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.”

The Journey Home

This novel, published in 1945, is an account of a train journey from Florida to New York. The central character, Lieutenant Don Corbett, is on three weeks’ leave from service as an Air Force bombardier in Europe. During the train journey, he moves from carriage to carriage, engaging in conversation with a wide variety of characters. Through doing so, he gets an insight into the mood of America’s home front and some of them see beneath his steely veneer the frailty and fatigue of a war-weary fighter.

The author, Zelda Popkin (née Feinberg, born 5 July 1898), grew up in and around New York City. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. On leaving school, she worked as a newspaper reporter. She wrote regularly for magazines, such as The New Yorker, before she wrote her first novel when convalescing from a long illness. Published in 1938, it was the first of five detective novels featuring Mary Carner, one of the earliest female detectives in fiction. After those novels, she wrote this novel, focused on American attitudes to the Second World War; then Small Victory (published in 1947), one of the first American novels on the Holocaust; later Quiet Street, the earliest novel in English about the creation of the state of Israel, for which she received a National Jewish Book Award in 1952. Small Victory  was largely informed by her own experiences of post-war camps for displaced people in Germany, which she visited on behalf of the American Red Cross in the winter of 1945-1946.

The central character, Don Corbett, befriends Nina, a young New York woman, on the train and she tries to connect to this experience of war. Towards the end of the novel, part of the train is derailed and in conversation with Don, she tries to use the disaster as a means of understanding the horrors of war:
“I feel as if I'd been through the war. Why, it's something like that, like that wreck, isn't it?”
“Something. Only more so. All the time.”
“Oh, no!... but then how do they stand it?"
“Some do. Some don't. Depends on what kind of person you are. If you're one kind, you pull up your guts and do something to help. If you’re another, you sit down and cry and say why did it happen to me?”

Death in the Mind

This novel, published in 1945, reads like a series of Homeland, except for the fact that it's set during the Second World War. The main premise is that the Nazis are using hypnotism to turn Americans into Nazi operatives. The novel begins with an American submarine commander firing torpedoes into an American ship in an English harbour. The American and British security agents are asked to investigate. The central characters are two agents, John Evans, who is leading the investigation, and his girlfriend, Madeleine Sawyers, who appears to have been turned by the Nazis.

The author, Richard Lockridge (born 26 September 1898), wrote this novel with the assistance of George Estabrooks (born 16 December 1895), a psychology professor with an expert knowledge of hypnotism. Lockridge grew up in Missouri and attended the University of Missouri. He briefly served in the navy in 1918 and returned to naval service during the Second World War, working in the Navy Public Relations Office. He was a drama critic for The New York Sun from 1928 to 1943. His first book, a biography, was published in 1932. His first detective novel was published in 1940 and he went on to write more than 60 similar novels, many in collaboration with is wife Frances. They won an Edgar in the Mystery Writers Association's first annual awards in 1945.

The novel begins by setting the scene for the event that sparks the investigation:
“Things were not going well for the Allies that day in late September of 1942 — they were not going well anywhere. In North Africa things went badly and Rommel’s tanks rumbled up to the line the British held only some fifty miles from Alexandria. They rumbled rapidly... Things went badly in North Africa and they went badly in Russia, where the Germans and those who followed them were snarling into Stalingrad. The Allied world awaited news which seemed inevitable. When Hitler screamed that Stalingrad would surely fall there were very few people in the world... who doubted him.”

The White Brigade

This novel, published in 1943, is described as “an absorbing and authentic account of the Belgian underground” during the Second World War. In effect it's a factual account of the White Brigade resistance movement (“all the characters in the book are real”), written in the form of fiction to protect the identities of those involved in the struggle against Nazi occupation. The central character, Jean Buchet, believes he is involved in the Resistance for the sake of his daughter but the terrible living conditions in Nazi-occupied Belgium lead to a tuberculosis epidemic and both his wife and daughter are infected. A wanted man for his resistance activities, his terminally-ill wife urges him to flee to England. There he joins many other Belgian exiles flying in the Royal Air Force.

The author, Robert Goffin (born 21 May 1898), grew up in the Walloon part of Brabant in central Belgium. He was educated at the Athenaeum Saint-Gilles in Brussels and then studied law at the city’s Free University. His first book of poetry was published in 1918. During the five years preceding the Second World War, he published 13 books: two novels, three collections of poetry, three long studies on eels, rats and spiders, two works of literary criticism, two books on the Habsburgs and also a Michelin-type gastronomy guide. He lived in exile during the Second World War, supporting himself by writing and delivering lectures. During this period, along with several well-researched books set in Nazi-occupied Belgium, he also published books on the history of jazz and delivered a related course at the New School for Social Research in New York City. After the war he returned to Belgium and resumed his work as a lawyer. In 1953 he was elected to the prestigious Royal Academy of French Language and Literature.

Whereas many outsiders would contrast the German occupation of Belgium in the First World War with the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, the author describes how the country was “occupied by the same enemy who had tortured it in 1914”. The central character, Jean Buchet, “remembered with anguish those years of desolation”. Reference is made to the Resistance movement during that first occupation, citing the response in the underground press to the execution of Philippe Baucq in October 1915:
“You may rob us, imprison us, even kill us; you can never silence us... Our voice is the voice of all the mothers, the widows, the children who weep for those whom they have lost. That voice will not be still until the last German, soldier or spy, has left the country, invaded as it was in contravention of every right.”