THE
LEXANARAS
Continuing
It WASN'T Fun Finding Out BERNARD WICKSTEED'S
STRAIGHT-TO-THE-HEART
DIARY
HAT do
the
Koreans think about it till? I have three points of view in my diary.
One from a young fellow with a university education,
other from An
old woman who
THREE
PEOPLE I
THINK WE FORGET.
used to do my washing, and about to blindfold him he caught the third from a man I saw shot by a firing squad.
The youth who had been to m university was employed by colleague of mine to translate the Korean papers. Ho sald quite frankly that when We pulled out of Seoul he was going to stay behind.
"But they'll shoot you be cale you worked for us," we bald,
"Oh,
OU
they won't," he answered. "You see, I chall be come a Communist, too."
He said he wasn't going to do this to save his skin. He
could save that by going south with everyone else. Nor was he staying through any bellet in the tenebings of Marx.
It was simply that he thought the Communists had a better chance of unlling, the country than UNO.
With the forces of UNO falling back at a breakneck speed * was difficult for us to con- vince him that he might be wrong.
Case history-2
NOW
meet Momina-san, the
sight of me for the Arst time. I Was wearing my old R.A.F. Kreatcoat and I believe he thought was a Russian.
Whatever it was, he pointed to me and started to argue with the guards. One of them raised the butt of his rifle to give him a clout, then lowered it as he remembered there were out- siders present.
The doomed man continued to shout in such a frenzled way that our interpreter couldn't understand what he was say-
Ing....
We drove back in the truck Avo fewer than went out.
Epilogue-1
JAN199EUGENT:NORTHAUDHU
WHY do I tell you these ince VY stories? Because I think you ought to know what people are thinking there.
On the surface none of these three points of view sounds very encouraging to the cause to which we are pledged, and for which some of your sons and husbands are already fighting.
But
shutting it is no good your eyes to them and prelend- ing they don't exist.
bbo
BRITISH
COAL SHORTAGE LOCAL TRAINS TO. BE CUT
RAILWAYS
alapa
"You can't expect a fire in your waiting-room-AND. in the engine."
London Express Service
SINCLAIR LEWIS- the man
who 'died
by
REBECCA WEST
9
-HEN Sinclair town in Main Street, on the
Lewis died
it smug American
was his second man in Babbitt. death. For at
business
laundresa. She is a grand- help these people get over that
We have to do something to some time in the thirties a It might almost be said mother with baggy trousers and hair done up in a tight little bun feeling of hopelessness, and the man
of great literary that the United States had
at the bacis. Her timid ways worst way of doing so is to talent, possibly and beady black eyes make her pretend that it doesn't exist.
seem like a mouse.
Two days before Christmas
she peeped round
her mouselike
the door irt way and
an-
nounced, in a mixture of gestures
and pidgin English, A
that she was going to Pusan.
Epilogue-2
BE
changed into, an
genius, never laughed at itself be eccentric fore. These books were whose literary gifts were not only funny, they were of locked in a struggle with great historial importance. the odd things he did and
said and the odd way he
- MID such puzzling surround-lived.
what is the ings as these morale of our boys like? Well,
.
twice
SINCLAIR LEWIS
She had got a place on a truck thinks I trio wother that of them wrote with a carefulness of turn led to the great crash He made U.SIA.
going south. her a ing-that more than half
million won-more than 280 have been called up from the and to raise the money she had Reserve and don't want to be
anyway, let sold up everything except the soldiers clothes the slood in and
soldiers in Korea. 4 bundle of bedding.
We gave her some cigarettes and chocolates for the journey and asked why she was going. She would have to ride for the best part of a week perched dangerously on top of an over- loaded truck, with no protec- tion whatever against the biting sub-zero wind,
Surely it would have been better to have kept her home together and slayed behind. She had done no wrong. The Com- munists wouldn't do anything to her becaus0 sho had once washed dirty linen for the de- mocratic Press.
Ah, we didn't understami, sho explained with a wealth of shy giggles and timid gestures. It wasn't the Communists she was afraid of. She had stayed be hind before, and it made little difference to her whose shirts she washed.
alone
It does your heart good to see them, stolidly putting up with every kind of hardship, grum- bling like mad but doing it with a twinkle in the eye.
-(London Express Service):
For what they guyed was the mood of excessive self- confidence which led to the In his middle thirties he over-speculation which in its craft for which he got less of 1929, and the collapse of credit than he deserved, be the financiers of the whole cause he was a best-seller. world, Two novels
really were original.
were the first They satires on modern America: on the smug American small
OTTO HAD A DOLLAR
A
PROBLEM, TOO.
RED HAIR
It seemed as if "Red" would go on from strength to strength, for he seemed to have lockhaus
tible vitality.
. :י
had coveted
the
honour, and
had died in 1020 without it.
Needless to say there was no concerted plan to aids him. But
It happened that no English writer wrote to congratulate him, except Hugh Walpole.
Red Lewis was an intensely sensitive man, and he brooded over this silence,
SELF-DOUBT
.He had himself the greatest respect for English literature, and had many close friendships with English writers. He was not a conceited man. Indeed, he was full of self-doubt.
He felt no resentment against the English writers who had failed to congratulate him, but he did feel that maybe he was not a good writer after all, and that the award was perhaps, ridiculous.
1
His work was still full of intelligence, and it was always noble, but it became diffuse, and
becume more and more isolated and withdrawn.
laugh at itself lacked self-confidence; and he
tion. The historian of the He had married as his second future who wants to know how wite, Dorothy Thompson, the a certain kind of pre-depression writer on international affairs, American falkod need only who was handsome, brilliant, Who Knew and, like her predecessor, a turn to The Man Coolidge, and if he wants to superb housewife and a devoled know how pre-depression wife. Americans felt about-a-trip to
He was most striking in ap- Europe he need only turn to He was pedantically truthful pearance. He was very tall Dodsworth. But in the long run and in many ways neat as an with bright-red hair, a long the writer was defeated by the old maid. But in many other knobby face, and long knobby other parts of Rod Lawis.
ways he was quite wild. limbs.
The preacher committed him He WAN extremely plain, to novels in which the action did
a rather nice little boy.
BEERY little letter showed up in the mail theexcept when he had the look of not-spring out of the characters, the simplest matters of dally
other day from a man in Milwaukee......
Dear Mr Rone:
There's an old German couple Otto and Lena Brenner.
Palm
in our neighourhood named
Otto has been a gateman at one of the local breweries for longer than most of us can remember, and ever since he got matried in 1910 he's been turning his pay cheque over to his wife who cashes it at the grocer's and give him a couple of dollars of the top for spending money.
What made her sell up her
About 30 cents of this goes for home and join the refugees was smoking tobacco and the rest the dread of being bombed again for beer at Stegmeyer's Social by the United Nations.
Club,
saloon where Otto drops little talk
by BILLY ROSE
He had a not unendearing middle-Western accent. When he tried to stop a taxi with the cry "Driver," soft, burred
R' went rolling down the streets.
but from a moral argument, which he had had complete in his mind when he started.
It made bim oddly discon- tented with lids own personal
life. He was married twice, He was greatly liked when.be His first wife, Grace Hegger first visited London. He was Lewis, was a woman of enchant- cager, modest, enthusiastic, ing prettiness, a whinisical turm joyous, and he passionately of mind, a superb housewife, meant to write profoundly, and a devoted wife. truly, beautifully.
It is, of course, quite certain that he did succeed in writing I hope she made the journey in regularly for a safely. She was rather a dear, with the boys. Lena, of course, no sign of it so he finally went better than most of us. All the sume, the story did not work out as could have been wished. and it is fortunate that the op- has never approved of the club, home, plenty worried. ponents of the United Nations and
Otto's has always sald
taven't an alt force to frighten Friends were a bunch of no knock on the gateman's door
her.
Case history-3
goods.
Last month Lena got word that her sister in Racine was sick and needed her.
There were too many talents competing for possession of his lean and vital body.
WELSH BLOOD
He was Walsh by blood, and in temperament he conformed to a recognisable type, the Welsh Non-conformist preacher.
An hour later there was a and it was Little Stevie, the kid who works for Stegmover. "The panhandler came in right after you left and gave us this," he sald, handing Otto a roll of bills The following Friday night with rubber band on it, "He THE third Korean had been when Otto cashed his cheque he says he picked it up right after tortured when I saw him. I took the 37 dollars in bills, and you gave him the quarter, but pants pocket, his conscience started to bother should think he had been sor-shoved them into tured for a long Linc.
He along with an odd quarter left him."
Ho was full of the sense that and had to be over from his previous week's couldn't walk
the money-Itman ought to exorcize his in- carried to the top of the hill spending money. Then he went
grained guilt, and seckt salva- where his grave had already home, ate a little dinner, and
tion and often this sense rose to been dug. His face was the stretched out on the couch for colour of this paper,' and but for a nap. the Mongolian cast of his eyes
out of Belson,
For the best part of an hour
Olto counted was 37 dollars,
When Lena
got back from
J
He found it difficult to con- form to the habits of Society in
routine, Guests, whom he had asked to luncheon would arrive and find him about to go to bed because his day had got muddied
up some weeks before and be had never got things straight.
ODD, LONELY
He would be found in an hotel sulle in New York, having breakfast at dinner-time with a As the wife at a prosperous large company of people whom author, she had quite inevitably he had collected during the past to live in a certain way. This two days, whose names he and worried him, just as it would probably did not know have worried a Welsh preacher. who seemed to have been living with him ever since their first meeting. THE MIMIC
He grew odder and wider, and lonelier and lonelier.
HIS married life became symbol to him of light-minded- ness and folly, though it had
It is heart-rending to think actually anchored him in safe that he gave the world a very waters, in spite of the tendency great deal, but got very little of the non-preacher parts of out of the world. him to drift.
The world might say that that His dramalle gifts also seted was not its fault but it was not Red Lewis's fault elthar. It was inconveniently for him.
Mimicry became an inordinate 'tion, which
the fault of his strange constikt,, made him better
a revivalist passion, and the pansion, and it was not easy for than most people in some ways, wards poured out of him-some- a hostess or her guests
to be and for more diflcult
Red appeared at a dinner party, dpeaking broken English in the character of a Budapest antiqua dealer, and refused to baniton this impersonation during the whole evening.
he might have come straight he turned and tossed but Anally Racine, the old boy handed her times out of his pen, sometimes pleased and keep pleased when he gave up, put on his hat and the dough and that might have out of his mouth, particularly at
been that, except the following parti I didn't want to go to the headed for Stegmeyer's. "
night, while tidying. up, she He was also the son of execution, but a Norwegian
wedged doctor, and He thought medicine A few doors from the bar, a found a roll of bills Journalist told me I must. Ho said I couldn't report the war panhandler gave him a hard- behind a cushion on the couch the highest occupation a man honestly unless I saw this side luck story, and it was so con-
"Look," she said to Olto, could follow and always re- of it, too.
He took to padding out his vincing that Ollo dug down and gave him quarter.---
in his father's-footsteps.
books with long passages of da- parlour So we drove out to the execu-went intorter. Then he "money! Thirty-seven dollars!" gretted that he had not followed
lic also had considerable: logue which Izd ittle to do tion ground in the
where,
of course, he
with the action simply because got hir
talent-not so great as he sup: he bed invented an idiom for as the five men who were to be usual warm reception, and had
posed but still remarkable as the characters he would like shot. They had to kneel on the himself his usual ane time. That floor with their heads bowed. is, until it was his turn to buy
an actor and a mimic,
to speak. a round-when he reached for his money it wasn't thero.
samo truck
The Norwegian and I stood round them with the guards and tried to keep our balance as the truck bumped out through the suburbs of Seoul and into the hilla beyond.
Otto Imow he wasn't worth a darn as a liar, and so he told
enn everything.
"It means only one thing" said his wife. "Thon no-goods ot Stegmeyer's saw you was in bad trouble and took imp collee- tion."
"This is the first time my old A
few minutes later Lena lady has let me cash, my pay went to the cupboard and gar cheque and I'll never hour the her cont. "Put on your hat and end of it if I don't have the let's go," she said.
I don't know whether the man I am writing about doserved to mancy when she gets, back”
die or not. The magistrate who said Otto. "I gave a panhandler "Go where?" said Otto, came out in his car to witness quarter before I camokin arid
the execution sald he was a thale when the billa must have Communist teen given a fair trial.
Well, practically everybody in The guards tied him to a port | Stormoyey went out to look by his grave, and we they word rọt, 919's moisen kuat there was
informer and had fallen oát of my pockej,”
+
All those gifts complicated his His career became more' and career as a writer. Sometimes, more disordered. He was dengly they married with momentarily upset by an incident which be happy results.
gan by pleasing him and ended by making him deeply miser- nble...
HIS 'TRACT'
The writer, the preacher and In 1930, he received the Nobel the doctor ali got together in prize for literature. It was an' Murtin Arrowsmith, a book unexpected award, for he was. about modern American deall- only "43 and hla books were not First I'm gonna
"To Stegmeyer's, of course, ac medicine, which reads too of unquestioned 'greatne
apologise to thon friends of yours, After much like a tract, but is still
woll worth, rating that the drinks are on me.
Copyright, referenda Londom sprak Auraiya
1. As a mimit he could reproduce The lulum of a ph is porfees
English writers were unenthu- Blastic. Many had inbourDa band and in vain to get the prize awarded to reina Handys who
others.
(World Copyright Reserved-
London Express Service),
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