July 1951
In This Issue
Explore the July 1951 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Latin America
What Happened at Clark Field
In 1945 WALTER D. EDMONDS, the author of Rome Haul and Drums Along the Mohawk, received the assignment to write the valiant story of the American Air Force in the Philippines in the first year of the war. He interviewed some eighty of the pilots and ground officers who survived; he visited Manila in the spring of ‘45. He checked his source material against the official records, and his chronicle They Fought with What They Had, the first volume of which will be published in September, is an inspiring story of American courage. From it, we have selected the most crucial single episode, the first Japanese attack on the airfields north of Manila.
The Silent Revolution
BARBARA WARD early established her reputation in her brilliant editorials in the London Economist. Last spring she left her desk to be married and to live in Australia. She has promised the Atlantic a new series of articles. Meantime, she writes, “Life here continues to be strewn with lotus. After all the hurly-burly of the Economist and London and the BBC and a hundred other things, it is bliss to sit and savor the passing of time. I am reading Newman and the Fathers and my next book will have nothing to do with economics.“
First Communion
Love Goes, We Stay
Fly Back to the Moment
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
Farewell and Hail
Father Pkokop's Dilemma
In a Church organization forced to obey the Communist government, which course shall a devout village priest pursue: betray his faith or abandon his parishioners? A brilliant journalist, born in Czechoslovakia and now an American citizen, JOSEPH WECHSBERGevokes the answer, in all its homely details, in the extraordinary interview which follows. Mr. Wechsberg is the author of a novel, Continental Touch, and several books about European travel.
How to Be a Poet or the Ascent of Parnassus Made Easy
Poet, storyteller, and broadcaster, DYLAN THOMAS WAS born in Wales and published his first volume of verse in 1934 when he was nineteen. His Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. which he published in 1940,is a chronicle based on autobiography. Recently Mr. Thomas was invited by the editor of Circus to describe the steps which help to establish a popular poet in England today. It Was an opportunity for iron y which he has not wasted.
The Suppression of News
The free press guaranteed by our Constitution is encountering a new — and growing obstacle: a flat refusal by many public officials to divulge what is going on in their conduct of office. JAMES S. POPE,Managing Editor of the Louisiille Courier-Journal for the past eleven years, is a director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and chairman of that group’s Committee on Freedom of Information. He is also a director of the Associated Press Managing Editors.
A Ride on the Short Dog
Poet and short-story Writer, JAMES STILL, tins dour much of his creative writing in that remote. picturesque stronghold, the Kentucky mountains. For years he was the librarian of the Hindman Settlement School at the forks of Troublesome Creek, and he has been the laureate of the mountaineers. In 1940 he shared honors with Thomas Wolfe in the Southern Authors’ Award, for his novel River of Larlh.
Tarry Awhile, Time
Chekhov
The dean of living Russian novelists, IvAN BUNIN was born in 1870 at voronezh in Central Russia. His early work, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy, attracted the attention of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, and his friendship with the latter began in 1895. Mr. Bunin has lived in exile since the Russian Revolution; now in his new book Memories & Portraits, which Doubleday is to publish this summer, he has given us a firsthand account of those Russian immortals whom he knew in his youth.
Sailor Hat
AGNES NEWTON KEITH, a graduate of the University of California, first went to live in North Borneo as the bride of Harry Keith, an English zoologist who teas serving as Conservator of Forests and It Wild Life. Her happy adventures in the jungle and in Sandukan, the tiny capital, she described in her first book, Land Below the Wind, which won the Atlantic nonfiction prize of 1939. Mr. and Mrs. Keith and their young son George were taken prisoner by the Japanese, and four and a half years later, after convalescing from that experience, she wrote her second book. Three Came Home. The Keiths were called back to North Borneo directly after the war to assist in the reconstruction; in her forthcoming volume, While Man Returns, of which this is a chapter, Mrs. Keith tells of the third phase of their life in the hast.
Anniversary in Paris
DONALD MOFFAT, the Boston author, became a friend of France during his years in the tmeriean Field Serriee in the First World War. He and his wife made extended visits to the country in the years between the wars., and there he gathered the knowledge of country and character so pleasantly depicted in his books The Mou family in Franco and A Villa in Brittany. Last summer they went back again — the first lime they had been in Paris since the Liberation, and the reunion resulted in a new series of which this is the first.
Outward Bound
H. M. TOMLINSON was born close to the London Docks with shipping in his blood. But when he went to sen, it was not before the mast but as a writer. The Sea and the Jungle, which resulted from his maiden voyage to South America, ranks among the finest prose of our time. It was followed by Old Junk (papers of seafaring and of his work as a tear correspondent in France). London River, Gallions Reach, and more recently, The Wind Is Rising, a collection of essays, written in England during the Blitz, unrivaled for their power of indignation.
It's Later Than You Think
Of English parentage, MONICA STIRLING was educated in Paris, where her father directed the English Theatre and where she now lives and does her writing. In the early years of the war, she worked in the De Gaulle headquarters in London; after the Allied invasion, she returned to Prance and served for eighteen months as a special correspondent for the Atlantic. Meantime her short stories in the Atlantic had won her a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer award for a year s writing in Italy. In this interval, she wrote her first novel, Lovers Aren’t Company, which was published under the Allantic-Little, Brown imprint. We hope to have her second ready for press shortly.
Song for Lovers
Bradley and Macarthur
General Omar Bradley in Europe and General Douglas Mac Arthur in the Pacific proved to he two of our most decisive commanders in World war 11. General Bradley has just published his military autobiography; General MacArthur is hard at work on his, and in the meantime we are invited to read the booh about him by his friend, General George C. Kenney. We turn to RICHARD E. DANELSON, who served in Military Intelligence in both wars, for an appraisal of these two great leaders and the books about them.
Czechoslovakia
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
Reader's Choice
Wines of France
Dominations and Powers
The Heart of a Man
The Watch
The Season of the Stranger
The Guests of Summer
This Month
Listen, Sister..
FAIRLEY BLAKE is a pseudonym. Readers who disagree with his Martini theories ore referred to M. F. K. Fisher’s treatise, “ To the Gibson and Beyond,”which appeared in the January, 1949, Atlantic.
A Hollywood Child Star's Garden of Verses. I (Apologies to Robert Louis Steretison)
Stop Player. Joke No. 4
WILLIAM GADDIS entered editorial work in New York after leaving Harvard and for the past two years has been living and writing in France and Spain. This is his first appearance in the Atlantic.
Jurbocars
If problems of noise and low fuel mileage ran be solved, the turbine-d riven car will yet make its appearance on American highways.DBNNIS MAY,well-known authority on British automobile design, gives an up-to-date report on overseas developments with this type of power plant.
The Bride
Canada
With a minimum of formalities at the border, Americans can find an unlimited variety of inducements to summer travel in ‘anada. RICHAHD JOSEPH is a journalist who has spent most of the past five pears in sizing up vacation travel throughout the world.
