The World & Norman Corwin

The nearest (though not very near) thing to a fine artist in the medium of U.S. radio is Norman Corwin. Few dramatists reach so wide an audience--a fact that last February helped him win the first Wendell Willkie One World Award: a round-the-world trip designed to dramatize, as did Willkie's, the adjacence of everywhere.

Corwin took off in June with CBS Recorder Lee Bland and 225 pounds of magnetic wire-recording equipment. Four months, 42,000 miles and 16 countries later they had 100 hours of recorded interviews with prince and fellah, commissar and coolie, pundit and stevedore. The English transcript filled 3,700 typed pages. For three months Corwin, four recording engineers and six typists chewed at this great bulk, finally worked it down to a hard core. Last week, the first of 13 One World Flight broadcasts incorporating the material was aired over CBS.

It was a shrewd paste-up of the clipping from Corwin's recording tape, connected by thin strips of narrative and commentary. In trying to give a serious, upright report, Corwin occasionally let his show lag, repeat itself, get incoherent. But at its many high points One World Flight had a sudden, heady power. The high points were all excerpts from Corwin's wonderfully perceptive, intimate sound track.

P: A London peddler, howling unintelligible Cockney among gear groans and horn toots: "Cut iris, cut cauliflower, Yorkshire blue peas and brand new potatoes."

P:The low, agile, almost dainty voice of Clement Attlee, gently remonstrating: "After all ... you can't expect all the problems of that war, and a good many left over from the first world war, to disappear overnight. . . ."

P: The minor, nerve-scraping chant of Arab women on Egypt's Independence Day.

P: Jawaharlal Nehru's voice, as full of infinitesimal currents as the Ganges, and as mysterious: "People are not alike. Nations are not alike. Everybody is not the same or as clever or strong as everybody else."

P:Mikail M. Borodin, editor of the Moscow Daily News, in English as thick as borsch: And there are people who would start a world conflagration . . . in order that it be warm. . . ."

P: The Widow Camelia of Lanuvio, Italy, who lost her husband, her two children and most of her other relatives in a bombardment, telling her story in a voice so astoundingly massive that she might be speaking the mourning of all Europe.

Said Corwin diffidently of his work: "I hope you'll excuse the pretentious comparison, but I think of the series like Pathfinder planes which precede a raid and light a target. My series may not score a hit, but it may light up an area that has not hitherto been explored. . . . Anyway, it's all there for history, if history is interested."

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