Edmund Wilson’s book reviews in The New Yorker were influential with the city’s serious readers but this week the lead review in the magazine was by A. J. Liebling.
Liebling often wrote about the city’s newspapers and the book getting the attention was Top Secret by Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM, a New York tabloid of the day with a left wing bias. It occupied a niche between The Post, a liberal tabloid in those days, and The Daily Worker, the Communist Party house organ.
Ingersoll (1900-1985) was an interesting character. He had been born into the Manhattan social elite and had played key roles in the launch of The New Yorker and later in the creation of Fortune when he was with Time-Life. He believed that he had not been sufficiently recognized for his achievements. Staunch Stalinist Lillian Hellman introduced him to her Communist circle when they were having an affair. The idea behind PM was to have a tabloid sympathetic to the left but not under control of the Communist Party as a counter to the city's right wing tabloids. This led to conflicts within the newspaper reflecting the fissures on the left with the Communists in an uproar when PM veered from the Party line and the non-Communists upset when it adhered too closely. It did draw attention in its short life for a series of muckraking articles attacking the sacred cows of the day.
Ingersoll insisted that PM accept no advertising to maintain its independence. He often ran signed editorials on the front page. Other papers ridiculed PM for being often a day or two behind in reporting the news. They characterized Ingersoll as an egomaniac. It also cost more than the city's other tabloids.
PM was not a financial success despite contributions from some of the leading journalists and writers of the day and financial backing from Marshall Field, heir to the department store fortune. Ingersoll quit later in 1946 when his backers insisted the paper start accepting advertising. He had also gotten caught in the internecine warfare within his staff. PM folded in 1948. However, it did give birth to the highly successful Sunday supplement Parade, hardly noted for political radicalism.
Ingersoll was drafted in 1942 when he was 41, entering the Army as a private but soon rising up the ranks to serve with Omar Bradley. Recently he has been credited for playing a major role in the creation of a phantom army under Patton to delude the Nazis about D-Day planning.
After returning home, he wrote The Battle is the Pay-Off, an account of the war from the soldier’s point of view. In the follow-up, Top Secret, he praised Bradley, whom he credited with winning the war in Western Europe with the assistance of Patton, and he attacked the military reputation of Eisenhower, whom the mainstream press had virtually canonized. He was particularly hard on British Field Marshal Montgomery, charging that Montgomery's anti-Soviet obsession and ego had interfered with the conduct of the war.
Liebling found Ingersoll’s book an unconvincing argument but he welcomed the debate, writing that "as the author remarks, the second World War was probably the last old-fashioned war we will have to argue over....Atomic wars will be too brief for analysis."
The book review pages also included capsule reviews of several other new books.
Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories (published in England in 1945 as The Demon Lover and Other Stories) was a collection of short stories by esteemed Anglo-Irish modernist writer Elizabeth Bowen set in wartime Britain. The reviewer found them beautifully written but not among Bowen’s most notable work. “The Demon Lover,” however, is one of her best known short stories. It is a chilling tale of a woman who receives a letter from her long-dead lover during the London blitz. Bowen was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, noted for her depiction of the emotional repression of Engish middle class life. One of the most respected writers of the mid-20th century, only a few of her novels are still in print today. See Wikipedia for more about Bowen and some of her best known works like The Last September and The Heat of the Day.
Peony by Keith West (not to be confused with a Pearl Buck novel on China with the same title published two years later) was the story of a Chinese girl in conflict with the traditions with which she was raised. The reviewer found it “sorrowful” and “self-conscious.”
Buried Stream by Ernest Brace was about a Manhattan public relations executive who undergoes a spiritual awakening. The reviewer found it thoughtful and intelligent but not profound.
I Heard Them Sing by Ferdinand Reyher was a period piece about a Midwestern barber struggling to make a go of a marriage with a mismatched spouse. It was deemed affecting but inexpertly written. It was adapted to the screen in 1952 as “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie.”
Young Man with a Dream by Irish writer Kenneth Reddin (aka Kenneth Sarr) was a novel about a Dubliner who dreams of escape to the South Seas that the reviewer found overly complicated for its subject matter.
Wind in the Olive Tree by Abel Plenn was the account of the author’s experiences working in the U.S. Embassy in Franco’s Spain during the war. The reviewer found the book “thoughtful and disturbing” but “not well-written” and “sharply biased to the Left.”
How to Grow Old Disgracefully by Norman Anthony was a memoir by a cartoonist, humor magazine editor and Jazz Age man-about-town. The reviewer found it entertaining.
General Wainwright’s Story by Hearst columnist Robert Considine was an account of the Battles of Corregidor and Bataan as well as of Wainwright’s three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. The reviewer found it “highly satisfactory reading.” It was one of a slew of journalistic accounts of the recently concluded war that were coming out at this time.
Public Men In and Out of Office, edited by JT Salter, was a collection of short profiles of controversial statesmen and politicians of the day including former vice-president and hero of the Left Henry Wallace, ardent segregationist, anti-woman's rights advocate and notably ill-tempered Senator Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina and the corrupt, racist demagogue from Mississippi, Senator Theodore Bilbo, written by historians, political scientists and journalists. It was faulted for uneven writing and a too temperate tone.
Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett was the heavily promoted memoir of a celebrated hunter and conservationist in India who often was called in to track down tigers and leopards that had attacked humans. It was a Book-of-the Month Club selection and international bestseller which the reviewer dismissed as “Ruptured Kipling.”
Architects of Charleston by Beatrice St. Julien Ravenal on the people behind the antebellum houses of the Southern city was said to be beautifully illustrated and witty in an old-fashioned way.
House of the Month Book of Small Houses by Harold Group, the first of an expected series, was deplored for presenting “prettified” drawings and floor plans of houses in the New England colonial style which the reviewer wrote disparagingly is the style preferred by bank financers over more practical, modern and economical housing.