(5 of 5)
Two biographies tackled subjects from the great age of exploration and produced fresh material and absorbing stories: Bradford Smith's Captain John Smith (no kin) and Kathleen Romoli's Balboa of Darien. Two frequently misunderstood figures were straightened out again: Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, in Fletcher Pratt's combative Stanton, and a queen of England in H. F. M. Prescott's superb Mary Tudor. Among the remaining literary biographies, some were dull but useful (F. Holmes Dudden's exhaustive Henry Fielding, Leon Edel's first volume of Henry James) ; some were long on sympathy if short on brilliance (Reginald Pound's Arnold Bennett, Lionel Stevenson's able Ordeal of George Meredith); and a few actually enlarged their subjects' dimensions (Betty Miller's Robert Browning, David Magarshack's Chekhov, Antony Alpers' Katherine Mansfield). In one book that was not properly a biography, two well-known men told a great deal about themselves and about each other in one of the longest correspondences of the century. The Holmes-Laski Letters were part mutual-admiration society, part intellectual fencing match between an old-fashioned liberal and an agile-minded, often devious leftist.
Among the many books on art, two were achievements of the first rank. One was the U.S. appearance of the first four volumes of the British Pelican History of Art, a 48-volume project. The other was Andre Malraux's The Voices of Silence, a brilliant if tantalizingly subjective musing on art through the ages. In a year when books on flying saucers and interplanetary travel became commonplace, Jonathan Norton Leonard brought the subject back to earth in his informed and sensible Flight into Space. For humor it was a sad, unsmiling period. Thurber Country, a book of characteristic sketches, was James Thurber at his second best, but standing alone in a shrinking field, it was more than ever welcome.
Poetry & Criticism
The best as well as the most tragic news in poetry was made by one man: Welshman Dylan Thomas. His Collected Poems early in the year confirmed what had long been clear: that he was the finest young poet writing in English. His death at 39 in Manhattan was a bleak reminder of the standing of his contemporaries.
Poet-Novelist Robert Penn Warren received praise from the poets' critical claque for Brother to Dragons, but the sad truth was that this long narrative poem about a frontier murder was dull and prosy. In A Hopkins Reader, there was plenty of evidence, though not easy to read, to show why a Victorian Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, is still an influence on poets writing today. And of U.S. poets today, no better sampling came along than New Poems, ably edited by Rolfe Humphries. The price: 35¢.
No major critic made a major evaluation in any area, but Briton V. S. Pritchett's shrewd and readable literary essays in Books in General could serve as a lesson in the appreciation of books for today's academicians.
* Though not enough to overtake the venerable (1611) King James Version. This year, as for generations, the King James was the nation's real bestseller.