The Working Class

Novelist William Faulkner complained that literary fame takes a terrible toll. The Kenyan Review had printed a piece that referred to Faulkner's "images of linear discreteness," and "images of curve." But: "Look," explained Faulkner to the New York Times Book Review, "I'm just a writer. Not a literary man . . ." And all those book reviews made things awkward around home (Oxford, Miss.): " 'Why look here,' they'll say, 'Bill Faulkner's gone and got his picture in the New York paper.' So they come around and try to borrow money, figuring I've made a million dollars . . ." The old days, before success came, sometimes look pretty good to Faulkner: "I was a free man. Had one pair of pants, one pair of shoes, and an old trench coat with a pocket big enough for a whiskey bottle; Now I get stacks of letters, asking what I eat for breakfast, and what about curves and linear discreteness . . ."

Margaret Truman, still a booming musical attraction, got an offer from an English firm that wants to book her on a concert tour of Britain.

Max Schmeling, onetime world heavyweight champ, onetime Nazi paratrooper, now admitted being an ex-pug. In Berlin, he plodded through ten dull rounds, lost the decision, and announced, for the second time this year, that he would retire.

Auguste Piccard, 64, who once set a high-flying record in a balloon (and later promised his anxious wife that he would never balloon again), had to give up his current try at ocean diving. After two weeks of mechanical trouble off the Cape Verde Islands, he sent the 40-ton bathyscaphe down, unmanned, on a test dip of 4,250 feet (deeper than the man-aboard record of 3,028 feet set in 1934 by William Beebe, but far short of the 2 1/2 miles Professor Piccard was hoping for). When the bathyscaphe surfaced, it was caught in a heavy ground swell and banged against the ship, and some of its equipment was wrecked. The left-handed professor* called off the expedition and sadly headed for home, but he thought he might try again next year.

Finally launching his long-deferred North American tour (the U.S. refused him a visa until he got a non-subversive sponsor), the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, "Red Dean" of Canterbury, had one more little run-in with authority (Canadian) at the Montreal airport. But it was only a "technical detail," about passport stamps, soon cleared up. His speech in Windsor, Ont. was briefly interrupted when a heckler loudly disagreed with the Dean's contention that free elections are held in Russia "all the time."

The Solid Flesh

In London, Queen Elizabeth was staying indoors for a couple of days with a touch of the grippe.

In Durham, N.C., U.A.W. Boss Walter Reuther was up again after a complicated "exploratory" operation on his shotgun-blasted right arm. A friend who watched the operation reported: "The doctor feels very good about the whole thing."

In Prague, evidence at a murder trial purportedly revealed that the body of Jan Masaryk had been the object of a futile kidnap attempt, presumably to find out just what had really caused his death.

In Villefranche, France, ex-King Michael of Rumania and Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma bounced back into the news approximately on schedule: they confirmed the rumor that they were expecting in April.

The Laurels

Recognition took a variety of forms.

For George Patton, it was a memorial that would probably have been to his liking. The Army's latest medium tank, half again as fast as its predecessor (the Pershing), 62% more powerful, and with a special "wobble-stick" control which both shifts and steers, was named in his honor.

For Arthur Wermuth, once-famed "One Man Army of Bataan," who drifted from wartime heroism to peacetime girl trouble, it was the mandate of the people. He was elected marshal of the city court of Wichita, Kans.

Leni Riefenstahl, flamboyant Nazi-favored film-maker who has stoutly denied that she was ever Hitler's mistress (she once told reporters: "I get film orders from Hitler. That is all."), a close friend of Jew-Baiter Julius Streicher and an enemy of Joseph Goebbels, was partially freed of the taint of old acquaintance. The onetime beauty, now fading, fortyish, and no longer allowed to make movies, was cleared by a French zone denazification court.

Marshal Semion Timoshenko, the Soviet army's first World War II hero, was suddenly back in favor. Sent off after the war to a command in Turkestan, the marshal seemed to have left the limelight for good. This week he reappeared in Moscow to take the salute in the annual parade celebrating the 1917 revolution. And in Washington, the Soviet embassy celebrated with a lavish reception (turkey, ham, lobster, shrimp, salad, ice cream and vodka). Among the guests: Attorney General Tom Clark; Hollywood's Eric Johnston; Under Secretary of State Bob Lovett; the Bureau of Standards' Edward U. Condon; Henry Wallace.

Couturier Hattie Carnegie won the American Fashion Critics' Award (a statuette called "Winnie" and a $1,000 Government bond), but took it calmly. The prizewinning dress (a judiciously engineered evening number of mauve and pink satin, draped to expose both shoulders and one ankle), Hattie confided, was pretty old stuff: "It's something we've made before and before and before and after and after and after . . . We wore dresses like that in grandmother's time."

Vice President-elect Alben Barkley, a 71 -year-old widower, quizzed by newsmen about who would be his official hostess, ducked the question with a Southern gallant's glint in his eye: he said that "there are several applicants."

Mohandas Gandhi, it now developed, was greatly respected by Narayan Vinayak Godse, the Hindu who shot and killed him last January. "Before I fired the shots I actually wished him luck and bowed to him in reverence," Godse told a New Delhi court, where he is on trial for murder. Gandhi's policy and action "brought ruin to millions of Hindus," Godse said and he had killed Gandhi "purely for the benefit of humanity" and the death penalty would be welcome: "I do not desire any mercy . . ."

*Jean Felix, Swiss Auguste's right-handed twin, and also a balloonist, is now a U.S. citizen and professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota.

* New York's Mayor William O'Dwyer, Winnie and Hattie Carnegie.

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