Books and Authors Abroad: English Laurels in America (Sunday Times, July 4, 1948)
By Ian Fleming
In the United States the literary event of the year has been the publication of the first of five volumes of Mr. Churchill’s war memoirs entitled The Gathering Storm. The New York Times and Life have published long extracts from the book, as has The Daily Telegraph in England, and now a further huge section of the American public will read this great English adventure story by Britain’s first citizen.
The efforts of our official propaganda organisations are small beer beside the vast American audience created by Mr. Churchill, and it is debatable whether the handiwork of any other single Englishman will bring in more hard currency this year. The Gathering Storm, which has been acclaimed by the critics with “rave” but reverent notices, deals with the prelude to war—in the author’s words, “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm”—and with the Twilight War, ending in May, 1940. The volume (nearly 800 pages with the appendices) closes with Mr. Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.
Due largely to the shortage .of paper and cloth, the majority of the British public will not read this great segment of their own history until Messrs. Cassell publish the volume here in September.
Few other major works of general interest have appeared. "Vinegar” Joe Stilwell’s posthumous and peppery memoirs of the Burma campaign have not been praised, and Mr. Sumner Welles’s We Need Not Fail has made no stir. Dr. Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male still leads the best-sellers for the worst reasons. In fact, it is a stodgy agglomeration of statistics and graphs whose findings will be treated with respect by the medical authorities to whom it is addressed. The Hatfields and the McCoys, by Virgil Jones, is an exciting piece of folklore retelling the story of the famous family feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border. The Harvard University Press are publishing the definitive Letters of Edgar Allan Poe in October.
English authors are well represented by Edward Crankshaw’s Russia and the Russians and by Simon Nowell Smith’s scholarly piece of Henry James research, The Legend of the Master, and English novelists easily lead a barren fiction field. Evelyn Waugh’s piece of side-splitting necrophilia, The Loved One, which has so far only appeared here in Horizon (Chapman & Hall are to publish in book form), has been greeted with masochistic ecstasy, and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter has been chosen as the Book of the Month.
Forthcoming volumes include a new James M. Cain The Moth; The Sky and the Forest, a tale of Africa by C. S. Forester; No High Way, by Nevil Shute; and Ape and Essence, a new Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World vein. Ernest Hemingway’s long new novel is said to be maturing slowly.
American books are only qualitatively absent from this short survey. The output of literary chewing-gum continues apace, but the public is surfeited, probably owing to “an unfortunate combination of higher prices and lower quality,” as the Saturday Review of Literature puts it. The publishers moan and groan, but the drumming of the book clubs, the tireless superlatives of reviewers, and ever shinier book jackets are of no avail and, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a slump is a slump is a slump.