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The U.S. came in for some sharp criticism, notably from two British writers. After seven years in the U.S., Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer decided that its people were terribly lonely and everlastingly fearful of looking like sissies. He came about as close to the mark as gadabout anthro-pologists-on-grant usually do. More pretentious was leftish Harold Laski's American Democracy, a glib, fat examination of the U.S. with capitalism as its aboriginal villain.
Of. the numerous peeks behind the Iron Curtain, the most candid and observant was Sam Welles's Profile of Europe. In down-to-earth pictures of daily living, he showed that Russian Communism is still a burden borne on the patient backs of the overworked and undernourished Russian people. In I Saw Poland Betrayed, onetime U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane wrote a blunt, forceful account of the means by which the Kremlin (with little resistance from the U.S. Government) took over the Polish state. Political pundits had a sure-fire topic in Russia v. the Western democracies. Most crisp and provocative of a spate of books on the subject was bright, British Barbara Ward's The West at Bay, in which she argued that Western Europe must have Western Union or "we are for the dark."
Arnold Toynbee, whose Study of History (a one-volume condensation of his work-in-progress) was a surprise bestseller of 1947, again was listed with an even more unlikely candidate, Civilization on Trial. In 13 scholarly essays he reaffirmed the large, calm view of history, taking the position that man might be destroyed but other formS of life would carry on.
More alarmed and alarming were William Vogt, who warned the world in Road to Survival that its growing population was rapidly using up the earth's substance, and Fairfield Osborn who, in Our Plundered Planet, lectured man for destroying the fertility of the land. Poet Thomas Merton, now a Trappist monk, lent poetic excitement to his autobiographical account of a worldly young pagan's conversion to Roman Catholicism, in Seven Storey Mountain. And, in a category all its own, there was Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a continuing bestseller in spite of its statistical dullness, and gave rise to more bad jokes and pseudoscientific claptrap than any book in recent years.
POETRY & CRITICISM
Some very good poetry was written in 1948, most of it by the older and established writers. No bright young poet blazed a sensational new trail—not even as narrow and hard to follow as the one Robert Lowell blazed in 1946.
Ezra Pound, godfather-emeritus of modern verse, came through in his old age with some of the best—and worst—poetry of the year. In his Pisan Cantos he ranted, as of old, about usurers, Churchill and Mussolini; but a new, touching note of sadness and humility crept into his verse.