Abstract

Fiction in Review, 1944, September, 23

The article presents information on the novel "The Leaning Tower & Other Stories." "The Leaning Tower and Other Stories," is a remarkable literary-political document by Anne Porter, not unrelated in method to Thomas Mann's story of the German inflation, Disorder and Early Sorrow. It is a story about German leader Adolf Hitler which never mentions Hitler except as the unnamed subject of a photograph in a barber shop; it is an analysis of political forces without political analyses; it is a chapter of history which still manages, as literature, to stand outside and above history. Miss Porter is telling us about Germany in 1931, about the emotions that prepare national violence. Her narrative device is to follow an impressionable young Texan, who in the first freedom of maturity carries out the romantic resolution to visit the Berlin be had heard about from a childhood friend, as he becomes more and more frightened by the creeping awfulness of pre-Nazi German life.