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For an American living in France since seven years, the most interesting fact in your review of Henry Miller's book about the States, An Air-Conditioned Nightmare [TIME, Dec. 24], is the lightly touched point that Author Miller left Europe as soon as the going grew hard in 1940. As he had been settled in Paris since ten years "to study vice," while he "worked at panhandling and slept on park benches," we wish only that he had stayed in Europe for five years more. . . .
When we read; for instance, that he thought Boston "a vast jumbled waste created by prehuman or subhuman monsters in a delirium of greed," we wonder what possibilities of contrast are left him if he should describe Europe's real "jumbled waste" cities. . . . For us, this "largest force lately to appear on the horizon of American letters" is a man to amuse a very prosperous culture which can still permit itself the undermining, disheartening, demoralizing effect of his kind of literature.
For let anyone . . . try to survive and keep his family alive, to furnish a pleasant place to live with bits of this and that, to manage eggs from wrongly fed and badly housed chickens, to scrape and tan animal furs for family use, to wash and spin wool, with homemade soap and homemade spinning wheel, to finish the winter evenings by the light of a potato-lamp (with its improvised wick set in melted fat in a hollowed-out potato!). The effort is sure to leave him with the greatest indifference toward the "literature of despair.". . .
(MME.) MARTHA DEWEESE IVALDY
La Ferté-Bernard
France
Thankless OPAsters
Sirs:
We who work with Chester Bowles and know the difficulty of his task were surprised and pleased to find TIME so ably presenting both sides of the story of inflation in your March 4 issue.
First inspired by the need for a job to be done in price control and rationing, later inspired by the magnificent job that Bowles does in handling men and situations, we try awkwardly to carry the ball as he calls the signals. . . .
It is a difficult job, it is distasteful, it is thankless. But in that job many people find as I did a new sense of community responsibility. . . .
RAE E. WALTERS
Sixth OPA Region Administrator
Chicago
Are G.I.S Prejudiced?
Sirs:
Why all this fuss about the results of that poll taken among "typical" G.I.S in Germany [TIME, Feb. 4]?
What do you think the Army does—make broadminded zealots out of small-town Bilbo fans? Or educators for democracy out of kids brought up under Tammany's protective wings? . . . Prejudiced? Hell, yes, they're prejudiced. They learned it at home. . . .
ROGER H. DENNETT
Torrington, Conn.
The Yanks Have It
Sirs:
Re: G.I.S and British brides, the following excerpt is taken from a letter which I recently received from Miss Edna Scotchmer of London, who was my secretary in London during 1943 when I was employed there as a civilian: