Cluttered with Culture
Sir:
TIME is neat, compact and well-written. But I think it dishonest of TIME to overplay modern art, and show such senile distortionalists and juvenile paint slingers. I do not question the right of any individual to be an expressionist, distortionalist or eggbeater-ist--to trickle, sling or spray paint. If these people find happiness, well and good. There may be a revolution in the art world, but there are others who rebel against being cultured, and wish to remain uncouth and unartistic.
PAUL SIREN
Mass, Mich.
Sir:
Usually, when popular magazines handle articles on modern art, they treat it like a beast that might get out of control and kill off half of their subscribers. Your Feb. 13 Art section showed that another type of writing on modern art is not excluded. Thank you for reporting well on "Abstract Expressionism," America's biggest contribution to Western art to date.
B. G. KOMODORE
New Orleans
Sir:
Honest, I don't worship Jackson Pollock . . . Today it's almost impossible to worship anything except the creative expression of the self. This emphasis on individuality (not for its own sake) makes the work of the "abstract expressionists" meaningful--not in any basically different way from jazz, or certain aspects of American business before becoming institutionalized, etc. This vital American painting is not only an answer to greyflannelsuitism, but to art as propaganda (e.g., Russia today and Mexico yesterday). Its seemingly uncommunicative, antisocial, art-for-art's-sake implications are understandable in terms of the failure of so much art for God's and state's sake . . .
B. H. FRIEDMAN
New York City
The Lonely One
Sir:
Thanks for the Feb. 20 article on Governor Frank J. Lausche. The one characteristic of this very able man is his refusal to bow to various pressure groups. He has made mistakes, but by following the conservative pattern of testing the water with one's toes instead of diving in over one's head, he has indeed set an example in Ohio of what an honest, conservative government can accomplish--an example that might be noted by Stevenson, Harriman and Kefauver . . .
GEORGE CATTERLIN
Oxford, Ohio
Sir:
Frank Lausche is a cinch to be the next President of the United States if he campaigns as a bourgeois peasant, a Protestant Catholic and a Republican Democrat.
MRS. J. G. RODRIGUEZ
Lexington, Ky.
Inside Information
Sir:
I was shook to the marrow when I read Dr. Stripp's brilliant invocation prayer: "We believe Adlai Stevenson to be Thy choice for President of the United States" [Feb. 13]. How does Dr. Stripp presume God would choose sides?
V. R. LARANTA Lieutenant, U.S.A.F.
Clovis, N. Mex.
Sir:
Since when is God a Democrat?
J. LYNN GUBSER LARRY E. REEDER
Cambridge, Mass.
Historical Bounce
Sir:
To keep the journalistic or historical record straight on your Feb. 20 statement that the Chicago Tribune "has never based one of its own men in Moscow," these are the facts: In August 1921, while the Hoover-Litvinoff "treaty" was being concluded in Riga (which, incidentally, stipulated that American reporters were to be allowed in Soviet Russia), Floyd Gibbons, head of the Tribune foreign-news service, went to Moscow. He scooped the world on the Russian famine. Within a few weeks he assigned me as permanent Tribune correspondent in Moscow. I stayed in Russia about a year and a half. Sam Spewack of the New York World, two others and myself smuggled out news through the American Relief diplomatic pouch. We were caught when the Soviets broke the treaty and opened the mailbags. At this time Colonel McCormick sent his famous "ultimatum" to the Soviet government; addressed to Foreign Affairs Minister Chicherin, it read:
YOU MUST ABANDON THE CENSORSHIP AND
GUARANTEE FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION OTHERWISE OUR CORRESPONDENT WILL BE WITHDRAWN AND SO WILL THE CORRESPONDENTS OF OTHER AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS SO THAT RUSSIA WILL FIND HERSELF WITHOUT MEANS OF COMMUNICATION WITH THE OUTER WORLD.
R. R. McCORMICK
Chicherin called me in and protested that Colonel McCormick "addresses me as an equal power--I cannot accept ultimatums from him." I was expelled from Russia immediately. Spewack, Francis McCullough of the Herald and Percy Noel of the Philadelphia Ledger, were expelled or left the same week . . .
GEORGE SELDES
Westport, Conn.
Poet v. Poet
Sir:
Re the Walt Whitman and Camden bridge dispute [Feb. 6]: in dedicating the bridge to Walt Whitman, the officials concerned are honoring Whitman as a poet, not just Whitman the man. I am a Catholic and like Whitman, whatever his sexual leanings; he was a better poet than Joyce Kilmer any day. They can take Trees and throw it away and/or build their own bridge. They just don't understand Whitman or his poetry. As for the man, they might remember that during the Civil War he did as much as any man to visit, comfort and help the sick . . .
BILL LANE Miami
Black Partners
Sir:
Congratulations for a good presentation on the new French Cabinet member, Felix Houphouet-Boigny [Feb. 13]. It is refreshing to see old, weary French politicians call on a man from West Africa to rewrite the French Union; even more inspiring to see that they have found for the job a well-trained and well-prepared man who is a good Christian . . .
(THE REV.) J. M. JAMMES
St. Felicitas Rectory Chicago
Sir:
Your story refers to Minister Houphouet-Boigny as "the first Negro ever to hold Cabinet rank in France." This is not true. France has had Negro Cabinet members before, and it has accepted them with the same casualness as it has its many black Deputies . . .
JAMES W. IVY Editor
The Crisis New York City
P: N.A.A.C.P.'s Ivy correctly states that other Negroes have held Cabinet posts in France. TIME should have said that Minister Houphouet-Boigny is the first West African Negro to achieve Cabinet rank. Two French Negroes held major Cabinet offices before him: Cuban-born Severiano de Heredia, who became a French citizen, Mayor of Paris and Minister of Public Works, 1887; Martinique-born Henri Lemery, who was Minister of Justice in 1934.--ED.
New Thoughts on Old Scrolls
Sir:
Professor Allegro's discovery of evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that Christ had a forerunner [Feb. 6] corroborates a lecture on the Gospel of St. Matthew that was given at Bern, Switzerland way back in 1910 by a highly independent German thinker named Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). The question of how Steiner was able to create a theory in clear accord with documentary evidence that was still underground is intriguing.
Steiner named Allegro's "Teacher of Righteousness" Jesus Ben Pandira." He described him as the leader of the Essenes, who was inspired "to impart a teaching that was to make comprehensible the mystery of Palestine--the mystery of Christ." Steiner went on to say that "after being accused of heresy and blasphemy [Jesus Ben Pandira] was stoned, and hanged upon a tree." Among the prophet's pupils, Steiner concluded, was a favorite named Netzer, who founded an Essene community at Nazareth. After the return from Egypt, Jesus was taken to Nazareth "that (in the words of St. Matthew) it might be fulfilled what was spoken by the prophets: He shall become a Nazarene." Becoming a Nazarene, said Steiner, meant becoming an initiate of Netzer's Essene community: "There the early years of Jesus were to be passed."
Steiner's amazing lecture was taken down in shorthand and later published by the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London. At the time scholars would have none of it; now they will have to accept a good deal of it as proved . . .
JEFFERSON ELIOT
New York City
Help for the Paralyzed
Sir:
We were pleased indeed to read in your Feb. 6 Medicine section of the invention by our company of a special dictating machine for iron-lung patients and other victims of paralysis. We should point out, however, that you have referred to the equipment in question as a Dictaphone, which is the trade name of our good friends, the Dictaphone Corp., not of our firm, Sonograph Ltd., which is the major Canadian company in the dictating-machine field here.
F. R. VERNER
Sonograph Ltd. Toronto
What James Joyce Did
Sir:
V. S. Pritchett's expose of James Joyce [Feb. 13] has been long overdue. Joyce was an anti-intellectual. His crime was to unseat reason from its throne. The role of the intellect is to reduce the chaos of the subconscious, and of the stream of consciousness, to order. To surrender that function and retreat to chaos is treason against man himself and the God who endowed him with intellect and will.
(THE REV.) JOHN CLARENCE PETRIE
St. Martin's Episcopal Church Clewiston, Fla.
Sir:
British critics have been from the outset almost universally hostile toward this Irish literary giant, James Joyce. Pritchett's reassessment might confirm the strong suspicion that there is frequently an element of national jealousy involved . . .
J. T. GILBERT
Lanham, Md.
Sir:
Mr. Pritchett's strictures are neither new nor revealing, except of the critic; for if critics test books, books at the same time test critics . . . Had TIME consulted its own files it could have learned more of Joyce than Mr. Pritchett has forgotten. Your reviews of Ulysses and of Finnegans Wake were models of competent reporting, while a real sense of Joyce as a man and artist appeared in your obituary.
RICHARD M. KEIN
Louisville
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