The Year in Books
What would it profit a man to have read the bestselling books of 1953?
From the novels, he would soon have learned that good literary taste is not what keeps bookstores in business. Nearly half the big moneymakers were historical novels running the short gamut from the trashy to the commonplace, strong on sex, sadism and sometimes even history, but woefully weak as writing. There were a few well-carpentered time killers by such canny old hands as A. J. Cronin and James Hilton, an occasional thoughtful and readable story--James Michener's The Bridges at Toko-ri, Herman Wouk's The Came Mutiny, now in its third year of best-sellerdom--but not one new work of topflight fiction. The novels worth cheering about--and there were several in 1953--had relatively scant commercial success.
High among the nonfiction bestsellers were books of personal uplift and personal adventure, advice on golf, a couple of cartoon collections, Dr. Kinsey on the human female, and the life story of an unabashed bordello keeper who could probably tell Kinsey a thing or two, Polly Adler's A House Is Not a Home.
In the main trends of the year, non-fiction outsold fiction, children's books had a boom (notwithstanding their dully predictable tendency to preach good behavior in barnyard parables), and a lot of good reading continued to turn up more or less unheralded. Finally, for the second year in a row, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible sold more than 1,000,000 copies, to lead all other current books.*
FICTION
With a few exceptions, the top-selling novels of 1953 were set in the long ago and far away. Danish Novelist Annemarie Selinko's Desiree, a sentimental historical about the adventures of an early mistress of Napoleon, fought it out for first place for several months with a holdover from last year, Thomas Costain's The Silver Chalice. At the end, both were overhauled by a new edition of Lloyd Douglas' The Robe, which, boosted by the movie, recovered the top place on the list that it first won in 1943. With similar help from
Hollywood, James Jones's 1951 From Here to Eternity beat out James Hilton's Time and Time Again, Samuel Shellabarger's Lord Vanity, and A. J. Cronin's Beyond This Place. Jones's novel also had the year's biggest sale among the paperbacks, a reported 1,500,000 at 75-c- . Another war novel, Leon Uris' Battle Cry, got in among the hard-cover leaders with a crude, realistic story about marines who had the virtue --refreshing in fiction--of knowing what they were fighting for.
Happily, while the old hands were reworking old formulas, the year also saw a succession of unusually good first novels. Ovid Williams Pierce in The Plantation and Jefferson Young in A Good Man wrote stories about life in the South that were distinguished by grace, dignity and good writing. George Lanning joined their company with This Happy Rural Seat, a mature story about middle-aged Americans. James Baldwin became a new Negro writer to watch with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a powerfully lyrical novel about religious fervor and human isolation in Harlem.
Even the Literary Guild, customarily little interested in unknown novelists, chose three first novels in 1953, and two were good. Stephania, a story of difficult and subtle relationships among patients in a Swedish hospital, was the surprising work of Ilona Karmel, a Polish graduate of Nazi concentration camps who wrote an adopted English that was both expert and moving. The other was Helen Fowler's The Intruder, an Australian novel about a mind-sick veteran and the family of his dead buddy. Another notable first was Mr. Nicholas, a whiplash dissection of a tyrannical London father by young (27) Briton Thomas Hinde. Two others, slickly competent, successful and considerably overrated by reviewers, were John Phillins' The Second Happiest Day and Charles Flood's Love Is a Bridge, each in its way an inconclusive excursion into the emotional difficulties of the comfortably fixed.
The richest, most exuberant novel of the year came from Greece, the work of 68-year-old Nikos Kazantzakis, a top candidate for 1952's Nobel Prize. His Zorba the Greek had a picaresque hero who, almost alone in the fiction of 1953, communicated the conviction that it is wonderful to be alive. By comparison, the chest-beating hero of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was a neurotic wise guy--though Augie did better than Zorba in the bookstores.
Two books by Giovanni Verga, an Italian writer who died in 1922, still contained lessons for any fiction writer. The House by the Medlar Tree and Little Novels of Sicily were powerful stories about Sicilian peasants whose harshly tragic existence could not destroy their stubborn dignity. Another famed Italian brought out his first novel in eleven years; A Handful of Blackberries proved that ex-Communist Ignazio Silone knows where the rot of Communism lies and still has enough of his old novelist's skill to expose it.
One of the disappointments of the year was John Hersey's The Marmot Drive, the story of a Connecticut woodchuck hunt, full of murky meanings and pseudo-archaic Yankee lingo. One of the real surprises of the year was the belated bow in fiction of aged (81) Philosopher Bertrand Russell. His Satan in the Suburbs consisted of five stories whose weird plots and good-natured skepticism made for pretty good fun.
NON-FICTION
Religious and inspirational books, together with accounts of personal adventure, stole the show all year. After the Revised Standard Bible came the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking--and it did nearly as well as the three fiction bestsellers put together. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female sold very well for an $8 book, but even at some 200,000 copies, it was not the runaway that the trade had expected. It was only one of many books on women (Frenchwoman Simone de Beauvoir's disgruntled The Second Sex was another), but all the industry and argument that went into them seemed to leave the confrontation of the sexes pretty much as before.
The most successful adventure stories had a personal-narrative quality that challenged the year's best fiction. Two of the best, and bestselling as well, were by Frenchmen: Maurice Herzog's thriller about the scaling of Annapurna (see CINEMA) and J. Y. Cousteau's eerily poetic description of deep-sea diving, The Silent World. Finest of the field was Charles Lindbergh's recollection of his flight across the Atlantic in 1927, The Spirit of St. Louis.
Books on Russia, Korea, Red China and Communism kept the presses warm all year. Among those that stood out was War Correspondent Philip Deane's I Was a Captive in Korea. In an even voice, he told of 33 months as a prisoner, exposed the shockingly calculated inhumanity of his captors. Deane's book and S. L. A. Marshall's The River and the Gauntlet, the story of the U.S. Eighth Army's defeat in North Korea, would make sober Christmas presents, but they are two books of 1953 that thoughtful Americans can still profit from. Not so distressing, and highly informative as well as entertaining, was Admiral Leslie Stevens' Russian Assignment, a critically urbane look at the Russian scene during his 1947-49 mission as naval attache.
There were other books, important by any standard, which never got their real due from the bookstore traffic. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind skillfully defined a political and philosophical tradition whose qualities are often misinterpreted, even by its friends. In Five Gentlemen of Japan, Frank Gibney explained briefly and readably what more formal scholars have failed to explain: the Japanese national character, its breakdown in World War II, and the reasons why free nations can now welcome the Japanese to their company. Of the trickle of foreign books critical of the U.S., the most sensible and understanding was Italian Luigi Barzini Jr.'s Americans Are Alone in the World. The most gratuitous book from abroad was, by all odds, Briton Earl Jowitt's The Strange Case of Alger Hiss, which niggled at American jurisprudence and raised among readers questions as to the earl's competence to judge the nature of Communist conspiracy.
Among the many books that took the long view on man's past and his future, two raised enough big questions to keep the cracker-barrel set busy all winter. In a casually lofty historical essay, The World and the West, Historian Arnold Toynbee suggested that faithless Western man stands a fair chance of getting his comeuppance from Russia and the East, but who knows?--maybe not. There was no such hemming and hawing from Physicist Charles Galton Darwin. The grandson of the author of The Origin of Species played the old Malthusian game in The Next Million Years, saw ahead nothing but vast increases of population and ultimate world starvation. In a worrying world, Darwin's horizon scanning seemed like a worrier's luxury.
In a year that saw several valiant attempts at clarifying the gloomy science of economics, Robert L. Heilbroner scored a popular triumph in The Worldly Philosophers. He made the ordinarily dusty trip from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to John Keynes as clear and straight as anyone who ever took up the thankless job. Another popularizer, and a very practiced old hand at the game. Will Durant, showed up with The Renaissance, the fifth fat volume of his story of civilization. As usual, Author Will brought down upon himself the buts and ifs of scholars, but did the period up in a sprightly fashion that his critics must secretly envy.
There was a falling-off of books on World War II, at least of useful ones, but a few were important and and a a handful readable. Sir Winston Churchill wound up his great six-volume history of the war with Triumph and Tragedy, which carried events from the Normandy beaches to final victory, and ended with Churchill's defeat in 1945 at the hands of Labor. With New Guinea and the Marianas, Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison completed the eighth volume (six more to come) of his U.S. naval history of the war, a job second in scope and flair only to Churchill's own. And from the U.S. Army came Louis Morton's The Fall of the Philippines, Volume 19 of its projected 87-volume official history, and one of the best so far. From the enemy side came documents of such varying value as Ciano's Hidden Diary, Franz von Papen's Memoirs, The Rommel Papers and Hitler's Secret Conversations, a collection of curious drivel that must have the remnants of his followers wondering how they could have swallowed similar stuff.
The normally busy Lincoln and Civil War branches of the publishing industry almost ground to a halt, but two fine items more than saved the day for the specialists. One was nothing less than The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln in eight bulging volumes, which brought to a close a 29-year job of loving scholarship by the Abraham Lincoln Association. The other was A Stillness at Appomattox, the last of three lively volumes detailing the history of the Army of the Potomac. It was the job of a journalist, Bruce Catton, but no scholar had done it nearly so well.
Readers of biography and autobiography had the most interesting time of it, month in, month out. To be sure, the year's first big guns fired blanks. Carl Sandburg was curiously flat in Always the Young Strangers, a long reminiscence of his own youth, and Scholar Edgar Johnson was thorough but wooden in his Charles Dickens. But there were better things to come. One was an excellent first volume of a definitive biography of Sigmund Freud by a distinguished British disciple, Dr. Ernest Jones. Biographer Andre Maurois published his best book, Leila, about man-eating French Novelist George Sand. In The Traitor and the Spy, James Thomas Flexner took a careful historical look at Benedict Arnold and Major John Andre in a book rich in excitement and scholarship. Irving Brant finished the fourth volume of his massive James Madison, which may yet (one more volume to come) turn out to be one of the most distinguished U.S. biographies ever written.
Two biographies tackled subjects from the great age of exploration and produced fresh material and absorbing stories: Bradford Smith's Captain John Smith (no kin) and Kathleen Romoli's Balboa of Darien. Two frequently misunderstood figures were straightened out again: Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, in Fletcher Pratt's combative Stanton, and a queen of England in H. F. M. Prescott's superb Mary Tudor. Among the remaining literary biographies, some were dull but useful (F. Holmes Dudden's exhaustive Henry Fielding, Leon Edel's first volume of Henry James) ; some were long on sympathy if short on brilliance (Reginald Pound's Arnold Bennett, Lionel Stevenson's able Ordeal of George Meredith); and a few actually enlarged their subjects' dimensions (Betty Miller's Robert Browning, David Magarshack's Chekhov, Antony Alpers' Katherine Mansfield). In one book that was not properly a biography, two well-known men told a great deal about themselves and about each other in one of the longest correspondences of the century. The Holmes-Laski Letters were part mutual-admiration society, part intellectual fencing match between an old-fashioned liberal and an agile-minded, often devious leftist.
Among the many books on art, two were achievements of the first rank. One was the U.S. appearance of the first four volumes of the British Pelican History of Art, a 48-volume project. The other was Andre Malraux's The Voices of Silence, a brilliant if tantalizingly subjective musing on art through the ages. In a year when books on flying saucers and interplanetary travel became commonplace, Jonathan Norton Leonard brought the subject back to earth in his informed and sensible Flight into Space. For humor it was a sad, unsmiling period. Thurber Country, a book of characteristic sketches, was James Thurber at his second best, but standing alone in a shrinking field, it was more than ever welcome.
Poetry & Criticism
The best as well as the most tragic news in poetry was made by one man: Welshman Dylan Thomas. His Collected Poems early in the year confirmed what had long been clear: that he was the finest young poet writing in English. His death at 39 in Manhattan was a bleak reminder of the standing of his contemporaries.
Poet-Novelist Robert Penn Warren received praise from the poets' critical claque for Brother to Dragons, but the sad truth was that this long narrative poem about a frontier murder was dull and prosy. In A Hopkins Reader, there was plenty of evidence, though not easy to read, to show why a Victorian Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, is still an influence on poets writing today. And of U.S. poets today, no better sampling came along than New Poems, ably edited by Rolfe Humphries. The price: 35-c-.
No major critic made a major evaluation in any area, but Briton V. S. Pritchett's shrewd and readable literary essays in Books in General could serve as a lesson in the appreciation of books for today's academicians.
* Though not enough to overtake the venerable (1611) King James Version. This year, as for generations, the King James was the nation's real bestseller.
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