November 1955
In This Issue
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Articles
Educational Television
A lawyer who has taken an increasing responsibility in business management, a citizen who is publicspirited and outspoken and who works without stint to put his ideas into action, LELAND HAZARD took the lead in educational television when very few the country over knew where it was going. Station WQED in Pittsburgh, of which he is president, has blazed a trail and has served the citizens of western Pennsylvania in an extraordinary number of ways. Mr. Hazard has been vice president and general counsel of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company since 1947.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
Accent on Living
Letter to Posterity
H. F. ELLISis a Londoner whose light prose has frequently appeared in the Atlantic. He is the author, also, of an extraordinarily funny book, The Vexations of A. J. Wentworth.
Are You the O'Reilly
A New Yorker who was graduated in 1949 from the University of Missouri, KEN BERNHARDTspent three years as a free-lance writer traveling in Western Europe. He is now engaged in advertising in the chemical industry.
Purely Nominal
Record Reviews
Civil Defense in Between
DAVID HUNT was graduated in 1952 from the University of Manitoba. He now lives in Winnipeg, where he is a feature writer for the Winnipeg Tribune.
Exercise in Pessimism
Air Travel With Stopovers. Ii
Jordan
Other Worlds Than Ours
“If the life of our solar system,” writes DONALD H. MENZEL, Director of the Harvard Observatory, “is to be limited by chance collision with a wandering star, the earth is likely to live to a ripe old age.” A leading astrophysicist, Dr. Menzel is the author of several books in the field of physics, radio propagation, and astronomy, and his book debunking flying saucers attracted wide attention. In the following paper, remarkable for the clarity of its elucidation, Dr. Menzel proposes a new theory about the origin of our solar system.
British Cultural Fatigue
The liveliest and certainly one of the youngest of the London critics, KENNETH TYNAN,now in his twenty-ninth year, is a frequent visitor to this country, where he has the chance to compare the productions of Broadway with those of his home city, and, in general, our arts with England’s. He is the author of three books on the theater, and since 1951 he has, in the great tradition of Shaw and Max Beerbohm, been rendering provocative and penetrating judgments, as the drama critic first of The Spectator, then of the Evening Standard, and now of the revered Observer.
Hunting Moon
Each autumn WILLIAM WISTER HAINES,the playwright and novelist, joins his doctor brother on a trek to northern Canada, where they track down the myriads of wild fowl that are then making ready for their migration. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote his first two novels, Slim and High Tension,about the men who risk their lives working close to “hot wire,”Mr. Haines has written the scenarios for many successful pictures; and his own play, Command Decision,was a hit on Broadway, in the films, and as a book.
Canada's Boom
The Kidnaping of Kamlon
An American married to a British civil servant. AGNES NEWTON KEITH has spent twenty years of her maturity in the islands of the South Pacific. From 1934 until 1942 she and her husband made their headquarters in Sandakan, North Borneo, and from those years came her prize-winning Atlantic book, Land Below the Wind. Her great war book, Three Came Home, was the painful, compassionate account of her three years in a Japanese prison camp. When she and Harry had recovered their health, they returned to Asia as representatives of the U.N., and from their tour of duty in the Philippines has come the source material for her new and illuminating volume, Bare Feet in the Palace, of which this is an episode.
Horizon Thong
Soviet Industry
On the eve of the Geneva Conference, Marshal Bulganin, in a speech to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, acknowledged the shortcomings of the Soviet industrial organization. For an appraisal of Bulganin’s far-reaching report we turn to EDWARD CRANKSHAW,the English author and historian. Mr. Crankshaw first visited Russia as a member of the British Military Mission to Moscow; he went back again in 1947 as a writer for the London Observer; and it was in the course of these tours of duty that he assembled the source material for his two readable and authoritative books, Russia and the Russians and Cracks in the Kremlin Wall.
Cockles, Brambles, and Fern Hill: Dylan Thomas in Wales
JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN, a poet and teacher long associated with the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA in New York City and now teaching at the University of Connecticut, was instrumental in bringing Dylan Thomas to America in 1950. He handled the many details of the poet’s three tours; he became an intimate friend and the deeply troubled observer of an unfolding tragedy. His account of those fateful years is, as Katherine Anne Porter puts it, “most honestly and movingly and disturbingly told” in his new book, Dylan Thomas in America, which will be published this month by Atlantic-Little, Brown and from which this is an excerpt.
Saturday Night
A native New Yorker, MARJORIE HOUSEPIAN grew up near Gramercy Park not far from the Armenian section where most of her Armenian relatives still live. In her early teens she spent two years abroad; attended the New York public schools and graduated from Barnard College in 1944. She is now working as secretary to the president of Barnard, and has been studying writing at Columbia under Martha Foley. Her first appearance in the Atlantic was in the January issue, when we published “How Can You Shame a Donkey?” We are happy to have her back with this new story.
The Wreath
FRANK O’CONNOR, the Irish author who has taught several courses on the writing of fiction, was ashed how he approached his own short stories. Said Mr. O’Connor, “With me it’s a difficulty of temperament. Mine is lyrical, explosive. I write a story with a feeling of slight regret for poor Shakespeare’s lack of talent and wake up with a hangover that makes poteen look like cold water. Then, having cursed life and forsworn literature, I start rewriting. If I can work up the Shakespeare mood often enough I may get it right in six revisions. If I don’t I may have to rewrite it fifty times. This isn’t exaggeration.” Mr. O’Connor is now living in the United States. His most recent collection, More Stories, was published last year by Knopf.
T. E. Lawrence: Man or Myth?
Biographer and historian, CAPTAIN B. H. LIDDELL HART succeeded Colonel Repington as the foremost military correspondent in Britain. He served as military critic on the Times of London from 1935 to 1939 and was also adviser on defense to the Times and the War Minister. The author of many pertinent studies of the German commanders in the First World War,Captain Liddell Hart was also the biographer and friend of T. E. Lawrence,whose integrity he defends in the article which follows.
Charles De Gaulle: Self-Portrait of a Patriot
The first volume of de Gaulle’s war memoirs, The Call to Honour, which Viking has just published in translation, reveals not only a stubborn French patriot and a dogmatic general, but a writer of remarkable talent. CURTIS CATE,who gives us here an analytical portrait of de Gaulle the man of letters, was born in France, is a graduate of Harvard, and is now on the staff of the Atlantic.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
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