Success Gone Awry:
KRAFT, JOSEPH
Success Gone Awry Name and Address. By T. S. Matthews. Simon and Schuster. 309 pp. $4.50 Reviewed by Joseph Kraft Contributor, "Esquire," "Saturday Evening Post' ABOUT THE EXTERNALS of T. S....
...Next morning she died...
...Anecdote and innuendo tie the story together...
...This is not my day in America...
...I said, God knows why...
...She was very weak by that time, but I whispered the 'glorious' news in her ear, and she smiled as if she understood...
...He replied to Luce that he had not resigned...
...Paul's...
...4.50 Reviewed by Joseph Kraft Contributor, "Esquire," "Saturday Evening Post' ABOUT THE EXTERNALS of T. S. Matthews' life there was nothing ordinary...
...He was en route home across the Atlantic the day he won his degree at Oxford: "The only evidence I had of it was my name in a paragraph from the London Times...
...What it says about God, Politics, America, Sex and Journalism has, no doubt, been said before by better and more penetrating writers...
...Even the bitter satisfaction of biting the hand that fed him was washed away in the daily round...
...that I would try...
...Everything of possible interest that could be said was said...
...His wife Julie was dying, and he decided to give up his job...
...Later he was to live amid stirring events, but remotely...
...Maurois obviously didn't at all like Wilson...
...There is reason there for bearing malice, and since leaving Time in 1952 to live and write in Britain...
...Harry had generously decided to make me editor of Time...
...But it says something that not long ago, at a very informal New York club, when Matthews approached a luncheon group of present and former Time men, they rose to a man...
...And once, when asked what he did, he replied: "Well, I manage to keep busy...
...He conveyed the decision to a deputy who counseled him against telling Henry Luce...
...Time's friendly publisher, bubbling with 'glorious, good' news for me...
...When at last the Mauroises left we looked at each other and asked how we could possibly go through with another such evening...
...In the foreground are breathless accounts of comings and goings among the mighty...
...We never saw the Mauroises again...
...The generic title is "Great Contemporaries...
...Out of such stuff others have woven an autobiographical genre...
...It was Jim Linen...
...I didn't like Time...
...It strikes, and holds, a note of genuine dignity...
...He set down 1939 as the "year of the big wind . . . because that was the year I lost my friend Schuyler...
...My years on the New Republic in a sense came to nothing...
...Apparently the deputy himself passed the word, for Matthews received a letter from Luce accepting his resignation...
...There was a misunderstanding and Maurois and his wife arrived three hours late, voluble in apology and promising they would also come next evening...
...The first Great War, the depression that ended the boom of the Twenties were hardly more to me than newspaper headlines...
...his father a bishop...
...His great friendship, with college classmate Schuyler Jackson, fell apart...
...To ordinary men it tells the story of a modern tragedy, of a man determined "to make the successful people I envied and despised admit I was as good as they were...
...Name and Address is a rare autobiography, and in a way, an important one...
...In the last paragraph he writes: "I have failed to do what I set out to do...
...His first wife died young...
...The setting is provided by sumptuous homes, luxury hotels and women who are always beautiful or charming...
...Joined to failure is a deep sense of the inconsequence of experience...
...Matthews has not only nursed his grudge but expanded it...
...Inevitably he failed...
...This day belongs to the '100 per centers,' the new-rich Texans, the Madison Avenue boys, the professional patriots, the organization men, the hard-eyed herdsmen of political yahoos, the dogs that eat dogs...
...Eventually he became Managing Editor, then Editor: the prototype for the title character in John Brooks' novel, The Big Wheel...
...his childhood "protected and pampered...
...But it is a scrupulous rendering of accounts, free of evasion and bare of confession...
...Great contemporaries he knew, but as with great events the contact went awry...
...The evening came, it was as dreadful as we had expected...
...I had become so used to Time's ways, curt, snide, conceited as they were, that I hardly noticed them any longer...
...Wilson obviously didn't much like Maurois...
...Anyone who stays in the same place for twenty years is likely to lose the sense of where he is...
...Be sure and tell Julie!' said Jim...
...He once arranged a meeting between Andre Maurois and Edmund Wilson...
...In 1949 Matthews was on leave as Managing Editor of Time...
...And that's how I got to be editor of Time...
...Toward the end of his book he finds that his most characteristic phrase is "I'm afraid...
...They stayed until after midnight...
...I had not been a success at school," Matthews writes of St...
...On every piece of copy I typed, I could have written with truth T do not like my work.' " His great ambition, to be a poet, came to naught...
...Paul's, Princeton and Oxford, worked at the New Republic in its better days and joined Time in its early ones...
...he writes of his expatriation as if speaking from beyond the grave...
...Perhaps...
...Luce countered with a suggestion that Matthews be promoted to Editor of Time...
...Matthews' title sets him apart at the outset...
...His mother was an heiress...
...A few weeks later, Matthews writes, "I got a phone call from New York...
...He studied at St...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 19
