The Year in Books

In one of Manhattan's biggest bookshops, a salesman gestured cynically toward his Christmas customers. "Give them a fat historical novel and they'll trample every good book in the place to get to it." It was a familiar moan in the book business--even when the moaner had to raise his voice to be heard above his booming cash register. Yet as a summary for 1949 the judgment was too jaundiced. It was true that popular puddings were as plentiful as usual, with old practitioners like Frank Yerby, Marguerite Steen and F. van Wyck Mason tirelessly serving them up. But 1949 was also a year in which there were more good books in more fields than the U.S. public has had for several years past.

There were no skyrocket bursts of great, fresh genius, and among the novelists many an old hand had shown a faltering touch. But 1949's books, fiction and nonfiction, accurately and often brilliantly reflected the state of man and his world. They were books colored by personal questioning, confusion and discontent; but also showing through was a determination to express both personal and public dilemmas and to face them firmly. More than in recent years, fiction in 1949 leavened its cynicism with compassion. In a great deal of nonfiction, skepticism was tempered with American optimism: though happiness and order might have to be earned, they were not irrevocably beyond reach.

As the year drew toward its close, a wacky picture book, White Collar Zoo, stood at the head of the non-fiction bestsellers, and a vastly overrated picaresque novel with a panoramic ancient setting, The Egyptian, ruled the current fiction roost. One was a good-natured freak, the other an escape hatch, and neither of them was a suggestive commentary on the year's literary inventory.

FICTION For U.S. novelists--the established, the still-maturing and the beginners--it was a productive year. But of the big-reputation writers, John Phillips Marquand alone improved on past performance. In Point of No Return he cannily mirrored the disturbing combination of ambition, worldly success and inner discontent that gnaws at U.S. middle-class peace of mind, and his novel dominated bestseller lists for much of the year. Sinclair Lewis, Marquand's own literary hero, made a pass at historical fiction with a religious twist in The God-Seeker, his 21st novel. He missed so badly that admirers of Babbitt and Arrowsmith politely looked the other way. John Dos Passos, whose radical trilogy, U.S.A., is a literary landmark of the '30s, completed another, less satisfying trilogy with The Grand Design, a preachy, disillusioned novel about New Dealers in Washington. Novels about the war were neither very good nor very popular. Though last year's The Naked and the Dead died hard on '49 bestseller lists, no new war fiction got far beyond its beachhead. Best of the lot was From the City, From the Plow, Englishman Alexander Baron's quietly terrifying story of a doomed British infantry battalion. Of the U.S. entries, only Alfred Hayes's The Girl on the Via Flaminia, a study of G.I. frustration and Italian despair, seemed likely to survive the year in which it was written. Big-name fiction with a religious theme, all of it conspicuously short on literary merit, was as popular as ever. The Big Fisherman, Lloyd Douglas' top bestseller of last year, again outsold every other novel in 1949. Paul Wellman's The Chain, a story about a two-fisted Episcopal minister, never got into Fisherman's class, but Sholem Asch's Mary, with its author's past successes and a huge ad campaign behind it, walked close on The Egyptian's heels. Several U.S. novelists with rabid cheering sections let their fans down badly. Philip Wylie's Opus 21 was a dreary mixture of sex, animadversions on life, and cocktail-hour psychiatry. Christopher Morley's large audience showed more sense than his publishers when they bypassed The Man Who Made Friends with Him self, an ancient juvenile's pretentious effort to confront modern life with nervous puns arid snippings from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The saddest failure and the most unexpected was John O'Hara's A Rage to Live, a pointless novel about an unfaithful wife. But its frank preoccupation with sex and O'Hara's old reputation for taut, incisive writing made it an immediate bestseller.

Riffraff & Anger. Working at his own pace and indebted to no literary model, Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren produced, in The Man with the Golden Arm, the best U.S. novel of the year. A tender but clear-eyed story about Chicago's slum riffraff, it proved that no human materials, however tawdry, are outside a good writer's reach. A. B. Guthrie showed again in his second book, The Way West, that the historical novel need not be tied to the tired old formulas of bodice-and-battle period pieces. The best first novel of the year was Artist Tom Lea's story about Mexican bullfighters, The Brave Bulls. More interesting and accomplished, but not so appealing, was Paul Bowles's impressive first novel, The Sheltering Sky, about a despair-ridden pair of U.S. intellectuals going to pot in North Africa. Two good books clearly written from the heart were Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn, a warm, gentle story about Kentucky hill folk, and Morton Thompson's The Cry and the Covenant, an angry, compassionate biographical novel about Hungarian Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered the cause of childbed fever. Among the year's volumes of collected short stories, The Golden Apples, by Stylist Eudora Welty, stood in a class of its own. These stories of the South had a unity of mood and place that put the group just behind the best novels of the year. Truman Capote, last year's white-haired boy-with-bangs, showed no advance over his precocious but overrated talents in A Tree of Night and Other Stories. From Nigel Dennis, an Englishman who had lived for 15 years in the U.S., came A Sea Change, a crisp, flashing satire on professional liberals. Easily one of the bestwritten books of 1949, A Sea Change impressed critics in both the U.S. and England but failed to find the audience it deserved, perhaps because in fiction, as in life, paid liberals make predictable gestures and meet predictable ends.

Manners & Morals. All in all, the best novels of the year came from Britain. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was a grim warning of what the latter stages of statism could be like. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice and a bestseller, it was a happy combination of urgent theme and ideal writer that found adequate recognition. The Literary Guild also reached abroad, in a departure from its routine menu, to give its 900,000 members Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. Long considered one of the world's fine stylists, Miss Bowen was at her best in this study of tenuous human relationships in wartime Britain. To Be a Pilgrim, Joyce Gary's fourth novel to be published in the U.S., was a knowing, good-humored look at 20th Century British manners & morals seen through the eyes of an old Victorian individualist. England's shyest novelist and one of her best, Henry Green, made his American bow with Loving. A dense, subtly written and poetic novel of character with an Irish-castle setting, it fully deserved the British critical puffs that preceded it. The most overrated British novel of the year was Hope Muntz's care fully researched but woodenly written The Golden Warrior, the story of luckless King Harold and the Norman Conquest. The parade of Italian novels continued throughout the year, most of them reflecting the bitterness and weariness of Italian life. Much-touted Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome was a sexy, glibly written story about a young prostitute that lacked entirely the large significance claimed for it. Stronger and better stuff was Elio Vittorini's In Sicily, a sad, smoldering look at Italian poverty and hopelessness under Mussolini. It came with a blessing from Ernest Hemingway, who had postponed his own long-awaited postwar novel to whip out a short one promised for the summer of 1950 under the marathon title, Across the River and into the Trees.

NON-FICTION The war, the uneasy peace and the many-directioned search for personal and world repose accounted for most of the year's best-read books. No war books achieved the popularity of Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe or Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins. From Winston Churchill came Their Finest Hour, the stately, grandly stated second volume of his World War II memoirs. Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery went on with his battle report in El Alamein to the River Sangro, but its army-manual style limited its appeal chiefly to professional soldiers. A more dramatic soldier's story, important and unfortunately neglected, was Polish Lieut. General Anders' account of his army's sacrifices and betrayals, An Army in Exile. U.S. big brass, hounded by publishers and eager ghostwriters, combed memories, diaries and official records to get their stories on the record. Hard-boiled Major General Claire Chennault had a field day with U.S. blundering in China in Way of a Fighter, and General "Howlin' Mad" Smith lashed out at high-level boners in his story of what happened to his marines in the Pacific. General "Hap" Arnold's yarn-spinning Global Mission was twice too long but important for any student of the war in the air. Blunt, down-to-earth and unghosted was General George Kenney's General Kenney Reports, a day-by-day account of his job and of the air war in the Southwest Pacific. Best of the books on the war at sea were Volume IV (Coral Sea} and Volume V (Guadalcanal) of Harvard Professor Samuel Eliot Morison's massive history of the Navy in World War II. What war at sea meant for the Germans was compactly set down in Anthony Martienssen's Hitler and His Admirals, written from captured Nazi records. One book seemed certain to become a minor classic of its kind: British Captain Russell Grenfell's The Bismarck Episode, a terse description of the pursuit and destruction of the mighty German battleship in the greatest sea hunt in naval history. Of the books of personal war experiences, two were outstanding: Norwegian Odd Nansen's From Day to Day, a grim report, set down with dignity, of what he saw as a prisoner in various German concentration camps; and Briton F. Spencer Chap man's The Jungle Is Neutral, an expertly written story of his life as a guerrilla soldier in Japanese-held Malaya. Detractors and worshipers of F.D.R. took a relative breather. The opening of most of his personal papers to researchers next March probably meant an approaching rain of biographical books: John Gunther's inside F.D.R. had already been announced. But only the President's wife and his secretary had much to add in 1949. In F.D.R., My Boss, Grace Tully set down such between-dictation details as she had observed in nearly 17 stenographic years. Eleanor Roosevelt's This I Remember was the historically valuable reminiscing of a wife who concluded that "I was one of those who served his purposes." Solid to Fascinating. Most of the year's good biographies had literary figures for their subjects. Others ranged from worthy-solid (Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis' authoritative but somewhat unwieldy career study of John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy} to fascinating (Richard Aldington's The Strange Life of Charles Waterton, an en gaging story of an English eccentric and naturalist). Gene Fowler tried to size up New York's Jimmy Walker in Beau James, but succeeded only in sounding like a sentimental buddy at a wake. The toughest biographical chore of the year was W. C. Fields, in which Robert Lewis Taylor failed to convey the great comedian's essential quality but piled up a readable store of anecdote. The most objective political portrait was Isaac Deutscher's Stalin, thorough but short on fresh material. John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud was in a category of its own, a moving, unsentimental sketch of his son Johnny, who died of a brain tumor at 17. Gunther never wrote so good a book. California celebrated its Gold Rush centenary and a flash flood of Californiana rushed in on the event. Most of what was washed down panned light, but two books at least ran to pay dirt: Gold Rush Album, an absorbing picture book edited by Joseph Henry Jackson, which conveyed the turbulence and hysteria of the day, and the late Archer Butler Hulbert's reissued Forty-Niners, a fine non-fiction base from which armchair pioneers can authoritatively explore the way West. There was plenty of first-rate Americana. As usual, much of the worthy spadework issued from the university presses while the commercial publishers grabbed off whatever was most readable. Ben Ames Williams delivered the best available edition of Mary Boykin Chesnut's candid and feminine Civil War jottings, A Diary from Dixie, while Donald Arthur Smalley brought out a superb edition of English woman Frances Trollope's cutting swipe at U.S. 19th Century behavior, Domestic Manners of the Americans. Marion L. Starkey put a somewhat Freudian but not ungentle finger on the 17th Century Salem witch trials in The Devil in Massachusetts, and Historian Herbert Bolton did a fascinating retrace job on Coronado's abortive gold hunt in Coronado, Knight of the Pueblos and Plains. Head, shoulders and chest above every other history of the year was Mathematician Kenneth P. Williams' Unionside history of the Civil War, Lincoln Finds a General. Mind to Modern Arms. The search went on for self-understanding, self-repose, religious comfort, reassurance about the state of the world. The late Rabbi Liebman's Peace of Mind, out in March 1946, was bought strongly throughout 1949. Trappist Monk Thomas Merton followed his autobiographical The Seven Sto rey Mountain with The Waters of Siloe, a readable but routine history of the Trappist order, which late in the year passed its worthier predecessor on best seller lists. Other big sellers whose titles alone explained what their readers were after: Monsignor Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul, the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's 1948 A Guide to Confident Living, H. A. Overstreet's The Mature Mind. There were other inquiries into the state of man and his works. The dullest intellectual flop was Novelist Arthur Koestler's Insight and Outlook, an embarrassingly pretentious "inclusive theory of ethics, esthetics, and creative thinking." Profoundly unoriginal, it lugubriously paraded Koestler's deep-water reading of a lifetime. Nobel Prizewinner T.S. Eliot argued brilliantly if irritatingly for a classbound, aristocracy-led society in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. More pertinent was Episcopal Clergyman Bernard Iddings Bell's sharp criticism of U.S. education, Crisis in Education, which argued that only training in thinking, mor als and religion could rescue the nation from a school-fostered age of adolescence. During the year, atomic jitters had first given way to resignation, then to calm stocktaking. Incomparably the best and most common-sensical book was Scientist Vannevar Bush's challenging and hopeful Modern Arms and Free Men. Genuflections by the great made U.S. readers take two great men seriously, but the enthusiasm was as forced as it was deserved. To the bicentennial homage paid Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was added a spate of books about him, most of them quickies, few of them eagerly bought. Humanitarian (and Goethe scholar) Al bert Schweitzer fared only slightly better in the bookshops. Theirs was not the kind of greatness that courted popularity comfortably. Good of their kind, in this or any year, were: William Beebe's High Jungle, a re port on researches in Venezuela by the best living writer among naturalists; The Story of Maps, Cartographer Lloyd A. Brown's readable survey about a neglected subject, again remarkably well-written; and as a sheer reading experience, some times tickling, sometimes infuriating, H. L. Mencken's fat roundup of dicta and dogma, A Mencken Chrestomathy.

POETRY AND CRITICISM No new poet of stature broke into print, and those of known talent coaxed their muse in silence. Man of the year, as he has been to most U.S. readers of poetry for many years, was Robert Frost, hale and 74, whose Complete Poems only formally reaffirmed his size. Worth the effort it took to read them were the Collected Poems of Englishman William Empson, whose passive philosophy of life was expressed in verse that sometimes went off like fireworks. There was little U.S. literary criticism worth the time of readers who cared for literature and respected the creative impulse. The best book of the year in its field was British Professor F. R. Leavis' The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, a. study whose depth and discrimination made most critics aware of their meager equipment. The year was rich in literary biographies and collections of literary correspondence. New letters of Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Shelley and even Henry VIII were turned up, but not even close students of the writers found in them any cause for new evaluations. Most fortunate in his biographer was Charles Dickens, who profited by Hesketh Pearson's lively interest in Dickens: His Character, Comedy & Career. In The Universe of G.B.S., George Bernard Shaw finally got a good calm look from a biographer, Professor William Irvine, who liked and respected but wasn't afraid of him. A much more worshipful look passed from Charles Tennyson to grandfather Alfred in Alfred Tennyson. Famed Milton Scholar James Holly Hanford's longtime labor, John Milton, Englishman, was an able and balanced but somewhat pedantic biography of the powerful, troubled poet. The keenest job of literary detective work was Howard Vincent's The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, a book that explained how Melville converted a brisk whaling yarn into a U.S. classic. And standing alone among the translations of not one but many years was Samuel Putnam's truly creative restoration of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

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