The Literary Life

Best-selling Author Thomas Merton

(The Seven Storey Mountain), self-styled "true child of ther modern world," who took the vow of silence of the Trappist monks eight years ago, was ordained a priest of the order at Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery, near Bardstown, Ky.

Norman Mailer, whose novel The Naked and the Dead drew a cry of shocked protest upon its appearance in Britain (TIME, May 9), got a disdainful clearance from Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross: "While much of this most tedious and lengthy book is foul, lewd and revolting, looking at it as a whole I do not think it has the intention to corrupt and deprave, or that it is likely to lead to any result other than disgust at its contents."

Rachel Benet, 17, daughter of Rosemary and the late Poet Stephen Vincent Benet (John Brown's Body), won first prize in a nationwide essay contest sponsored by the Atlantic. The prize: $25 cash and a four-year scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh.

Home-Town Boys

Old Soldier Lucius D. Clay, who survived the standard ticker-tape and keys-to-the-city routine in New York last week, came back to his home town of Marietta, Ga., to the cheers of 20,000 jammed along the streets and a heart-warming welcome (see cut) from Reuben Johnson, 88, who used to take care of Clay when the general was a baby (junior grade).

Jose Ferrer, versatile star of stage and screen, who got an honorary M.A. from Princeton, his alma mater, two years ago, flew down to his island homeland after 16 years' absence to be made an honorary

Doctor of Fine Arts by the University of Puerto Rico.

Gape-mouthed Comic Joe E. Brown, who used to be a pretty fair ballplayer himself (he once rated a tryout with the Yankees), came back to his old home town of Holgate, Ohio, to be guest of honor at the opening of the new local ball yard, named the Joe E. Brown Stadium. Then he drove over to nearby Bowling Green State University for an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Innocents Abroad Mrs. Oksana Stepanovna Kasenkina, the Russian schoolteacher who jumped from a window of the Soviet consulate into a sea of headlines last August (she has since netted $45,000 from the sale of her syndicated stories, with a book scheduled for October publication), weathered another shaking-up. Taking driving lessons in Freehold, N.J., she misjudged a turn, piled her 1948 Pontiac into a light standard and a street sign, walked away unhurt.

Peter Loire, sinister, serpent-eyed cinemenace, filed a petition in bankruptcy in Los Angeles, in which he ruefully reported that he had been completely cleaned out in a Hollywood business deal.

Exiled Princess lleana of Rumania, daughter of the late Queen Marie, sister of ex-King Carol, who has been living in Buenos Aires since the Communists took over Rumania in January 1948, pawned some of the crown jewels (a diamond & sapphire-studded platinum diadem) in a local hock shop for $60,000, a third of their estimated value, to raise some business capital for her husband, Archduke Anton of Habsburg.

Second Thoughts

Indian Ambassador Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit told the Women's National Press Club that "too many sugar things are said in the world today, and I am surfeited with them." (In 1947, when she was India's first ambassador to Moscow, Mrs. Pandit had sweetly said: "India has a special link with the Soviet Union, since both India and Russia have shown a capacity to blend and harmonize different races and civilizations.")

British Novelist E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) told the American Academy of Arts and Letters that in pessimistic moments he thought that "man's best chance for harmony lies in apathy, uninventiveness and inertia . . . Universal exhaustion would certainly be a new experience. The human race has never undergone it, and it is still too perky to admit that it ... might result in a sprouting of new growth through decay."

"If is hard for a writer in the Western tradition to understand the atmosphere of Russia," admitted Novelist Thomas Mann, "hard for him to understand a man like Shostakovich kneeling down before the authorities. And yet, after all, in the Middle Ages artists lived under the dogma of the church and felt relatively free. It is possible--is it possible?--for an artist to function within a frame of philosophy .whose limits cannot be transcended ... I don't know."

Canadian-born Lord Beaverbropk, publisher of London's high-powered Daily Express, Sunday Express and Evening Standard, celebrated his yoth birthday at a luncheon given by 600 employees. The Beaver's birthday resolutions:

"I'll not give up my bad temper. I'll not give up my passions. I've enjoyed them far too much to put them away. I'll not give up my prejudices . . . the very foundation of my strength and vigour."

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