WE were talking about pollution, and he said, 'Well, it's a worldwide problem, no question about that. The Danube is the dirtiest damn river I ever saw. The rivers in Europe are all like that. The Mediterranean is filthy. And nobody wants to go to Acapulco. You can't swim in the bay any more. It's a worldwide problem!' " The speaker was Henry Ford II, and his listener was Detroit Bureau Chief Peter Vanderwicken, who was in the process of reporting this week's cover story on Ford and the new philosophy of social commitment that is spreading through U.S. commerce and industry. Ordinarily, Ford is one of Detroit's less accessible executives, yet on this occasion he talked open WITH deep regret I report the death in Rome last week of Alwyn Lee, who has been TIME'S foremost literary critic. He was, as a colleague fondly puts it, "a swinger of the intellect. Until one met him, one never fully understood what the college president means at commencement time when he invites you into 'the fellowship of educated men.' "

There were many Alwyns, and probably none of us knew all of them. Alwyn the critic could sift a ton of aesthetic sludge and produce a column and a half of buoyant wit, pleasure and wisdom. It is stultifying to honor a man with lists, but it would be remiss not to mention his TIME review of Nabokov's Lolita, a model of incisiveness and insight; a brief and scintillating piece on Henry Miller that tells all anyone will ever need to know about that writer; and a short story called Something for Bradshaw's Tombstone, which prefigures much that Graham Greene would later have to say about the American's ability to wreak havoc on "backward" peoples.

Alwyn Lee was a newspapermanly and at length with Vanderwicken aboard one of his five jet planes, in his office and over lunch at the Ford "Glass House" headquarters in Dearborn. Those interviews were bolstered by many others as TIME correspondents across the U.S. talked to business, political and civic leaders in their various territories, and sought out examples of enlightened--as well as unenlightened--corporate conscience and social awareness. The finished story was written by George Church, edited by Marshall Loeb and re-searched by Eileen Shields and Claire Barnett in his native Australia until 1939, when he joined the Australian News and Information Bureau in New York. His 15 years at TIME were interrupted only by a four-year freelance writing stint. To his friends he was a rare, complex, rewarding and endearing man. His death is a keen loss to his colleagues, to TIME and to its readers.

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