The Big Picture

Sir:

Kudos for the story on the Post-Dispatch's Bill Mauldin [July 21]. Although never known for its adaptability to new ideas, the Midwest can be proud of Dan Fitzpatrick's equally corrosive successor. Mauldin gives fair promise of adhering to Joseph Pulitzer's platform: "Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties."

ROBERT E. YARBER East St. Louis, Ill.

Sir:

Your story did the man and his art full justice. You show graphically why, for the second time in his life, Bill has become a national institution of the live and kicking division.

ROBERT B. GILLESPIE New York City

Sir:

When you listed the top American cartoonists, you failed to include one of the best editorial and political cartoonists in America today.

Walt Kelly's brilliant satire and political comment in his cartoons certainly make him one of the truly outstanding representatives of his profession.

DOUGLAS IRELAND Plymouth, Mass.

Sir:

With just one paragraph, your fine cover story on Bill Mauldin dismisses the importance of the greatest American cartoonist since Nast.

If you give Nast credit for deflating the "image" of Boss Tweed without giving equal credit to Herblock for deflating the "image" of the late sawdust Caesar from Wisconsin, you make a great error of omission.

MARVIN E. SCHULMAN Los Angeles

Sir:

Bill Mauldin seems to change his "principles" according to his personal position at a given time.

When he was an enlisted man, all the officers were monsters or morons. Now that he has an expensive home, family responsibilities and $20,000 a year, he is suddenly against Khrushchev and all like him, who must have loved him for all he did to help them sow disrespect in the old days.

EDITH E. SEKOWSKI New Brunswick, N.J.

Sir:

Now that Mauldin has it made (your cover, plus 26 thou' per), is he big enough to hit ?

My view is that his good ideas and draughtsmanship are limited by his oldfashioned, mushy medium and his refusal to stoop to symbolism.

What's wrong with symbolism? It was a pretty good tool in the hands of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Nast and is today in Richard Q. Yardley's wonderful work [for the Baltimore Sun].

Mauldin is a comer all right, but he's years behind Yardley.

BURGES GREEN

Providence Journal Providence

Sir:

In a discussion I had with Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. shortly after Bill Mauldin's encounter with him, he expressed his disapproval of Mauldin's portrayal of the front-line soldiers: the cartoons could influence too many rear-echelon soldiers--all the way back to England, if not the U.S.--into affecting similar sloppy appearances in order to look like combat soldiers.

General Patton contended that this could unnecessarily make for a widespread problem in military discipline and apparently based his opinion on the rather surprising assertion that "we had the same trouble with Bairnsfather in the last war." Which at least shows that Mauldin was following a hallowed military tradition.

DAVE BREGER South Nyack, N.Y.

P: General Patton's remark to Reader Breger (who is himself a cartoonist, creator of the much put-upon "Private Breger") was an apt comparison, even if it was not a sound complaint. Dashing Captain Bruce Bairnsfather went to France in 1914 with Britain's Royal Warwickshire Regiment, saw his cartoons--featuring a character called "Old Bill"--become immensely popular with soldiers and civilians alike. For a Bairnsfather World War I classic, which could have served as a prototype for Mauldin's World War II Willie and Joe cartoons, see cut.--ED.

Sir:

Why build up Mauldin at the expense of all other American editorial cartoonists? Sure, he's good, but not that good--and we are not that bad.

A calmer paean would show that he has more in common with the rest of us than otherwise. In the first place, he doesn't draw very well, which establishes him as our pure blood brother. Second, like most of the others he has borrowed a good part of his technique. Third, he deals more in indignities than profundities. Fourth, he has good days and bad days as do we all.

It is only fair now that TIME turn its imagination loose and trip down the hierarchic stairs through the also-rans, and even into the never-weres. Our profession is in need of variety--not a grand sachem.

CHARLES O. BISSELL Editorial Cartoonist The Tennesseean Nashville

Brief Glory

Sir:

Your vivid account of the Tour de France [July 21] reminded me of a day, almost ten years ago, when my girl friend and I achieved a certain celebrity in one of the regional bicycle races that precede the big Tour.

Riding a couple of dilapidated, rented bicycles, we had set out to cycle from Montpellier to Nimes. We noticed from the start that there was unusual activity along the normally deserted rural highway, but it was only after we had covered several kilometers that we realized that the little groups of people who thronged every intersection were calling out to us, "Allez, allez, Mesdemoisellesl Vous etes les premieres!"

We were following the route of the Grand Tour du Midi and we were, in truth, "in the lead."

IDA KOSCIESZA

Chicago

Monumental Party

Sir:

I wasn't too surprised when Mrs. Kennedy decided to use the lawn of our national shrine at Mount Vernon for a dinner party [July 21]. Perhaps this can be followed by a cookout at the Lincoln Memorial.

EDWARD R. WEDDON, M.D. Stockbridge, Mich.

Sir:

Three cheers to Jackie Kennedy for her continued creativity and imagination in making use of Mount Vernon to entertain.

JOHN VOGEL Narberth, Pa.

The End of the Story

Sir:

You are to be commended for your fine obituary on Ernest Hemingway [July 14]. You have captured his lasting contribution to our language and literature with the objectivity and good sense that Hemingway himself would have admired.

When I first heard of his death, I was reminded of a line from Death in the Afternoon: "If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it." In a sense, Ernest Hemingway's love affair was with the tragic world which he created in his novels, and with the tragic characters who rimmed that world. What happened at Ketchum was, ironically, no happy end.

ALEXANDER MEDLICOTT JR. Seattle

Sir:

Your dissection of Hemingway the man is unnecessary. It would be better to accept that artists are imperfect people. The fact that some produce nearly perfect works does not alter the fact. Nature does not create artists. Artists create themselves by overreacting to their experiences and yielding to a neurotic need to inform humanity of their joys, miseries and impressions. Normal people are not driven by these abnormal needs, thus do not produce works of art.

CHARLES F. BIRRELL Harrisburg, Pa.

Sir:

Your deeply understanding review was in the main admirable, but you failed to clarify the strange incongruity of his Henleyesque career with its anticlimax in the Catholic funeral ceremony. Beyond the nebulous implication that Hemingway was either an agnostic or an atheist, there is nothing in your article to inform the reader as to whether he was enough of a Catholic to warrant the obsequies, whether in life he would have authorized them, or whether the rites were anything more than an expression of his mourners' troubled sense of decorum.

LEONARD MONZERT West Newton, Mass.

P: The prayers at Hemingway's grave were conducted by a Catholic priest at the request of his widow. Hemingway had become a Catholic at the time of his second marriage but, as a divorced man, could not have had a funeral Mass.--ED.

Sir:

Hemingway ended his preface to The Fifth Column and the First Fortynine Stories in this way: "I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones." This was 1938. Did he make it?

JOHN SCOTT TROTTER

Los Angeles

P: He made it only part way. After 1938 he wrote three novels: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and Into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Although he did a lot of other writing, he did not publish 25 short stories.--ED.

Sir:

I wonder if Hemingway was not, in this final act, testing all writers on what he had tried to teach them of blood, guts and death. If so, all failed the test except TIME.

RUFUS J. CHRISTGAU Oakland, Calif.

One on the House

Sir:

I have read with considerable interest your article [July 21] on J. & B. scotch. Most of it was extremely accurate but may I stress that although I may be 63, I have been well embalmed and have no intention, in foreseeable future, of passing on the active management to my puberal, 53-year-old, brush-moustached, co-managing director, Mr. Ralph Cobbold. At time of writing, the result of your article is a wreath from my staff and an ominous closing in by my bookmakers and other creditors. As you have given my senility such worldwide publicity, perhaps you will give my reincarnation the same treatment.

EDWARD TATHAM Managing Director Justerini & Brooks Ltd. London

Sir:

As TIME said, color has nothing to do with the character, lightness or heaviness of Scotch whisky. Since the color of the finished product is contributed mainly by the addition of burnt sugar or caramel, a heavy, preponderantly malty whisky might be quite light in color, while a whisky light in character might be any color that the shipper considers suitable. Both Black and White and Ballantine are regarded as light in character --neither should be described as "heavy."

FRANCIS T. HUNTER President

"21" Brands, Inc. New York City

Kirk's Other Ghost

Sir:

Many thanks for the review of Old House of Fear [July 7].

Recently I was delighted to be informed that I had purchased and restored a certified ghost, without knowing it: at Baldwin, Mich., where I acquired an old house for my father and stepmother. They converted a bedroom into a bathroom and restored the corner of a door frame that had been mysteriously knocked away, apparently many years before. Then steps began to be heard in the corridors and on the stairs. My father, who never gave much credence to such phenomena, says this indubitably is a ghost, but he is rather at home with it. My stepmother often hears the footfalls, too. According to information they have gathered from old residents, this is supposed to be the revenant of an old man who blew off his head in that former bedroom, the shotgun charge destroying the corner of the door frame at the same time.

RUSSELL KIRK Leven, Fife, Scotland

Hitting the Trail

Sir:

You have everything in that wonderful, wacky camping cover [July 14] except the mosquitoes.

ROZELLAH R. BARNARD Carmel, Calif.

Sir:

Please accept our appreciation for the beautiful picture of our Ozark country and the Buffalo River.

Sometimes we get the feeling that Arkansas is the little state that the nation forgot.

RAY S. MANOR Executive Secretary Arkansas Motor-Hotel Association Little Rock, Ark.

Sir:

You perhaps have had other letters regarding the picture and section of the camping story about Dr. Samuel L. Painter. He died of a coronary thrombosis Sat., July 8. TIME reached us on Tuesday, the day of his funeral.

Thank you again for adding to the wonderful memories that we all have of a young man who gave his few short years in full dedication to the healing of people.

MRS. COLE H. ROBERTS Albuquerque

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