The Literary Life

Mme. Wellington Koo, wealthy wife of the Chinese Ambassador to Great Britain, is a collector of jade and friends, a famed hostess, a noted linguist (English, French, Dutch, German, Mandarin, Malay)--and an unpublished author. For four years she has worked on an autobiography, but only recently did her busy husband, now in the U.S., find time to read it. Two days before the book was due to go on sale last week, more than 6,000 booksellers and critics who already had copies got a hurried telegram from Dial Press: "Publication suspended."

From Gertrude Stein, doggedly pursuing her own literary life in France, came a manuscript, Mrs. Reynolds, to Manhattan Publisher Bennett Cerf. She had mailed it to a friend in Sweden, who got it to the U.S. by mysterious means--perhaps by diplomatic pouch, hinted Cerf, to spare suspicious censors the task of trying to decode it. The publisher said .he looked at the manuscript, could make nothing of it, thought it could probably be read from either end, decided to publish it.

Also ready for a publisher (Alfred A. Knopf) was thrice-married Cinemactress Joan Bennett's manuscript, How To Be Attractive. She summed it up: "An attractive woman is one who grows smart instead of old."

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