The Contributors' Column

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THEATREGOERS who saw Ethel Barrymore’s production of Whiteoaks will remember the keen and sensitive Englishman who played the part of Finch. His name is Stephen Haggard (p. 665) and he had just passed his twenty-ninth birthday when Poland was invaded. Mr. Haggard had several good reasons for not wishing to fight, He was an artist, with a reputation that would have made it easy for him to follow his art to America; he was a young husband who had spent many happy months in Germany and who had been educated almost from birth to abhor the thought of war. After an inward struggle he resolved never to enter a theatre again until Hitler had been stopped. He sent his wife and two small sons to America, and then, in the forty-eight hours before leaving for the infantry training centre, he wrote for his two boys a Testament of Faith which the Atlantic is proud to publish.

Margaret McGovern (p. 683) works hard by day at the Stillman Infirmary, Harvard University, in order that she may have her nights free for her verse and her reading. Her first volume of poems, The Lost Year, was published in 1929, and she is now at work on a play in blank verse on the subject of Shakespeare’s life. This is her first appearance in the Atlantic.

Royal S. Kellogg (p. 684) is that rare bird in America, a careful and methodical motorist. He has been driving automobiles since 1915. In that quarter of a century he has owned eight different cars, has used them solely for his and his family’s pleasure, and has kept account of every penny they cost him. Here is a clear and undeniable statement of what it costs for civilization on wheels.

Second in our series of prose portraits of Genius at Work is Paul Hollister’s (p. 689) play-byplay description of Walt Disney in his studio.

Converse Studio.Inc.

When Richard Ely Danielson (p. 702) thinks of the Civil War (about which he knows a great deal), into his imagination comes Corporal Hardy, Union veteran whose courage and loyalty stir the blood. Mr. Danielson’s first short story about Corporal Hardy appeared in the Atlantic for November 1938. We recommend that it be reread here and now.

From coast to coast Americans are profoundly disturbed by the developments in the Far East. In the October issue W. R. Castle stated his reasons for acquiescing in a Monroe Doctrine for Japan. Now comes A Proposal for much more drastic action towards Japan — a proposal signed by sixteen members of the Faculty of the Haryard Law School (p. 706).

Any action which the United States undertakes in the Pacific this year will inevitably involve the two-ocean strategy of a one-ocean navy. It is with this problem in mind that we have turned to Captain William D. Puleston (p. 707), former Chief of the Naval Intelligence and author of the biography of Mahan which was published last year. Readers will understand, of course, that the views expressed by Captain Puleston are personal and do not commit the Navy Department.

Born in Bombay, India, in 1906, T(erence) H(anbury) White (p. 712) took his Bachelor’s degree at Queen’s College, Cambridge, in 1928, and then embarked upon the writing of fiction, much of it drawn from the Middle Ages, in which he lives vicariously. Readers who enjoyed his novel, The Sword in the Stone, — selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club in January 1939, — will be curious to road his new book, The Ill-Made Knight.

As a little boy, Sholem Asch (p. 713) was pursued through the streets of his Polish village, taunted by young Gentiles who pointed at him and shouted, ‘Did you kill Christ? Did you?’ Today, the most eloquent of all Jewish novelists, he returns to this ageless question, and the answer he gives is a moving appeal for the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile. Of Mr. Asch’s many novels, perhaps the best known are The Mother, Three Cities, and The Nazarene.

Dean of the School of English at Simmons College, Robert M. Gay (p. 724) is well qualified to remind us of what Mark Twain stands for today.

Tennessee born and bred, Katharine O. Wright (p. 727) is, as she says, an incurable highlander. ‘I first came to know the mountain people,’ she writes, ‘when my doctor grandfather took me in his buggy to make calls on some of his patients. It was then that their speech first caught my fancy, and to this day nothing in the English language seems to me more apt than certain mountain ways of speech. After leaving school I had the great experience of working two years at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky.’

Of that small band of authors who have continued to write in England during the weeks of the sledgehammer blows, we put first H. M. Tomlinson (p. 732), whose essays speak with a fortitude and beauty altogether memorable.

Different from the mass of conscientious objectors, the pacifists of whatever inner persuasion, are the Quakers, whose opposition to participation in war has been maintained in theory and in practice for almost three hundred years. Their conviction has been clearly set forth by D. Elton Trueblood (p. 740), chaplain and professor of philosophy of religion at Stanford University.

Mary Manning (p. 747) was born and grew up in Dublin. As she puts it, she was ‘slightly educated at one of those oldworld schools for the daughters of gentlemen.’ Then, at the age of sixteen, she joined the Abbey School of Acting, eventually graduating into the Abbey Company, where she played small parts, ‘eccentric old ladies, village half-wits, etc.’ ‘Of course,’ she writes, ‘I longed to play leads, straight leads, full of passion. But it was not to be. On the side I wrote plays, three of which were produced at the Gate Theatre.’ In 1934 she visited the United States, married a Bostonian, and now does her writing in Buffalo.

Harland Manchester (p. 751), whose article on the Electric Eye appears in this issue, is a New Yorker whose chief interest lies in inventions and the development of industrial techniques. His articles on Diesel engines and on synthetic rubber have attracted particular attention in recent months.

A native of St. Albans, Vermont, and a graduate of the University of Vermont, Frances Frost (p. 758) is an Atlantic contributor with six volumes of poetry and several New England novels to her credit. Her last narrative, A ate Trimingham, came from the press on November 18.

The present address of Gontran de Poncins (p. 759) is unknown. A traveler to the far reaches, he spent twelve months in 1938-1939 living with the smallest and most primitive tribe of Seal Eskimos, the Netsilik, whose twenty-five members live with Stone Age comfort in King William Land. On his return from the Far North, he wrote his book, assisted in its translation, and started back to his beloved France, then on the verge of collapse. No word has been heard from him since.

It is a pleasure to publish in the Contributors’ Club one of the two essays on Citizenship which received Honorable Mention in our recent competition. W. C. Newman (p. 769), the author, is a Mississippian who in 1922 became a ‘circuit rider’ and for twelve years ministered to the hill people. He is today minister of the Methodist Church at Indianola, Mississippi, in the almost exact centre of a vast Negro population. Last year he was awarded the Rosenwald Fellowship for study in sociology and religion.

With this issue we bring to a close Richard Aldington’s (p. 773) searching and eloquent autobiography, Farewell to Europe, the story of an English poet, novelist, and critic who traveled far in the Old World and who eventually came for his freedom to the New. The story of his free-lancing, of his friendship with D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Norman Douglas, and Ezra Pound, has appeared in successive issues, beginning in the Atlantic for September.