The Earthquake

This semi-allegorical novel, published in 1950, tells how a series of earthquakes bring about the disintegration of society. The narrator and central character has killed his wife and his state of mind is being analysed by a psychiatrist. As part of this investigation, he records incidents from his life beginning with his childhood and concluding with the act of uxoricide. Presumably the following description is intended to refer to the Nazi regime:
“In those days we were ruled by a party whom the wits styled the ‘Government of the Industrious Ants’. The name was not ill-chosen considering that their national emblem was a wheel and their motto ‘To rest is to rust’... [The regime] went so far as to bind the citizen not only with laws but also with all kinds of unwritten rules and expressions of opinion which were never clearly defined and could thus be interpreted in a variety of ways. To discover the correct interpretation required in the subject a herd instinct, an instinct for uniformity. The threat of danger was greatest, therefore, to those who wanted to roam freely and indeed they were the chief victims of the hunters and their bloodhounds.”

The author, Heinz Risse (born 30 March 1898), grew up in Düsseldorf. On completing his schooling in 1915 he enlisted in the army and served on the Western Front. Here he recalls fighting around the village of Fleury. Although wounded by a grenade in 1918, he was the only one of his 22 classmates to survive the war. After the war he studied in Marburg, Frankfurt and Heidelberg universities and pursued a career in accountancy. He did not begin writing fiction until after the Second World War, his first literary work (a collection of novellas) being published in 1948. He went on to write five novels, mostly with sociological and philosophical themes, as well as short stories and numerous works of non-fiction. In 1956 he received the Immermann literary prize of the city of Düsseldorf and in 1974 he was awarded the cultural prize of the city of Solingen.

The narrator describes the life-changing event that occurred when he had just reached adulthood:
“As long as my father was alive it was taken for granted that I should go to the university when I had finished school... My plans disintegrated when my father was suddenly killed in the earthquake. I had to start earning a living and after passing my leaving examination at school, entered an insurance firm as a junior... My mother was compelled to go out to work.“
Such was the experience of many families when the main breadwinner was killed in the First World War.

The Skin

This black comedy, published in 1949, is set in Naples following the Allied liberation of the city. The central character, bearing the author’s name, is embedded with the American forces as a liaison officer. He is torn between the American viewpoint of being liberators and the perspective of the Neapolitans that they have been conquered rather than liberated. He observes the immediate aftermath of the American takeover of the city in the context of abject poverty and years of persecution, describing the situation in terms of an outbreak of an epidemic:
“I preferred the war to the plague. Within the space of a day, within a few hours, all — men, women and children — had been infected by the horrible, mysterious disease. What amazed and terrified the people was the sudden, violent, fatal character of that fearful epidemic. The plague had been able to achieve more in a few days than tyranny had done in 20 years of universal humiliation or war in three years of hunger, grief and atrocious suffering. These people who bartered themselves, their honor, their bodies and the flesh of their own children in the streets — could they possibly be the people who a few days before... had given such conspicuous and horrible proof of their courage... in the face of German opposition?”
Rather than being set free by the Allied forces, the people of the city were immediately enslaved to a system of corruption, exploitation and abuse. The macrocosm is that the vicious oppression of Fascism was being replaced by the ruthless free-for-all of American capitalism.

The author, Curzio Malaparte (né Kurt Erich Suckert, born 9 June 1898), grew up in Prato, Tuscany, the son of a German father and an Italian mother. On the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for service in the Legion Garibaldi of the French Foreign Legion. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he enlisted in the Italian army and served in the Dolomites as a captain in the 5th Alpine Regiment. In the aftermath of the war he wrote Viva Caporetto! — a fictional account of the 1917 battle in the Austrian Littoral in which the Italian army was routed. It was scathingly critical of the Italian military leadership that oversaw the slaughter. During the 1920s he was active as both a journalist and a Fascist. In 1931, however, his book, Coup d'état, was published. In it, he was critical of both Hitler and Mussolini and this led him to being stripped of his Fascist party membership, then to him being exiled on the island of Lipari from 1933 to 1938 and was subsequently jailed repeatedly between 1938 and 1943. In 1941 he worked on the Eastern Front as a war correspondent for Corriere della Serra. This assignment informed the first of his two seminal novels: Kaputt, published in 1944. From November 1943 to March 1946 he worked as a liaison officer with the American High Command and his experience in that role was the basis for his greatest novel (this one).

In reference to the title of the novel, the narrator observes the situation for the people of Italy:
“Today they suffer and make others suffer, they kill and are killed, they do wonderful things and dreadful things, not to save their souls, but to save their skins. They think they are fighting and suffering to save their souls but in reality they are fighting and suffering to save their skins and their skins alone. Nothing else counts. Men are heroes for the sake of a very paltry thing today! An ugly thing! The human skin is ugly. Look! It’s loathsome. And to think that the world is full of heroes who are ready to sacrifice their lives for such a thing as this!”

Device and Desire

This comic novel, published in 1949, is set in affluent Philadelphia. The plot revolves around the death of Camilla Flint Purdon, a wealthy dowager and those who hope to inherit her millions. Her will contains a peculiar request with regard to her funeral:
“None of the legatees on pain of forfeiting his legacy shall follow to the grave. I will not have people pretending sorrow they do not feel.”
One of the family members ignores the request and is believed to have forfeited the legacy that is due to her — until a codicil to the will is found and the tables are turned. 

The author, Mary Fanning Wickham (née Porcher, born 8 June 1898), grew up in Philadelphia and received the benefits of a private education. She turned a place in the prestigious Bryn Mawr College to volunteer as an emergency aide during the First World War. She began writing fiction in the 1920s but only two of her seven novels of that period were published. Her first successful novel (this one) appeared in 1949. Another novel followed as well as poetry and works of non-fiction, including an autobiography in 1988. Her other claim to fame is that her second marriage was to the ornithologist James Bond — Ian Fleming came across him and felt his plain name would suit his new fictional character.

The novel describes the parallel responses to the death of a family member — the conventional emotional loss of a loved one and the unemotional loss of someone who performed an important role in family life but in a way that did not inspire respect and admiration. Her daughter Kate’s sense of loss is shown in the context of previous bereavement:
“When Kate’s father had died, a pillar of her world had collapsed. She had never loved him but she had depended on him. Now, when the undertakers came to take her mother's body away, and their dark sleek car had rolled unctuously down the drive and out through the gate, Kate became light-headed.”
This made me reflect on the fact that some of the men killed in the war were not greatly loved and admired by the members of the family (they weren't all charming young men) but their deaths were still felt hugely because of the roles they performed within the family.

The Years of the Locust

This novel, published in 1947, is set in the author's native Missouri. The central character, Dade Kenzie, the family patriarch has died and the novel covers just three days in the aftermath of his death. It documents the response of seven characters to Old Dade's death and traces the influence he had on each of their lives. The title of the novel refers to part of God's promise revealed to the prophet Joel:
“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.”


The author tells how a preacher
explained this:

“He said that it meant that the Lord would give people a chance to straighten things out, even after they had made the worst kind of a mess. He said that, since the Lord had to work through people, he had to give them lots of chances to make good, just like a mother had to give her child more than one chance to learn a thing.”






The author, Loula Grace Erdman (born 8 June 1898), grew up in rural Missouri. She submitted her first story for publication at the age of 14 and wasn't deterred by it being rejected. She went to college and then began a career as a teacher in Amarillo, Texas. The pinnacle of her teaching career was at West Texas State College where from 1945, as an assistant professor, she taught creative writing. Later she was promoted to the role of novelist in residence. Her first novel was published in 1944 and had plenty of autobiographical content, being about a teacher fresh out of college. Her third novel (this one) was awarded the biennial Dodd-Mead-Redbook Award and with it a prize of $10,000. She went on to write a total of 17 novels as well as short stories and works of non-fiction.

Taking into account that the novel is ultimately about bereavement, the novel contains some positive perspectives on death:
“There was no telling how many lives he had helped to shape, lives that maybe got his influence only indirectly, themselves scarcely knowing of his existence. So goodness and strength and force are spread as ripples spread when the stone is thrown into the water. His destiny, enlarged and multiplied, was passed on and on. Death did not finish such an influence as that.”

Deborah

This feminist novel, published in 1946, is set in the American Midwest. It chronicles the life of the central character, Deborah Seerlie, from her childhood on a Dakota farm to her life as a student in Chicago, then teacher, wife and mother, concluding with her return to her impoverished homestead with her granddaughter. Deborah assesses the different opportunities available to each generation of women: her rebellion against her parents’ plan for her to settle down with a local farmer; her desire for her daughters to get a degree; her hopes that her granddaughter will marry her childhood sweetheart and have a career.

The author, Marian Castle (née Johnson, born 5 November 1896; some sources have 1898 and I had listed her among the authors for that year), had a small-town Midwest upbringing, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Like Deborah in this novel, she took a year out from her studies (aged 16) to teach in a junior school. She recalled this episode in rural Wisconsin: “I look back on that year teaching 32 pupils in seven grades as a nightmare of ‘character building’. I remember how I battled deep snow drifts and deeper ignorance (my own and the children's) and how the snow and the ignorance usually won.” Having graduated from the University of Chicago in 1920, she got married in 1924 and soon settled in Denver, Colorado. Her first published writing were Western short stories in magazines. She began writing her first novel (this one) in 1936. She went on to write three more novels.

Deborah, the central character of the novel, is twice widowed and outlives two of her three children. Her son, Richard, dies in an army camp in 1918 during the influenza epidemic. He had run away from home to join up and she had complained to her husband:
“But I had such plans for him — I won't let him. He had to lie about his age to enlist — I can get him out."
Many years later she did not distinguish between his death from illness and any other kind of war death:
“I lost my son Richard in the war and my daughter Gay... several years later.”