Books: Literary Life

• Share

Turnabout. Oliver St. John Gogarty is an Irish physician, Senator, wit, poet and the original of Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses. His autobiographical volumes, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street and Tumbling in the Hay, tell of his indiscreet youth, his love of laughter and low company, his delight in stories of his own and other people's misbehavior. One such got him into a libel suit which cost him £900. But when Patrick Kavanagh, young Irish poet, published The Green Fool (TIME, Feb. 27), fun-loving Dr. Gogarty could not see the joke. In it Kavanagh told of visiting Dublin as a tramp with literary aspirations, calling on Gogarty: "I mistook Gogarty's white-robed maid for his wife—or his mistress. I expected every poet to have a spare wife." In London last month Dr. Gogarty sued Kavanagh for libel, won £100.

Review. In 1924, Henry Seidel Canby, William Rose Benet and Christopher Morley took The Saturday Review of Literature out of the New York Evening Post, launched it as a separate publication. Its amiable reviews, amiable literary gossip, mildly titillating personal ads, weekly word puzzle, reached some 30,000 readers. Dr. Canby stepped down as editor in 1936, irascible Bernard De Voto stepped up. Two years later De Voto turned over direction to young, good-natured George Stevens. Last week another shake-up left The Saturday Review with the same editors but new owners. Purchaser was tall, hard-working Joseph Hilton Smyth, onetime pulp editor, conductor of a mimeographed sheet analyzing foreign affairs, who in the last year has taken over Current History and two venerable, distinguished magazines: Living Age (founded in 1844), North American Review (1815). Associated with him is Publisher Harrison Smith. Owners Smyth & Smith announced there would be no change in The Saturday Review's policy, with George Stevens remaining as editor, Founders Canby, Morley & Benet as contributors.