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European biographers did little better. Biographical surprise-of-the-year was Britisher Margaret Lane's admirable The Tale of Beatrix Potter, the story of the eccentric lady who fashioned and illustrated the children's beloved Peter Rabbit. Charles Dickens, by Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, cast no light on Dickens' working manners, much on his bedside manner. Stefan Zweig's posthumous, unfinished Balzac might have said more if Zweig had lived to finish the telling. Hesketh Pearson's Oscar Wilde was a sober, intelligent study of a man—and type—who is rarely treated with either sobriety or intelligence. Three literary autobiographies rated notice: Communist Playwright Sean 0'Casey's Drums under the Window, which stirred personalities, poetry and politics into a uniquely Irish stew; Liberal Franz Schoenberner's Confessions of a European Intellectual, which touched more gaily than profoundly on the soul of European man; Tory Poet-Essayist Osbert SitwelPs The Scarlet Tree, which drew pay-dirt from the inexhaustible lode of English aristocratic peculiarities.
Almost silent, on both sides of the water, were the essayists and belles-lettrists: Lord David Cecil's monograph, Thomas Hardy, was intelligent and informative, but not in a class with Cecil's The Young Melbourne. Two books by George Orwell—Animal Farm, a penetrating satire on Soviet dictatorship, and Dickens, Dali and Others, a collection of essays—introduced many Americans to a vigorous British critic who observes life and literature with an eye that is usually more sharp than bloodshot.
FICTION
In 1946, good novels were as rare as vacant apartments. U.S. novelists had nothing to offer more controversial than Charles (Lost Weekend) Jackson's frank, unsubtle study of homosexuality, The Fall of Valor, nothing more successfully satirical than John Marquand's B. F.'s Daughter, nothing more socially rebellious than James T. Farrell's Bernard Clare, or Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters, a now-gamey-now-gooey protest against the kind of ad man he had been.
The gap between high sales and highbrows was wider than ever—a difference due, in large part, to the fact that the popular writers seemed to dramatize without thinking, and the unpopular writers to think without dramatizing. Nearest U.S. approach to a good combination of thought and drama was Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a novel about the Huey Long regime. Among the best of the rest: Conrad Richter's The Fields, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, Christina Stead's Letty Fox, Sholem Asch's East River, Jerome Weidman's Too Early to Tell.
Old and young American favorites showed up short of wind, but still long-winded. The late Theodore Dreiser's last novel, The Bulwark, had the weight, but not the distinction, of a Percheron. Upton Sinclair's A World to Win did no more than mark another 600-odd pages in the improbable progress of Hero Lanny Budd. William Saroyan's The Adventures of Wesley Jackson presented a moist and flaccid soul behind a bold front. Pearl Buck's Pavilion of Women was not of great price.