Mollie Among the Neurotics

Last week on the cover of the New Yorker, Eustace Tilley took his annual gander at a pink butterfly. Inside, back among the brandy and perfume ads appeared a feature not nearly so old as Eustace Tilley, but already as much of a standby: the quietly perceptive weekly Letter from London. (Last week's topic was the coal crisis: "like living a bad patch of the war all over again.")

The letter was in familiar surroundings, but its author was not. Mollie Panter-Downes, London correspondent for the New Yorker since the day Britain went to war, had come to Manhattan to meet her bosses for the first time. The "goddam bunch of neurotics," as terrier-tempered Editor Harold Ross calls his jumpy staff, were charmed.

Ross deputized three of the strongest neurotics to meet Mollie at the Queen Elizabeth. He put her up at the Plaza, arranged parties for her and her husband, Clare Robinson, an official in the German control office in London.

Her hosts found her almost suspiciously normal, a slender, friendly woman of 40 who seemed as unaffected as her correspondence. Green-eyed Mollie was no brittle careerist but a woman who, besides working for the New Yorker, was her' own housekeeper, did her own canning.

The carefully casual prose which Mollie had cabled during the war did not usually chronicle great events, but their reflection in the strained faces of the British people. Every week Mollie went to London, 40 miles from her 15th Century house at Haslemere in Surrey. She trotted to the Commons, the Ministries, the galleries and the concert halls, talked with shopkeepers and bombed-out housewives and Cockneys--people like herself. She wrote in a little glass hut tucked in the woods at home. Almost a literary unknown in her own country, she had done little writing for British audiences since a fairly successful first novel, Shoreless Sea, she wrote at 16.

Ross had asked her over to "absorb the atmosphere" of the office. She was taking care not to absorb too much. "To please them," she says, "I'll go down there two or three days a week."

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