Letters: The Middle Road

Sir:

. . . Regarding these attacks on Quemoy Island [TIME, Sept. 13], you agonize over the fact that the U.S. has not made up “its mind about Asia.” The pathetic record over Viet Nam of the present Administration does indicate that it may not have made up its mind. There, the tough talk of liberation quickly became the feather duster of appeasement. Let me remind you, however, that the previous Administration had made up its mind, albeit not with dispatch. And that policy . . . was for our fleet to protect Formosa . . . and not to protect coastal areas such as Quemoy—which, the U.S. did make up its mind, it would be unrealistic to defend.

We would be well advised, in the light of this policy, not to encourage irresponsible adventuring in Amoy harbor. Can we not remember that the Middle Road . . . is, in foreign policy, neither liberation nor appeasement? It is containment.

CHARLES L. BURWELL New York City

Sir:

. . . The U.S., in an effort to take a dynamic position, has assumed a new look in its defense program centered around the atomic and hydrogen bombs. It has taken a military posture of “Start something and we’ll strike.” Under the fears and blandishments of our friends and allies, this posture has become as ineffectual as the comic who, shaking his fist under the nose of his antagonist, shouts: “Some one of these days—POWEE—right in the kisser !” . . .

Let us recognize the benefits of a firm stand, followed by action and carried to completion, as illustrated by the actions of Magsaysay in the Philippines and of Templer in Malaya . . .

K. R. THOMPSON Duluth, Minn.

Gestalt Action

Sir:

Apropos the review of Sabrina [TIME, Sept, 13], William Wyler, not Billy Wilder, directed Roman Holiday. TIME, which is continually adjuring its readers not to confuse Senator McCarthy with Charlie McCarthy or Stonewall Jackson with C. D. Jackson, should surely not make such a mistake . . .

DAVID CLARKE

London

Sir:

You’re just going to make William Wyler unhappy by confusing him with Billy Wilder . . . Of all the people in Hollywood who make a living by telling actors what to do, probably two of the most distinctive ones are Wyler and Wilder. Hollywood’s got few enough imaginative people, without your lumping them together into a new Gestalt director . . .

JAMES T. DEKAY New York City

¶ TIME’S apologies to Directors Wilder (left) and Wyler (right) with friend (see cut)—ED.

Alicia in Wonderland

Sir:

Congratulations on your warmhearted cover story of Sept. 13 [on] the human dynamo known as Alicia Patterson.

With a Pulitzer Prize and a TIME cover as feathers in her cap, she is a most striking example of the unleashed power of the modern American woman. She seems the epitome of a female legend in the journalism world . . .

MARLENE A. BURNS

Pittsfield, Mass.

Sir:

With reference to . . . “Alicia in Wonderland,” I strongly feel that there was a typographical error in that the last word of that title was intended to be “Blunderland.” The four pages devoted to this subject would appear entirely adequate to convince your readers that Newspaper Publisher Patterson is just another stupid American woman of that fast-growing segment who doubtless are awaiting with bated breath the day when by some miracle of modern medical science they can be accorded both sexes . . .

A. VINCENT WILSON Pasadena, Calif.

Sir:

The TIME story about Newsday and me was, to understate it, supercolossal . . . Now I will have to live up to the story—which won’t be easy.

ALICIA PATTERSON Newsday Garden City, L.I.

Sir:

What do you mean—”Long Island housewives must have it [Newsday] to shop, just as their husbands must read it for news and gossip of county government in their own backyard?”

We women are interested in what goes on in the world too. I must admit begrudgingly, though, that I was never much of an editorial reader until 1948 when we started reading our wonderful Newsday.

JEAN M. DEMERS Massapequa, L.I.

Dove, Glove, Shove, etc.

Sir:

The word boys of ASCAP are going to laugh at your “four basic rhymes” for “love” in the English language—above, dove, glove, shove [TIME, Sept. 13] because the word “of” has saved their lives hundreds of times, next in usage to good old “above.”

PAT BALLARD Troy, Pa.

Sir:

Deserved praise you have given Cole Porter’s coziness with rhymes. Here’s another tribute:

He’s the top, he’s the real Rossetti, He’s the top, he’s a Browning, Betty, He’s a Chesterton A Pope, a Donne, A Gray, He’s a Bach, a Handel, A glowing candle Of Miss Millay . . .

M. L. WALKER New York City

Campaign Strategy

Sir:

. . . Vice President Nixon left me terribly depressed with his off-handish advice to his Republican colleagues concerning campaign strategy for the November 1954 elections [TIME, Sept. 13].When he recommended that candidates for our nation’s sacred legislative offices avoid debate, my stomach turned. What is he afraid of ? . . .

Peace, Progress and Prosperity do not come by pointing out the superiority of a Dulles over an Acheson. Our Vice President shows himself to be taking advantage of popular clichés at a tremendous risk to his party’s future . . .

(THE REV.) ELMO PASCALS Oakwood Heights Staten Island, N.Y.

Come to the Fair

Sir:

Your “American in Damascus” can put away his phenobarbitone [TIME, Sept. 13] . . . The best medium for propagating national prestige is the display of the more ordinary consumer goods, and while [Soviet] machinery might be first-rate (as laymen, myself and the “kaffiyeh-topped shepherds” cannot comment), it seems to me that the U.S.S.R. hasn’t had much practice lately in producing consumer goods.

To me their textiles seem dowdy, unimaginative and old-fashioned . . . The same three adjectives apply equally to their [Soviet] wallpapers. Perhaps the “camel drivers” will be as quick as I to notice the record-players with steel needles—they went out with the “Old Look.” . . . As for their glassware, I’ve seen better stuff offered as prizes at Hampstead Heath for getting three darts in the treble 20 . . .

My maid is beating my brains out for me to get her a ticket for Cinerama, but she hasn’t shown any hankering to visit the Red Star pavilion. See what I mean?

GEOFFREY PHIPPEN Damascus, Syria

Ruffed

Sir:

With regard to your cut of Bishop Berggrav in your issue of Sept. 13, may I point out that Holbein’s portraits are not ruffed. Ruffs came in later, and are characteristic of the portraits by Frans Hals [see cut].

HILARY E. ARATHOON Guatemala City, Guatemala

Fireworks on the Riverbanks

Sir:

TIME [Aug. 23] is guilty of a powerful boner when it reports that the St. Lawrence power project, when completed in 1959, “will generate more power than TVA.” The 12.6 billion kilowatt-hours per year estimated for the St. Lawrence project compares with over 16.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electric power produced by TVA hydro plants in fiscal year 1950, TVA’s peak year of hydro generation.

PAUL L. EVANS Director of Information Tennessee Valley Authority Knoxville, Tenn.

“Five Little Lines”

Sir:

About the best line in English poetry [TIME, Sept. 13]: the late eminent critic, George Saintsbury, plumped for Shakespeare’s Hamlet line, “The rest is silence,” as one of the two “jewels four words long” in all poetry. The other, of course (said Saintsbury), is Sappho’s “Ego de mono, kateudo” [But I sleep alone].

As for the greatest lines in English poetry, Kipling identified them:

“In all the millions permitted there are no more than five — five little lines — of which one can say, ‘These are the magic. These are the vision. The rest is only poetry.’ ”

TIME undoubtedly knows the five lines he meant.*

FRANK DAHM Yonkers, N.Y.

Microcephalic Assault

Sir:

I squinted baffledly at the latest microcephalic assault on science fiction [TIME, Sept. 6]: “Many science-fiction plots betray ‘schizophrenic manifestations’ in the minds of their authors . . .”

Schizophrenia means “cleft mind”—in other words, to be of two minds. Who, including your faceless reviewer, isn’t? . . . “Science fiction may”—note the on-the-one-hand indecision—”be bad science and worse fiction,” says he; yet our writers include neurologists, astronomers, engineers, physicists, chemists, etc., and many superb stories that have appeared in Galaxy rate as masterpieces . . .

Science fiction is legitimate speculative exploration. If that’s schizophrenic, Heyerdahl belongs on a couch instead of his Kon Tiki raft.

H. L. GOLD Editor Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine New York City

Frivolity & Maturity

Sir:

A very conservative C minus to your Education editor . . . Everyone . . . seems to want [the] National Student Association to be somebody’s political cat’s-paw [TIME, Sept. 13] . . .

N.S.A. is neither right, wrong, left, center, nor cynical. If college kids believe in momentarily ignoring the great issues of the times to get down to their own business, they are not being conservative, but rather, sensible. Deploring Joe McCarthy (second to baseball, the national pastime) is for N.S.A. an unavoidable frivolity, basically tied to many of the problems under discussion . . .

JOE EARLY JR. Schenectady, N.Y.

Sir:

. . . What your report sees as a lack of wildeyeness, we see as the growth of mature and responsible thought . . .

JOHN SEILER Chairman

New England Region U.S.N.S.A. Cambridge, Mass.

Inside Red China

Sir:

It has occurred to me, insistently, that the visit of Attlee, Bevan and “fellow travelers” to Mao’s China and the subsequent bombing and shelling of the Nationalist island of Quemoy is too chronological to be coincident. This visit and its many ramifications would seem to have been the “go ahead” signal to Mao & Co. . . .

With all the other restrictions that Britain in its avowal of democratic principles has still imposed upon its citizens, I wonder at the government’s sanity in allowing this inadvised junket at just this time . . .

YSABEL GARDEN Redondo Beach, Calif.

Sir:

The recent escapades of Clement Attlee and his colleague [Nye Bevan], with his piscatorial humor, leave me bloody well nauseated.

RICHARD E. CHARD Lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Randolph Field, Texas

Sir:

Well done, Mr. Attlee and fellow travelers. Mind you carry your umbrellas when landing in London—you make me sick.

L. E. ZERVUDACHI Alexandria, Egypt

* A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! — Coleridge, Kubla Khan.

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. — Keats, Ode to a Nightingale.