An Odd, Sad Waif

Two Hungarians struck up a conversation in Lausanne one winter evening in 1922 and, as Hungarians will, when Hungarians meet, they talked the night through. That, says Emery Kelen, was the start of “our thirty-year partnership.” (“Our thirty-year war,” snorts Alois Derso.) At any rate, they were to become the pictorial biographers of the League of Nations (“our girl of Geneva”) doing for the League what Queen Mathilda had done for the Battle of Hastings at her loom so many centuries before. The Kelen-Derso entente (cordial or not) didn’t break up until after the Second World War when Emery Kelen became television director of the United Nations while his partner, Alois Derso, opted instead to continue as an artist and in due course became national review’s chief, most popular (and for the first three or four years) only regular illustrator. (In consequence of these choices Emery Kelen now lives in the country, is semi-retired, and finds time to write first-class books such as Peace in Their Time, while Derso continues poor, and unretired—and available to NR’s editors, provided they don’t call before 3 PM.)

Alois Derso: Self-Portrait

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Two Hungarians struck up a conversation in Lausanne one winter evening in 1922 and, as Hungarians will, when Hungarians meet, they talked the night through. That, says Emery Kelen, was the start of “our thirty-year partnership.” (“Our thirty-year war,” snorts Alois Derso.) At any rate, they were to become the pictorial biographers of the League of Nations (“our girl of Geneva”) doing for the League what Queen Mathilda had done for the Battle of Hastings at her loom so many centuries before. The Kelen-Derso entente (cordial or not) didn’t break up until after the Second World War when Emery Kelen became television director of the United Nations while his partner, Alois Derso, opted instead to continue as an artist and in due course became national review’s chief, most popular (and for the first three or four years) only regular illustrator. (In consequence of these choices Emery Kelen now lives in the country, is semi-retired, and finds time to write first-class books such as Peace in Their Time, while Derso continues poor, and unretired—and available to NR’s editors, provided they don’t call before 3 PM.)

Alois Derso: Self-Portrait