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24 answer was: “When our per-capita output of pig iron is as high as yours.” . The Russians seem content to wait for that day. Can we? POWER AND GLORY THE GREAT ONES, by Ralph Ingersoll (Harcourt, Brace and Company; $3). ; THE EX-EMPLOYEES of Henry R. Luce are forever storming into Manhattan cocktail parties to cast a contagion over the conversation. They have an exposé _in their pocket, a novel in their system, or hemlock in their soul. All three, . more than likely, concern their bald-— ing, bushy-browed, one-time boss. Ralph Ingersoll renounced his cushy job as a Time-Life overdog to found and edit the newspaper PM. This is not the place for that agonizing story. Suffice it to say that when Ingersoll was eased out of his “new kind of .. newspaper,” he took with. him the last of the dash and sparkle of a noble ex- periment. Life now begins at 47 for Ralph Ingersoll, a brave age to start over as a novelist, _ Ingersoll used to produce his PM editorials by pacing up and down and dictating at a furious. rate. The re- sultant prose gave his readers the feel- ing of being grabbed roughly by the lapels while a hairy-chested assailant barked in their ears. The odd thing was that the shouts often made a good deal of sense; for Ingersoll was an instinctive, if apoplectic, reporter. The Great Ones, at intervals, exudes that old-time religion. But one can’t escape the hunch that Ingersoll. at last has been broken to a typewriter. Who's who. Any resemblance in The Great Ones to You Know Who, the author is at great pains to make clear, is purely coincidental. Imaginative genius alone could contrive the ficti- tious mating of Yaleman Sturges Strong, co-founder of Facts, the Know- ing Weekly, with gifted Letia Long, whose ashen but well preserved beauty sweeps through the world of art, let- ters and politics, The mussy chronicle of publisher Sturges Strong and career-woman Letia se SE SSS ey Re eT Long permits Ingersoll to comment ‘sharply on a great variety of subjects. He appears to have first-hand infor- mation about them all: Hotchkiss, speakeasies, Yale, psychoanalysis. and ' the Racquet Club, to mention a few. The Great Ones are, after all, only little, little people. Their sordid lives are portrayed by Ingersoll without benefit of fine prose or dramatic sub- tleties. The sensation is something akin to staring at a set of dirty fingernails. It is an uncomfortable book. Success sfory. Ingersoll wastes little sympathy on either partner of this marital miscartiage. Yet there is a pathetic quality to Sturges Strong, sit- ting high up in the. gleaming monu- ment to his publishing triumphs. He is made out to be lonely and super- fluous, a prisoner of his own. accom- plishments. Strong’s contribution to his magazines was a dogged will and single-minded energy to succeed; the . inspiration and talent flowed from others. When the huge success is finally achieved, Strong’s single-mind- edness is no longer a necessary asset. He is merely. tolerated by his bright young editors, who grudgingly allow him to indulge his whim to write an occasional piece for publication. Even then they are forced to tinker with it, Facts style. For these ingrates Ingersoll provides an appropriate epitaph: ‘They drove themselves and drove the people under them until, in their preoccupation with recording what the world was doing, they forgot the world itself.” Letia Long was obviously never meant to marry a man ordained for God, for country and for Yale. She was a lady of extraordinary talent, and the strange fact of her infatuation for Sturges Strong was based on a terrible miscalculation. She thought there must be somebody she could look up to. She looks up at a considerable number of men in Ingersoll’s novel— in apartments, in Long Island man- sions, on boats (both sail and power) —only to find them wanting. Little else being left her, she becomes a virgin of the intellect. The Great Ones does an injustice to NEW REPUBLIC all the Very Important People who - manage to be only slightly ridiculous. Sturges Strong and Letia Long are too much of a bad thing. They congeal like cold wax under the icy breath of In- getsoli’s irritation. They are, in fact, unbelievable. The Great Ones, nevertheless, is an interesting document of the times. Among the taloned gentry of Publish- ing Alley it is likely to cause a flutter and titter. Ralph Ingersoll, chooses, may end up as the John P. Marquand of New York and Reno. PENN KIMBALL ‘BEST OF TRE STORIES THE COMMON CHORD, by Frank “—-©'€onnor=(Alfred “A. Knopf; $2.75). A LONG FOURTH AND OTHER STORIES, by Peter Taylor (Harcourt, Brace; $3). THE WALL OF DUST, by Hallam Ten- nyson (The Viking Press; $2.50). THE WoRLD of Frank O'Connor is the small Irish town and may be already - familiar to readers of Crab-Apple Jelly, published several years ago. The “com- mon chord” in the present stories is sex: not merely love-making, but sex in all its personal and social manifes- tations from puppy love to the inherit- ance of family property. The term may be here extended, in fact, to all those elements in life not included in that other dominant force—the Church. The stories take place between these two positives; either in their natural conflict, or in their sometimes unholy alliance, as when the puritanism of Irish Catholicism provides the women with a weapon for sexual tyranny. At the same time, O’Connor is sensitive and skillful enough to discern and demon- strate how these-two elements are com- bined in his most genial characters. He appreciates the traditional pieties and scruples of the formal code when “life had rubbed {a man’s] principles down considerably” and produced a fine patina of urbane humanity. A teliable key to O’Connor’s at- . titude toward his subject is the absence of satire where. satire is all but ir- resistible. It gives his work depth that ee SN en Se if he . ye