In the world of letters, Harry S. Truman and Edmund Wilson each had his hour of triumph, such as it was.
The President was informed by letter that he had been chosen an honorary editor of the Harvard Crimson, campus newspaper. When the Crimson got a formal acknowledgement from the White House, it had to respond with some sad news: somebody had just been hoaxing the President—Crimson rules forbade honorary editors.
To balding Scholar Wilson came one of those attentions he never got in the cloistered days before his Memoirs of Hecate County was banned. His fourth and current wife, Elena, was nominated by a group of magazine artists one of the Ten Most Glamorous Women of 1946.
Sinclair Lewis, whose last try at movie writing was an anti-fascist horse opera (junked as "bad box office"), was back for another try—this time a satire on Adam & Eve. Two days after he hit Hollywood, Babbitt's aging creator: 1) went to a big party at Gossipist Hedda Hopper's, 2) talked like a native. "The movies are no more commercial," declared Lewis, "than any other form of art. . . . There's no reason to suppose that a poor man starving in a garret writes better than a rich man living in a mansion. . . . Human beings are 100% commercial as hell. . . . Rembrandt was one of the most commercial bastards that ever lived."
In Manhattan, lean, bemonocled Visitor Sax Rohmer, who had been chiefly concerned with Fu Manchu for the past 30 years, listened with professional interest to Soprano Mimi Benzell. She would sing in a new operetta, Chinese Nightingale—new book & lyrics by Sax Rohmer. The show would open in London, but Briton
Rohmer would not stay there. "I shall spend most of my time in the south of France," said he. "It's much more pleasant there. Conditions in England are shocking, just shocking."
Bound home from France after an eight-month visit was best-seller Richard Wright (Black Boy, Native Son); but he was going back again in the spring. "America is not the New World," wrote the Negro novelist in a Parisian journal, "because the social elements in the States are among the oldest . . . whereas Europe has abandoned the ancient structure. . . . Thus, France and Europe should be considered the New World."
George Bernard Shaw, for a change, was in print with an utterance that had nothing to do with mankind's folly. The New Statesman and Nation had got hold of an old note he had sent (apparently with a picture) to the late Actress Ellen Terry, with whom he carried on a safely epistolary "love-affair" for 30 years:
This scene which would a stone unharden Is but the view from Bernard's garden. Here, standing sideways to the dawn, And looking northwards up the lawn, You see the house that Bernard weeps in Because his Ellen never peeps in.
Hedy Lamarr, who wants to break a picture contract with Producer Arnold Pressburger because she expects a baby in March, lost a court fight to have her case heard before the baby arrives. "Miss Lamarr's condition," gravely deposed the producer, "came about not through any fault of my own, but due entirely to an act on the part of the plaintiff which was solely within the plaintiff's own control."