Imagine you were an independent school educator in the years just before World War II. When the first Independent School Bulletin arrived, almost simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, what books would have been on your shelves? Are there any your children and grandchildren might be reading now? According to best-seller and notable book lists, there were quite a few significant works that appeared in those dark times.
It was a good era for children: The Sword in the Stone, The Yearling, Goodnight Moon, and Make Way for Ducklings were all new. (The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, however, outsold them all.) The field of adult literature, too, brought works that are still read, and taught: The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Power and the Glory, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and Finnegans Wake. Only The Grapes of Wrath, however, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the best seller of 1939, achieved popular fame. Just trailing Steinbeck were How Green Was My Valley and The Keys of the Kingdom, books still popular in the 1950s but now faded from view.
It was a white male time. Of the 29 books listed as “Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant,” in one chronicle, only four were by women, and one each by a Latino and an African-American male. Of these, though, three are still well known. In 1940, Richard Wright published Native Son, the first enduring novel by an African-American man. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published The Garden of the Forking Paths, his debut collection of the short fiction that would make him world-renowned. Finally, a great work of nonfiction, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, told the English-speaking world about Yugoslavia, a distant region that for at least the next 60 years would be a focus of international attention. The book has repeatedly been called “one of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th century,” and is one of the lesser-known works in this column that I would enthusiastically recommend.
Most of the era’s nonfiction has not fared as well as West’s classic. Many were evanescent works on current events, politics, or humor. But several would have been of great interest to educators, as well as to those who were following events in the larger world — and to us looking back from 75 years on.
Two imposing educational figures crossed paths at this moment: John Dewey, whose Freedom and Culture was almost the last of his nearly 30 works, and Mortimer Adler, whose How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education began his long career as one of the most successful crossover figures between academic and popular readership.
Freedom and Culture is a short but dense work, recalling Dewey’s origins as a cofounder of pragmatism. Taking us through the history of democratic and political thought and its metamorphoses and challenges, from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment and the 19th century, Dewey places the current European ideological conflict, soon to be a global struggle, in cultural context.
Arguing that democracy is not merely a political system but a “way of life” that offers “the means by which human nature can assure its fullest realization in the greatest number of persons,” Dewey objects to both Marxism and Nazism not only as totalitarian and despotic, but as providing “a monistic block-universe theory,” with only one explanation for all events, either economic or racial, and one solution for all human problems. He cites Jefferson’s view that “laws and institutions go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,” and must change “as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances.” (Dewey is also scathing about his era’s “idolatry of the Constitution as it stands.”) His peroration asserts his belief in democracy as an ongoing process, one “as fundamentally simple and as immensely difficult as is the energetic, unflagging, unceasing creation of the ever-present new road on which we can walk together.”
Adler, though 43 years younger than Dewey, believed, as playwright Tom Stoppard wrote, that “Aristotle got it more or less right, and St. Augustine brought it up to date.” How to Read a Book is a purely popular work, unlike Adler’s earlier academic studies, including The Nature of Judicial Proof: An Inquiry into the Logical, Legal, and Empirical Aspects of the Law of Evidence and St. Thomas and the Gentiles. The 1972 edition, cowritten with Charles Van Doren, which is the only one currently available, mixes a guide to intelligent reading for beginning college students or adult learners with a marketing pitch for Adler’s Great Books series.
Observing that “[t]here is some feeling nowadays that reading is not as necessary as it once was,” Adler proposes a four-stage method of reading, from simple literacy, to skimming, to thorough (“analytical”) reading, and finally to his Platonic (to mix philosophers) ideal: “syntopical” (comparative) reading. The best readers, in other words, connect what they are reading to everything else they have read, building their own grand synthesis of knowledge. To help, of course, they could purchase Adler’s Syntopicon, which offers a path through 102 Great Ideas found in the Great Books. Though the Syntopicon and the Great Books series it completes are long out of print, How to Read a Book is still No. 1 under “Reading Skills Reference” on Amazon.
Our last three books provide a window into the most significant events of the 1930s and ’40s. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories is a series of fictionalized vignettes about Isherwood — or a character named “Isherwood” — and the (thinly disguised) people he encounters from 1929 to 1933 while living in Germany. Although the period comprised only the beginnings of Nazi dominance, Isherwood wrote retrospectively, marking the era’s growing anti-Semitism, especially in his story of the Landauers, a wealthy Jewish family who fatally assume the Nazis are no different from past anti-Semites. In one of the grimmest passages in the book, “Isherwood,” shortly after leaving Germany, overhears a conversation in Prague between two businessmen about his friend Bernard Landauer:
“He’s dead.”
“You don’t say!” “Heart failure. That’s what the newspapers said.”
“Heart failure. You don’t say.”
“There’s a lot of heart failure going around in Germany these days. If you ask me, anyone’s heart’s likely to fail if it gets a bullet inside it.”
The afterlife of Berlin Stories, as the film I Am a Camera and even more as the source of the musical Cabaret, makes it perhaps the single best-known picture we have of the end of the Weimar Republic and the coming cataclysm.
William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934–1941 takes up where Berlin Stories left off, giving us a close-up look at the highest levels of a society going mad. Shirer’s access to the Nazi leadership, together with the bluntness of his dangerously secret personal musings, makes the diary almost a historical thriller, even though we know how it turns out. Shirer watched with puzzlement and resignation as Germany, Italy, and Spain descended into violence and dictatorship, while England and France, as well as the League of Nations, refused to act.
The German people, he thought, were divided between a fanatical minority and a general population that seemed, in these years, surprisingly indifferent to the country’s direction. In 1936, he describes the Reichstag reacting to Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland: “The six hundred deputies, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream Heils… in unison like a college yell.”
On the other hand, when Germany invades Poland and England and France declare war, he notes, “Life here is still quite normal. The operas, the theatres, the movies, all open and jammed,” and presciently observes, “I doubt if anything short of an awful bombing or years of semi-starvation will bring home the war to the people here.”
Finally, in 1939 the belated appearance in the United States of a 1920s work from Europe made headlines in literary and legal circles, and reached No. 7 on the year’s best-seller list. That book? The first complete U.S. edition of Mein Kampf, possibly the most notorious work of the 20th century. Even those of us who would shudder at opening its pages will find the story of its U.S. publication intriguing. As told in many newspapers and other publications, Mein Kampf’s appearance was delayed in part by the reluctance of those outside Germany to pay royalties to Hitler. Once World War II began, Hitler lost all rights to U.S. royalties, and its American publishers eventually donated their profits to various charities. Meanwhile, Mein Kampf continues to sell online, where it ranks fourth in Amazon’s list of books on Fascism. The book passed into the public domain on January 1, 2016.