Time was at its snidest in taking potshots this week at former Time-Life executive Ralph Ingersoll, his left-leaning New York daily PM and his newly published book, TOP SECRET. The editors of Time didn't like Ingersoll, his newspaper or his politics. Ingersoll believed that Time Life honcho Henry Luce had never given him proper credit for the creation of Fortune during his days with the company and let this be known.
In addition to a dismissive review of his new book, which was based on his wartime experiences with General Omar Bradley, Time ran a separate article this attacking his management of PM. Luce and his loyal minions promulgated the coming of the American Century in the postwar era. In this scenario the world would live under the benevolent paternalism of America’s business establishment with their British peers as junior partners. Ingersoll presented an alternative postwar proposition critical of the financial elite of Wall Street and London and sympathetic to Stalin and the Soviet Union.
The Time reviewer called Top Secret an "earnest, shrill World War II history as interpreted by the editor of Manhattan's earnest, shrill tabloid PM." The book was Ingersoll's account of the Allied invasion of Europe and the Battle of Germany, in which Ingersoll had served as an officer. The Anglophile Time took great offense at Ingersoll's criticism of British actions during the military action. The reviewer wrote, "Stalin and Molotov could hardly have made a balder plea for the U.S. to ditch Britain." According to the reviewer, Ingersoll asserted in his book that the British would manipulate the U.S. into a third world war against Russia if they could. This was pretty much Communist Party gospel in the U.S. now that the war was over and was widely accepted by many fellow travelers, as well even though British voters had put the left-leaning Labour Party into power. A few weeks earlier, the far left had taken to the streets of New York in a noisy demonstration against former prime minister Winston Churchill, visiting the US at this time,because of his now famous comment that the Soviet Union had drawn an “Iron Curtain” around Eastern Europe. In his book Ingersoll had it in particularly for Field Marshall Montgomery whom he portrayed as arrogant and incompetent. He was not alone in this view. Montgomery had many critics even in his own country for his egotism and lack of tact.
The reviewer acknowledged that the book contained some useful history and that Ingersoll wrote that, in the end, the conduct of the war was "spectacularly efficient" and the British "are at bottom not so bad."
The New York Times ran a review of Top Secret on April 18. While Charles Poore agreed with other critics that the book was unbalanced and intemperate, he also wrote that it was “ one of the most...vigorous-- and readable--battle pieces of the year.”
“It is fireworks all the way,” he added, beginning with “an unforgettable picture of the rude and rancorous London planning era before D-Day” then proceeding to “more realistic scenes of carnage,” including “some magnificent descriptions of the Normandy landings.” It ends in “a whopping long editorial on what we must do to be saved.”
Time magazine also reviewed Eudora Welty's DELTA WEDDING, the most significant work of fiction published this week. The critic wrote that the novel, Welty’s first, was, like her previous short story collections, "likely to provoke the same old mixture of puzzlement over the odd people in it and respect for the sensitive, nimble hand that pulls the strings. Every page is filled with a sensitivity and workmanship that raise it far above the level of most novels; but also into an atmosphere that most readers may find too rare to breathe in." The reviewer compared it to a train whose last stop was "cloud-cuckooland," warning that it was short on plot and long on confusing comings-and-goings of a large cast of characters.
Like all Time articles at this time, the review was unsigned, as if a single person wrote the entire magazine, but according to several books about Welty, it was written by George Dangerfield, who also reviewed for The Saturday Review and formerly was literary editor of Vanity Fair. He is best known today as a historian. Welty's critical admirers complained that he neither understood nor fully appreciated Welty's writing. Despite Dangerfield's mixed feelings, Time included Delta Wedding as one the best books of 1946 in its annual year-end wrap-up.
The Time review ends with a depiction of Welty as a spinster who busied herself with flowers, painting and the Junior League. This helped set the writer in popular imagination as a shy, retiring Southern gentlewoman , happily shut away in Jackson, Mississippi. Actually, Welty spent considerable time in New York City where she was well acquainted with the city's raucous Bohemian set and had searched for a job that would keep her there. The Sunday book reviews of The New York Times and Herald Tribune also reviewed the novel this week. See the links for these reviews and other critical reaction.
The magazine also turned its attention to BLOOD OF THE LAMB, dismissed as “not much of a novel... long on local color, loud piety, snuff, 'stump liquor' and local talk." Although a first novel, it was deemed worthy of mention because of its author, Charles H. Baker, a handsome, charming bon vivant with a dapper Errol Flynn mustache who wrote about gourmet food and exotic cocktails in his popular series of Gentlemen's Companion books. After marrying an heiress, he traveled the globe writing travel and food articles for upscale magazines like Esquire and Town & Country, and had a column "Here's How" in Gourmet. He was a drinking buddy of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and other famous tipplers of the day.
In this novel, he drew upon his humbler beginnings in a small town in rural Orange County, Florida, in the days long before Disney World and gated condominium developments when Central Florida was deep in the backwoods. Set just before the First World War, the novel was sort of a cross between Elmer Gantry and Tobacco Road. Bawdy, Southern eccentrics were popular characters in fiction at this time. The ad that ran in The New York Times on April 18 linked the new novel to Erskine Caldwell’s best-selling earthy novels, saying that it was “from the land of the Florida Crackers south of Tobacco Road.” But Baker showed none of the sympathy that Caldwell had to his characters, portraying them as crude buffoons and bigoted scoundrels.
The main character in Baker’s novel is an evangelical charlatan who had been run out of other towns for his lewd behavior. The characters and situations are over-the-top, owing more to the folklore tradition than to the conventional novel structure, according to Charles Poore who reviewed it for The Times. He wrote “Mr. Baker is determined to stress the crudities and bigotries of Cracker life, disapproving of them heartily.” Poore found the novel entertaining as well as shocking.