CRADLE ROCKED

In Manhattan last week a rowdy, bloody battle broke aboard Authoress Joan Lowell's first literary ship, The Cradle of the Deep (TIME, March 18). The book was published in March by Simon & Schuster, playboys of the publishing world, who in 1927 promoted the bull-elephantine Trader Horn.

The whopper-publishers sent forth The Cradle of the Deep as "autobiography" --truth, human document, veracious account of the author's first 17 years as a child of the sea aboard her father's four-masted windjammer, the Minnie A. Caine, copra trader in the South Seas. The chaste and conservative Book-of-the-Month Club offered it to its 80,000 readers. The publishers offered it to the general public. Sales reached 107,000.

In the great climactic chapter of her story, Authoress Lowell told of the burning and sinking of the Minnie A. Caine off the coast of Australia some seven years ago, she swimming three miles to a light-ship with a family of kittens clinging with their claws to her firm flesh. What started last week's uproar was the discovery of the Minnie A. Caine, lying placidly at anchor in Oakland Harbor, Calif. She has been there for the past two years. Fact-finders were able to show that Joan Lowell and her father had been aboard the Minnie A. Caine about 15 months instead of 16 years.

Whopper-publishers Simon & Schuster and Whopperess Lowell, replied cheerfully that she had used ''artistic selectivity." Husband Thompson Buchanan, a journalist-playwright with Hollywood affiliations, admitted that it was true that his wife had lived on the Minnie A. Caine only a short time, but protested that she had lived on many another ship and that in her book she had merged all the real ships into one literary entity, thus demonstrating her good judgment.

The net result of the whole affair seemed to be just a lot more whacking good publicity for The Cradle of the Deep and for Simon & Schuster as whopper-publishers, to whom any budding whopperist would do well to take his (her) manuscript.