Fiction in the Herald Tribune Book Review

New Orleans-based writer Harnett T. Kane wrote the review of Eudora Welty’s first full-length novel, DELTA WEDDING, the big fiction release of the week. Kane was the author of Plantation Parade, Deep Delta Country, and Louisiana Hayride.

Welty, Kane wrote “has created something vividly original, sui generis” in Delta Wedding. He anticipated the complaint that would be voiced by some ideologue reviewers. “Unlike many of her contemporaries—and some will hold this up as a lack—Miss Welty shows little direct concern with the broader aspects of the South, or her part of it.” That is she offered no dissection or condemnation of the Bilbos and Rankins, two Mississippi racist politicians held in extreme contempt by Northern liberals, or of the political culture that gave rise to them. “This is a social picture of another kind,” Kane wrote, focused instead on the “day-to-day interaction of a small group” repeating the same events through the different perspective of the various characters.

The story takes place in the Twenties and was a “friendly appreciative picture.” Welty “works for the most part in a kindly mood of nostalgia and happy evocation of human values” without the savage irony or biting comments that had been evident in some of the short stories that had won her acclaim. She was a “magnificent observer’ with an “eye for gestures.”

Kane concluded that for all its virtues Delta Wedding would not please all readers. The story moved slowly and sometimes was too subtle or obscure. It provided little background on the characters it depicted. In print today.

See here for what The New York Times Book Review and other critics had to say.

MOON IN THE RIVER by Jim Phelan. Weird goings on and lingering pagan rituals in a small, isolated British village where the residents live in fear of someone or something they called Horny. Reviewer Thomas Sugrue called it "a fascinating story of diabolism and rural simplicity." Sugrue was himself represented on the Bestseller List with an "as told to," Starling of the White House. Moon in the River sounds like the kind of horror book that would be a bestseller in today's market

Albert Camus was attracting a lot of press attention this week. He had come to New York at the end of March to do interviews for the first publication in English of one of his works, the novel THE STRANGER, and to discuss possible Broadway production of his play "Caligula."

THE BITTER BOX by Eleanor Clark was reviewed by Rose Feld,

France and the US were reestablishing contact after the long wartime separation. The wife of the president of the provisional government of France and Leon Blum, who had served as prime minister before the war, were on goodwill missions to New York. Katherine Cornell was starring on Broadway in an English-language version of Jean Anouilh's "Antigone," which had electrified audiences in Nazi-occupied Paris. Meanwhile the French were devouring the American crime movies which their critics would dub "Film noir" this year.

The New York intelligentsia were attempting to digest Existentialism, the philosophical movement that had swept over their Parisian counterparts during the Nazi occupation and was newly arrived in the US. Even the Sunday News, whose readers were not for the mostpart among the literary elite, had interviewed Camus. In his interviews, Camus avowed that he was not actually an Existentialist: while he accepted the premise of the absurdity of existence and the futility of resistance, he also insisted that resistance was necessary.

who often reviewed for both the Herald Tribune and The Times and also contributed to magazines like The New Yorker. “There is small doubt that Eleanor Clark….will be hailed as a ‘find’ in the literary world,” Feld wrote. “Her writing has an almost polished beauty, a poetic absorption with the inner meaning of the outward symbol.” However, Feld added, “the book as a whole leaves one strangely restless and baffled.” The novel was the story of a drab bank teller who finds excitement by becoming involved with “a shoddy, small revolutionary group.” Clark “surrounds him with a host of bizarre characters,” according to Feld.

The Herald Tribune Book Review assigned the review of The Stranger to Justin O'Brien, head of the French Literature department at Columbia. O'Brien was instrumental in introducing the writing of contemporary French writers to American audiences and later was himself a Camus translator. In his review, he drew heavily on Camus' essays, not yet available in English, particularly one Camus had written on Kafka. O'Brien saw some similarities in Camus' writing with Kafka and also noted echoes of Steinbeck and Faulkner, two American writers popular in France.

Camus was, O’Brien wrote, “almost completely unknown in America” and only recently familiar to French audiences after the publication “in rapid succession” during the early years of the German occupation of “his first novel, a philosophical essay on the problem of suicide and the philosophy of existentialism, and his first two plays.” The Germans apparently found his writings harmless. However at the same time he was editing an underground Resistance newspaper “Combat” under a pseudonym. In April 1946 he was 33. O’Brien saw him as a spokesperson “for the French youth who survived that anguished epoch.”

Unlike The New Yorker’s Edmund Wilson, the dean of literary critics at the time, who liked The Stranger well enough but failed to see what all the fuss was about, O’Brien believed that Camus was an emerging major new voice who would appeal to those who liked Kafka, Dostoevsky, Gide and Malraux. Camus wrote with “an assurance, a mastery that are apparent in the excellent translation by Stuart Gilbert” and had "set himself among the moralists who discourse, for our edification, upon our most fundamental problems.” In print.

HIS DAYS ARE AS GRASS by Charles Mergendahl. The uneventful life of a 23 year-old corporal who fights and dies at Tarawa, reviewed by Richard Match. Book critics wondered where all the major novels about the war were at this point. This was a slight story from a veteran of Tarawa. Mergendahl later wrote a number of potboilers including The Bramble Bush.

BRUTUS WAS AN HONORABLE MAN by Walter Marquiss. A shadowy, ex-priest who knows a dark secret shared by the two powerful men who control a town over four decades intercedes to thwart their most destructive schemes. Reviewed by James Gray who called it "a racy parable of Middle Western life" and an "expertly dramatized, fully documented editorial" about the need to maintain vigilance against the rich and powerful. However he found the plot overly melodramatic. Marquiss was a prolific writer of short stories for the pulps.

GOODBYE SON AND OTHER STORIES by poet and novelist Janet Lewis was a collection of short stories. The title story, a novelette, was a supernatural tale about a woman whose only son dies at birth but reappears just before tragedies when others who were born at the same time are killed. The reviewer, poet Louise Townsend Nicholl wrote that the title story "would live for a long time in anthologies." Lewis was married to prominent literary critic and novelist Yvor Winters. The book is in print.