Antimacassar City

This historical novel, published in 1940, is a somewhat Dickensian depiction of an Ayrshire family as they establish themselves in Glasgow society. Set in the 1870s, the central character is Phoebe Moorhouse, the only daughter of the second marriage of her father. When they are killed in a pony-and-trap accident, the ten-year-old orphan moves to Glasgow to become part of her half-brother Arthur's family. During the course of the novel, Arthur, a provisions merchant, works his way up from living near the toughest parts of the city and they join the exodus to the prosperous western suburbs. The novel formed part of the Wax Fruit trilogy. The trilogy in turn was followed by two sequels.

The author, Guy Mc Crone (born 13 September 1898), grew up in Glasgow. In January 1917, prior to taking up a place in university, he volunteered  to serve with the Young Men’s Christian Association on the Western Front. In an interview he explained this: "being ineligible for the army, I went to scrub floors and sell cigarettes in soldiers’ Y.M.C.A. [centres] in Normandy and Paris”. He went on to study economics at Cambridge. After university he worked as a printer in Glasgow and was a major proponent of opera there. He began writing in 1931 and his first novel appeared in 1937. A further seven novels were published. He defended the fact that he wrote mostly about Glasgow society:
“People have asked me why I continue to write almost exclusively about my own kind of people...Here is my reason. I had not gone far with the study of the novel before I saw that a novelist, especially if he has a recording talent and not a talent for fantasy, writes best about the place that has been his home; that is, the home of his childhood and adolescence”.

Phoebe Moorhouse, the central character, has a particularly traumatic experience early on in her life in Glasgow. This produces a peculiar change of mindset — she seems to lose all feeling for other people:
“She regarded him with her usual impersonal interest. He must be racked with anxiety. Did people express so little when they were faced with ruin? Did they merely sit quietly and look before them? Was she really hard, that she could not feel more for this stranger? Was there something left out of her make-up? Had she a limited supply of sympathy?”
This change of mindset is typically of what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder, known in the First World War as shell shock or neurasthenia.

Between the Devil

This novel, published in 1939, is set in a small town in Virginia with an economy centred on a mill. The central character, Edward Burton, a young Methodist minister, whose wife is expecting their first child, becomes embroiled in the conflict between a fledgling trade union movement and the union-busting vigilantes. Having both powerful and powerless in his congregation, he tries, with the best of intentions, to serve each side with tragic results both for him and for the vulnerable people he seeks to help.

The author, Murrell Edmunds (born 23 March 1898), grew up in Virginia. While studying at the University of Virginia, he joined the army for service during the latter months of the war. On returning to university, he studied law. in 1926 he abandoned the legal profession to devote his time to writing. He sought to show in his writing the possibility of change through “the gradual relaxation of old patterns and tensions and a forthright new articulation of the brotherhood of man”. His first novel was published in 1927. During a long career he wrote eight more novels as well as short stories, plays and poetry. Aware that his social and political views were too progressive for Virginian society in general, he spent much of his career in New Orleans where his views were either tolerated or shared by those in his social circle.

Edward Burton, the young minister at the centre of this novel, is not unduly troubled when encountering death in his pastoral work:
“Edward laid his Bible on the side of the bed and sat down. Anne's pale face was barely recognisable on the white pillow, the outlines of her wasted body hardly discernible under the covers. He looked at her closely. He was accustomed to death; it neither shocked nor awed him. Death was sure. Death was certain. Life it was that bewildered and betrayed.”

The Fugitive

This psychological novel, published in 1938, details the experience of a killer on the run through rural Vermont.  The central character is an orphan farmhand. His employer, James Stark, makes an agreement with him to give him $600 at the end of three years but tries during those years to get the farmhand to leave and thus avoid having to pay. Nearing the end of the contract, at the age of 18, things come to a head and he kills Stark. He flees to the hills and is pursued by the local farmers.

The author, Richard Warren Hatch (born 18 April 1898), grew up in Massachusetts. His first novel was published in 1929 and, like this novel, featured a young farmhand. Writing under the pseudonym of Clare Meredith, most of his subsequent novels were set in rural Vermont and were psychological in their focus. He also wrote several works of fiction for children.

The author describes the psychological endurance that enables the fugitive to persevere in spite of physical weakness:
“Swinging along, fear-driven so that he had the preternatural strength of the sick, the lost and the demented, there gradually awoke in him the sense of his own prowess. He was aware that he went on beyond the limits of his own strength, that he did the impossible. He was aware that his endurance was too great for him. It was an overwhelming thought.”
In the same way soldiers were mentally driven on to overcome weakness of fatigue and injury.

Coming from the Fair

This novel, published in 1937, is a sequel to the 1935 novel Holy Ireland, which introduced the family of Patrick O’Neill, a Dublin cattle dealer. The semi-biographical focus is on her mother’s life. The second book starts with the death of Patrick and then follows the stories of his children and grandchildren, beginning in 1903 and finishing in 1933. Part 6 of the novel begins in 1916 with Patrick’s widow Julia remarking to a priest about the parallel conflicts of 1916:
“Now, Father, you can say what you like, and I don't want to say anything about my son killed in Flanders, and I'm not saying anything about the other Irish boys, killed and waiting to be killed, God help them, but there's one way only to look at this rebellion, and that is as a stab in the back.”

The author, Norah Hoult (born 10 September 1898), was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a free-thinking English father (terming himself a Theosophist in the 1901 census in which Norah is recorded as Eleanor). By the age of 10, both her parents had died and their children moved to England to be cared for by her English relatives. Working as a journalist, her first book, a collection of short stories, was published in 1928 and received critical acclaim. Her first novel appeared in 1930 and she went on to write more than 20 novels and three further collections of short stories. She returned to live in Ireland in 1957.

The central character, Charlie O'Neill, the wayward son of Patrick, gets caught up in the rush to enlist for war service during a cattle-dealing trip to Liverpool.
“Fellows going to enlist. The whole bloody train was packed seemingly with chaps going to enlist, to die for King and country... Mc Carroll was really going to London to enlist and he'd brought him along to do it as well... Charlie closed his eyes trying to recall last night's scene in the Liverpool pub. English chaps jeering them, asking what the Paddies were going to do about the war. Mc Carroll shouting he was off to London in the morning to join up with the London Irish.”
Far from keen, on reaching London, he manages to evade his enthusiastic friends and does not join up.

God's Sparrows

This epic novel, published in 1937, focuses on the wartime experience of an Ontario family, both at home and on the Western Front. Unsurprisingly it includes elements of romance and tragedy. The central character, Daniel Thatcher, is in competition with his ambitious brother, who enlists ahead of him, and his free-thinking father, who publicly opposes the war. The key event in Daniel’s active service comes toward the end of the war rather than at the iconic battles of Canadian history (Ypres, Passchendaele) — at the end of the novel, he leads his men in attack:
“They went up, over, and disappeared to eyes below the parapet level... Behind the flickering, rocking line of shell bursts 70 yards in front of them the line of men advanced, then knelt to wait for the barrage to jump forward, then broke up as men darted into trenches and shell holes to clear out the Germans at bayonet point, then sped on again to the line of the barrage.”

The author, Philip Child (born 19 January 1898), grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. He was studying at the University of Toronto when in April 1917 he enlisted for war service. He arrived at the Western Front in January 1918 and served as a private in the 262 Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. After the war he studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Following a time spent working as a journalist, he pursued an academic career and in 1942 was appointed professor of English in the University of Toronto. His first book, an historic novel, was published in 1933. He received prestigious national awards for two of his other novels. A collection of poetry, published in 1951, was also well received.

Having experienced much of the war, the central character Dan and his cousin Quentin discuss the Last Judgment. Philosopher Quentin views it in military terms:
“It'll be like the army, all smothered in red tape. Your theological credentials will have to be precisely in order; then they'll send you from one under-strapper to the next, as they do when you go to find out something in the War Office, all little men dealing with you by rule of thumb.”
He does not fear being killed:
“I'm not afraid of death... Only thing I'm afraid of — and hate — is this damned unreality we live in here and now: not knowing what we are or what we are here for; desiring, and not knowing why we have to; wanting life, more and more life, and getting death...”

By the Waters of Babylon

This story story, published in 1937, was written in response to the Fascist bombing of the Basque town of Gernika. As a work of science fiction it is considered remarkably prescient of the aftermath of atomic warfare as seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The author’s reference to a “deadly mist” is probably influenced by the use of mustard gas in the trench warfare of the First World War. The story is set in New England several generations after a war had killed most people. The remnant live primitively as hill people. The central character, John, disobeys the tribal law and visits the Forbidden Zone (New York City) and observes the equivalent of Pompeii (an advanced civilisation brought suddenly to an end). The story inspired elements of Edgar Pangborn’s The Music Master of Babylon, which was set in a post-apocalyptic New York City.

The author, Stephen Vincent Benét (born 22 July 1898), was the son of an army colonel. Belonging to a two-generation military family, he was sent to military academy in California at the age of 10. He studied English literature at Yale and was a key contributor, mostly of poems, to the university’s literary magazine. His studies were interrupted by a year of military service as a code clerk in Washington D.C. He graduated in 1919 and his first novel was published in 1921. His most famous work, John Brown's Body, an epic poem on the American Civil War, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929.

The central character, John, observes the fate of the advanced civilisation that had inhabited New York City. His tribe reveres those people as gods because they had been advanced but doesn't attribute their destruction to their own folly:
“Then I saw their fate come upon them and that was terrible past speech. It came upon them as they walked the streets of their city. I have been in the fight with the Forest People. I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets of their city. Poor gods, poor gods! Then the towers began to fall. A few escaped. Yes, a few.”

My War with the United States

This eccentric account of the author's war service was published in 1937. He explains in the foreword that the chapters of the book were translated from the German entries he made in the diary he kept during his service in the United States Army. The author served with a New York State field hospital unit, beginning at a fort in Oswego on Lake Ontario and later at an army psychiatric hospital at Fort Porter, Buffalo. During his time at Buffalo, the author himself experiences mental illness and protects his sanity by transporting his thoughts to the rural idyll of his Austrian childhood:
“I have found a way to calm myself: I go myself to the long baths. There is a bathroom for the men that is not much used, as they prefer showers. I lie in it whenever I can and I have started to think in pictures and make myself several scenes to which I can escape instantly when the danger appears.”

The author, Lüdwig Bemelmans (born 27 April 1898), the son of a Belgian artist, was born in South Tyrol and grew up in the central Austrian town of Gmunden and in his mother’s home city of Regensburg, Bavaria. He emigrated to the United States in December 1914 and worked for several years in hotels and restaurants. He joined the army in 1917 but was restricted to home service due to being a citizen of an enemy state. In the 1920s he did some work as a newspaper cartoonist but he did not achieve success as a published author until the 1920s. His first children's book was published in 1934 and his Madeline series commenced in 1939. He won the Caldecott Medal (for the most distinguished American picture book for children) in 1954. He also wrote several autobiographical books and some travel literature.

At one point during his war service, a colonel from headquarters sent for him and revealed that someone in New York had told the police he was a German spy and that the claim had been investigated. He writes elsewhere that “it is fine of the Americans that now, here in the war, they let me speak German, tell me that Germany is beautiful and don't say a word that I have a stack of German books and many German ideas. I am truly thankful for all this and respect it.” He compares the American mindset with the German one:
“I am thankful that there is little or no patriotism among the soldiers. They will fight and even be killed but they do it, even the crude ones, with the same feeling as if they were repairing a truck and it rolled over them. This seems a bigger field of sentiment and thinking than the Germans are capable of and I think it makes men better soldiers. The Germans are tied up with three little holy grails; they constantly shout and march around with them...”