The Laurels

When the 1948 Bollingen Prize for Poetry went to Ezra Pound, longtime tub-thumper for MusSolini and fascism, there was a literary and political furor from Bangor to San Diego, and a joint congressional committee abolished all further Library of Congress awards. Last week, the $1,000 award's new trustees at Yale University announced the winner for 1949: Wallace Stevens, 70, vice president of the Hartford (Conn.) Accident & Indemnity Co.

A poets' poet, Stevens had been quietly building up his reputation since he won a $100 prize from Poetry magazine in 1914 for four of his earliest verses (Phases). Like London Publisher T. S. Eliot, he has never regarded poetry as a full-time job. To have daily contact with other work, he says, "gives a man character as, a poet." Promptly at 8:15 every weekday morning, Insuranceman Stevens strides into his Hartford office. Often he hands his secretary a crumpled bit of paper bearing a specimen of his minuscule handwriting--his poem for the day. Sample (in which he uses a blue guitar as a symbol of the poet's transforming art):

"They said, 'You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.' The man replied, 'Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.'"

"Poetry," said Stevens when he heard the news, "is my way of making the world palatable . . . There's a sense of imminent tragedy in the air today . . . What any poet does is to address himself to that situation. What he gets is not necessarily a solution, but some defense against it."

The nation's top milliners pooled their talents to pick "the best chapeaued women of America." Among the winners: Mrs. Lauritz Melchior, Cinemactress Gloria Swanson, Mrs. Bennett Cerf, Actress Sarah Churchill, Comedienne Gracie Allen.

Presented to wartime U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, for his help, as president of the American Red Cross, in fighting forest fires: the U.S. Forest Service's "Smokey Bear" award.

The Literary Life

Just back from Europe with fourth wife Mary and the corrected first draft of his new novel, Across the River and into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway got off a newsy note to Manhattan Columnist Leonard Lyons: "Mary broke her [left] leg in two places, skiing like a damned champion at Cortina [in Italy]. Last year it was the right leg ... We had good duck and goose shooting, and Venice and Paris were both as fine as ever. Am a boy with five home towns now--Paris, Venice, Ketchum [Idaho], Key West and Havana . . ."

Dead for three decades, Buffalo Bill Cody was still dodging arrows. The Berlin Communist daily Taegliche Rundschau indignantly asked, "What is Buffalo Bill doing in the Soviet sector?," served notice on East Germans that reading politically "obnoxious" stories about the colorful American Indian fighter was strengstens verboten.

Winding up a coast-to-coast lecture tour with her husband, Authoress Mrs. Krishna Hutheesing, younger sister of India's Prime Minister Nehru, said in Manhattan that the kumkum, the spot of color worn in the center of the forehead by Indian women, is not a caste mark. "It's a sign that one is feeling gay or festive--we put it on as part of our make-up."

Author-Playwright William Saroyan denied rumors that he was going to do some scenario writing for 20th Century-Fox: "I am not a screen writer and have never done any screen writing. I was at Metro in 1942 ... to see if I could hoodwink [Cinemagnate] L. B. Mayer into letting me produce and direct The Human Comedy. He hoodwinked me. The movie stank, so I was awarded an 'Oscar' for writing the novel on which it was un-based ..."

The Furrowed Brow

World Citizen Garry Davis, 28, returning to his native land after two years of crusading in Europe for world government, had just enough time to greet his father, Bandleader Meyer Davis, before he was whisked off, for questioning, to Ellis Island where he stayed for four days. Although he had come back on a French immigrant visa, Garry said he would not try to regain his U.S. citizenship: "I intend to remain stateless." His residence: "The Earth."

On his 82nd birthday, New Jersey's Representative Charles A. Eaton complained that "I don't have as much wind as when I was younger. I suspect that the reason I haven't is because I have been around Congress so long."

Britain's Laborite Michael Foot had his patriotic dander up. In the House of Commons, he told fellow M.P.s that Hollywood's plans to cast Irene Dunne as Queen Victoria and to star Gregory Peck in a film about Dunkirk was "one of the greatest insults to the British Empire since Errol Flynn captured Burma single-handed."

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