Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...South Shore Players at Cohasset, Mass, announced that famed Novelist Sinclair Lewis would make his debut as a professional actor there this summer, playing for a week in July the role of Doremus Jessup in the dramatization of his book, It Can't Happen Here...
...Night made strong reading, even in its greatly expurgated translation. But that violent and gory novel is a model of Puritan self-restraint compared with Céline's new, untranslated and probably untranslatable Trifles for a Massacre, current sensation of French literature, in which the novelist's genius for invective, hatred of modern civilization and fertility in cursing it have exploded in an anti-Semitic tirade calculated to end all anti-Semitic tirades, to make Nazis turn green with envy...
What made M. Céline an anti-Semite is explained with Gallic candor in the first 40 pages of Trifles for a Massacre. It appears that at 43, a successful novelist, War hero and practicing physician, Céline suddenly felt a great liking for dancing girls. To get acquainted with these attractive creatures he composed a ballet, filled with dancing shepherds, pure emotions, sweetness & light, and consequently much different from his usual pessimistic and obscene prose. It was rejected. Jewish musicians, actors and production managers, he decided, wanted the girls themselves. For the next 337 pages of Trifles...
When Trifles for a Massacre was published, horrified Left critics who had praised Céline's Journey to the End of the Night damned him as a Fascist. Dissenting, Novelist André Gide declared the book should be taken as a joke, although a dangerous one, being virtually a satire on the absurdity and vulgarity of genuine antiSemitism. Bystanding critics found another explanation in the detachment of modern French literature from French life, the tendency of writers like Céline to regard writing as a disinterested mental game, to be played without thought of the social values...
...shining exception to this pattern of War fiction is Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa. It is an old-fashioned moral study, and Author Zweig is almost the only War novelist for whom armed conflict is only a part of the war between good & evil that rages as fiercely when the guns are silent. Last week Author Zweig published the fourth volume of Grischa's moral story. A long and involved book called The Crowning of a King, it deals, superficially, with the intrigues of the German general staff over the selection of a king...