was one of the most successful U.S. novels of the year, a perfectly controlled, remarkably well-written account of a college girl's descent into schizophrenia. Another penetrating look at adolescence was James Agee's The Morning Watch, a symbol-laden, poetically written story of a schoolboy's fervor on Good Friday.

Surprises & Comedowns. Several of the big names of U.S. fiction appeared in 1951, but weakly. Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner found the lower rungs of the bestseller lists with Requiem for a Nun, a piece of second-best Faulkner in which the heroine of Sanctuary is brought back to sin some more but also to see a glimmering of atonement. John Marquand offered a new variant of his chronically bedeviled American male in Melville Goodwin, USA, but a lot of old Marquand enthusiasts were beginning to tire of the poor fellow, even in a general's costume. Writers such as John Dos Passes (Chosen Country) and John O'Hara (The Farmers Hotel) surprised their admirers with books of complete inconsequence, and Sinclair Lewis bowed out posthumously with a novel (World So Wide) about an uprooted American in Italy that it would have been a kindness to have left unpublished. For a young fellow with a success behind him, Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer suffered a sharp comedown. His Barbary Shore, stuffed with petulant social consciousness, 1930s style, was both archaic and naive. That specialist in Southern eccentrics, Truman Capote, got himself and his characters up a tree in The Grass Harp, a whimsical exercise in erratic human relationships that became swamped in cuteness.

Again it was the foreign novelists who wrote best and said most. From England came three novels that would be standouts in any year. In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene wrote with explosive irony about an adulterous love affair that leads to sainthood. Some of his critics complained that the Roman Catholic in Greene had grabbed the wheel from the novelist at the end. But Greene's skill had never been surer, and his book was one that his fellow novelists could study with profit. Another English novelist who could be studied but scarcely imitated was Henry Green, a businessman who is also a born writer. He had his ups & downs with three novels. Caught and Party Going carried his stamp only lightly. But Concluding (published with Caught in the last week of 1950) was a fine original novel about youth and old age, written in a style close to poetry and filled with insights into human incongruities. Joyce Gary proved again that he has the richest comic sense among living writers in English. His Mister Johnson, the story of a young African clerk who wanted too much from life, was just about the most satisfying novel of the U.S. year, though first published in England in 1939. Nancy Mitford's gift for cultivated malice came shining through in The Blessing, a comedy of Franco-British manners, and a little book called The Young Visiters, written 51 years ago by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford, proved to be just as good fun as when British readers first discovered it.

English novels usually look good on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, because only the best of them are imported. Actually, British fiction in 1951 was not much better, overall, than the U.S. variety. Complained the Times Literary Supplement: "The truth is that the greater part of the fiction that is on sale to the public is as simple a narcotic as tobacco."

There was nothing narcotic about the year's novels from Italy. The two best were by Alberto Moravia: Conjugal Love, which dealt with a nasty marriage conflict without becoming nasty, and The Conformist, the case history of a weakling whose weakness made him a Fascist. Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli) came a cropper with The Watch, a sympathetic but unfocused look at his postwar land, but Giuseppe Berto followed an uneven first novel (The Sky Is Red) with The Brigand, the story of an Italian Robin Hood which exposed the despair of ordinary people with a fine mixture of candor and sympathy.

Thomas Mann (a U.S. citizen who writes in German and is Englished by one of the world's best translators, Mrs. H. T. Lowe-Porter) holds gloomy views about the world's future, but suppressed the gloom in his new book. The Holy Sinner was an urbane story about a child born of incest who becomes pope, a medieval tale that Mann embellished with touches of Freud and assorted ironic mockeries. Another prophet of gloom stuck to his pessimism. In The Age of Longing, Arthur Koestler saw a cynical Europe doomed to war, unwillingly tied to a U.S. it could not respect. Like many a man who has lost faith in Communism, Koestler still seemed without a clear new belief--least of all in democracy.

Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre went on grubbing for the sources of France's moral decay in Troubled Sleep, while Marcel Ayme took a tolerant satirist's view of that same decay in The Miraculous Barber. Sweden's Paer Lagerkvist won the Nobel Prize (he was Faulkner's runner-up last year) soon after his Barabbas was published in the U.S. It was the story of a brutish man, spared from crucifixion in place of Jesus, who carried the memory of Golgotha through the rest of his life. Only a brief sample of Lagerkvist, it nevertheless commanded respect. Two other foreign novels, hard to classify, showed skill with out-of-the-way locales. Edgar Mittelholzer's Shadows Move Among Them dealt with a highly unconventional missionary in British Guiana. From Haiti came The Pencil of God, by Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, a fascinating study of the power of voodoo.

NON-FICTION

The year's non-fiction was plummed with good reading, mainly concerned with the middle-road facts of modern life. Most of the war books told of battles long ago. A bookish fellow from another planet--unless he saw David Douglas Duncan's chilling pictures of the fighting in Korea, This Is War!--might have found it hard to believe that the nation was engaged in one of the stubbornest wars in its history.

Russia and Communism were getting to be known quantities instead of bogeymen. Edward Crankshaw's Cracks in the Kremlin Wall expressed one expert's judgment that Russia is feebler than supposed. Other careful books exposed Communism in practice. Margarete Buber (Under Two Dictators), Elinor Lipper (Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps), Zbigniew Stypulkowski (Invitation to Moscow) and Gustav Herling (^4 World Apart) were all graduates of Soviet prisons, and wrote of their experiences with skill. The reissue of French Traveler Astolphe de Custine's book of a century ago, Journey for Our Time, reminded moderns that, then as. now, Russia's rulers had a bent for despotism.

The foreign-policy debate in books was remarkable chiefly for its lack of acrimony. It was apparent from The Forrestal Diaries that James Forrestal had become a civilian casualty in his dogged fight for national security. George Kennan, reported to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, argued in American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, for a foreign policy of more conscious U.S. self-interest. Senator Robert Taft's A Foreign Policy for Americans called for a more economical use of U.S. strength, more emphasis on air and sea power.

Historians & Soldiers. Books about World War II had little of their pre-Korea appeal. Easily the best was Winston Churchill's fifth volume of his history of the war, Closing the Ring; it was, in fact, one of the most readable books of the year. General Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story, while uncommonly critical of some commanders, did little more than add details to the account his wartime boss, Ike Eisenhower, had told three years before. The Army's own official history, United States Army in World War II (seven volumes finished of go-odd projected), did a workmanlike job in Cross-Channel Attack. For anyone who was in on the show, the pictures alone made it a book to own.

Samuel Eliot Morison got on with his superb history of the Navy's war in Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls; Novelist Walter Edmonds turned historian in They Fought with What They Had to tell the griefs of U.S. airmen in the first months of the Pacific war; and the submariners got some of their due in Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood's Sink 'Em All and Battle Submerged by Rear Admiral Harley Cope and Captain Walter Karig. For pure excitement, there was nothing better than the diary kept by a French fighter pilot in the British air force, Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show.

Of the many good books in the field of history, two were standouts: British Historian Arthur Bryant's The Age of Elegance, a brilliant, lively account of England in the second decade of the igth Century, and Marshall Davidson's handsome two-volume Life in America, a top-notch social history of the U.S. that was worth its $20.

Philosophers & Experts. From Rome, aged Philosopher George Santayana sent over his long-awaited Dominations and Powers. The old skeptic wrote as brilliantly as ever, but the book was a tantalizing rehash of his ideas on liberty and man's fate. His conclusion: "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." A more optimistic and challenging view could be drawn from LIFE'S Picture History of Western Man; one of the year's bestsellers, it lighted up the whole heritage of the West. In The Conduct of Life, fourth volume of a 20-year tetralogy, Lewis Mumford asked for an end to the fripperies of modern living, evangelically pleaded for individual regeneration.

There was a variety of good books by experts discussing their chosen fields. Harvard President James Conant's Science and Common Sense was a book that could dispel a lot of fuzziness if it got the reading it deserved. Andre Malraux's The Twilight of the Absolute was loaded with fresh, if intricate, thinking about art. C. W. Ceram's Gods, Graves & Scholars ranged readably over the history of archeology.

In the field of biblical scholarship, the first volume of a vast network of exegesis and commentary appeared: The Interpreter's Bible. Its goal: "To penetrate to the core of biblical religion." There were two new major jobs of basic dictionary making, the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionary and Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language; also an endlessly fascinating Dictionary of Americanisms from the University of Chicago, and a fine new American Oxford Atlas.

Kings & Presidents. The year's outstanding biography was Englishwoman Cecil Woodham-Smith's story of the dedicated Florence Nightingale. The glibbest was Hesketh Pearson's quick look at Disraeli in Dizzy. The most unabashedly sensational was Ethel Waters' crudely effective His Eye Is on the Sparrow. Onetime Brigadier Desmond Young wrote an uncritically sympathetic life of his wartime enemy in Rommel, and sales proved that the Afrika Korps' brilliant commander still held a place in U.S. imagination. The Rise and Fall of Hermann Goering was a much better book than Rommel, but fat Hermann seemed to have faded from public interest. A story that was obviously surefire and proved it in bookstores was the Duke of Windsor's A King's Story.

Among the scholarly biographies were several of major importance: Douglas Southall Freeman's third and fourth volumes of George Washington, Charles M. Wiltse's John C. Calhoun, Holman Hamilton's Zachary Taylor, and two first-rate Thomas Jeffersons: Dumas Malone's (the second volume of a work in progress) and Nathan Schachner's. In a year of political scandals, it was good to have books about two Americans whose personal integrity had survived their political careers: The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover and Merlo Pusey's Charles Evans Hughes.

Some of the year's best reading, though it sometimes seemed more like spying, showed up in collections of letters written by writers. John Keats, Henry Adams, Katherine Mansfield and Gustave Flaubert gave themselves away most successfully, but none surpassed the candor of that old confessed sinner, Nobel Prizewinner Andre Gide, in the fourth and last volume of his Journals, published just after his death. The life of Robert Louis Stevenson got a meticulously detailed going over from J. C. Furnas in Voyage to Windward, and a man and writer as unlike him as possible had all bumps and crotchets sensibly catalogued in Harry T. Moore's Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence.

One man of letters had some things to say about modern life that badly needed saying, but he found few U.S. listeners. In Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster spoke up for the final worth of personal relationships, human love, intellectual integrity and the importance of quality. But 20 or 30 times as many book buyers put their money on Gayelord Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer, which stood near the top of the bestseller list for the second year in a row.

Poetry

No new poet raised an exciting voice during the year, but a few who had already proved their right to be heard spoke again. Wystan Hugh Auden, still incorrigibly witty but reaching toward wisdom at 44, fired a quotable broadside of satiric ideas in Nones. At 67, William Carlos Williams wound up his four-part poem, Paterson, a doctor-poet's crackling, diffuse commentary on the life he has observed in his corner of suburbia (Rutherford, N.J.). The publication of the Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats merely confirmed the indisputable fact that he was one of the greatest who ever used the language.

1951 BESTSELLERS

FICTION

From Here to Eternity, James Jones

The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk

Moses, Sholem Asch

Melville Goodwin, USA, John Marquand

The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat

NON-FICTION

Washington Confidential, Jack Lait and

Lee Mortimer

The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook

LIFE'S Picture History of Western Man

Look Younger, Live Longer, Gayelord Hauser

The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson

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