The books that have appeared this year, whether they deal with factual events or with experiences of mind and feeling, are for the most part documents of war. And even among those that seem remote from war there are many which are conscious escapes from it or rapid summings up of familiar things that war has altered. There are the active words of generals and statesmen; accounts and analyses of conflict and reconstruction by scholars, artists, journalists; simple records of disaster by ordinary men who had never thought of writing for the public; reminiscences of peaceful years; fictional narratives based on fighting and its results.
ENGLAND
Most important of the publications by leading men is, without doubt, Blood, Sweat and Tears, speeches delivered by Winston Churchill between May 1938 and February 1941. There are also collections of addresses by Lord Halifax between Feb. 6, 1934 and Feb. 27, 1940, Speeches on Foreign Policy, and one of excerpts from those of Ernest Bevin, The Balance Sheet of the Future. Sir Archibald Wavell's Generals and Generalship contains three lectures delivered two years ago at Trinity College, Cambridge; and his admiring biography, Allenby: a Study in Greatness, is another analysis by the renowned commander of qualities demanded of military leaders.
A number of outstanding men in the British Labour Party are represented in Labour's Aims in War and Peace, edited by C. R. Attlee. Francis Williams, former editor of the London Daily Herald, has published two books, Democracy's Battle and War by Revolution, concerning the rise of dictatorships and means of coping with them. The second volume of Professor W. K. Hancock's Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, dealing with problems of economic policy from 1918 to 1939, has appeared. J. B. Priestley's Out of the People is a lecture about the political and social reconstruction which England faces; Julian Huxley's radio talks, Democracy Marches, are on the same subject, and his Man Stands Alone is a collection of essays 'towards some new formulation of our basic beliefs and attitudes.' The English Are Like That is an analysis of his compatriots by Philip Carr. This War We Wage by Herbert Morrison, Howard Spring, and E. M. Delafield, England Speaks, a symposium by eight well known writers, John Strachey's A Faith to Fight For, and David Thomson's The Democratic Ideal in France and England, are all discussions of the principles for which England fights.
Among personal narratives of England at war are John Strachey's direct account of his experiences as air raid warden, Digging for Mrs. Miller; Vera Brittain's journalistic, patriotic England's Hour; Phyllis Bottome's detailed description of London and Liverpool under bombardment, Mansion House of Liberty; Margaret Kennedy's journal from May to September 1940, Where Stands a Winged Sentry; Margery Allingham's narrative of life in a small English village during the first year and a half of war, The Oaken Heart; and Their Finest Hour, a collection of first hand stories gathered and edited by two American newspaper men, Allan Michie and Walter Graebner. There is a picture of Provence at the outbreak of the war and of a village in Sussex after the capitulation in Lady Winifred Fortescue's Trampled Lilies, and a personal record by an English aviator of air war over France, Paul M. Richey's Fighter Pilot. There are records of Dunkirk: a compilation by Douglas Williams, war correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, of ten accounts by British soldiers who took part in the evacuation, Retreat from Dunkirk; and John Masefield's simple, graphic little book of sixty pages, The Nine Days Wonder, with five heroic lyrics in memory of the event. And there is a day by day account of twenty days after the break-through at Sedan, The Road to Bordeaux, by two English volunteers in the French army, C. D. Freeman and Douglas Cooper. The chief interest of Somerset Maugham's record of the war, Strictly Personal, is its analysis of French morale at the time of the downfall. Several collections of letters from Britain have been published, among which: Women of Britain, from British women between August 1939 and January 1941, assembled by Jan Struther; War Letters from Britain, edited by Mrs. Vincent Sheean (Diana Forbes-Robertson); and London Front, edited by Mr. and Mrs. H. M. Harwood. In Invasion in the Snow; a Study of Mechanized War by John Langdon-Davies we have an analysis of the Finnish war by an English correspondent. Rebecca West's 'magnum opus,' Black Lamb and Grey Falcon stands to rank as the most impressive book of the year. It is a travel diary of a trip to Yugoslavia in 1937 which, however, purports to be much more than that: 'an analysis of our culture, the world of ideas and emotions in which we live,' a kind of allegory of the whole of modern civilization. A pleasant book about sheep-farming in Wales, Thomas Firbank's I Bought a Mountain, seems to belong to another world or another age.
Of novels about the war, the long serious one by Eric Knight, This Above All, and Jane Nicholson's story of domestic life in London during August and September 1940, Shelter, attracted most attention. Storm Jameson's short novel, The Fort, attempts to concentrate in a conversation between French and English soldiers and a German captive the national psychologies involved in both Great Wars. Robert Greenwood's Mr. Bunting in Peace and War pictures the average 'little man' of England in war-time. Of fiction that does not deal with the war, we have notably Virginia Woolf's posthumous Between the Acts; Elizabeth Bowen's collection of short stories Look at all those Roses; Hugh Walpole's posthumous novel, Blind Man's House; Charles Morgan's The Empty Room, an allegorical reassertion of life and love against a background of war; John Buchan's last romance, Mountain Meadow; Compton Mackenzie's West to North, fourth installment in his The Four Winds of Love; and Phyllis Bentley's Manhold, which continues her fictionalized history of Yorkshire. The popular author of The Citadel, A. J. Cronin, has produced another melodramatic but well-written novel of facile moral teaching, The Keys of the Kingdom; and the equally popular James Hilton has added to Lost Horizon and Good-bye, Mr. Chips another sentimental, genial, and skillful story, Random Harvest. C. Day-Lewis has written a gruesome detective tale, The Corpse in the Snowman; Evan John Simpson, a historical novel about Marie Antoinette, King's Masque, not so good as his Crippled Splendor; J. C. Powys a two volume romance of Wales in the fifteenth century, Owen Glendower; and John Masefield a brief tale of rebellion in Byzantium in 532, Conquer.
More important than fiction has been the poetry of the year, for apart from certain volumes of traditional verse — collections of poems by Alice Meynell, Hilaire Belloc, Walter de la Mare, and others — there have been two or three publications of authentic and significant new poetry: W. H. Auden's The Double Man, brilliant in statement of the day's philosophic perplexities; Plant and Phantom by Louis MacNeice, undemonstrative and exquisitely pure; and the bitter, clever, passionate Selected Poems by George Barker.
The biographies and autobiographies have a strangely remote flavor, apart from one or two, such as Viscount E.A.R. Cecil's story of his life, A Great Experiment, which deals mostly with the League of Nations, and Sir George Compton's Concerning W. S. Churchill. John Masefield has written of his work in a mill in Yonkers, N. Y., over forty-five years ago, In the Mill; Aldous Huxley has given in Grey Eminence a portrait of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's invaluable aide and collaborator; and the autobiographies of Ernest Rhys, Wales England Wed, of Lady Winifred Fortescue, There's rosemary ... there's rue; of Richard Aldington, Life for Life's Sake, all have the air of period pieces.
Among critical essays should be mentioned The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, a simple, discriminating study by Louis MacNeice; and of scholarly publications, the inauguration of a Cambridge Economic History of Europe.
FRANCE
Analyses by the French of their country's débâcle have been numerous, the most significant being probably Jacques Maritain's factual, closely reasoned A Travers le Désastre. Very valuable also are Robert de Saint Jean's Démocratie, Beurre et Canons, an interpretation by 'the average educated French bourgeois,' especially noteworthy for its portrait of Paul Reynaud, with whom the author was in close collaboration; and the merciless Pierre Laval by the famous French attorney Henry Torrès. Translation at this time of General Charles de Gaulle's The Army of the Future, originally published in 1934 when its author was captain at St. Cyr, seems tragically ironic, as does also the admiring biography of her brother, André Maginot, Mme. Marguerite Joseph's He Might Have Saved France. Men of Europe is a dramatic, gossipy, behind-the-scenes account of events in Europe in the last two decades by a journalist who writes under the name of André Simone. They Speak for a Nation is a collection of excerpts, edited by Eve Curie, from letters by French men and women to friends in England and America; and All Gaul is Divided is another such collection, containing some sixteen letters from a French family living in the occupied zone.
Four French novels have been translated into English this year: Roger Martin du Gard's continuation of The Thibaults, Summer 1914; Jules Romains' Aftermath, the seventeenth and eighteenth volumes in the French edition of his Men of Good Will; Louis Aragon's long novel of French life from 1889 to the first World War, The Century Was Young; and the slight thing by Henri Troyat, Judith Madrier, which uses the present war as a backdrop for a story of amorous intrigues. There is a book, not yet translated, of literary studies of André Maurois, Études littéraires, with essays on Paul Valéry, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Claudel, and Charles Peguy. An analysis of dictatorship, written over a hundred years ago, has been translated, Benjamin Constant's Prophecy from the Past: On Conquest and Usurpation.
GERMANY
An edition of Hitler's utterances has appeared as a sequel to Mein Kampf. This important collection, My New Order, edited with commentary by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, is chronologically arranged with a list of important events that give the background for each speech. The collection extends from an address on March 7, 1918, to workers organized to form a 'Labor Committee for a Good Peace' to the proclamation on June 22, 1941, announcing the invasion of Russia. Gottfried Leske's I Was a Nazi Flier is a further revelation of Nazi mentality, the diary of a young German airman who took part in the bombing of Belgium, Holland, France, and England. Alfred von Wegerer's The Origins of World War II, based on official documents, attempts to prove, as did the author's previous books about World War I, Germany's innocence in these conflicts.
Hermann Rauschning, author of The Revolution of Nihilism, has given a further analysis of National Socialism in The Redemption of Democracy; and in The Conservative Revolution has attempted to explain why he and his friends had first accepted Hitler, thinking for three years that they might be able to use him for their own liberal ends. A similar account, Fritz Thyssen's I Paid Hitler, is of the part played by German business men in Hitler's rise to power. Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State is an independent analysis of Nazi dictatorship, a study of Nazi law by a labor lawyer who had practised in Berlin before Hitler and, although anti-Nazi, stayed there until 1938. Sebastian Haffner's Germany: Jekyll and Hyde is a study by a young German emigré of 'the habits of mind that have dominated the German Reich from Bismarck to Hitler.' The author's theory is that because Germans lack the political sense to control a large state, they should, after the defeat of Nazism, return to the small states system of 1866. Emil Ludwig's The Germans is an attempt to explain German character through a historical résumé of 2,000 years. Similar attempts have been made through compilations of German works, such as Will Schaber's Thinker vs. Junker, a 'collection of speeches, aphorisms, essays and letters written by the best of German minds from the reign of Frederick the Great to Nazism,' ending with Thomas Mann's Christmas message to the German people in 1940.
Among personal narratives of German refugees are O. Zarek's autobiography, Splendor and Shame; Renée Brand's Short Days Ago; the accounts in William Allen Neilson's collection, We Escaped, which contains stories also of fugitives of other nationalities; and The Spoil of Europe, an apparently authentic 'exposition of the Nazi technique in the political and economic conquest of Europe' by one who has had access to important documents and who writes under the name Thomas Reveille. Martin Gumpert's First Papers, with a preface by Thomas Mann, gives flattering impressions of America by a distinguished doctor who escaped from Nazi Germany five years ago. Lion Feuchtwanger's The Devil in France is an account of his experiences in concentration camps in France, and A. Reiner's The Coward Heart is a melodramatic novel of German exiles in Paris before the invasion. E. M. Remarque's new novel, Flotsam, tells of three German refugees obliged to flee from country to country in Europe.
The most distinguished German work of the year is a short novel by Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads, an allegory, based on an Indian fable. A book of poems by Rudolf Fuchs, who is well known for his translations of Czech poetry, Gedichte aus Reigate, has appeared in England in a limited edition of 150 copies. There is a new edition of Franz Kafka's The Castle, with a brief introduction by Thomas Mann, and A Franz Kafka Miscellany, which contains an autobiographic sketch, unpublished parts of The Castle, and extracts from Max Brod's biography of Kafka and from Kafka's Letter to my Father.
Alex Bein's Theodore Herzl is an able biography of the originator of the Zionist movement. Friedrich Engels' unfinished work on the philosophy of science from the Marxist standpoint, Dialects of Nature, has appeared in translation, as has also, for the first time, a classic of German religious philosophy, Herder's God, Some Conversations.
OTHER COUNTRIES
From what it is possible to gather, the literary output of all other countries has been so slight this year that is seems wiser to consider it as a whole instead of separately, according to nationalities.
There are, to begin with, important accounts of the German invasion: that of Czechoslovakia in Ten Million Prisoners by Vojta Beneš, elder brother of Eduard Beneš and once Senator in his country's Republic, written in collaboration with R. A. Ginsburg; of the Netherlands, in Juggernaut over Holland, an extraordinarily restrained account by the Dutch Foreign Minister, E. N. V. Kleffens; of Norway, by her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Halvdan Koht, Norway Neutral and Invaded, the most authoritative account to date of that phase of the war. We have also personal narratives of imprisonment and escape, among the best of which are those by two Hungarians: Hans Habe's A Thousand Shall Fall, and Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Koestler is already known for his unusual work on the Moscow Trials, Darkness at Noon.
There are several important works of history and on the theory of history. The 1911 one volume abridgment of Mikhail Sergeevich Grushevskü's standard A History of the Ukraine has been translated into English and brought up to date; Salvador de Madariaga, whose excellent Christopher Columbus appeared in 1940, has published a magnificent history of the conquest of Mexico, Hernan Cortes, Conqueror of Mexico; and Count Carlo Sforza, one time Foreign Minister of Italy, has written in Fifty Years of War and Diplomacy in the Balkans a story principally of Yugoslavia and of her remarkable peasant statesman, Nicholas Pashich. Professor Guglielmo Ferrero's The Reconstruction of Europe, the second volume in a trilogy on the Napoleonic Wars, deals with the post-war European situation of 1814 and 1815, pointing out analogies between that time and ours. Benedetto Croce, in History as the Story of Liberty, continues his previous work on the nature of historical thought; and Ortega y Gasset, in a collection of essays, Toward a Philosophy of History, ventures some novel theories concerning the origin of the State.
Outstanding among works of fiction is the Polish novel, Salt of the Earth, by Josef Wittlin. It is the story of the first World War, part of a trilogy, to be called The Saga of the Patient Foot-Soldier, which, although only now translated into English, has already appeared in nine other languages. Mikhail Sholohov has written another long novel of the Cossacks, The Don Flows Home to the Sea; from Sweden we have Harald Hornborg's Passion and the Sword, which won a prize as the best novel in Swedish by a Finnish author, and Vilhelm Moberg's The Earth Is Ours; and from Iceland, a simple, deeply pious story, The Good Shepherd, by Gunnar Gunnarsson. From Holland comes an able psychological novel, Willy Corsari's Man without Uniform. The Latin-American Prize Novel was Ciro Alegria's tale of a small village in the Peruvian mountains, Broad and Alien Is the World; and from China has come a translation of short stories, Ah Q, and Others, by the influential writer, Lusin, who died in 1936.
For the rest, the year has brought translations from two of the greatest modern Spanish authors: Truth of Two, poems by Pedro Salinas, and From Lorca's Theatre, five of Federico García Lorca's plays; a book of tributes from critics of many lands to Belgium's outstanding novelist, Témoignages sur Jean Tousseul, edited by J. P. Bonnami; a book about Switzerland, D. de Rougemont's and C. Muret's The Heart of Europe, 'neither history nor guide book,' but an attempt to describe how 'one people has managed to remain free and diverse yet united'; reminiscences by Mme. Pilsudska of her great husband, Pilsudski; a second book about China by Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek, China Shall Rise Again; an unusually entertaining travel book from Denmark, Hakon Mielche's Journey to the World's End; further translations from Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and Stages on Life's Way; and a new, American edition of Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiography, Toward Freedom.
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