1939: Literature, World

ENGLAND

Fiction.

Outstanding in this year's fiction were four works of different kinds: Sirocco by Ralph Bates, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Professor by Rex Warner, and Captain Horatio Hornblower by Cecil Scott Forester. They represented distinct categories of narrative into which the other novels of the year seemed naturally to fall.

Ralph Bates, who had helped to organize the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and who for many years before had lived in Spain and known it well, brought together in Sirocco some of his short stories about its people. Spanning the last fifteen years of Spanish history, they were honest, understanding tales that ranged in method from the symbolic to the journalistic, — one of the few works of English fiction this year that dealt seriously with the present scene. Another was Christopher Isherwood's volume of short stories, Good-bye to Berlin. They were about the German capital in the years immediately preceding Hitler, written in the exact, lucid, unemphatic prose which is coming to be recognized as Isherwood's medium. But, on the whole, the 'problem novel' seemed to have all but vanished. This was notably true of the novel of social and industrial problems, of which there was one only, Sailor Comes Home, the tragic tale of a Welsh mining town by Howard Clewes. Somerset Maugham's Christmas Holiday had to do with a wealthy young man's discovery of how the 'other half' lives, but it was too light in tone and its emphasis too much on melodrama to be taken seriously as 'proletarian fiction'; and the same can be said of Storm Jameson's picturesque tale of a Soho slum, Here Comes a Candle. Those English novelists who were interested in the contemporary scene turned their attention to other aspects of it. Richard Aldington, for example, whose first novel, Death of a Hero (1928) was of the war, gave in Rejected Guest, through the life story of a man born during the Great War, a history of the period between that war and the present. H. M. Tomlinson, well known for his All Our Yesterdays (1930) now wrote a period piece of England on the brink of 1914, The Day Before. George Buchanan's Entanglement was a depressing, composite picture of London in 1937 and 1938. Pamela Frankau's The Devil We Know, Louis Golding's Mr. Emanuel, and Mary Borden's Passport for a Girl were sympathetic studies of Jews as they are affected by Hitler's régime.

A greater number of novelists turned from sociology to psychology, from social questions to analyses of individuals. Among these Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, her fifth novel and by general consent her best, had deeper implications than its subject might at first glance indicate. A piece of delicate characterization, somewhat in the manner of Henry James, a study of the repressive effect of a sophisticated, politely conventional English household on an adolescent girl, it seemed to some critics to be a symbol of the general heartlessness of upper-class Englishmen to-day; the death of the child's heart stood for the 'death of an era.' Other novels were more or less conventional love stories in a variety of settings: a hospital in Mary Renault's Promise of Love, a rural English parish in Margaret Mathews' Such Harmony, London musical halls in Storm Jameson's Straws in Amber. Elswyth Thane Beebe's Tryst had to do with the love of a girl for the ghost that haunts the house she lives in. There were studies of neurotics, such as Leonard Strong's The Open Sky, Angry Man's Tale by Peter de Polnay, As for the Woman by Anthony Cox, and Phyllis Bottome's Danger Signal, a kind of psychoanalytic detective story. There were tales of married life and amiable sketches of pleasant people in English suburbs and country homes: an ordinary suburban couple during the first year of marriage in Norman Collin's Love in Our Time; several maladjusted pairs of the upper bourgeoisie in Alec Waugh's Galsworthian Going their Own Ways, a Novel of Modern Marriage; the 'nicest sort of English family life' in Alice Grant Rosman's William's Room.

Striking a somewhat deeper note, in its unadorned presentation of modern English aristocracy, was Mrs. Dorothy Whipple's The Priory. And in at least two other novels modern English society was looked at critically: in Warwick Deeping's Bluewater, a contrast of urban sophistication and rural simplicity; and in Archibald MacDonell's Autobiography of a Cad, a satire of the upper classes during the post-war years. Storm Jameson's The Captain's Wife was a gloomy study of a willful, egotistic woman. Margaret Kennedy, who some time ago made her mark with The Constant Nymph, produced this year a novel of sensational episodes, The Midas Touch. G. B. Stern's The Woman in the Hall had to do with a professional beggar who managed to give her daughters an upper class education. James Hill's No Victory for the Soldier was the story of a musical child prodigy, a frustrated genius, who ultimately found fulfilment by taking part in the Spanish Civil War. Freda Lingstrom in Axel traced the fortunes of three children adopted by a lonely man. Olive Warner's Uncle Lawrence was a warm-hearted little sketch of the 'black sheep' of an English family, self-exiled to an island in Lake Erie. Considerable popularity was attained by Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus, a quiet story of how a group of Anglican nuns attempted and failed to set up a school in the Himalayas.

Stories of romantic adventure were also in the ascendant. Chief of these was Cecil Scott Forester's Flying Colors which completed the trilogy about his remarkable sea captain in Napoleonic times. Together with the two earlier books, Ships of the Line and Beat to Quarters, it was published in an omnibus volume, Captain Horatio Hornblower. Another trilogy of adventure was John Masefield's romance, the second and third parts of which were published under title Live and Kicking Ned. Sir Hugh Walpole's The Sea Tower was a story of melodramatic horror. Two semi-historical novels by Norah Lofts also had to do with adventurous heroes. One was of the eighteenth century, Colin Lowrie, the tale of an exiled Jacobite Scotsman who was sold into slavery in the West Indies and escaped to Virginia before he returned to his native land; the other, Blossom Like the Rose, was a romantic novel of America in the late seventeenth century. Seventeenth century Germany was the background of A. E. W. Mason's Königsmark.

Of more strictly historical interest were several volumes on a variety of themes. Louis Golding's Biblical narrative In the Steps of Moses the Conqueror, continuing his In the Steps of Moses the Lawgiver (1938), told of the Israelites' journey through Transjordan, giving the author an opportunity to describe the country through which he himself had traveled. There were two novels of the Boer War: Francis Brett Young's The City of Gold, a sequel to They Seek a Country, and Watch for the Dawn by Stuart Cloete, popular author of The Turning Wheels. Francis Hackett, well known for his Henry the Eighth, produced another carefully documented piece of fictionalized history, Queen Anne Boleyn. Margaret Irwin's The Bride was concerned with the Stuart cause. And Joseph Walter Cove's Vanessa and the Dean retold in the form of a novel, the usually slighted story of Jonathan Swift's relationship with Esther Vanhomrigh. Dorothy Hewlett's Victorian House and Muriel Coxon's Family Circle were pictures of family life in Victorian England. Henry Handel Richardson's Young Cosima had as its theme one of the most notable figures in modern chronicles of love, the daughter of Franz Liszt and the wife of Richard Wagner; but whether in spite or because of the intrinsic fascination of the theme, this novel did not come up to Ultima Thule which in 1929 had established its author's fame for skill in manipulating psychological intricacies.

One of the most significant developments of English fiction in recent years has been its marked tendency to allegory. Influenced by the work of Franz Kaffka, serious younger writers have chosen to express themselves in the form of satiric fantasy. Last year Rex Warner wrote The Wild Goose Chase; this year he published The Professor; and although the relative merits of these two novels might be disputed, the nightmare power of many scenes in the latter book could not be denied. It was a satire on the pathetic ineptitude of liberals in the face of modern dictatorships; newspaper accounts of the falls of small democracies were the tragic realities on which the fantasy was based. Over the Mountain by the young poet, Ruthven Todd, was another allegory of fascism and a satire of Englishmen. Other imaginary stories were of a different, non-Kaffkian order. Nevil Shute Norway's Ordeal, a graphic account of a family's plight during the bombardment of a British seaport town was too plausible in its grim details to be convincing as fantasy; it was a realistic picture of what actually would occur under the circumstances. In The Hopkins Manuscript, the author of Journey's End, Robert Cedric Sheriff, tried his hand, not too successfully, at the genre. And H. G. Wells in The Holy Terror looked once more into the face of things to come, but more despairingly than usual. Sylvia Townsend Warner's After the Death of Don Juan was an exquisitely polished, ironic re-working of the legend of the Great Lover and Rebel. Light and humorous in tone were T. A. White's playful, anachronistic pseudo-historical fantasies of King Arthur, The Sword in the Stone and Witch in the Wood.

Best of the 'hammock reading' novels were Angela Thirkell's The Brandons: Naomi Royde-Smith's detective tale, The Altar-Piece and her avowedly escapist The Younger Venus, recommended by one American reviewer to 'day-dreaming adolescents'; Michael Arlen's tale of international intrigue, The Flying Dutchman; Cecil Roberts' They Wanted to Live, sequel to Victoria, Four-thirty; and Somerset Maugham's 'sophisticated fairy-tale' Princess September and the Nightingale.

Poetry.

Robert Graves, known especially for his novels and historical romances, Good-bye to All That, I, Claudius, etc., published this year a selection of the poetry he has written, Collected Poems. A new edition of Hilaire Belloc's Sonnets and Verse, first published in 1923, came out with many new poems; and Walter de la Mare brought out an anthology, Behold this Dreamer, a collection of prose and verse, of which the sub-title indicated its nature: 'of reverie, night, sleep, dream, love-dreams, nightmare, death, the unconscious, the imagination, divination, the artist, and kindred subjects.'

Of new poetry very little appeared. There was a long poem by Victoria Sackville-West, Solitude, a stately, melancholy, reflective piece on man's essential loneliness and on death. There was a volume of thirty short, compact, cerebral lyrics, Poems, by Anne Ridler, known to date as a Shakespearean critic. Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden wrote together, partly in verse and partly in prose, an allegorical play of capitalism and socialism, On the Frontier. Stephen Spender translated from the German and the Spanish: together with J. B. Leishman, Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies; with J. L. Gili, poems of Garcia Lorca. There were poems by Auden in Journey to a War, a travel book on China, also written in collaboration with Isherwood.

It is perhaps not irrelevant to mention here that Auden and Isherwood are both now in the United States, as is also Richard Aldington; and that Stephen Spender is reported to have said at the outbreak of the war: 'As I haven't been told to do anything, I can devote myself to writing, perhaps my posthumous works.'

Criticism and Essays.

Among the few works of literary criticism that appeared this year, there was none of outstanding importance. Modern Poetry by Louis MacNeice combined literary autobiography with a critical discussion of poetry. Herbert Edward Read's Poetry and Anarchism, 'a personal confession of faith,' was an examination of the poet's place in an industrial society. Joan Evans' Taste and Temperament was 'a brief study of psychological types in their relation to the visual arts'; and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, a book of practical advice about the writer's craft. In The Price of Leadership, John Middleton Murry propounded the theory that 'the continuance of Democracy depends upon the ruling class being consciously Christian.' J. Bronowski's The Poet's Defense, essays on Sidney, Shelley, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swinburne, Housman, and Yeats, was based on the thesis that poetry itself diverges from poetic theory. A lecture delivered at Cambridge by John Dover Wilson was published: Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold as Critics of Wordsworth. Malcolm Elwin's Old Gods Falling dealt in a youthful, breezy way with English literature from 1887 to 1914. Sir James Barrie's hitherto unpublished speeches, from 1893 to 1935, were brought together in McConnachie and J.M.B.; and over forty articles on a variety of topics by Dean Inge were collected in a volume called Our Present Discontents.

Biography.

In the realm of biography documents and studies of Victorial England continued to accumulate in 1939. One of the most valuable records of the period, a serious chronicle of political events as well as a revelation of a curious personality Charles Greville's Memoirs, came out in an unabridged edition by Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford. Lord David Cecil, who some years ago wrote a very sensitive biography of the poet William Cowper, The Stricken Deer, now published a study of Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, The Young Melbourne, good as a portrait not only of the man but of the political scene in which he functioned in his early days. A very important work was J. L. Hammond's monumental life of Gladstone, Gladstone and the Irish Nation. There was also a biography, by R. L. Arkell, of the little known queen consort of George II, Caroline of Ansbach. Clive of Plassey by Alfred Mervyn Davies was a study of the political background and activity of the hero of India; and A Number of People by Sir Edward Marsh, consisted of amusing, anecdotal reminiscences of aristocratic and literary London before 1914.

Among publications of a more strictly literary interest there was, to begin with, David Garnett's edition of the Letters of T. E. Lawrence. The collection included diaries and unpublished notes as well as letters, and although by no means complete, formed an extremely valuable addition to the biographical material concerning this baffling person. A Poet and Two Painters was a memoir of that other, very different but also extraordinary, Lawrence, D. H. By Knud Merrild, one of the two Danish painters who spent the winter of 1922-23 with the Lawrences near Taos, it was a refreshingly detached account of the writer whose personality has suffered through disciples' idolatry. A pathetic and amusing collection was the edition by George Paston and Peter Quenell of letters written to Byron by the women who had loved him, To Lord Byron.

Edward Lear, author of many limericks, of 'The Owl and the Pussycat' and other famous nonsense, was honored this year for the first time in a biography. Edward Lear by Angus Davidson was a well documented record of the humorist's tragic life. Professor F. C. Green's Stendhal, a semi-popular biography of the great French novelist, about whom little has been written in English, did something to clarify the facts of his life, but attempted no thorough going analysis of his work. One of the most exotic of Victorian literary figures was the subject of a sketch by Yvonne French, Ouida: a Study in Ostentation. There was a scholarly biography of Coleridge, Lawrence Hanson's The Life of S. T. Coleridge; it dealt only with the poet's youth, and a sequel was promised. Professor Ernest de Selincourt's final volume of Wordsworth's correspondence, Letters, the Later Years, covered the last thirty years of the poet's life. The third volume of Arthur Bryant's definitive biography of Pepys was published in 1939, Samuel Pepys, the Saviour of the Navy; it dealt with the period from 1693 to 1689 when the illustrious diarist was serving at the Admiralty. One of the most able studies of the year was Enid Starkie's critical biography of the daemonic French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Phyllis Bottome published a biography of the former friend and later opponent of Sigmund Freud, and the founder of the school of Individual Psychology, Alfred Adler. Official, in a sense, since Adler himself had asked her to write it, her biography was perhaps too much the work of a friend and not enough that of a scientist.

Certain autobiographies published during 1939 threw an oblique light on the contemporary state of mind. Siegfried Sassoon, for example, whose poems of the war, Counter Attack (1918), were among the most graphic and bitter of those written by young men who had fought at the front, has gone, it would seem, from disillusion to reminiscent nostalgia. At any rate, The Old Century and Seven More Years, retreating to a period earlier than that of his other autobiographic books, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, was an idyllic picture of his boyhood and youth. Ralph Hale Mottram's Autobiography with a Difference was also a quiet volume of reminiscence; and A. A. Milne's Autobiography, frankly designed to entertain, was as distant from the world of violence as might have been expected from the creator of Christopher Robin.

Other records, however, were of a different kind, as, for example: John Gielgud's Early Stages, which was not so much a personal history of the brilliant young Shakespearean actor as the story of the theater as he has known it; J. B. Priestley's Rain upon Godshill, continuing his Midnight on the Desert (1937); or Sir George Compton Arthur Archer's 'memoirs of an English soldier,' Not Worth Reading. Havelock Ellis, who will be long remembered for his monumental Studies in the Psychology of Sex, died this year, having before his death completed a history of himself. My Life was a frank narrative, concerned in large part with the story of his tempestuous relations with his wife. Not strictly classifiable as autobiography, and yet too personal and impressionistic an account to be taken as a conventional book of travel, was the story told by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood of their trip to China, Journey to a War.

Political Writings.

The future historian of our times will be enlightened if he is not overwhelmed, by the mass of documents which political leaders and journalists are preparing for his examination. The two-volume Memoirs of the Peace Conference by David Lloyd George appeared this year, an account by the only surviving member of those who manipulated the destinies of nations in 1918, of what transpired at Versailles. Actual documents of the conference were here, but they did not obscure the nature of the work as special pleading in the author's own defense. Neville Chamberlain's chief speeches on foreign affairs from May 1937 to April 1939 were published in a collection bearing the ironically tragic title, In Search of Peace. Brief articles on domestic and foreign affairs written by Winston Churchill between 1936 and 1939 came out in Step by Step, and speeches by Anthony Eden from 1924 to 1938, in a volume called Foreign Affairs. There was also The British War Blue Book which contained, among other important documents relative to England's position in the present war, Sir Nevile Henderson's reports of his interviews with Ribbentrop and Hitler. Liddell Hart's In Defense of Britain, written before the outbreak of the war, recommended a policy of 'defense by defense,' on the principle that in event of conflict only through a war of sporadic battles had modern civilization a chance to survive. In Security: Can We Retrieve It? Sir James Arthur Salter analysed the political and economic reasons that have brought Europe to its present pass and attempted to sketch a 'constructive policy for a new foundation of peace' based on his belief in the power of organized military and economic planning. One of the most eloquent condemnations of the Munich settlement was Betrayal in Central Europe by the eminent journalist G. E. R. Gedye, a harrowing eyewitness account of the Nazi conquest of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Another such condemnation was Lost Liberty? by Joan and Jonathan Griffin, two English people who chancing to be in Prague during the summer and autumn of 1938, obtained access to important official documents. In Survey after Munich Graham Hutton, one of the editors of 'The London Economist' dealt with the likely consequences, rather than the causes, of the Munich agreement, concluding that despite Germany's new gained strength, France and England would remain unconquered. Philip Guedalla's The Hundredth Year was an episodic history of 1936, done in the vein of his The Hundred Years, largely through sketches of important personalities.

Harold Nicolson, who resigned from the Foreign Affairs Committee in protest against Chamberlain's policy at Munich, wrote a compact history of the officially prescribed methods of international relations, Diplomacy. An interesting experiment in discovering and reporting public opinion was Britain by Mass-Observation, a valuable record, as gathered by impartial observers, of what people of all classes were thinking on a variety of current topics. There was a final despairing criticism of modern civilization by H. G. Wells. In The Fate of Man he gave over as hopeless even his cherished idea of the World Brain, and concluded that man was 'being carried less and less intelligently and more and more rapidly along the stream of fate to degradation, suffering, and death.'

History and Philosophy.

A sketch of the year's literary output would not be complete without mention of several important works of history and philosophy. The second volume of the History of the London Times, covering the period from the 1840's through the 1880's was issued. (The first volume had appeared in 1935.) Sir Bernard Pares published a story of the Russian Revolution, the title of which, The Fall of the Russian Monarch, was indicative of its sympathy and angle of approach. The British Common People 1746-1938 by George Cole and R. M. Postgate was a very thorough history of the English working class. The problem that continued to preoccupy English philosophers was that of the relation of science and society. An important contribution to the discussion was J. D. Bernal's The Social Function of Science which without claiming that science had power to change the world was an argument for what it could do in a changed world. J. B. S. Haldane's The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences was an explanation of the Marxist position with reference to science, an analysis of the application to the sciences of dialectical materialism; and Professor Hyman Levy's Modern Science was, to quote the summary of one of his reviewers: 'a closely reasoned seven hundred page manifesto proclaiming the essential unity between scientific ideas, technical discoveries and social development.'

IRELAND

The literary event of the year was the publication of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Seventeen years had gone into the composition of it, and parts had already appeared as Work in Progress. In its completed form it aroused much discussion. A longer and more difficult book than Ulysses, it was an attempt to recreate directly the experience of sleep and dreaming. For this purpose Joyce evolved an extremely complex symbolism, a rich, involved language that compounded English with foreign tongues. Whether it was a work of mere ingenuity, or of profundity, or of sheer madness, was a question among critics; but all were obliged to concede that it contained passages of extraordinary lyric beauty.

Oliver St. John Gogarty, whose volume of reminiscences As I Was Walking Down Sackville Street came out a few years ago, published another book of autobiographic recollections, Tumbling in the Hay. It told, with the vividness and careless, robust humour characteristic of him, of his days as a medical student in Dublin some thirty years ago. The author of Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie, etc., Sean O'Casey, published the touching story of his early boyhood in a Dublin slum, I Knock at the Door. The Green Fool, the autobiography of the peasant poet, the 'Irish Jesse Stuart,' written in the dialect of his country, had none of the social implications which the world has learned to expect from Irish writers. Nor was the volume of anecdotal reminiscence by Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall, Seventy Years Young, as profound a picture of the country as might have come from one who was acquainted with 'every one who touched Ireland from Edward VII to Michael Collins' and whose husband's estate was one of the oldest in Ireland. Sons of the Sword Maker by Maurice Walsh was a historical romance, based partly on Gaelic Saga, of Ireland at the time of the Emperor Augustus. Myrtle Johnston's The Rising was a picture of Ireland during the American Civil War. In Red Sky at Dawn Philip Rooney told a simple tale of love and adventure in the nineteenth century. And Call My Brother Back was a quiet autobiographical novel by Michael McLaverty of a family in the north of Ireland. The Fountain of Magic was a collection of poems, translated from the Irish by Frank O'Connor, the selection having been made by William Butler Yeats.

CANADA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND

Among works from Canada must be mentioned the important volume of memoirs, Robert Laird Borden; His Memoirs, by the Canadian Prime Minister during the first World War. There was also a study of Anglo-American relations, Lionel M. Gelber's The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship; and an analysis of the literature of French Canada, Ian Forbes Fraser's The Spirit of French Canada, A Study of the Literature. Ted Allan's This Time a Better Earth was an autobiographical novel by a young Canadian journalist, telling the story of six comrades who had joined the International Brigade in Spain. A daring Australian journalist, Janet Mitchell, gave a record of her adventures in various parts of the world in Spoils of Opportunity. From New Zealand came Eileen May Duggan's Poems, with an introduction by Walter de la Mare, a volume which received much praise from critics.

GERMANY

Hitler's Mein Kampf was published this year for the first time in an unabridged English translation. The version that had been known hitherto was the bowdlerized one of 1933. Now for the first time English speaking people could study the political theory with the practical application of which they have become all too familiar in the last few years. The strident, rhapsodic book gave lasting form to the individualistic, nationalistic, anti-materialist, anti-rational attitude on which the National Socialist system operated. It was pointed out in an analysis by Max Lerner, who called Hitler 'the Edward Lear of political thinking' that just as the strength of Lear's absurdities rested on non-sequiturs, so the importance of Hitler's theorizing depended on the terrible power of the irrational.

Nearly all the other books that came from Germany were more or less direct reflections of the policies announced in the Fuehrer's autobiography. Outstanding among these was The Revolution of Nihilism by Hermann Rauschning, a former leader of the National Socialist movement and one time president of the Danzig senate who resigned from both the party and the presidency in 1935. The book was written in 1938, but not translated into English until the following year. It traced the history of the Nazi movement from its inception and predicted both the conquest of Czechoslovakia and the Russo-German alliance. For the future, Herr Rauschning prophesied that 'the new National Socialist social order will consist of . . . blind obedience to an absolute despotism . . . a progressive economic destruction of the middle classes, and the all-pervading atmosphere of barracks and prison . . . desolation, impoverishment, regimentation, and the collapse of civilized existence.' Rauschning's analysis confirmed that of Peter D. Drucker, a former Viennese editor, now in America, whose The End of Economic Man was a philosophic explanation of the rise of National Socialism, an attempt to account for the mass movement toward fascism. It went farther back in history than Rauschning's book and differed from it in its emphasis on fascist success as evidence of the failure of both socialism and capitalism to create a satisfactory life for the great masses of men. A. C. Grezinski, one of the organizers of the Weimar Republic, in Inside Germany gave an account of the fall of the German republic and of the events leading up to the rise of Hitler. Norbert Muhlen's Schacht: Hitler's Magician, was a hostile picture of the financial wizard which emphasized the shrewdness and rapacity of his dealings, but was not so much his biography as an analysis of the economic conditions of the Third Reich.

Personal accounts of European horrors continued to flow in their tragic stream. There was Konrad Heiden's The New Inquisition, one of the most graphic and painful records of the Nazis' repressive measures against the Jews. There was the minute, partly fictionalized story of Austria's last three years, Showdown in Vienna by Martin Fuchs, who had been one of Schuschnigg's personal aides. Erika and Klaus Mann gave in Escape to Life a series of pen portraits of notable artists and intellectuals exiled from Germany, among them the scientist Einstein, the musicians Busch and Serkin, and their own father Thomas Mann. I Was in Prison, a collection of suppressed letters by German pastors in Nazi prisons was also published. And there was an interesting, but not wholly authoritative account of anti-Nazi underground movements in Germany, Men against Hitler by Fritz Max Cahen, a journalist who has been in opposition to Hitler since 1932. Hans Habe's Three over the Frontier was a story of three German exiles wandering about Europe in search of safety.

Two books of memoirs deserve mention: Autobiography of a German Rebel, the straightforward, unadorned journal of Toni Sender, who now lives in the United States but was once a member of the Reichstag and one of the leaders of the Weimar Republic; and My Life and History, the personal story of Berta Szeps, sister-in-law of Clemenceau, daughter of a famous liberal newspaper editor of Vienna, who having known people close to the center of European events from the 1880's to 1938, had unusual opportunity to observe the political scene. In her book she included not only many of her own letters and excerpts from her diary but also material given her by her father and her friends.

Posthumously translated were two novels by a remarkable young German author. Odon von Horvath, self-exiled to Paris, was killed in 1938 in an untoward accident, crushed by a falling tree in the Champs Élysées. He was known abroad as a writer of great promise and already fine accomplishment. The Age of the Fish and A Child of Our Time were both of them tragic fantasies which in the guise of simple, realistic stories, Dostoierskian in their intensity, were forceful criticisms of our times and bitter analyses of Nazi philosophy. The former, a story of a German schoolmaster, pointed by implication the lesson that 'the souls of men' in the modern world were becoming 'as rigid as the face of a fish'; the latter, about a soldier obliged to take part in the invasion of a defenseless country, gave its central meaning in the following words: 'Your children will tell you that this soldier was a common murderer — but don't revile him. Just think, how could he help himself? He was a child of his time.'

An early novel of Thomas Mann, first published in Germany in 1905, Royal Highness, came out this year in a new translation, with a preface by its author. An allegory of deeper meanings than its humorous, fantastic, simple story might superficially indicate, it was an early statement — and one of which Thomas Mann has declared himself to be especially fond — of the humanistic, democratic principles developed in his later works.

Of other novels translated from the German should be mentioned Heinrich Mann's Henry: King of France, a sequel to his Young Henry of Navarre, a thorough, well documented work, more history than fiction; Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, the first full length novel by the well known biographer, a 'psychological' tale, the theme of which was the futile tragedy of personal sacrifice; Emil Ludwig's Quartet, a soulful story of a small group of secluded intellectuals in Switzerland. There was also a first novel of unusual merit, Five Destinies, by a German refugee in London, writing under the assumed name of Anna Reiner; it was about life in Germany since 1920. The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler, expatriate German journalist, was ostensibly a historical novel of the gladiators' war which Spartacus had led in 72 bc, but the story held sharp implications for modern Germany. Herman Kesten's Children of Guernica was a tale of the Spanish war, told as if by one who had come from it to a German refugee in Paris.

Two plays by Ernst Toller, the tragic, forceful author of Man and the Masses, who committed suicide in New York in the summer of 1939, were translated by Stephen Spender and Hugh Hunt. They were Pastor Hall and Blind Man's Buff, the first, a play about the persecution by the Nazis of a Protestant minister, based on the Niemoller case; the other, concerning a murder trial. Also translated by Stephen Spender, in collaboration with J. B. Leishmann, were Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, published with both the German and the English texts and with explanatory notes. Walter Riezler's biography, Beethoven, contained detailed interpretations of some of the composer's greatest works. Ludwig Marcuse's Soldier of the Church was a fictionalized account of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The list of important German writers and thinkers is beginning to sound like a necrology: Rilke, von Horvath, Toller are dead. So is the great Viennese psychologist, Sigmund Freud. He died this year in London, having completed there in exile a study which, started some years earlier, had been laid aside in the hostile environment of his own home. A psychoanalytic, anthropological analysis of anti-Semitism, Moses and Monotheism was based on the hypothesis that the founder of the Jewish religion was not a Jew at all but an Egyptian. The scientific accuracy of its argument has been questioned but however fanciful it may be, this final work of a great thinker must remain, at the very least, a provocative example of his speculative, revolutionary intelligence. The last work of Freud's former disciple and later rival, Alfred Adler was also published this year, Social Interest, a final restatement of the theory of Individual Psychology.

FRANCE

An omnibus volume, The Thibaults, containing the first six parts of Roger Martin du Gard's monumental novel of a middle-class French family before 1914, was published in 1939, the first two parts in a new translation, which does not yet complete the English version of the work. Another volume, Verdun, was added to Jules Romains' Men of Good Will, bringing his roman fleuve down to the period of the Great War. For the rest, French novels seemed to indicate an extraordinarily marked tendency to rural retreat. Two years ago Jean Giono's The Song of the World was translated. This year came a story that had been written earlier, The Harvest, a simple idyll of French peasantry. The same effort to capture something of permanent value in a shifting world was apparent in Raymonde Vincent's quiet novel of country people, Born of Woman, and in Claire Sainte-Soline's Mountain Top, the tale of a business man's escape to Nature from the life of industry and finance. But the French book which in English translation gained greatest popularity was one of a very different philosophy from these having more in common with the school of Unanimisme than with that of escape to the country. Several years ago the translation of Night Flight had won its author, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, an admiring audience. This year he published another book about the craft he knows and loves, Wind, Sand, and Stars, noteworthy not only as an addition to the growing literature of flying but for its admiring sense of the deep human value in the comradeship of men working together. Of interest to the student of French literature was the translation of Leon Bloy's The Woman Who Was Poor. This book first appeared in 1897 and although, by common consent not a good novel, it has historic value as the work of an important member of the group of late romanticists. Speeches delivered by Premier Daladier 1938-39 were collected in a volume called In Defense of France.

SCANDINAVIA

To be noted especially in the year's work from the countries of Northern Europe was a novel by Unto Seppänen, Sun and Storm, a remarkable chronicle of Finnish peasantry from the late nineteenth century to about 1920. On Oct. 15 Stanley Young wrote of it in words that now have an ominous ring: 'If Finland vanishes to-morrow, Sibelius and Seppänen will have made her monument.' The Norwegian author Gosta af Geijerstam, known for his Northern Summer and Storevik, published a novel, Iva, which unlike his earlier work was a tragic story of a man's defeat. Alexander Brinchmann's The Rich Man was the tale of an industrialist who, dissatisfied with his wealth, seeks happiness in poverty. And The Long Dream by Sigrid Boo was a slow-paced psychological study of a woman, written with an eye to the romantic requirements of the screen. Sigrid Undset published a book of essays, composed over a period of years, on a variety of subjects, Men, Women, and Places. There was a workmanlike biography of Edvard Grieg by David Monrad-Johansen, and one of Rölvaag by Theodore Jorgensen and Nora O. Solum. From Denmark came a humorous, modernized, symbolic version of the Jonah legend, Reluctant Prophet, by Harold Tandrup. Joachim Joesten's Rats in the Larder was an account of the influence of Nazis in Denmark. A volume of selections from Sren Kierkegaard's Journals, edited and translated by Alexander Dru, inaugurated a definitive translation of his works, another one of which, Fear and Trembling, 'a dialectical lyric,' was also translated this year by Robert Payne. There was a mystical story of a peasant girl, The Crown, by the Swedish author Fru Elisabeth Paulsen. And the famous Arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson published two books: one, a historical account of Iceland and a study of it as it is at present, Iceland, the First American Republic; the other, Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic, an analysis of five unexplained cases of lost explorers.

RUSSIA

Another account of the Arctic was that by the Russian explorer Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, the diary of men stranded for a winter on an ice floe, Life on an Ice Floe. A Book of Short Stories by Maxim Gorki was a collection of fifteen stories by the illustrious Russian author. They were translated by several men and published with a short introduction by Aldous Huxley. Six of them now appeared in English for the first time; and the whole series, chronologically arranged, spanning the years from 1894 to 1924, could be taken as a record of the progress of Gorki's convictions from a vague humanism to socialism. Posthumously published was an unfinished historical novel of the Russian Revolution, Born of the Storm, by Nikolai Alekseevitch Ostrovski, author of The Making of a Hero (1937). A new translation of Chekhov's The Sea Gull by Stark Young appeared with an essay by the translator. The memoirs of Vladimir Iosifovich Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past, covered the years from 1894 to 1917, a record of the reign of Nicholas II by a member of Russia's ruling class before the War. Stalin by Boris Souvarine was a biography of the Russian dictator by one who had been a member of the Executive of the Communist International. It came out in English translation only this year, although it had first appeared in France several years ago. Speeches by Maksim Litvinov and other documents concerning the relations of Russia with other countries were collected in a volume entitled Against Aggression.

OTHER COUNTRIES

Two books about contemporary wars aroused considerable interest. One came from Spain, the other from Japan. In Place of Splendor by Constancia de la Mora, daughter of a great Spanish statesman and herself head of the Loyalist Foreign Press Bureau during the Civil War, was an authoritative, personal, simple, horrifying account of the war. Equally simple and very moving was the Japanese best seller Wheat and Soldiers. Purporting to be the diary of an infantry corporal fighting in China, Ashihei Hino, it was actually the work of Katsumori Tamui, one of Japan's most popular and brilliant authors. Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca was a selection from the work of the young Spanish poet killed in 1936, translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. Nineteen stories of the two hundred written by the famous Italian author Luigi Pirandello were collected this year, Medals. Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade was a narrative of the Italian campaign in the Alps in 1916-1917 by the author of Road to Exile (1936). Ignazio Silone's The School for Dictators was a lucid, satiric analysis of dictatorship, done in the form of dialogues by the author of Bread and Wine. There was a nostalgic idyll of peasant life, Jean Clarambaux, by a little known Belgian novelist, Oliver Degée, writing under the pseudonym Jean Tousseul. Vincent Van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard was a collection dating from the artist's most creative period at Arles from 1887 to 1889. A Hungarian journalist, writing in English, Tibor Koeves, published a volume of casual essays on travel, Time-table for Tramps. Jolan Földes, author of The Street of the Fishing Cat, wrote another novel about a European colony abroad, Egyptian Interlude. The Swiss journalist Gretede Francesco's The Power of the Charlatan was a history of quacks and of the social conditions that have made quackery possible. The former President of Czechoslovakia, Eduard Benes, traced the growth of democracy and the development of the totalitarian states in a book based on lectures delivered by him at the University of Chicago, Democracy To-day and To-morrow. Arthur Waley annotated in a scholarly way The Analects of Confucius.