(6 of 7)
naturalist). Gene Fowler tried to size up
New York's Jimmy Walker in Beau James, but succeeded only in sounding like a
sentimental buddy at a wake. The toughest biographical chore of the year was
W. C. Fields, in which Robert Lewis Taylor failed to convey the great comedian's
essential quality but piled up a readable store of anecdote. The most objective political
portrait was Isaac Deutscher's Stalin, thorough but short on fresh material.
John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud was in a category of its own, a moving, unsentimental
sketch of his son Johnny, who died of a brain tumor at 17. Gunther
never wrote so good a book.
California celebrated its Gold Rush centenary and a flash flood of Californiana
rushed in on the event. Most of what was washed down panned light, but two books
at least ran to pay dirt: Gold Rush Album, an absorbing picture book edited by
Joseph Henry Jackson, which conveyed the turbulence and hysteria of the day,
and the late Archer Butler Hulbert's reissued Forty-Niners, a fine non-fiction base
from which armchair pioneers can authoritatively explore the way West.
There was plenty of first-rate Americana. As usual, much of the worthy spadework
issued from the university presses while the commercial publishers grabbed
off whatever was most readable. Ben Ames Williams delivered the best available edition
of Mary Boykin Chesnut's candid and feminine Civil War jottings, A Diary
from Dixie, while Donald Arthur Smalley brought out a superb edition of English
woman Frances Trollope's cutting swipe at U.S. 19th Century behavior, Domestic
Manners of the Americans. Marion L. Starkey put a somewhat Freudian but not
ungentle finger on the 17th Century Salem witch trials in The Devil in Massachusetts,
and Historian Herbert Bolton did a fascinating retrace job on Coronado's abortive
gold hunt in Coronado, Knight of the Pueblos and Plains. Head, shoulders and
chest above every other history of the year was Mathematician Kenneth P. Williams'
Unionside history of the Civil War, Lincoln Finds a General.
Mind to Modern Arms. The search went on for self-understanding, self-repose,
religious comfort, reassurance about the state of the world. The late Rabbi
Liebman's Peace of Mind, out in March 1946, was bought strongly throughout
1949. Trappist Monk Thomas Merton followed his autobiographical The Seven Sto
rey Mountain with The Waters of Siloe, a readable but routine history of the
Trappist order, which late in the year passed its worthier predecessor on best
seller lists. Other big sellers whose titles alone explained what their readers were
after: Monsignor Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul, the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent
Peale's 1948 A Guide to Confident Living, H. A. Overstreet's The Mature Mind.
There were other inquiries into the state of man and his works. The dullest
intellectual flop was Novelist Arthur
Koestler's Insight and Outlook, an embarrassingly pretentious "inclusive theory
of ethics, esthetics, and creative thinking."
Profoundly unoriginal, it lugubriously paraded Koestler's deep-water reading of a
lifetime. Nobel Prizewinner T.S. Eliot argued brilliantly if irritatingly for a classbound,
aristocracy-led society in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. More
pertinent was Episcopal Clergyman Bernard Iddings Bell's sharp criticism of U.S.
education, Crisis in Education, which argued that only training in
