REFLECTIONS: 59 on the Aisle

REFLECTIONS 59 on the Aisle Manhattan has the world's most inhuman subways, some of its most hopelessly snarled traffic and, in the public bars, its most relentless television sets; it also has some of the world's best music and drama. For four years, U.N. staff members have been exposed to the blessings as well as to the curses of their international capital. Last week,the New York Herald Tribune's Peter Kihss set out to discover how they like Manhattan culture.

He found that UNers do not have time to be really full-time culture vultures. The average U.N. delegate goes to the theater or the opera no more than once a month, always finds tickets hard to get. Australia's J. 0. Makin is the most devoted theatergoer (he has sat through Anne of the Thousand Days four times), possibly because in his youth he wanted to be an actor himself. Britain's Alexander Cadogan found American plays rather inferior; as for recent movies he liked best, they were Henry V., Hamlet and Fallen Idol; when Cadogan thought about it, he realized that all three of them were British. As for T. S. Eliot's Cocktail Party (TIME, Jan. 30), Cadogan found some of it a bit difficult to follow. "But of course," he added, "I may be getting hard of hearing."

France's Jean Chauvel was perturbed by Broadway's outbursts of pessimisanthro-py, e.g., Death of a Salesman, preferred the gloom of museums to the gloom of theaters and the zephyrs of chamber music to the hurricanes of opera. China's Dr. P. C. Chang thought Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics were delightfully fresh but could not pay the same compliment to the Metropolitan Opera's chorus.

Yugoslavia's Ales Bebler, commenting on All the King's Men (a fictional film biography of Huey Long, Louisiana's late little Tito) found it a threat to democracy. "The main idea you get out of it is that you .can believe no politicians . . . Even the most humble farmer rising to be a governor of a state is necessarily corrupted by power, it says, and after a while develops a fascist tendency and has SS troops around him. It makes for pessimism. It undermines democracy."

U.N. Secretary General Trygve Lie admitted that he did not have much chance to go to the theater these days. "I am sorry to confess," said he, "that this winter I got a television set." When he gets time, between work and watching TV, he loves to see a good baseball game. He is a Dodger fan.