Spring Fiction Roundup

In addition to the novels deemed worthy of full-sized reviews, the Sunday-Herald Tribune included a roundup this week of the season's new fiction. Each book had a separate review several paragraphs long and most reviews were signed.

Among the more significant of the books under review was STATES OF GRACE by Francis Steegmuller. The novel was a satire about a recent seminary graduate who is sent to a unique Catholic parish in Egypt with a congregation made up of American expatriates and ruled over by the grand-dame sister of an American bishop. Reviewer Richard Match wrote "sharp-tongued, but lighthearted, his story bubbles with a kind of goat-like exuberance. The result reads like collaboration between Thorne Smith and James T. Farrell, if that seems possible." Smith was the writer of light, comic novels like the Topper series and Farrell wrote the gritty Studs Lonigan novels. Steegmuller was already known as a New Yorker contributor. He previously had written a number of critical studies, novels and mysteries under his own name and as Byron Steel and David Keith. The tall, elegant, urbane writer was one of a circle of friends who had attended Columbia University in the late 1920s and went on to notable careers, including literary critic Lionel Trilling, book editor and critic Clifton Fadiman, historian Jacques Barzun, art historian Meyer Schapiro, architect Richard Snow and historian Dwight Minor. Steegmuller, best known as a biographer, later in his career won the National Book Award.

Two books out of England threw their reviewers for a loop. Both have developed a cult following since. NIGHT AND THE CITY by Gerald Kersh was a hardboiled look at the London underworld considered by its fans as a classic of noir fiction. Reviewer Iris Barry described the protagonist as “a small human rat, a pimp who is also a blackmailer.” As for the book, she wrote, “This tale of London’s underworld, of the squalor and scum clinging to the fringes of the city’s amusement areas comes close to the absolute in sordid realism.” It was released in Great Britain in 1938 and has been filmed twice. Barry was film curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a Brit herself.

Reviewer Herbert Kupferberg seems to have been horrified by IN YOUTH IS PLEASURE by Denton Welch. It was about the inner life of a 15-year-old boy with a “vivid and erotic imagination” that made him seem to Kupferberg like a young Oscar Wilde. The other characters were “a rum lot.” The boy’s mother was dead and his father, who spent part of the year in the Far East, smoked opium. The boy did not get along with his two brothers, perhaps because they were older and “always seemed to be coming upon him when he was decorating himself with lipstick or chaining himself to a grass-roller to pretend he was a captive.” A sadistic schoolmaster invites the boy and his fellow students to spend their vacation with him at his cottage on the Thames and then submits them to humiliation. “It has a delicately wicked, most unpleasant flavor and a dream-like elusiveness,” Kupferberg wrote. In many respects the novel paralleled Welch's own adolescence. He later escaped the restrictions of British upper class life and went to art school but fractured his spine when his bicycle was struck by a car on a country road. Although he recovered, he was in constant pain and complications from the injury led to his death in 1948 at 33. In Youth Is Pleasure was published in England in 1943. The book remains in print with an intro by William Burroughs, who was one of his fans. Kupferberg, who was in his twenties at this time, primarily was a music critic and later was editor of the Sunday supplement Parade.

Another daring novel from Britain was THE SINGLE PILGRIM written by mystery writer Christianna Brand under the pen name Mary Roland. It was about a woman with syphilis, which was pretty much a taboo subject in popular fiction. The heroine, a proper young woman married to the handsome scion of a prominent family, goes into an "emotional tailspin" when she hears that her husband has been killed in the war. She gives in to the seduction of a "mad, bad and dangerous" young pilot and contracts syphilis. When her husband turns up alive she faces the dilemma of revealing her indiscretion and its consequence. Reviewer Rose Feld wrote that “while Miss Roland’s courage is impressive, her equipment as a craftsman is insufficient to carry the weight of her theme.”

Two notables were among the reviewers assigned critiques in the roundup. Mississippi newspaper editor Hodding Carter took on TRUMPET TO THE WORLD, about the travails of an African American soldier in a racist world. Carter won a Pulitzer later in 1946 for his editorials against intolerance in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. Nine years later he was censured by a vote of the Mississippi state legislature for his editorials against the racist White Citizens Council. At this point he was best known as the author of the novel Winds of Fear about racial violence. A Columbia Law School student recently returned from the service, William Kunstler, reviewed a historical potboiler, PROVING GROUND. Kunstler would become notorious for his legal defense of political radicals over the next few decades.

Trumpet to the World was by a 23-year-old war veteran, Mark Harris, from a Jewish family in Mount Vernon, New York. Carter, who condemned racist extremism, advocated gradual change in the South and defended his home region to the North. He wrote that "in the field of protest literature" this novel was “notable principally for its clear and restrained narration, with occasional didactic lapses, for its inversion of the non-sympathetic ‘Strange Fruit’ theme and for the absence of a single lynching.” Carter pointed out that despite its frequency in the literature and rhetoric of the time, there had been only three lynchings that he knew of in 1945. However, he did not know if Southern belles running off with their African American lovers was any more common. Inter-racial relationships was a daring subject of the time that had been tackled in the popular novel Strange Fruit, unsuccessfully adapted to the stage in 1946, and in the Broadway hit of the day“Deep Are the Roots,” that made Barbara Bel Geddes a star. Harris achieved success later in his career with a quartet of novels about baseball, including Bang the Drum Slowly. In print.

Proving Ground by Leone Lowden was about the conflict between Union supporters and Confederate sympathizers in southern Indiana during the Civil War. According to Kunstler, it mostly offered "melodrama and plenty of it." He wrote that “the reader will be amazed at the quantity of unusual happenings that can be crammed into a single volume.” Its chief value was that “in a field dominated by Southern subjects, it attempts to portray the less romantic perhaps but equally important story of the North.”

THE DEVIL IS LONELINESS by Elma K. Limbaugh was about life at a wartime defense plant in the Midwest. Reviewer Florence Haxton Bullock wrote that the heroine was "one of those girls from nowhere, going nowhere, who came out of poorly paid jobs or overcrowded homes to flock to the factories." She praised the author's portrayal of this milieu. “Pick any of the big war plants through whose gates hordes of women in heavy slacks, shirts and protective turbans came crowding to do a man’s work, and you have the mise en scene of Elma K. Lambaugh’s impressively realistic novel,” she wrote. However she felt that the author lost her way when she introduced characters from outside this world into the narrative.

WITH CRADLE AND CLOCK was an historical novel by Knud Stowman, a Danish-born epidemiologist whose previous novel L. Baxter Medicus had won the Booksellers Award. Like the earlier novel, his new book was set in colonial New York and had a medical theme. It had been designated a Harper's Find. His hero was a young doctor who arrives in New York in 1702 to help Dr. Baxter battle an outbreak of Yellow Fever and stays to do something about the appalling childbirth mortality rate in the city. The reviewer, Lisle Bell, had been profiled in Time in 1944 for his yeoman's work as a book critic. According to the magazine article, Bell had reviewed 17,000 books while also writing a newspaper column, ad copy, vaudeville skits and a few Mack Sennett comedies. He specialized in short reviews and roundups.

TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION by Helen Douglas Irvine was an historical romance set in Scotland in the 1840s. A prominent middle-aged lawyer married to a "practical, rather commonplace girl" encounters his former fiancée, a well-born, beautiful woman whom he had spurned in his youth. Poet and college professor Stephen Stepanchev found it "an engaging story" not overburdened by extraneous historical detail. Despite a "somewhat tedious beginning, cluttered with exposition" the story "develops with tremendous gusto and self assurance."

DEAD CENTER by Jane Wetherell was about a newlywed woman who was the victim of "a family you will cordially dislike on sight and care for less as time goes on," according to reviewer George Conrad. While Conrad found the book "entertaining" he thought it could have done with more subtlety.

Conrad also reviewed GOLDEN EARRINGS by Yolanda Foldes. "Novelists with an urge to write about the recent past and a disinclination to come to grips with war have had practically no place to park," he wrote, but Foldes had ingeniously sidestepped the problem. In her story, a British colonel who has escaped from a German POW camp hooks up with a gypsy fortune teller. Although both are married, a romance ensues. It becomes a romantic comedy as he attempts to masquerade as a gypsy and joins a caravan. The book became a movie with Ray Milland as the officer and Marlene Dietrich as the gypsy. The theme song was a big hit.