People: Royalty

George VI and Elizabeth let it be

known that they would hold no courts next year—just garden parties. It’s the clothing shortage.

The Duke of Windsor and his Duchess arrived safely in Manhattan—the Duke in a blue suit (and cotton sweater and plaid shirt), the Duchess in what she helpfully described to some 50 welcoming reporters and cameramen as “a blue wool suit with a red wool jersey, a striped silk hat—I guess that’s what you call it—with a veil, and a black box calf and alligator handbag.” Also a mink stole. But no jewels. (Explained the Duke, whose Duchess got stolen blind back in Britain: “Well, really, there wouldn’t be many left to bring, you know.”) They figured on staying till May this time. Then back to France.

Relatives

In Portland, Maine, police finally restored to his family a wandering little window-shopper who had somehow lost his bearings: nine-year-old Robert E. Peary III, exploratory grandson of the late Arctic explorer.

In Washington, one of the capital’s most striking relatives back in the Herbert Hoover era broke into the papers again with a bang (and a Hat) the day after the great Republican landslide. Photographed with Bess Truman at the Washington Club was Dolly Gann, onetime vice presidential sister, whose brave struggles in the capital’s social war used to make national news.

Wizards

The two busiest beavers in Britain were bobbing chin & chin last week:

George Bernard Shaw, explaining just what it was that he wanted the Fabian Society to do about making Henry A. Wallace the next U.S. president (TIME, Nov. 11): “What it can. Ventilate the proposition.”

Philosopher Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, bearded by the press and attempting an explanation of British tolerance of demi-bared bosoms in the cinema: “Perhaps it is because we have a longer past. We know that often in our history women have worn low-cut dresses, and it doesn’t shock us that Jane Russell looks more like a woman than any woman ought to look.”

Rhythmists

Philadelphia was about to give local musical talent a boost. Soon to be played there for the first time was a newly discovered quartet for strings written by a neglected Philadelphia composer: Benjamin Franklin.

Another statesman making his mark in the musical arts was Trygve Lie. On the dance floor at a refined shindig for U.N. employes, the Secretary-General cut a lot of fine figure.

Maestro Leopold Stokowski and wife Gloria were also attracting attention with their music: the tabloid Daily Mirror breathlessly reported that “neighbors have heard loud quarrels and the noise of thrown dishes. . . .”

Movers & Shakers

Young writers today are having too much money thrown at them, protested Publisher Harrison Smith in Manhattan; they are turning an easy dollar instead of writing an honest book, and nothing good can come of it.-

Whatever the state of letters, litterateurs were enjoying triumphs of all sorts:

Jules Remains, marathon serialist (Men of Good Will), was initiated into the august French Academy. He wore the traditional brocaded, green dress suit and the dress sword, but he skipped the traditional speech praising his predecessor. Predecessor Abel Bonnard had been kicked out of the Academy as a collaborationist.

In Manhattan, Pulitzer Prizewinning Historian Allan Nevins got a $10,000 prize from Publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons for a history (Ordeal of the Union) that will not appear till next year. He would use some of the money for research, give some to the University of Sydney, some to the Society of American Historians, said he—”and then, if there’s anything left over, I’ll buy Mrs. Nevins a box of candy.”

Upton Sinclair was out of trouble in London with his Dragon Harvest after the Pommery champagne people agreed to drop a libel suit against its British publishers. The publishers would just have to strike out some passages that made the Pommerys look pro-German and suggested that good Frenchmen would not drink Pommery champagne.

Existentialist Dramatist Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed the perfect Parisian tribute at the Paris opening of his plays, Death without Burial and The Respectful Prostitute (a double feature). Members of the audience fell out among themselves, shouted at the plays, shouted at each other, and some of them even walked out. (Dramatist Sartre almost missad the fun: he forgot to issue himself a pass and had considerable trouble getting in.)

But the big achievement prize properly belonged to U.S. Writer Henry Miller, big man on the avant-garde campus, four-letter man of four-letter words. His Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn moved the French moralist society, the Group for Social and Moral Action, to bring suit on the ground of obscenity. In Paris.

Inside Dopesters

The nature of man, and men, got some special attention.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, calling for more elbow room in the cities, observed: “The way our cities are now, with the pushing and shoving and congestion, can result only in insensitivity, stupidity, loss of manhood.”

In the U.S. on her first visit, Viscountess Rothermere, pretty second wife of the British news publisher, reported after a spell of looking around: “You feel at once that this is a woman’s world. . . . They are certainly more entertaining than American men.” The trouble with the men: “long-winded.”

Raymond Duncan, the late, apotheosized Isadora’s chlamys-wearing brother, long the most Attic sight in Paris (see cut), prepared at 72 to make his first visit to the U.S. since the early ’30s, prepared the U.S. with an explanation of the nature of Raymond Duncan: “It is really simple to do great things. As a matter of fact, I am so simple in all things, I am really childish. That’s why no one understands me. People are complicated these days, and I am utterly, utterly simple.”

-What a writer needs, according to answers to a questionnaire in Britain’s Horizon (literary) magazine—Editor Cyril Connolly: at least £5 ($20) a day; Novelist Elizabeth Bowen: “I should like to have £3,500 a year net”; Poet Dylan Thomas: “As much money as he wants to spend”; Poet-Novelist Robert Graves: “I cannot answer … in terms of pounds and pence. I … never keep accounts. . . .”