Archbishops
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, likes to drive home his points in workaday metaphors. Last week he conjured up an ironmongery (British for hardware store) in which a night-prowling prankster switched round the price tags. Then, said His Grace, “When we enter in the morning, we find lawn mowers are two for 5¢, nails $25 each, and a gallon of paint a penny. All the values are wrong. That is what has happened to our civilization, and we shall not come to order and peace until our price tags tally with God’s.”
The Archbishop of New York, Francis J. Spellman, home from a six-month trip (to Spain, Italy, England, Africa, the Near East), explained that he had spent more time visiting military hospitals than originally planned, declared that “from these visits I have received many consolations. . . .” To reports that he had been on a diplomatic mission, his answer was simply that he had traveled as a private citizen and Military Vicar of the U.S. He looked forward to Italy’s surrender, he said, as a hastener of peace and “an opportunity … to the United Nations to show how they intend to keep faith with the world, with their words and with themselves.”
Travelers
Lord Halifax, Britain’s towering Ambassador to the U.S., fixed things so that when the smallish mayor of Nelson, B.C., delivered his welcoming oration at the depot they would be approximately face to face. The mayor stood on the train’s rear platform, Halifax on the ground. “Ladies and gentlemen,” began the mayor, as the train moved down the track.
Yehudi Menuhin, back in Manhattan from a Latin American concert tour, recalled playing for an hour in his undershirt in broiling Trinidad, mastering some short-haired music for a concert at the Army base in San Juan. The shorthair number was St. Louis Blues. “I practiced and I got pretty good,” he said. He played it on his Guarnerius instead of the Strad, because the former “had a more earthy, a more contralto quality.”
General Sir Bernard Montgomery, who, back home with his cricket-captain son David, had lately made a picture of English summertime contentment,was in a jam when his Fortress ground-looped on a Sicilian airport about the size of a cricket field. Thoroughly shaken up but uninjured, the General “took it like a good sport,” said his pilot.
Litterateurs
Sigrid Undset, 61-year-old Nobel Prizewinner from Norway, declared that the thing about the U.S. that astonished her most was its women’s clubs. “It would never occur to a European woman,” said she, “to have lunch with a lot of other women, and not a male in sight. I must say I prefer mixed company.”
Robert Frost, 68, three-time Pulitzer Prizewinner and footloose poetigogue (variously employed at Yale, Amherst, Michigan, Middlebury and Harvard, where he was a “fellow in American Civilization”), was hired by Dartmouth as “resident consultant in the humanities.”
William Faulkner, 45, literary expert in the subhumanities, reached the end of a year’s labor at Warner Bros, at some $500 a week, was working on the script of a supercolossal about war, to be called Battle Cry. He had not written a complete script during the year, nor any books or stories, thought he might do some writing if he got a vacation.
Newton Booth Tarkington, two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner, turned 74 in Kennebunk Port, Me., noted happily that it was also a famed has-been’s birthday but that he himself was “still at it” (see p. 50).
Ezra Pound, 56, the sharp-bearded, incoherent, choleric poet’s poet from Idaho, persistent expatriate (since 1908), sage of Rapallo and champion of Fascism, was indicted by a District of Columbia grand jury for treason.*
Noel Coward, 43, tireless jack-of-all theater, sang his newest number over BBC:
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans,
When we’ve definitely got them on the
run,
Let us treat them kindly as we would a
valued friend,
We might send them out some bishops
as a form of lease and lend.
Let’s be sweet to them, and day by day
repeat to them,
That sterilization simply isn’t done,
Let’s help the dirty swine again,
To occupy the Rhine again,
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.
Property Owner
Edgar Bergen bought himself a two-cell jail with running water and electric lights. For a $10,000 war bond bid at a Hollywood auction, he acquired the pint-size pokey from a young man who had got it by error for $1.50 at a tax sale (TIME, July 12). Bergen did not say what he was going to do with his plum, which lies in Harvard, Neb. (pop: 704).
* Other expatriates indicted with him: RobertBest (TIME, Feb. 15), Constance Drexel, EdwardLeopold Delaney, Jane Anderson (TIME, Jan. 19,1942), Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach, DouglasChandler, Max Otto Koischwitz.
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