Collectors' Items

Thomas Mann faced the happy embarrassment of being wrong in a prediction he had made in 1930. The prediction (in A Sketch of My Life): "I have a feeling that I shall die at the same age as my mother , in 1945." At his Pacific Palisades home near Los Angeles, Author Mann looked fit despite a slight head cold, smoked his usual two cigars a day (with a liqueur on the side), smoked cigarets the rest of the time, walked his daily two miles "against the sea breeze," and was 500 pages along on a new novel which he figured would run to 700. Said he: "In my youth I was convinced I would die when I was 40. Then I grew older and older. By experience I learned that it was all a mistake, and now I think I will probably live to be quite old."

Ezra Pound set back the cause of modern poetry 20 years by being certified insane. The board of Washington psychiatrists who certified him thus revived many laymen's suspicions about poets in general. Psychiatrists described Poet Pound, awaiting trial for treason (pro-Axis broadcasts from Rome), as "abnormally grandiose, expansive and exuberant in manner," judged him "mentally unfit" to defend himself, had him packed off to a local asylum.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (born Destouches), best-selling intelligentsiac shocker of the '30s (Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan), anti-Semitic literary darling of Vichy France, was nabbed in Copenhagen. The Danes planned to let the French help him with his next chapter.

Gabriela Mistral, handsome, 56-year-old Chilean poetess (Los Sonetos de la Muerte), found herself still the lioness of social Stockholm a fortnight after receiving the Nobel Prize (TIME, Nov. 26) from towering King Gustaf. Poetess Mistral found Sweden's social democracy "a century ahead of everything else," but prepared to move on to another, gentler climate. Last a resident of Brazil's fair-&-warmer Petropolis, she would now head for California's Los Angeles, hopes to find a home, an office, and settle down.

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