ENGLAND
Fiction. On the basis of this year's novels, it would be difficult to detect any marked tendency in British fiction. All kinds of narratives were produced; in substance, historical, psychological, social; in method, realistic, allegorical, satiric. Perhaps the most significant factor was that of dissatisfaction and self-criticism. English publishers declared that American novels were in greater demand in England than the English, and rightly so. Storm Jameson in a critical essay, The Novel in Contemporary Life condemned the fiction of her country as 'completely ineffective.' It was, she said, 'immensely competent' but 'immensely unimportant'; and she pointed out as the chief reasons for this state of affairs; first, today's 'tendencies to standardization' not only in 'the torrent of standardized fiction' but 'in the book market itself,' the demand for and supply of the commonplace being the bad money that drove out the good; and secondly, the modern man's fundamental sense of insecurity; his feeling, that is, of having 'no roots in the past' and no certainty about the future. Confronted by these profoundly disturbing elements in his existence, the serious novelist had attempted to meet them by two esthetically false approaches, the surrealist and the proletarian. These, she said, were no longer promising, and hope now lay in a method of objectivity whereby the novelist would 'present not himself — not his raw personal emotions and reflections . . . but the thing observed' and would, in so doing, use words that were 'in closer touch with the language of nonliterary activities.'
The year's crop of English novels did not, however, seem to bear out Storm Jameson's contentions, for, although there were many that attempted to present life with complete objectivity, they were none of them so distinguished as one that was frankly interpretative. This was an allegory. The Wild Goose Chase. by Rex Warner, one of the advanced group of young writers of whom Auden and Spender are the chief. The novel, avowedly influenced by the work of Franz Kafka, was an outstanding example of a literary movement to which Selden Rodman has given the name of 'Social Symbolism.' Nor was Starting Point, the second novel by C. Day Lewis, a work of objective realism. Its subject was the history of the fortunes of four young men from the time of their studentship at Oxford in 1926, the year of the General Strike, to the moment, ten years later, when one of them joins the Loyalist forces in Spain; but these four young men, although not allegorical figures, were distinctly types, symbolizing certain kinds of people in capitalist society.
As successful as any in the realm of the self-abnegating fiction recommended by Storm Jameson, was her own The Moon Is Making, in which she pictured the harshness, pettiness, and greed of a York-shire family at the turn of the century. The Cleft Stick by Walter Greenwood, already known as the author of Love on the Dole, was more strictly documentary in character, a volume of stories depicting slum life in the industrial cities of Manchester and Salford. There were other topical, or up-to-the-minute journalistic novels. Such was Lettice Cooper's record of English social and political attitudes since the Ethiopian crisis, as exhibited within the bounds of a single industrial community. National Provincial. And such were Pamela Hanford Johnson's The Monument and World's End, novels of poor white-collar workers, with emphasis, however, laid not on the material hardships of their lives but on their recognition of these hardships as representing a socially significant problem, and on the moral strength of their socially-minded actions. In a preface to her study of textile families in Yorkshire. Sleep in Place. Phyllis Bentley explained that her purpose in writing the novel had been to probe the transition made by her generation 'from Victorian England . . . to the confused revolts and uncertain loyalties of to-day.' Philip Gibbs' Great Argument used a slender thread of story as vehicle for presenting various conflicting political faiths in England to-day. Phyllis Bottome's. The Mortal Storm was concerned with a German family, split on racial and political grounds during the Nazi persecutions. In The Big Firm. Annabel Williams-Ellis, presented from the standpoint of the owners of a large concern of 'Scientific Products,' the responsibilities toward war of English industrial society. Sheila Kaye-Smith's The Valiant Woman and Faithful Stranger, a volume of short stories, were notable for their craftsmanship, but touched a little too comfortably on uncomfortable social problems. And Glyn Jones' stories of Welsh colliers, The Blue Bed, were only partially realistic.
A number of novels, although serious in tone and modern in setting, were of an impact less immediate than the foregoing. Several of them were deliberately reminiscent in mood. Frank Swinnerton's Harvest Comedy, for instance — his twenty-sixth novel — was an analysis of the lives of three men, looked at in retrospect. Wyn Griffith's The Wooden Spoon attempted to recapture, in the form of autobiographic reminiscence, the deep-lying, intangible emotional currents of a life. And Francis Brett Young's very popular Doctor Bradley Remembers presented a 'human' country doctor thinking about his past struggles and achievements. The same author's Portrait of a Village, a novel without a plot, was a genial picture of a small rural community which, without being actual, was representative of many. In H. E. Bates' 'success story' Spella Ho! a great industrialist rose from a job as coal-stoker to a position of commanding importance in the world of business. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop was a satire on sensational journalism. Howard Spring's My Son, My Son!, one of the year's 'best sellers,' was a rather sentimental story of two generations. In The Brothers H. G. Wells portrayed two brothers fighting against each other in an imaginary war, only to discover in the end that they were really fighting for the same thing, — which was a way of expounding fable-wise the author's views on Communism and Fascism. His Apropos of Dolores, the portrait of a thoroughly repulsive woman, intended, perhaps, to point the thesis that human beings are most intelligently and usefully classifiable in psychological categories. An imaginative treatment of the ethics of government was F. L. Lucas', the well known critic's The Woman Clothed with the Sun, short stories brought together in an ingenious chronological scheme to show the progress of social ideals from the establishment of Christianity to a revolt against Fascism in the year 1943. The author of A High Wind in Jamaica. Richard Hughes, published a short novel of the seas. In Hazard, a tale of a hurricane on the Caribbean, which called forth numerous comparisons with Coarad's Typhoon.
Evan John's Crippled Splendour, a vivid historical novel, recreated the times and the mysterious personality of James I of Scotland. From John Masefield came a fantastic, picaresque tale against the background of eighteenth century traditions and setting. Dead Ned; its sub-title. 'The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Recovered Life' stated the theme, and a sequel was promised. Edith Sitwell for the first time tried her hand at fiction. I Live under a Black Sun was her free transposition into the twentieth century of Dean Swift's relationship to Stella and Vanessa. R. C. Hutchinson's Testament was a novel of the Russian Revolution.
In the face of fears and social distress, several novelists remained determinedly cheerful. Thus Richard Aldington, in what has been called the 'least humane' of his novels. Seven Against Reeves, wrote a humorous tale of a retired English business man: Hugh Walpole produced a joking account of London during the depression. The Jovfid Delaneys, and reprinted in Head in Green Bronze a number of the light-hearted stories published by him within the last fifteen years: Naomi Jacob in The Lenient God presented a satire of middle-class lives and Angela Thirkell's Summer Half and Pamifret Towers were pleasant and inconsequential comedies of upper-class English families. Stella Gibbons in Nightingale Wood and I, Compton-Burnett in Daughters and Sons also wrote social comedies. J. P. Priestley's The Doomsday Men having the American Southwest as background, was a story of mystery and adventure.
Of interest especially to students of literary history was the publication of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, for here were brought together the already well known volumes, eleven in number, which minutely analyze the reactions of their heroine. Miriam Henderson, together with a twelfth, not previously published; and thus presented in its entirety one of the earlier and most complete experiments in the 'stream-of-consciousness' method of narration.
Poetry.
In the realm of poetry there was nothing this year of outstanding importance, although Stephen Spender's symbolic verse drama of the conflict between Fascism and Communism, Trial of a Judge, contained passages of great beauty. It was, however, an uneven work, often falling short of the delicacy and precision that characterized his earlier lyrics. There was also a collection by Rex Warner, Poems, realistic in statement and optimistic in tone, and undeniably distinguished, but lacking the imaginative insight that marks great poetic utterance. A volume of verse, Proems, by six young English poets, Todd, Evans, Heppenstall, Foxall, Durrell, and Blakeston, was not very promising. Its all too timely accent of uncertainty suggested to one American critic 'a bank clerk watching the fall of his own currency' or 'a member of Parliament lamenting the inefficiency of his own air force.' W. H. Auden published a new anthology. The Oxford Book of English Light Verse, with a critical preface, excellent in definition and condensed analysis of a poet's relationship to his audience and of the interaction between his work and the world he lives in. For the rest, there was a volume of verse by Walter de la Mare, Memory and Other Poems; a re-issue of an early volume by John Masefield, Selected Poems; and a collection of twenty-one autobiographic poems by Richard Aldington, The Crystal World.
Criticism, Letters, Memoirs, Biographies.
Two of the year's essays in literary criticism have already been mentioned: Storm Jameson's The Novel in Contemporary Life and Auden's preface to The Oxford Book of English Light Verse. More ambitious in scope and very different in purpose were Ford Madox Ford's The March of Literature and Mightier than the Sword. The former, a kind of glorified but unconventional textbook, a commentary on the literature of the world 'From Confucius' Day to Our Own,' was designed to make great works of all time palatable to the general reader. It followed no order of chronology nor any well defined system of presentation, but was guided by the author's personal predilections and his interest in pointing out similarities between widely disparate civilizations and distant ages. The latter was a collection of criticisms and memoirs, — some of them highly diverting, — of the author's illustrious literary acquaintances: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, Theodore Dreiser, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In Enjoyment of Literature, the sensitive and highly individual novelist and critic, John Cowper Powys, brought together a number of essays on a variety of literary subjects, from the Greeks to Dostoevsky. There was a new edition, with a preface by Van Wyck Brooks, of Llewellyn Powys's character sketches, nature studies, and comments on art, Earth Memories. In Rainer Maria Rilke — Aspects of His Mind and Poetry, William Rose and G. Craig Houston published four essays by different contributors, together with a preface of Stefan Zweig who had known Rilke personally, on this poet whose importance is coming to be ever more clearly recognized. Rose Macaulay's The Writings of E. M. Forster was an enthusiastic analysis of the books, though neither of the man or the thought, of that scrupulous and insufficiently appreciated novelist. Professor R. G. Collingwood's The Principles of Art was an exposition of Croce's theory of esthetics. John Middleton Murry's Heaven and Earth, published in America as Heroes of Thought, was an attempt, according to its epilogue 'to reveal the actual growth of the modern world through the minds of some great men who experienced in act or imagination the travail of its becoming.' The dozen great men singled out for the purpose were Chaucer, Montaigne. Shakespeare, Cromwell, Milton, Rousseau, Goethe, Godwin, Wordsworth. Shelley, Marx and Morris. New Writing, the annual of Leftist prose, was again edited by John Lehmann. C. Day Lewis and C. Fenby collaborated in preparing an anthology of little known comments about Oxford, Anatomy of Oxford.
The third volumes of letters by Gerard Manly Hopkins was published this year, Further Letters of Gerard Manly Hopkins, supplementing the two that had come out in 1935. Perhaps not so important, on the whole, as the earlier volumes, this one included, nevertheless, two unusually interesting series; the correspondence with Coventry Patmore, which contained some meticulous analyses of Patmore's poems, and the letters to Mowbray Baillie. Laurence Housman's My Brother, A. E. Housman: Personal Recollections together with Thirty Hitherto Unpublished Poems was a volume of fragments that did not offer much toward a better understanding of his mysterious personality, nor did the new poems enhance his artistic stature. Augmenting the already lengthy list of works on the subject, Hugh Kingsmill published The Life of D. H. Lawrence, an episodic biography which, without being authoritative, was refreshing as the work of one who was not a disciple and so was capable of cool-headed and even humorous objectivity. Dorothy Hewlett's Adonais: A Life of John Keats was a sensitively appreciated interpretation which, in certain matters, supplemented the monumental biography of Amy Lowell. Be Loved No More was a history of Fanny Burney by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot. J. A. Roy's J. M. Barrie presented with critical comments passages from the work of his countryman and townsman, and added some biographical material. And in The Greenwood Hat were reprinted some two dozen early articles on various subjects contributed by Barrie to The St. James's Gazette. The eminent scholar Sir Herbert Grierson wrote a much needed biography, Sir Walter Scott, correcting and supplementing Lockhart's. In Unforgotten Years the author of Trivia, the American expatriate and gentleman-scholar, Logan Pearsall Smith, gathered together reminiscences of his literary life; and in The Summing Up, one of today's most popular literary craftsmen, Somerset Maugham, wrote a spiritual autobiography which, without 'laying bare his heart,' threw considerable light on his career. Thinking It Over was the title of Hesketh Pearson's volume of amusing reminiscences of his colorful life. And in Son of Scotland, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, author of British Agent, set down memories of his childhood. For the many admirers of Winifred Holtby, author of Mandoa, Mandoa, there were this year two posthumous publications of her work: The Pavements of Anderby, an uneven collection of essays and short stories, and Letters to a Friend, written from 1920-1935. It may be that the publication of Chestertonia, The Coloured Lands, should never have occurred; yet there were in it some characteristic pieces. A very unusual publication was T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers, an edition by Liddell Hart and Robert Graves of their correspondence with Lawrence together with the text of their biographies of him and his own careful annotations of them.
Travel.
Hugh Kingsmill's and Hesketh Pearson's Skye High was an entertaining account, parodying Boswell's manner, of a trip to the Hebrides in the wake of Boswell and Johnson. To the Hebrides also went Louis MacNeice, and wrote a delightful book about it, I Crossed the Minch. Sacheverell Sitwell's Rumanian Journcy was a somewhat condescending but pleasant enough description of a four weeks' trip to the Balkans; it consisted principally of splendid photographs on which the written text was but a commentary. Very different was John Lehmann's Prometheus and the Bolsheviks, a sympathetic, perhaps too rosy book about Soviet Georgia and the Caucasus. It contained translations of Georgian lyrics and was better as poetic description than as social commentary. Thrice a Stranger was the cordial but superficial account by Vera Brittain of her three visits to the United States, in 1926, 1934, and 1937, and of her gradual change of attitude toward this country from irritation to appreciative affection, for which she held both herself and the country responsible.
Science, Government, Economics.
Probably the most important British publication of the year was neither in the realm of fiction nor of belles-lettres but in that of science, for Lancelot Hogben's Science for the Citizen is likely to rank in the history of thought with the popularizations of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley. It proceeded with the task undertaken by him several years ago in Mathematics for the Million of making available to the general reader the substance and meaning of scientific development. But it was more than a compendious record of theories and inventions. In keeping with the growingly popular theory of 'scientific humanism,' of which Professor Hogben is one of the most brilliant exponents, it was a demonstration of the philosophic thesis that human thought, even abstract scientific theory, is a product of man's economic struggle with his environment; and so, a bountifully substantiated statement of the necessity for integrating social ethics and scientific knowledge, a history, that is, not only of scientific progress but also of the interrelationship between this progress and social needs. The Conway Memorial Lecture of 1937, delivered by Professor Hoghen, and now published as Retreat from Reason, formulated concisely the fundamental position which informs his work; faith in scientific rationalism as the only reasonable and hopeful approach to the solution of social problems.
A different attitude toward these matters was that of Sir Bertrand Russell who, in Power, expressing the liberal's characteristic belief in the possibility and the importance of individual solutions, took his stand on the ground of individual psychology. Developing the thesis that in dictatorships, just as in every individual enterprise, love of power rather than economic self-interest is the basic motivating force, he declared the hope of democracy to lie in the kind of education which develops a sense of independence in every man and trains him for intelligent citizenship in a democratically controlled socialism. The lectures delivered before the Fabian Society in 1937 were collected in a volume entitled Dare We Look Ahead? and the fact that at the time of publication they already seemed in many ways outmoded, was a measure of the rapidity with which events had moved within one year. The British scientist and philosopher Professor Hyman Levy gave in A Philosophy for a Modern Man a more complete synthesis of the theories he had expounded in The Universe of Science and Science in an Irrational Society, examining the relation of science to human desires and demonstrating the possibilities of dialectical materialism as a scientific philosophy designed toward an intelligent transformation of society. In Socialism versus Capitalism, Professor H. C. Pigou of Cambridge, one of the outstanding orthodox economists, declared himself in favor of Socialism. John Strachey's What Are We to Do? was a study from the Marxist standpoint of the British and American labor movements; and his Hope for America, a sympathetic analysis of the New Deal.
Discussions of the present state of Europe were numerous this year. Professor Seton-Watson's Britain and the Dictators was a respected scholar's examination of his country's position with reference to the dictatorships of Europe. It expressed the view that a policy of isolation was not tenable and advocated an alliance of the democracies, including those of the United States and of the Soviet Union, in opposition to the Nazi-Fascist states. Something of the same opinion was held by the 'Prose Laureate of Peace.' Sir Norman Angell, who, in Peace with the Dictators dramatized the attitudes of various nations whose aims are in conflict one with the other; condemned the opportunism of the Chamberlain Government; and declared that peace between the democracies and the dictatorships could not be reached through policies of isolation and nonresistance. An extremely violent denunciation of Great Britain was written by the author of Europa. Robert Briffault; in his Decline and Fall of the British Emipire, he damned his country as hypocritical on all counts, and wholly deserving the doom which he envisaged for her. Geoffrey T. Garratt's Mussolini's Roman Empire was another vigorous denunciation of recent British foreign policy. Paul Frischauer's England's Years of Danger attempted to show, through the evidence of letters, speeches, public documents at the time of the Napoleonic wars, the position traditionally taken by England when the stability of Europe is threatened. It tended to point the moral that dictatorship, through excesses, is self-doomed to collapse. Winston Churchill's While England Slept, a collection of his speeches in Parliament from 1932 to 1938, edited with notes that gave the intervening events, threw light on the present situation. Fascist in sympathies were Beverly Nichols' News of England and Walter Starkie's The Waveless Plain.
History.
In the midst of concern for the present, the past was not forgotten. The vogue for Queen Victoria, for instance, continued unabated. Hector Bolitho translated and edited letters of the Queen to her German cousins, Letters of Queen Victoria, which, although adding little to what was already known, confirmed the general impression of the Queen's character. The Letters of the Prince Consort, on the other hand, containing miscellaneous papers, many of them published for the first time, helped to explain both the personal qualities and the political attitudes which had made for his unpopularity in England. The well-known popularizer of the Victorian period, E. F. Benson, turned his attention to the daughters of the royal house, but the dominating figure in his Queen Victoria's Daughters was still the Queen. A study of that powerful figure in the Victorian court, the Queen's physician, friend, and adviser, Baron Stockmar, was written by Pierre Crabites, Victoria's Guardian Angel. And some previously unpublished, but politically unimportant, letters of Benjamin Disraeli appeared in Letters from Benjamin Disraeli to Frances Anne Marchioness of Londonderry, 1837-1861, edited with an introduction by the Marchioness.
With the publication of its sixth volume, War's End, Winston Churchill brought to completion his monumental life of Marlborough. The Captains and the Kings Depart, Journals and Letters of Reginald Viscount Esher continued the publication of documents concerning the remarkable liberal whom government leaders consulted and who himself consistently refused cabinet posts. According to Harold Laski this volume was 'the most important contribution to the inner understanding of British politics since the publication of the famous Greville Diaries nearly eighty years ago.' On the other hand, Herbert A. Asquith's Moments of Memory were personal rather than political reminiscences; they told more about the former Prime Minister's family than about his cabinet. Harold Nicolson's Helen's Tower was a genial and charming but not very illuminating picture of the writer's uncle, Lord Dufferin. It was the first volume of a projected autobiography which is to be given, as it were, obliquely, through the portrayal of personages known to the author. Hilaire Belloc's Louis XIV was not so much a biography as an encomium of monarchy as the best form of government. E. H. Carr, known, among other things, for his studies of Dostoevsky and of Herzen and his circle, wrote the first English biography of that very picturesque Russian revolutionary of the nineteenth century, Michael Bakunin.
IRELAND
At the age of seventy-three William Butler Yeats [died Jan. 29, 1939] wrote with his great lyric gift unimpaired. Such was the evidence of New Poems and of the three allegorical verse dramas in The Herne's Egg and Other Plays. Two other publications from his pen came out this year: A Vision, a highly mystical collection of verse and prose, comparable to the prophetic books of Blake, which had been published privately in a limited edition in 1925, and now appeared revised; and a new edition in a single volume, called Autobiography, consisting of Reveries over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil, and Dramatis Personae. The Living Torch, an edition of A. E.'s (George Russell's) contributions to The Irish Statesman, of which he had been editor, was an important addition to an understanding of his personality and his thought; and there was a good deal in it also about Yeats. Three publications of different kinds by Seán O'Faol in, author of A Nest of Simple Folk and Bird Alone, came out this year; a collection of Old Irish lyrics, translated and edited by him. The Silver Branch: a group of his own bitter, beautiful short stories of Ireland. A Purse of Coppers; and a remarkably balanced biography of Daniel O'Connell, King of the Beggars, wherein the democratic leader appeared with both his virtues and his imperfections on his head. There was a quiet, narrative poem by Padraic Colum, The Story of Loury Maen, based on a myth of the traditional king of Ireland. Oliver St. John Gogarty's I Follow St. Patrick, much more than a history of the Saint, was an ebullient record of a poet's journey in his wake. In Patches of Sunlight Lord Dunsany gave an impressionistic and not very revealing account of his early years. Of fiction might be mentioned Kate O'Brien's novel of Irish intellectuals. Pray for the Wanderer; Norah Hoult's realistic, warm-hearted picture of the Dublin of the public houses, Coming from the Fair; and a powerful first novel by Louis Lynch D'Alton, Death Is So Fair, about the unsuccessful Dublin Easter Day Rising of 1916.
GERMANY
The most important literary event of the year was the publication of Thomas Mann's Joseph in Egypt, the third part of the Biblical tetralogy in which one of the great authors of all time is setting down his epic of modern man. In an age distinguished by its explorations of the psyche and its consciousness of the difficulties involved in an adherence to democratic ideals, this work is a synthesis of liberal ethical evaluations and of the modern understanding of psychology and myth. It is important, therefore, not as a historical novel but as a philosophical interpretation of history; and also as a brilliant example of a narrative method whereby events are presented symbolically but not in terms of abstractions, the individual instances always concrete in their reality but bearing meanings beyond themselves. In addition, two political essays were written this year by Thomas Mann; The Coming Victory of Democracy, an analysis of the democratic temper and a proclamation of faith in its ultimate survival, and This Peace, a philippic in eloquent condemnation of the Four-Power Munich pact.
The work of Thomas Mann overshadowed that of his exiled fellow artists. Beside his profound sanity, for instance, Franz Werfel's Biblical fantasy of the prophet Jeremiah, Hearken unto the Voice, appeared doubly fanciful. Fortunately, other novels were on subjects so different from his that they did not readily court comparison. In The Crowning of a King Arnold Zweig added a fourth novel to the series (The Case of Sergeant Grischa, Young Woman of 1914, Education before Verdun) in which he has been analysing the mentality of modern Germany. It concerned the German occupation of Lithuania in 1917. Peter Mendelssohn's All That Matters, Irmgard Keun's After Midnight, and H. W. Katz' The Fishmans bore the authentic stamp of personal experience. The first of these was a story, related with impressive calm, of Hitler's coming to power; the second, a short novel about the difficulties encountered by an 'Aryan' girl of the middle-classes in the Nazi state; the third, which is to have a sequel, concerned the early childhood of a Jewish boy living in an environment of pre-war anti-Semitism in a Galician village. Walter Schoenstedt's In Praise of Life. published here in both the German original and in translation, was a novel of the fortunes of two young German friends, of their boyhood during the war, and their wanderings and suffering in the post-war period. Hans Fallada, author of Little Man What Now? one of the few unexiled German writers known abroad, produced a fairy tale for adults, Sparrow Farm, and a realistic story of Germany during the inflation of 1923. Wolf among Wolves. Heinrich Hauser's Last Port of Call was a sea yarn, the hero of which had fled to sea in escape from the tension of a fear-haunted Europe. A Great Lord was a historical novel of a Polish nobleman in the time of Napoleon by the Austrian Paul Frischauer, who is not so well known as his compatriots Stefan Zweig and Franz Weriel.
Two popular biographies were written by exiles; a life of Magellan by Stefan Zweig. Conqueror of the Seas; and a narrative of Offenbach. Orpheas in Paris, by Siegfried Kracauer. The rendering into English of Rilke's poems was continued by both J. B. Leishman. Later Poems, and M. D. Herter Norton. Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Of personal narratives, the autobiography of the Bavarian nobleman and foe of Nazism. Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein's Conquest of the Past had besides its inherent interest as autobiography, the importance of a document in explanation of the present regime. The same might be said of the second volume of Gustav Streseman's papers, Diaries, Letters, and Papers, which covered the period from January 1925 to September 1926, the months during which Herr Streseman effected Germany's entry into the League of Nations. Savage Symphony by Eva Lips was the story of the wife of a German anthropologist, professor at the University of Cologne, of her husband's expulsion from the Third Reich after he refused to falsify his scientific findings for the sake of Nazi propaganda. In The War against the West, Aurel Kolnai, born in Budapest of Austrian nationality, but writing in English, sought to examine in scholarly fashion the theory of National Socialism in the works of Nazi writers themselves. The Austrian journalist Willi Frischauer, in Twilight in Vienna, gave, from the standpoint of the average Austrian citizen's experience of it, an account of the German annexation. And a similarly up-to-date review of the crisis was The Last Fire Hours of Austria by Eugene Lennhoff, editor of the anti-Nazi Vienna Telegraph. Kurt Schuschnigg's My Austria, published in Vienna a few months before Austria ceased to exist, was a history of his country by her last Chancellor, from the time of the Armistice to the summer of 1937.
FRANCE
Of French novels this year the most remarkable was Andre Malraux's Man's Hope. An account of the first eight months of the Spanish Civil War, it was comparable in recent fiction only to the author's own work on the Chinese revolution of 1927, Man's Fate. Written on the very scene of action, it had the vivid qualities of journalistic immediacy of record, but was much more than a bit of skillful reporting. It struck through to the deeper implications of the brutal actualities it depicted. It showed the urgency of moral problems and the sharpness of conflicting ideals when the intensity of life has been heightened by the imminence of death, and was, therefore, more than the history of a chaotic war, an examination of ethical philosophies. From the standpoint of esthetics, it bore eloquent testimony to its author's thesis that important art must come as the result of action.
Also concerned with the Spanish War, were the works of Georges Bernanos. A Diary of My Times, The Great Cemeteries under the Moon, but they had not the intellectual brilliance of Malraux's book. Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Death on the Installment Plan was a continuation of his Journey to the End of Night. Dealing with the childhood and adolescence of the protagonist of the earlier novel, it was a brutal and often revolting story of the boy's growing cynicism and sense of inferiority, a savagely pessimistic book, with, however, something Rabelaisian in the gusto of its exaggerated grotesquery. The author's incredibly violent anti-Semitic tirade, Trifles for a Massacre, created a sensation in France, but was not translated. André Gide thought it should be taken as a joke. Residential Quarter by Louis Aragon was about the France of Paris and the provinces just before the World War. It was the second — (the first was The Bells of Basel, 1936) — of a projected series to be called The Real World, 'in memory of the long inner conflict' of its author, who had been in the vanguard of the Dada and Surreaiist movements. Pity for Women, written in 1930-1931 and published in France in 1936, but only now translated, was the work of Henri de Montherlant, author of Perish in Their Pride, and recipient of several French literary awards. It was a polished narrative of the philanderings of a cynical, irresponsible, and fatuous Don Juan of the post-war era. In Shadows around the Lake, Guy de Pourtalès wrote a novel of Calvinistic Geneva from 1890 to 1920. Roger Vercel in Tides of Mont St. Michel produced one of the most popular books of the year, probably because it showed a young man 'finding himself' and emphasized qualities of simplicity, solidity, and independence. Another, much less hopeful history of an individual's struggle with himself was Henri Troyat's tale of a middle-aged actor, One Minus Two. Jules Romains' monumental historical novel of France in the twentieth century, Men of Good-Will, was continued in its seventh volume, Death of a World, which brought the narrative down to the beginning of the World War; and the five parts of Georges Duhamel's saga of a middle-class Paris family were newly translated and collected in a single volume, The Pasquier Chronicles. Neither cycle was completed. Another 'roman fleuve,' as these lengthy novels are called in France, was undertaken by René Béhaine, to be called History of a Society. The first volume, The Survivors, royalist and anti-clerical in sympathies, was translated and published with a foreword by Ford Madox Ford who pronounced its author 'the most remarkable living writer.' Interesting as a document of literary history was Edouard Dujardin's We'll to the Woods No More, a novel that fifty years ago introduced the stream-of-consciousness method, but was only now translated for the first time.
Powerful, and more fantastic than fiction, was the story of his twelve years' imprisonment on Devil's Island, Dry Guillotine, by René Belbenoit, who escaped after four unsuccessful attempts — a minutely factual narrative, a horrifying record of socially sanctioned brutality. A biography of Léon Blum, which presented him as a leader equal in stature to Lenin, was written by Geoffrey Fraser and Thadée Natanson, Léon Blum: Man and Statesman. And an autobiography by the general secretary of the French Communist party, Maurice Thorez, was translated this year, A Son of the People. The popular André Maurois, turning from English to French Romanticism, wrote a life of Chateaubriand. Cloudy Trophy by Léon Daudet was a superficial interpretation of Victor Hugo's marriage and of his liaison with Juliette Brouet. There was an amusing volume of memoirs of the period between 1870 and 1914, Portraits of a Lifetime, by the portrait painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, who 'knew everybody.' Paul Valéry's essays in criticism, Variety: Second Series, were translated. Written on literary, sociological, and artistic subjects, they had a fundamental unity as illustrations of the view that modern civilization imposes a complexity on man that runs counter to the unconscious and lasting simplicity which is native to him. In After-thoughts on the U.S.S.R. André Gide continued his disillusioned condemnation of Soviet Russia. Charles Seignobos, one of the foremost living historians, wrote in The Rise of European Civilization a survey of European cultures and institutions from their beginnings to the rise of Hitler, which was intended for the general public.
RUSSIA
The last of Gorky's novels was published in translation this year, The Spectre, completing the series entitled Forty Years — The Life of Clim Samghin, of which the others were The Bystander, The Magnet, and Other Fires. It covered the period between the two Russian revolutions, 1905-1917. And as an analysis of the modern 'intellectual' born in the nineteenth century, and of his era, it is to be compared with the works of Mann, Proust, and Joyce, from which it differs principally in laying emphasis on changes in the social structure as well as in the men who in turn make it and are made by it.
Less important Russian novels of the year were Benjamin Kaverin's The Larger View, about young intellectuals in Leningrad in 1928; Yuri Herman's Tonia, the story of a woman's happy transition from the pre-revolutionary ideals of her childhood to those of Soviet Russia; Valentin Tikhonov's The Mountain and the Stars, a tale of cruelty and adventure among Cossacks in 1921 under the command of the notorious Baron Ungern-Sternberg, concerning whom there was also a novel by Vladimir Pozner, The Bloody Baron; and Piotr Pavlenko's Red Planes Fly East, which centered about Russia's attempt to fortify Eastern Siberia in anticipation of conflict with Japan. Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark was a 'psychological' novel by a Russian émigré.
The most remarkable of living women revolutionists, Angelica Balabanoff, published her autobiography, My Life As a Rebel. The Secret Letters of the Last Tsar, a selection of the royal correspondence released from the public archives, contained letters, many of them intimate ones to his mother, dating from the Tsar's childhood to his imprisonment in 1917. There were several important publications concerning the Revolution: The Life of Lenin by one of his earliest supporters, P. Kerzhentsov; the History of the Civil War in the U.S.S.R., a compilation of documents edited by Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Gorki, Zhdanov, and Kirov, for the period from February to October 1917, the first installment of what is to be a series giving within the scope of a few volumes a comprehensive and consecutive survey of the Revolution; and supplementing the factual information of the History. The Russian Revolution by Lenin and Stalin, a collection, in chronological order, of many of the speeches and writings of these two leaders from February to November 1917. Over the North Pole by George Baidukov, noted in Russia both as writer and explorer, was interesting not only as the story of a remarkable flight but also as an account of Soviet methods in organizing such enterprises. A preface by Vilhjalmar Steffanson was a tribute to the fliers.
SCANDINAVIA AND ICELAND
From Denmark came an autobiography by the important novelist Martin Anderson Nexo, author of Pelle the Conqueror; it was the tragic, but by no means pessimistic picture of his childhood, Under the Open Sky. Peter Freuchen's It's All Adventure was a story of himself by the Danish explorer and journalist, a sequel to his Arctic Adventure. Peter Tutein's The Sealers was a vigorous yarn of those whose business it is to get seal skins. The Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke who, under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen, captured the imagination of the reading public several years ago with her Seven Gothic Tales, wrote this year an account of life on a coffee plantation in Kenya, Out of Africa. Sigrid Undset's Images in a Mirror was a novelette of marital troubles and adjustments. Gösta af Geijerstam continued in Storevik the portrait of the idyllic family of his Northern Summer. Aksel Sandemose, author of A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, wrote a direct, brutal. and buoyant tale of life aboard a freighter, Horns for Our Adornment. Gösta Larsson, already known through his novel of three years ago. Our Daily Bread, reconstructed in Fatherland, Farewell! the plight of impoverished Swedish workers who, after a long drawn out strike in the early years of this century, embarked for America. A new name to the American public was that of the Swedish editor Vilhelm Moberg, whose Memory of Youth, translated by Edwin Björkman, was a reminiscent tale of the peasant childhood and young manhood of a thirty-five year old editor; it was the first volume of a projected trilogy. One of the Swedish prize-winners in the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition was Curt Berg's The Blue Dragoons, about life in a Swedish regiment forty years ago in Norrland, a province of Northern Sweden. Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote two autobiographic novels of rural life in Iceland, Ships in the Sky and The Night and the Dream, both parts of a series to be called Church on the Hill. Gudmundur Kamban's I See a Wondrous Land, based on Viking sagas, was another tale of violence and adventure. From Finland came an appreciative biography of the musician who is considered by many to be the greatest of living composers, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality, by Karl Ekman. And Meck Heritage was the short, stark, tragic history of a poor peasant, by Finland's leading novelist, F. E. Sillanpaä.
OTHER COUNTRIES
The year's best work concerning Spain was Malraux's novel, mentioned above. But Burgos Justice by Ruiz Vilaplana, court clerk and coroner of the town, was a significant record of a conservative's change of heart after the Rebel occupation. And The Martyrdom of Spain by the liberal Catholic Professor of Law at Oviedo, Alfred Mendizabal, was a history of Spain from 1923 to 1936, as non-partisan and scholarly as anything that has been published about the background of the War. The strongly Leftist Spain between Death and Birth by the German-Swiss war correspondent, Peter Merin, added little to what was already known. Mr. Will among the Rebels by Ramon J. Sender, written before his Counterattack in Spain, dealt with the earlier Civil War of 1873; by comparison with the later work it showed how much the present conflict had served to mature the author.
Ignazio Silone's School for Dictators was an imaginary dialogue in which was analysed the effect of dictatorship on the lives of men, a subject which had been previously dramatized in his two novels, Fontamara and Bread and Wine. Two historical novels were translated from the Dutch: Maurits Dekker's Beggars Revolt, a story of the Netherlands' struggle for freedom in the sixteenth century, and Jo van Ammers-Kueller's tale of Holland in the eighteenth century, The House of Tavelinck. From other parts of the world, Hungary, Greece, Australia, came several romantic novels. Jolán Földes, who last year won the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition with The Street of the Fishing Cat, was responsible this year for two slight love stories. Prelude to Love and I'm Getting Married. C. P. Rodocanachi's Forever Ulysses recast the ancient epic to suit modern times. The hero was a combination of Homer's great wanderer and Sir Basil Zaharoff — an adventurous and successful entrepreneur, equal in cunning to his prototype, he covered the world in his travels. The Paderewski Memoirs was an authentic autobiographic document of one of the most extraordinary figures of our age. Dictated to Mary Lawton, the book had both the qualities and the defects of this form of informal presentation. The record covered the early years only, stopping with 1914, but a supplementary volume was promised.
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