(4 of 5)
Foreign favorites were no more inspiring. Septuagenarian Somerset Maugham's Then and Now was a suave, shallow examination of the mind and lusts of Machíavelli. Jules Romains puffed slowly into the terminus, home at last, in the final volumes of his panoramic scrutiny of Europe from 1908 to 1933. Erich Maria Remarque gave middle-agedly of his bright-but-second-best in Arch of Triumph. The late Franz Werfel, famed for his Forty Days of Musa Dagh, eclipsed himself in a tortuous fantasy, Star of the Unborn, about interplanetary life 100,000 years hence. In Thieves in the Night, Arthur Koestler made the burning question of Palestine into one of the year's best books, but he disappointed readers who had dreamed of another Darkness at Noon.
Theme: Religion. Like many an American best-seller—Gladys Schmitt's David the King, Russell Janney's shoddy Miracle of the Bells—some of the best foreign novels had religious themes. George Bernanos' Joy, Francois Mauriac's Woman of the Pharisees, Robert Graves's King Jesus were all highly intelligent books, but none of them had the popular appeal of Evelyn Waugh's Brides head Revisited, a novel that combined some of the best and worst writing of a brilliant career.
Of novels from abroad, Albert Camus' The Stranger was interesting as the first novel to come out of France's Existentialist school (TIME, Jan. 28). But its sad French killer-hero looked a little like an Ernest Hemingway character wearing the none-too-gay deceivers of Gallic pessimism. Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love was the gayest foreign novel of a solemn year. George Tabori's Companions of the Left Hand stood head & shoulders above most "social-interest" novels.
Two of the most notable works of fiction were collections of short stories: Elizabeth Bowen's sensitive stories of wartime England, Ivy Gripped the Steps; and New Yorker Critic Edmund Wilson's clinically sexy Memoirs of Hecate County, which the censors helped sell.
The men who presumably are the most gifted U.S. novelists were wholly missing from the fiction lists in 1946: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passes, Glenway Westcott, John Steinbeck. Also missing: a first-rate war novelist. Perhaps the best of the war yarns, Thomas Heggen's sardonic, episodic Mister Roberts, had no battle in it.
But readers who found fiction's cupboard bare of new works could at least be thankful that U.S. publishers stocked their shelves with some of the best of the old. Chief among these was Viking—which added to its admirable list of $2 "Portables" selections from the writings of Mark Twain, Rabelais, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Emerson and Blake. It was a big year in the continuing revival of Henry James, Tolstoy and Franz Kafka. Publishers also hopefully reprinted little-known works—most of them little-known in the U.S.—of Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Zola, Gorky.
POETRY