Against the Claptrap

It was almost as if True Confessions had been caught running installments of a Willa Cather novel: Since daytime radio serials, supposedly adored by "the U.S. housewife," are by common consent the most fatuous of dramas, the discovery of a soap opera that dared to be literate made radio columnists pop-eared.

Against the Storm is written by Sandra Michael for Procter & Gamble, goes out over NBC's Red network from 3 to 3:15 p.m. E.S.T. Mondays through Fridays. Unpublicized for two years, it began to get astonished reviews last month. Fortnight ago Variety, which is not girlish, called one day's episode "one of the most distinguished and stirring broadcasts in the history of commercial daytime radio." That broadcast succeeded in getting across the impact on a girl refugee of Manhattan's skyscraper wall looming out of a winter morning fog. Best bit: part of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: . . . Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

This week Poet Laureate John Masefield honored Against the Storm by taking part in it. Short-waved in from London, he responded to a greeting by the program's fictional professor, greeted his old American friend, Billy Booth (TIME, Aug. 11), and read some poems.

Against the Storm was named, and the first script was written, on the sunny Sunday morning when Great Britain accepted war with Germany. That, Sandra Michael says, was the most tremendous thing that ever happened to her. Something else had just happened: she had been given leave, by William Ramsey of Procter & Gamble, to write as if housewives were intelligent.

Luck was needed, for the soap opera is a rigid medium, a hard game to buck. Scripter Michael was lucky in her husband, a radio producer who could keep casting and direction in the family, and lucky in the fact that P. & G., with more than a dozen other soap operas running, could afford to experiment with one. She had acquired deftness with dialogue and sound in five years' radio apprenticeship. But the best thing she had was a determination to create living and thoughtful people.

Not a serial in the accepted sense, Against the Storm has a score or so characters, European and American, whose lives touch in haphazard couples or clusters as human lives do. Its focus is Harper University at Hawthorne and an English professor with his wife, his daughters and their friends.

Small Sandra Michael writes her five episodes a week sitting outdoors (if necessary, in blankets) in South Norwalk, Conn. A churchbell or a caterpillar on a leaf is enough to give her a start. By other than soap opera standards, her stuff is only fair. Her worst, deadline-rushed scripts are aimless and sentimental. But from her best a listener may at least get the shiver of sincere emotion conveyed, an honest word spoken.

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