Fifty Man Years

The last six weeks roughly marked the peak of the fall book season. In that time appeared about 50 novels, representing the labor of about 50 man years. TIME has reviewed the best seven. The remainder have given employment to hundreds of publishers' minions. They will give diversion to thousands of readers. Craftwork rather than Art, they fall into several time-smoothed categories:

Fascism v. democracy is their favorite, though only a brand new reader of novels would find anything new on the subject. In the worst of them, Charles Francis Stocking's Out of the Dust (Maestro, Chicago, $2.75), an American in Germany huffs & puffs through an interminable, blowhard melodrama. Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Great Tradition (Messner, $2.50) pictures in drawing room prose the democratic gropings of a German-U. S. aristocrat in Germany and revolutionary Spain. A cut above them is W. Townend's Rescue of Captain Leggatt (Morrow, $2.50), naively melodramatizing the enmity and brotherly reconciliation of a British and a German sea captain.

U. S. anti-fascist novels, written at 3,000 miles removed from fascist reality, are too often the sort which make a Fuehrer out of every bully. James T. Farrell's Jew-hating young Brooklyn Irishman, a bellicose introvert who sells Father Moylan's Christian Justice, is a convincing individual in Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (Vanguard, $1), but the tract-like limitations of the story are implicit in the original title: Tommy Gallagher--American Storm Trooper. Mari Sandoz's third book, Capital City (Little, Brown, $2.50), lacks even a credible character. A panoramic, pamphlet-pat story of imminent fascism in a Midwest State capital, it is little more than a leftwing city guide, mainly suggests that Author Sandoz writes much better about such intimate subjects as her father (Old Jules).

Historical novels still supply a big share, and bigger bulk, of any season's second-raters. Among the most recent batch of ten, the following are typical:

If Not Victory--Frank 0. Hough--Carrick & Evans ($2.50). A heroineless, fact-footed tale about a young Quaker farmer who turns Continental scout.

Michael Beam--Richard Matthews Hallet--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). As in many another recent frontier romance, Michael Beam likes Indians better and his creator writes more cautiously than used to be the case.

Artillery of Time--Chard Powers Smith--Scribner ($2.75). An undisciplined whopper (853 pages) about two New York State farm boys, one of whom carries the ball for rising U. S. industrialism (in the '50s and '60s), the other for democratic idealism.

The Torguts--W. L. River--Stokes ($2.50). Based on the migration of the Torgut Mongols from the Volga to their Chinese homeland in 1771, this long, stiff-jointed "epic" leaves a picture of vast hordes, no individuals.

To the End of the World--Helen C. White -- Macmillan ($2.50). The vicissitudes of an idealistic young Catholic priest in the French Revolution. Studious and devout, it will most interest Roman Catholic readers.

Noticeably skimpy is the recent crop of farm novels. Maine contributes a lone example: Marguerite Mclntire's Free and Clear (Farrar & Rinehart, $2.50), a drowsy tale about hardworking Ma and Pa Chadbourne, their two urban-bent children who turn out all right after all.

Prize-winners in their own countries, two foreign novels will not likely be so well prized by U. S. readers:

> Unto Seppaenen's Sun and Storm (Bobbs-Merrill, $2.50) traces the rise of a Finnish peasant to wealth and power. Sombre, heavy, conscientious, its handicap is that too many sombre, heavy, conscientious peasant novels have preceded it.

> One House Contain Us (Liveright, $2), a Rumanian prize novel adapted by one Oscar Leonard, is a slick if not sleazy combination of boudoir romance and political satire, might have been influenced by Molnar, Schnitzler, any one of a thousand under-the-pillow French novels.

> Jean Tousseul's Jean Clarambaux (Lippincott, $3) is a long, gentle, nostalgic, sentimental novel of life in a Belgian hamlet before and during the German occupation of 1914-18. Though written with no little art, it has the warm, excessive, disconcerting and soporific sweetness of a bottomless feather bed.

Most likely to succeed, is Lloyd C. Douglas's "inspirational" Doctor Hudson's Secret Journal (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50), sequel to that classic of spiritual horse -doctoring, Magnificent Obsession. Perennials in any group of novels are a certain number which appear to have been written because: 1) their authors need the money, or 2) some novelists get started and can't stop. Such are:

> A. Hamilton Gibbs's A Half Inch of Candle (Little, Brown, $2.50), a south-of-France British romance and pacifist sermon, slightly animated by the author's boyishness.

> Treaclish Warwick Deeping's Folly Island (Knopf, $2.50), a desperate romance against a background of British gardening.

> Susan Ertz's One Fight More (Appleton-Century, $2.50), her eleventh, is one novel more in which a foxy grandpa pulls together a big, bickering family.

Of the few which could be called good second-rate, some had first-rate assets--usually on the side of their entertainment value--but were definitely second-grade when placed alongside the best novels of their kind. They were:

>Axel -- Freda Lingstrom -- Little, Brown ($2.50). The story of three adopted children of a rich bachelor. Laid in England, Norway, Vienna, this Swedish-Englishwoman's novel suggests Louisa May Alcott in its engaging, tame but not vapid characters.

>-Four-Part Setting -- Ann Bridge --Little, Brown ($2.50). By the author of Peking Picnic, this sophisticated romance, with a Chinese background, stands out for its deft handling of romantic problems among the British embassy set.

> Strangers in the Land--E. B. Ashton --Scribner ($2.50). A competent report on nervous habits of a fast set in pre-Hitler Bavaria, centring on a German-Jewish lawyer and his shaky romance with a U. S. tourist.

>Past the End of the Pavement--Charles G. Finney--Holt ($2). A nostalgic tale of smalltown, small-boy Missouri brothers with a passion for odd pets. Author Finney (The Circus of Dr. Lao) describes the animals brightly, designs his laughs for adults.

The above novels reveal no promising new writers. Few will be remembered longer than a month. Few improve on past performance. But taken together these 22 novels suggest a couple of general observations: 1) it needs a whale of a lot of inferior novels to get a first-rate one; 2) what determines the first-rateness of a novel is not hatred of fascism, love of democracy, reverence for the U. S. past, emulation of best-seller formulas, adhesion to the Party Line, good intentions, or hard work. It is, rather, a private and non-negotiable possession, namely, creative talent.

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