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Officers and Gentlemen, by Evelyn Waugh, a satire on Englishmen in World War II, was very funny when it roasted spivs and fake heroes, but Tory Waugh was really a sad man when he wrote this fine book. It was about the impulses that make men rise to moral bigness, the disillusionment which comes in the discovery that sacrifices cannot do much to change other humans' natures. It was almost a dirge on the softening of England's national character.
The Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel, were the work of a little-known Eastern Jewish writer who disappeared, probably into a Russian concentration camp, in the late 1930s. An intellectual who fought as a cavalryman for the Bolsheviks, Babel wrote with extraordinary power and vividness about ghetto life and the brutality of revolution.
The Genius and the Goddess, by Aldous Huxley, discoursed with somewhat diminished brilliance on sexual infidelity at the genius level, grace and predestination in life, and the human limitations that accompany a very high I.Q.
Band of Angels, by Robert Penn Warren, one of the most critically overrated novels of the year, kept the Civil War pot boiling with blood, sex, sweat and crocodile tears.
Marjorie Morningstar, by Herman Wouk, again, as in The Caine Mutiny, put its author on the side of unfashionable literary virtues—this time, character and middle-class morality. Told as a love story about a stage-struck New York girl, Marjorie quickly became the nation's favorite novel.
Confessions of Felix Krull, by Thomas Mann, was the great writer's last book (he died at 80 before it was published), and certainly his most amusing. His picaresque hero, a life-charged confidence man, gave him a chance to poke fun at human folly, but with death so near, Mann had never shown such gusto for life.
Cards of Identity, by Nigel Dennis. This import from Britain was easily the most hilarious, mercilessly penetrating satire of the year. Its theme was badgered modern man looking for a self he can be content with, and the assorted phonies who are only too glad to bring him to couch.
Self Condemned, by Wyndham Lewis, showed England's most effective literary curmudgeon banging away at the shoddy thinking and sloppy living by which contemporary man is surrounded.
Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis, was the year's real sleeper. With each passing week this raffish, anecdotal description of life with a zany aunt had fresh thousands laughing, wound up as one of '55's biggest sellers.
Heritage, by Anthony West, not only explained the difficulties of growing up as the son of two unregenerate unmarried geniuses, but was a nice example of how a difficult subject may be handled with urbane intelligence.
Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan, a French girl with an existentially sad face, had a trivial triangle plot, raised above itself by unerringly accurate writing—and by the reader's chilling realization that its worldly insights were achieved by a 17-year-old author. It was the most successful book from outside the English-speaking world. The Germans continued to disappoint (Gerhard Kramer's We Shall March Again, and Heinrich Büll's Adam, Where Art Thou?), but other countries contributed moving items: