"Talk of the Town” had a brief interview that week with French-Algerian writer Albert Camus who was visiting New York on the occasion of the publication of The Stranger, the first of his works to be published in the United States. As Edmund Wilson noted in his April 13 review of the novel for the magazine, existentialism, which had emerged in Paris during the war, was “having a furious vogue.” According to “Talk of the Town,” Camus’s play "Caligula" was also coming to town sometime in the near future, it was thought. Edmund Wilson, the literary critic for The New Yorker whose novel Memoirs of Hecate County would be the center of a censorship controversy in 1946, was not completely sold on The Stranger in his April 13 review. He found the story well-written and a “clever feat” but failed to see the profound philosophical insights that Camus’ admirers found and he thought the protagonist was implausible. He lumped Camus with such American imitators of Hemingway as James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) whom he found in some respects superior. The interviewer found Camus in a hotel room on West 70th Street. He wrote that the writer was 32 but dressed like a character in the comic strip “Harold Teen.” Camus insisted that he was not an Existentialist, although he was friendly with Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophy’s chief proponent. Camus said he believed in the absurdity of existence. He also said that he detested the kind of realism that equated greatness with strength or material success. A former journalist, he told the interviewer that he would some day like to publish a newspaper that came out an hour after the other dailies and evaluated the truth of the news they reported. Perhaps he would have had a blog if the Internet had existed.
The lead book review in the April 20 issue, written by A.J. Liebling, whose usual beat was journalism, was devoted to Top Secret by Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM. PM was an interesting experiment, a picture tabloid with a left wing bias meant to counter the Right Wing Daily News and Mirror. Ingersoll, who had helped start Fortune when he was with Time-Life, insisted that the newspaper accept no advertising to maintain its independence and often ran editorials on the front page. Needless to say, it was not a financial success despite contributions from some leading journalists and writers of the day. Although its reporters ran the gamut of the Left from anti-Communist liberals to Communist Party members, they would all face charges of being Pinkos in the days to come. At Fortune Ingersoll had run a negative story about The New Yorker which countered with a parody of Time and mocking profile of Henry Luce which had set off a feud between Luce and Ross. Ingersoll was not a favorite of either publication in 1946.
Ingersoll was drafted in 1942, entering the Army as a private but soon rising up the ranks to serve with Omar Bradley. He had previously written The Battle is the Pay-Off, an account of the war from the soldier’s point of view. In Top Secret, he praised Bradley, whom he credited with winning the war in Western Europe with the assistance of Patton, and attacked the military reputation of Eisenhower and particularly Montgomery, whose anti-Soviet obsession and ego Ingersoll felt interfered with the conduct of the war. Liebling found the book an unconvincing argument but welcomed the debate writing that "as the author remarks, the second World War was probably the last old-fashioned war we will have to argue over....Atomic wars will be too brief for analysis."
The “Briefly Noted Fiction” that week:
Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories (published in England in 1943 as The Demon Lover and Other Stories), a collection of short stories by esteemed Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen about wartime Britain. The reviewer found them beautifully written but not among Bowen’s most notable work.
Peony by Keith West (not to be confused with a Pearl Buck novel on China published two years later) was the story of a Chinese girl in conflict with the traditions with which she was raised; the reviewer found it “sorrowful” and “self-conscious.”
In Ernest Brace’s Buried Stream, a Manhattan public relations executive undergoes a spiritual awakening; the reviewer found it thoughtful and intelligent but not profound.
I Heard Them Sing by Ferdinand Reyher, about a Midwestern barber struggling to make a go of a marriage with a mismatched spouse, was a period novel deemed affecting but inexpertly written. It was adapted to the screen in 1952 as “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie” [which is one of the first movies I remember seeing as a small child.]
Young Man with a Dream by Irish writer Kenneth Reddin (aka Kenneth Sarr) was a novel about a Dubliner who dreamed of escape to the South Seas that the reviewer found overly complicated for its subject matter. It too became a movie.
“Briefly Noted General”:
Wind in the Olive Tree, Abel Plenn’s account of his experiences working in the U.S. Embassy in Franco’s Spain during the war. The reviewer found the book “thoughtful and disturbing” but “not well-written” and “sharply biased to the Left.”
How to Grow Old Disgracefully was the entertaining memoir of cartoonist, humor magazine editor and Jazz Age man-about- town Norman Anthony.
The reviewer found General Wainwright’s Story, an account of the Battles of Corregidor and Bataan as well as of Wainwright’s three years as a Japanese prison of war written by prolific Hearst reporter and columnist Robert Considine, “highly satisfactory reading.”
Public Men In and Out of Office edited by JT Salter, a collection of short profiles of statesmen and politicians including leftist former vice-president and future presidential candidate Henry Wallace, ardent segregationist and anti-woman's rights advocate Senator Cotton Ed Smith and the corrupt, racist demagogue from Mississippi, Senator Theodore Bilbo, by historians, political scientists and journalists was faulted for uneven writing and a too temperate tone.
Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett was the heavily promoted memoir of a celebrated hunter and conservationist in India who often was called in to track down tigers and leopards that had attacked humans. It was a Book-of-the Month Club selection and international best seller which the reviewer dismissed as “Ruptured Kipling.”
Architects of Charleston by Beatrice St. Julien Ravenal on the people behind the ante-bellum houses of the Southern city was said to be beautifully illustrated and witty in an old-fashioned way.
The reviewer deplored the House of the Month Book of Small Houses by Harold Group, the first of an expected series, which presented “prettified” drawings and floor plans of houses in the New England colonial style which the reviewer wrote are preferred by bank financers over more practical, modern and economical housing.