Hanover Browsing
WILLIAM FAULKNER'S A Fable won the sixth annual National Book Award in fiction. I could not finish it. Better far as a work of art was Davis Grubb's Night of the Hunter, but how can the writer of a first novel compete with a Nobel Prize winner with the committee? He hasn't a prayer, though his book was under consideration. I have no quarrel whatever with the poetry award to Wallace Stevens, nor very much of a quarrel with the award to Joseph Wood Krutch for his important statement of the humanistic position in his The Measure ofMan. Though Paul Horgan's The GreatRiver certainly deserves some award.
Just for the record let me put down here the list of ten best novels ever written chosen by that excellent story teller, Somerset Maugham. These are: Fielding's Tom Jones, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Stendhal's Le Rouge et Noir, Balzac's Le Père Goriot, Dickens' DavidCopperfield, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Dostoevski's The Brothers Karamazov, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. In my choice I wouldn't think of leaving out Cervantes' DonQuixote, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Conrad's Nostromo, or Proust's Memories ofThings Past. I would be glad to publish, within reason, anybody's comments on his own ten best novels.
The most wonderful novel I can recall having read for many a moon is a translation from the French of Colette's The Vagabond. This is a truly superb work of art, and if you want to know how low our own fictional standards have fallen read this novel. Farrar, Straus & Young are the publishers. They have also published recently another translation from the French, Anne de Tourville's The Innocent Sailor, a sea story, unique and beautifully done.
I have greatly enjoyed Wallace Stegner's admirable Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, the story of John Wesley Powell and the second opening of the West. This book tells of Powell's dramatic achievement in leading the first expedition to descend the Green and Colorado Rivers through all their canyons, including the Grand. Powell may be called the Father of the American Geological Survey, but more important still he was about the first man to tell the whole truth about the West. The conservationists owe a lot to Mr. Powell. Mr. Stegner has told his story with authority.
Adrian Conan Doyle has issued a new selection of his father's Sherlock Holmes stories: A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes. This 686-page volume is a bargain at $2.95. It contains two novels and twenty-one short tales.
Just for the good of your own soul, and to orient yourself again about world politics, I suggest you look through David Low's cartoon history, 1931-1945, called Years of Wrath. You will be astonished how the Solons of our day are making the same mistakes made before; backing the wrong horses; being as short-sighted as ever. This book is published by Simon and Schuster.
Another book about Africa, but lacking the reportorial skill of Robert St. John, is Reginald Reynolds' Cairo to Cape Town (Doubleday). This trip covers six months, and the reader will learn something about present conditions in Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the Transvaal, Natal, and Cape Province. The author ends on a note of hope, not quite the same as in St. John's Malan's Africa. All I can say now is that if one is searching for hope, he may find it; if he is more objective, he may want a more realistic writer.
There are two books being written (one has been published) about George Orwell. The first by John Atkins, George Orwell, leaves something to be desired, as it is merely a book of exposition without much critical sense. Let's hope the second one will be better balanced.
More and more I find George Orwell one of the best writers of our time; especially his essays, which are superb. One good book of them is available, as I have said before, in Doubleday's Anchor books.
A revealing glimpse into the mind of a modern German may be found in Ernst von Salomon's book, Fragebogen (TheQuestionnaire). This is a depressing book, and gives strength to the French position that you can never trust or change a German. Salomon slides over all German crimes, and succeeds for many Germans in putting the entire blame on the United States.
