The Yearling

This lengthy novel, published in 1938, earned the author the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. Though set in the 1870s in the aftermath of the Civil War, it describes experiences of loss similar to that which shaped the generation of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash. Moreover, its description of loss helped to prepare its young readers for the death of brothers and friends during the Second World War.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (born 8 August 1896) had moved to northern Florida with her husband in 1928. Although an outsider, she quickly made a deep connection with the local environment and it inspired her to write short stories and novels immersed in the locality and seasoned with the Southern dialect. Her first novel, South Moon Under, published in 1933, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

The Yearling concentrates on the humble existence of small farmer, Ezra Baxter, son of a preacher, and his wife, Ora. Ezra was nicknamed Penny because of his size. They had many children:
“The family had come. Ora Baxter was plainly built for child-bearing. But it had seemed as though his seed were as puny as himself. The babies were frail and almost as fast as they came they sickened and died. Penny had buried them one by one in a cleared place among the black-jack oaks, where the poor loose soil made the digging easier... He had carved little wooden tombstones for all.”
“There had been a hiatus in the births. Then, when the loneliness of the place had begun to frighten him a little, and his wife was almost past the age of bearing, Jody Baxter was born and thrived.”

The Baxter parents bring up a single child as a treasure: he is the survivor. The author tells the parallel story of another survivor: a fawn, whose mother has been killed by Penny in an emergency, is adopted by Jody. Jody goes hunting with his father not as a pastime but as a necessity both for obtaining meat and hides to trade and as a means of subduing the threat that predators pose to the livestock on the Baxter farm. Jody tells his father “I hate things dyin.” His father explains the reality he must come to understand:
“Nothin's spared, son, if that be ary comfort to you... Well, hit's a stone wall nobody's yit clumb over. You kin kick it and crack your head agin it and holler but nobody'll listen and nobody'll answer.”

Jody is stunned by the death of his young friend and neighbour, Fodder-wing. He observed the boy’s body on the death bed:
“Fodder-wing's silence was intolerable. Now he understood. This was death.  Death was a silence that gave back no answer. Fodder-wing would never speak to him again.”

When the two, boy and deer, come of age, these two yearlings are forced to confront the harsh reality of survival on the Florida scrub. If Jody insists that his friendly deer remains his pet, he will continue to destroy the crops that his parents depend on for their very existence. If he loses the deer, he loses the only companion he has other than his parents. In the end, his parents force Jody to lose the deer. His father tries to console him:
“I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to git their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.”

Boss of the River

Published in 1937 as Menaud, maître-draveur, this Quebecois novel is regarded as one of the most significant nationalist novels of Quebec and in 2005 was selected as one of Canada’s 100 Most Important Books by the Literary Review of Canada. It is first and foremost a demonstration against the Anglophone takeover of Francophone lands for the exploitation of its natural resources.

The author, Félix-Antoine Savard (born 31 August 1896), was a Roman Catholic priest ordained in 1922. It was his ministry in the rural Charlevoix region that inspired him to write Boss of the River. Throughout the novel the central character, Menaud, is concerned with loss — some of what he fears losing is perhaps metaphorical for the greater loss of land and livelihood. He loses his son, Joson, to the river when they are part of a team trying to move huge numbers of logs downstream:
“Already the evening, like a grave digger, began to cast over the scene its cumulating dusk and here the man entered the very valley of torture, now on his knees, gazing up at the skies, imploring that at least there be granted to him the body of his son, to bury it at home beside his mother under the big birch, whose bark in a strong wind rustled like a prayer.”
Savard’s flowery prose is not to everyone’s taste. Interestingly, though, the author had described the scene prior to the young man’s death in the language of war, saying how the men in trying to subdue the raging log jam were “hurling insults at the enemy, shouting the satisfaction that surged in their hot blood”.

Having lost his wife and his son, he struggles to keep hold of his daughter. She has secretly agreed to marry Délié, the traitor in the community, who has arranged to sell the local land rights to the Anglophone outsiders. Another of the young men, Alexis, who had tried to rescue Joson from the river, is a more honourable suitor. He refuses to return to the work on the river:
“It would make me think too much about Joson. It is terrible — terrible how that haunts me.”

The concluding scenes of the novel depict Menaud suffering mental torment:
“The strangers have come! The strangers have come! Joson! Alexis! The mountain is full of them — the whole country is full of them”
He, however, clings to a nationalist trust:
“We are a people that knows not how to perish.”

And then the Harvest

Fedor Panferov (born 20 September 1896) came from the Volga region of south-central Russia. Much of his journalism and fiction focused on rural development under Stalin. His epic novel Brusski, published in four parts between 1928 and 1937, was the first literary account of Soviet collectivisation. This single-volume translation into English was published in 1939 with a clearer agricultural title.

The central characters of this propagandist novel are heroes of the proletariat. They are involved in increasing agricultural output, constructing a dam, developing an iron-and-steel industry, manufacturing tractors and many other ventures. Foremost among them is Kirill Zhdarkin, organiser of the metallurgical and tractor works and secretary of the town's party committee. Though viewed heroically at the beginning and end of the novel, the novel also describe Kirill’s adultery and the breakdown of his relationship with Steshka, the mother of his child. As he rages at the prospect of losing Steshka, he rapes her and she abandons the home. The author decides that even with such severe flaws in his character Kirill’s reputation can be redeemed. At the conclusion of the novel, Steshka returns to her love for Kirill as he shows the strength of the character on the eve of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. In a different context, this redemption and forgiveness is a common motif of literature. In the context of Stalin’s Russia, however, this is not a moral restoration of Kirill but rather a political device. A hero of the proletariat has to be shown to overcome all his weaknesses. There was no place for ultimate failure in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.


Kirill is not only depicted as a hero of Stalin’s Russia, he had previously been awarded the Order of the Red Banner for military valour during the Civil War. On a visit to the Kremlin, he recalled that Stalin never wore the badge:
“... he also had been a military man and an outstanding one at that. He had held the supreme command of more than one front, he had worked out the brilliant plan for shattering the enemy. But he never wore any decorations.”

The key heroic event of the novel, however, was the death of Natasha, a young pregnant woman who died trying to rescue a team of female peat workers from a devastating bog fire. The peat workers escaped a burning train by jumping into the grey ash left behind by the fire but “at once sank and fell to a squatting position, clutching their bare legs with their hands, writhing, struggling, bursting into flame. Natasha displayed the impulsive courage that many soldiers showed during the First World War:
“Not realising what was happening to the girls, carried away by the elemental desire to save them, she flung herself towards them and also sank into the grey ash. In a moment she was transformed into a little flaming bonfire. She struggled to her feet... but the flames caught her away and flung her back into the inferno.”
Kirill, who had been with Natasha when she did this, asked himself:
“I've left Natasha Poronina and the girl peat-workers in the fire. How that wound of mine is to be healed I don't know.”
Similarly, many who fought in the First World War added survivor guilt to their grief.

Nothing to Chance

Though written by a man, this novel largely takes the viewpoint of the young women who are central to the plot. Published in 1936, the novel is set in the north of France near to where much of the trench warfare of the Great War took place. The author, Charles Plisnier (born 13 December 1896) came from the Mons district of Belgium, an area similarly devastated by the war. In early 1917 he had gone to the Netherlands in an unsuccessful attempt to join the Belgian army of resistance. Instead he took to the cause of Communism following the success of the Bolshevik revolution. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that the context for this epic novel is an industrial bourgeois family that owns a small-town shoe factory.

At the outset of the novel, Fabienne, the daughter of the factory chief, sets the scene for the battlegrounds of the story:
“To start with there’s been this ridiculous war. It’s not only left us short of men — it’s made the ones that are still alive think far too much of themselves.”
The simple French title translates as Marriages. Fabienne abandons an unhappy engagement and carefully contrives to lure Maxime, one of her father’s salesmen, into a desperate marriage of convenience. In parallel plots we read of the similarly unconventional marriages of Fabienne’s cousins, Marcelle and Christa. All three marriages are portrayed as having been instigated by the women (a revolutionary feminist concept for the time perhaps — but the author ascribes to them a prejudice learnt in romantic novels).

Whereas Maxime might have been shown as a hero of the proletariat in his ascent from serving the firm and its clients to managing the whole business with rationalisation and economy of labour, he is instead shown as a villian both in matters of money and of the heart. Plisnier concludes the novel with a victory for Fabienne over Maxime, the man she had chosen to be her husband but who had undermined the marriage with infidelity and disloyalty:
“She was beautiful again with a kind of beauty which only adorns the very strong and unimpeded. In her whole bearing was that resplendent dignity which maturity bestows on women who have won.”
That generation of young French women are shown here to have become assertive through the responsibilities that arose due to the absence of men during the war. In contrast the narrative implies that many of the men in post-war French society were second-rate, weak individuals that could not fill the shoes of the fine young men who were killed or maimed during the war. This also is in contrast to the men of the previous generation. Marcelle’s mother had seen her marriage and her man far more positively than her daughter viewed hers:
“Married, she had loved him for his loyalty, his earnest method of dealing with life, his quiet attentions.”
Perhaps then this is a novel of nostalgia, of mourning for a society alienated from the standards that had existed before the war.

Tempest in Paradise

This thriller is set in the Far Eastern city of Harbin in 1932 around the time of Japan’s imposition of a new state (Manchukuo) in Manchuria. The Australian author, Janet Mitchell (born 3 November 1896), knew the city well (see her reportage from there http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4462104). As an explanatory preface she wrote that “many of the incidents in this story actually happened” but “except for allusions to public personages... no references to any living person is made or intended”.

The plot reveals many interesting extensions of the geopolitics of the First World War: the increasing regional dominance of Japan, the brutal control of Soviet society, the White Russian diaspora, the efforts of the League of Nations and the fragile existence of British and American expatriates in Far Eastern outposts. One of the expatriates, W.E. Maunder, editor of The Harbin Morning Star, describes the setting:
“No, it's not a bad place, Harbin, really. Apart from the fact that politically it is one of the most interesting places in the world, especially now, with the Japanese sweeping up from the south and doing just what they dam’ well like, while the Powers blether at Geneva, with the Soviet crouching in the north, with one eye winking from Vladivostok over the Sea of Japan and the other skimming across Outer Mongolia to China — apart from all this, from which anything might emerge, from a second Korea to a world war, there’s its human interest, to use a somewhat trite expression.”

The central character is Boris Moitev, a young poet and aspiring leader of the counter-revolutionary movement among the Harbin Russians. The other main characters are Russian members of his household and some British expatriates, including Madeline Vincent, who falls in love with him. Madeline learns to see the severity of her existence: “Life! What was it all about? Only one thing had become clear to her lately, that life was something that hurt you...” She also reflects on the difference between her generation and that of her cousin Agnes who she is staying with in Harbin: “...we are so often at cross purposes. It's the battle of the generations — of the pre-wars who accept life and the post-wars who challenge it.”

The final scene of the novel happens in the context of the chaos that was caused by the devastating Sungari River Flood and a consequent cholera epidemic. The author does not attempt to bring the romance of Boris and Madeline to a cheerful conclusion. Perhaps the First World War had turned young writers away from ‘happily ever after’; instead a romantic tale could end in tragedy; the hero that the reader had come to identify with would not survive. At the denouement, Boris has these words of his friend Tanya at the front of his mind: “..life and death don't matter. Only two things count — pity for others; for ourselves, courage!”

Night on the Galactic Railroad

Japan played a minor but regionally important role in the First World War as an ally of Britain. Its navy was active both in restricting German and Austrian naval activity in the Pacific and in seizing German and Austrian territories in China and in Micronesia. In early 1917 Japanese ships arrived in the Mediterranean to assist the Royal Navy. 

This imaginative novel, written around 1927, explores death and the afterlife from a child’s perspective. The author, Kenji Miyazawa (born 27 August 1896), experienced serious health problems throughout his life and wrote with a special awareness of mortality. The story was published posthumously in 1934, the author having died of pneumonia in the previous year.

The two central characters in this novella are Giovanni and Campanella, who are close friends and the sons of close friends (their fathers). One night Giovanni is on a grassy hill above his home town. There he gets on a mysterious train and finds that Campanella is already on board. The train brings them through space with passengers boarding and disembarking at the various stations along the way. When the conductor approaches Giovanni, he shows him a ticket that he did not know he had in his pocket. One of the passengers explains to him:
“Now this is something! That ticket will take you anywhere, even all the way to the true Heaven... No, perhaps even farther! It will take you anywhere this four-dimensional Galactic Railroad is capable of going. To have something like this on your person... you must be very important!”

Miyazawa tells about three of the passengers that board the train and have come from a ship that has sunk having hit an iceberg (as the Titanic had). These two children (a brother and sister) and their tutor did not get places on the lifeboats:
“I held onto these two for as long as I could... and now we're here.”
They are heading for Heaven. The girl tells them a tale about a scorpion that is cornered by a weasel. Fearing for his life, he runs away but falls into a well and starts to drown. He then started to pray:
“Oh, God. How many lives have I stolen to survive? Yet when it came my turn to be eaten by the weasel, I selfishly ran away... If only I'd let the weasel eat me, I could have helped him live another day. God, please hear my prayer. Even if my life has been meaningless, let my death be of help to others.”

Campanella looks out the window and observes his mother in Heaven. He leaves the train to join her. The scene that immediately follows is Giovanni waking on the same grassy hill. He walks to the bridge over the river and finds a commotion there. One of his classmates tells him what has happened:
“Zanelli leaned too far over on the boat we were in... It ended up tipping over and Zanelli fell in but Campanella dived in right after him and pushed him back up to the surface. Zanelli got pulled back into the boat... but Campanella... never resurfaced.”
As was often said about acts of self-sacrifice during the war,
“Greater love has no man than this than to lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

Meredith and Co.

This entertaining novel (published in 1933) about life in a preparatory school in the south of England draws heavily on the experiences of the author, George Mills (born 1 October 1896), as a young master from 1925 to 1926 at Windlesham House School in Sussex.

It would, however, be possible to construe that he was imagining the school in an immediate pre-war context with some of the boys destined for active service towards the end of the war.
“The mind of the small boy attaches tremendous importance to trivial matters. When the whole of Europe is swaying on the brink of a precipice, anxious citizens are snatching extra editions of the papers, and harassed parents are wondering how they can afford to educate and clothe their children, the small boy is knitting his brows and puzzling over a paper aeroplane!”


Whereas Mills might have been looking back at the financial disaster of the late 1920s, he might also have had in mind his own prep school days at Parkfield School (also in Sussex) and the impact the war had on his schoolmates. He hints at this remembrance at the end of the book in relating what happened to the schoolboy Meredith after he left prep school. Though describing an interwar context for his career, surely the loss of life points to Mills’s memories of lost lives during the war:
“Meredith was not thinking of the future. He did not know it but he was standing on the threshold of true greatness and was destined, after a fine Public School career, to pass some years of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty in the African swamps where, as a young doctor, he was to lay down his life fighting a cholera plague.”
The choice of the words ‘self-sacrifice’, ‘lay down his life’ and ‘fighting’ strongly suggests that he was reflecting on the war dead. Mills had served from June 1916 as a Private in the Rifle Brigade and later transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps in 1917. (His military service record is available at Ancestry.com but does not reveal much about his service.)