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Again it was the foreign novelists who wrote best and said most. From England came three novels that would be standouts in any year. In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene wrote with explosive irony about an adulterous love affair that leads to sainthood. Some of his critics complained that the Roman Catholic in Greene had grabbed the wheel from the novelist at the end. But Greene's skill had never been surer, and his book was one that his fellow novelists could study with profit. Another English novelist who could be studied but scarcely imitated was Henry Green, a businessman who is also a born writer. He had his ups & downs with three novels. Caught and Party Going carried his stamp only lightly. But Concluding (published with Caught in the last week of 1950) was a fine original novel about youth and old age, written in a style close to poetry and filled with insights into human incongruities. Joyce Gary proved again that he has the richest comic sense among living writers in English. His Mister Johnson, the story of a young African clerk who wanted too much from life, was just about the most satisfying novel of the U.S. year, though first published in England in 1939. Nancy Mitford's gift for cultivated malice came shining through in The Blessing, a comedy of Franco-British manners, and a little book called The Young Visiters, written 51 years ago by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford, proved to be just as good fun as when British readers first discovered it.
English novels usually look good on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, because only the best of them are imported. Actually, British fiction in 1951 was not much better, overall, than the U.S. variety. Complained the Times Literary Supplement: "The truth is that the greater part of the fiction that is on sale to the public is as simple a narcotic as tobacco."
There was nothing narcotic about the year's novels from Italy. The two best were by Alberto Moravia: Conjugal Love, which dealt with a nasty marriage conflict without becoming nasty, and The Conformist, the case history of a weakling whose weakness made him a Fascist. Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli) came a cropper with The Watch, a sympathetic but unfocused look at his postwar land, but Giuseppe Berto followed an uneven first novel (The Sky Is Red) with The Brigand, the story of an Italian Robin Hood which exposed the despair of ordinary people with a fine mixture of candor and sympathy.
Thomas Mann (a U.S. citizen who writes in German and is Englished by one of the world's best translators, Mrs. H. T. Lowe-Porter) holds gloomy views about the world's future, but suppressed the gloom in his new book. The Holy Sinner was an urbane story about a child born of incest who becomes pope, a medieval tale that Mann embellished with touches of Freud and assorted ironic mockeries. Another prophet of gloom stuck to his pessimism. In The Age of Longing, Arthur Koestler saw a cynical Europe doomed to war, unwillingly tied to a U.S. it could not respect. Like many a man who has lost faith in Communism, Koestler still seemed without a clear new belief—least of all in democracy.