Recent Articles – Page 155 – Old Magazine Articles

Letter from France (Tricolor Magazine, 1944)

A British staff officer who was an eyewitness to the Allied breakout from the Normandy hedgerows compiled all the assorted questions that friends and family had written to him in their respective letters and answered them in a public format published in TRICOLOR MAGAZINE:

What do you feel when you see people dead?

Just an urgent desire to get by quickly and a feeling of revulsion which is greater or less according to the length of time the body has been dead… There is no difference in appearance between decomposing men and decomposing animals and the same stench comes from both.

Charlie Chaplin Wanted to be Taken Seriously (Current Opinion, 1922)

We have all seen it many times before: the well-loved, widely accepted comedian who decides that being adored by the masses is simply not enough. For too many comic talents, sadly, there comes a time when they slip on one banana peel too many and it occurs to them that they want the world to appreciate them for their ability to think. Comics who fill this description might be Al Frankin, Woody Allen or Steve Martin.

This article tries to understand why Chaplin wanted to play a tragic part in a 1921 London stage adaptation of William Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’.
We have seen such behavior in comics many times before, they hadn’t.

An Austrian at the German Supreme Headquarters (Times Literary Supplement, 1921)

Reviewed herein is the W.W. memoir of General von Josef Graf Sturgkh (1859 – 1916) memoir recalling his days in Berlin serving as the Austrian Army delegate to the German military’s Great Headquarters (1915 – 1916):

Graf Sturgkh drops several hints about the very heavy losses incurred by the Germans in the very first weeks of the war…

An Englishman in the French Army (Times Literary Supplement, 1917)

Under the French Flag is a W.W. I memoir by M. Macdonald in which the author tells the story of an Englishman who chose to sign up for the French Army due to their lax recruiting regulations which provided for the enlistment of men as old as fifty years of age. The reviewer believed the author recounted some interesting scenes of early-war France and French barracks life.

Click here to read articles about W.W. I poetry.

Sean O’Casey: Laborer, Playwright, Poet (Stage Magazine, 1934)

Drama critic Ruth Woodbury Sedgwick interviewed Irish playwright Seán O’Casey
(1880 – 1964) for the November, 1934, issue of STAGE MAGAZINE and wrote this piece which clearly illustrated his art and politics.

Good Taste and the Year 1914 (The Delineator Magazine, 1914)

A quick read for costumers and historians regarding the fashion dos and don’ts on the matter of men’s ready-made clothes from 1914.

Dada at MOMA (Literary Digest, 1936)

An amusing, if blasphemous, art review of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 Dada and Surrealism exhibit.
The journalist oddly credited Joan Miro as the author of the Dada movement.

The Marx Brothers of the art world are displayed, in all their unrestrained glory, in an exhibition of Fantastic Art in New York this week.

An exhibition of this type is always easy prey for the practical joker. A similar show in Paris several years ago exhibited a shovel, submitted by a well-known but discontented artist as an example of perfect symmetry.

Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.

Violent Women (The Literary Digest, 1913)

With the number violent acts committed by destructive Suffragettes quickly growing, the British patriarchs considered deporting them to Australia and other dominions as a just punishment for such a class of women.

Read about an attack on President Wilson that was launched by the suffragettes in 1918…

A Writer in the Ranks (Yank Magazine, 1945)

Dashiel Hammett (1894 – 1961) had a pretty swell resume by the time World War II came along. He had written a string of well-received novels and enjoyed a few well-paying gigs in Hollywood. During the war years it was rare, but not unheard of, for an older man with such accomplishments to enlist in the army – and that is just what he did. The attached article spells out Hammett’s period serving on an Alaskan army base, his slow climb from Buck Private to sergeant, his difficulty with officers and the enjoyment of being anonymous.

Accompanying the article is a black and white image of the writer wearing Uncle Sam’s olive drab, herringbone twill – rather than the tell-tale tweed he was so often photographed wearing.

Click here to read a 1939 STAGE MAGAZINE profile of Hammett’s wife, the playwright Lillian Hellman.

‘Dark December” (The Commonweal, 1947)

This is the 1947 review of Robert Merrian’s history on the Battle of the Bulge, Dark December; the reviewer, T.E. Cassidy, had served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in the Ardennes:

Merriam is at his best analyzing the actual confusion that was rampant from the very beginning of the German drive on December 16th. I know his handling is expert here, for I was in the midst of the chaos, and can vividly recall, for example, the blank stares I met at various headquarters when I would ask what road net was clear, and to what point. It was really no one’s fault, after the first day or two. People simply did not know what was happening. And it was days and days before there was any concerted agreement among the different levels as to just what was going on.