January 1951
In This Issue
Explore the January 1951 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Malaya
My Last Visit With Shaw
VINCENT SHEEAN, who began his writing as a foreign correspondent and who scored his first international success with Personal History, was abashed — as any young writer would be — on his first meeting with George Bernard Shaw. But Shaw took a liking to him and to his wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson. He was invited again to the Victorian house on the edge of the little village of Ayot St. Lawrence, and as he came to know the great man and his charming wife Aunt Charlotte, his veneration for Shaw deepened and became articulate. These are the impressions of his last visit with George Bernard Shaw in the spring of 1949.
Yearning for Security
Give us orthodoxy and tell us what to do is the attitude which OSCAR HANDLIN, Associate Professor of History at Harvard, finds in the present-day college student. “The college is muggy with modest ambitions,”Professor Handlin writes; “the little dreams are not of wealth or fame or monumental accomplishments, but of bureaucrats’ offices in government or the corporations.”An authority on American social and economic history, Professor Handlin is the author of This Was America, published by Harvard University Press in 1919.
Faith in Science
“The road ahead may be invisible,” writes I. I. RABI,Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University, “but to science the unknown is a problem full of interest and promise. The scientific tradition should help us to renew and reaffirm our faith.” Dr. Rabi, who served as a member of the General Advisory Committee for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944 for his work in atomic physics.
The Weather Prophet
A native Texan and a partner in the Houston law firm of Baker, Bolts, Andrews, and Parish, DILLON ANDERSONis establishing a fresh reputation as a writer of short stories. He is contributing to the Atlantic a series of adventures in the lives of two happy hobos who fortunately do not take themselves too seriously. The Editor captured the first story on his visit to Houston in 1948; this is the fifth, and there are more to come.
The Russians Don't Hear
Many Americans have wondered by what mechanics of censorship the Soviet government has maintained its ironclad control over ideas and information within its own borders. ALEX INKELES, Lecturer and Research Associate at the Russian Research Center at Harvard, reveals a system of mass communications in which every loud-speaker, theater, newspaper, bulletin board, and advertisement is joined in an unceasing propaganda onslaught on the individual Russian. Dr. Inkeles is the author of the book Public Opinion in Soviet Russia published last summer by the Harvard University Press.
France
Pre-Valedictory
How Big Is an Inch?
A Yankee Republican liberal, SENATOR RALPH E. FLANDERScarried both labor’s and industry’s endorsement when he ran as Senator from Vermont. He has been a designer and inventor of machine tools. For thirteen years he was President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and in 1944 he received the American Engineering Council’s Hoover Medal for outstanding public service. Throughout his career, he has maintained that the standards of American industry should be initiated by industry itself, not imposed on industry by government, and in this trenchant article he explains why.
Music Under the Generals
Composer and author, NICOLAS NABOKOV began his study of music in St. Petersburg, where in his impressionable years he heard the singing of Chaliapin and the playing of Rachmaninov and young Heifetz, and saw the dancing of Pavlova and Karsavina. After the Revolution, he worked in the Berlin Conservatory, and when his first balletoratorio, Ode, was produced by Diaghilev in Paris, he entered upon the creative years during which he was to enjoy the friendship of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Koussevitzky. The paper which follows is drawn from his delightful book, Old Friends and New Music, which will soon be published under the Atlantic-Little, Brown imprint.
Sadie
A veteran of the Navy now in his twenty-fourth year, PETER MATTHIESSEN was graduated last June from Yale, where he is teaching creative writing in a part-time capacity. “It’s a fine job,” he says. “One of its great advantages is the opportunity which it affords me for my own writing. This is primarily the story of one man,” he continues. “His behavior is not intended is a comment on the South.” On this piece John Farrar commented, “A remarkable story, a very fine story indeed. It has skill, authenticity, atmosphere, restraint.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography
With his good looks, his swift so cross, his love of parties, and his incredible spending, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the personification of “the Jazz Age.”After his novel of Princeton, This Side of Paradise, which gained him immediate popularity, he went on to write The Great Gatsby, the almost perfect expression of the Prohibition Era. But it was Fitzgerald’s tragedy that he did not mature to carry out the still bigger books which he saw in his mind. ARTHUR MIZENER has been working on a biography of Fitzgerald since 1945; in his research he has had the help of people like Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway, and a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship enabled him to settle for an intense period at Princeton, where he had access to Fitzgerald’s personal papers. The Atlantic is pleased to publish an abridgment of Mr. Mizener’s book in three installments, of which this is the second.
Toulouse-Lautrec and Goya
MACKINLEY HELM, the Boston biographer and art critic, gives us his impressions of two distinguished one-man exhibits, the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec and of Goya: he goes on to speak of the sculpture on show in carious cities, and of the most notable books on art in this season. This is the fourth of the Atlantic’s series on Painting and Sculpture to which connoisseurs, curators, and artists will contribute. Next month we shall hear from Mitchell A. Wilder, Director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.
The Speechless Crows
Churchill: The Hinge of Fate
“This — is London“ meant throughout the war years one powerful fact for American radio listeners: they were about to hear one of EDWARD R. MURROW’S characteristically bold, accurate, steadfast accounts of Britain's struggle against the Nazis. A great reporter and a wise analyst now broadcasting on our own national affairs, Ed Murrow appraises for Atlantic readers The Hinge of Fate, the fourth and most controversial volume of Churchill’s history of the Second World War, published by Houghton Mifflin.
The Power of the Poet
A conference of distinguished poets was held in Cambridge last summer in connection with the Harvard Summer School, and their discussion brought out these illuminating words of PIERRE EMMANUEL, the French poet and critic. Mr. Emmanuel, who was born in 1916, is the author of some fifteen volumes of prose and verse; he taught mathematics and philosophy at a French lycée but stepped out of academic dress to take an active part in the Resistance movement. He is now in charge of the English-language broadcasts of the French government radio station. Radio Diffusion Française.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
The Age of Faith
The Traitor
Fritz Kreisler
Moulin Rouge
This Month
Une Petite Piqûre
This is the latest adventure of our pseudonymous correspondent in France whose reports are a frequent feature of these pages.
The Hawks
It's Spontaneous!
A Rhode Islander who was graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1939, EDWIN O’CONNOR served in the Coast Guard during the war and now lives in Boston.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
Our All-Year-Round Greeting Card
They Shall Have Music
JOHN M. CONLY is a former New York and Washington newspaperman who is now an associate editor of Pathfinder. “ They Shall Have Music” is a quarterly feature in the Atlantic.
