Connecticut College Alumni Magazine, Fall 1985
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Connecticut College Digital Commons @ Connecticut College Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Alumni News Archives Fall 1985 Connecticut College Alumni Magazine, Fall 1985 Connecticut College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/alumnews Recommended Citation Connecticut College, "Connecticut College Alumni Magazine, Fall 1985" (1985). Alumni News. 232. https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/alumnews/232 This Magazine is brought to you for free and open access by the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Archives at Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Alumni News by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. ", 'I~'"" . ,~{.~X,."', ;., , Editorial Boord: Vivian Segall '73, Editor (12 Smith Court, Noank, CT 06340) / Margaret Stewart Van Patten '86, Editorial Assistant / Katherine Gould '81 I Wayne Swanson / Marilyn Ellman Frankel '64/ Louise Stevenson Andersen '41, Class Notes Editor I Warren I Erickson '74 and Kristin Stchlscbmldt Lambert '69, ex officio. The Connecticut College Alumni Magazine (USPS 129-140). Official publication of the Connecticut College Alumni Association. All publication rights reserved. Contents reprinted only by permission of the editor. Published by the Connecticut College Alumni Association at Sykes Alumni Center, Connecticut College, New London, CI four times a year in Winter, Spring, Summer. Fall. Second-class postage paid at New London. CT 06320. Send form 3579 to Sykes Alumni Center, Connecticut College, New London, CT 06320. CASE member. Alumni Association Executive Boord: Warren T. Erickson '74. President I Marion Nichols Arnold '32, Vice President I Heather Turner Frazer '62, Secretary / Lourie Norton Moffatt '78, Treasurer I Edith Gaberman Sudarsky '43, Joy B. Levin '73, and Mary Ann Garvin Siegel '66, Alumni Trustees. George F. Hulme '77, Rebecca Holmes Post '63, and Sally Duffield Wilder '46, Directors I Committee Chairmen: Helen Reynolds '68 (Nominating) / Nancy Forde Lewandowski '76 (Aiumni Giving) I Carol Filice Godfrey '74 (Clubs) / Lee White Graham '61 (Finance and Programs) / George F. Hulme '77 (Classes) / Maarten Terry '83 (Undergraduate / Young Aiumni TAKE THE PLUNGE! Relations) / Kristin Stahlschmidt Lambert '69 (Executive Director) and Vivian Segall '73 (Alumni Magazine Editor), ex officio, Grand Canyon Rafting Trip Communications to any of the above may be addressed in care of the Alumni Office, Connecticut Col'eqe. New London, CT06320. Join alumni and friends for a seven-day raft trip One of the aims of The Connecticut through the Grand Canyon, July 12-19, 1986. College Alumni Magazine is to publish The 200-mile journey on the Colorado River takes thought-provoking articles, even though they may be controversial. Ideas expressed you gliding past gorgeous scenery and racing in the magazine are those of the authors through rapids. You need to bring only your and do not necessarily reflect the official sleeping bag and clothing. Everything else position of the Alumni Association or the College. is provided. Contact the Alumni Office for additional information. The Connecticut Coll~ Alumni Mag=xzine Volume 63, No.1, Fall 1985 8 South Africa: 19 There's Magic in his Method The Last Crisis By Roldah N. Cameron '51 By Marion Doro The bullet catch. the ThisIS the lost crisis the South disappearing troy of Harris African government can Refectory food. and other contain through coercion abracadabra 21 Round & About 22 In Memoriam 25 Class Notes 32 Alumni in Print 3 The Prisoner of Text By Paul Baumann Nine distinguished writers discuss the subtle retotico ship between fiction and nonfiction 12 The Reaction is Chemical By Gory G. Giachino Elementary school students find out what chemists do- Credits: Cover drawing by Mary and try it themselves Barthe/son; page 35 Kambrah Got- land '83. Photographs; Ken Laffol. 2·5 16 Philosopher in a New Key bock cover; Marion Dora, 7-11, Lindo By J Melvin Woody Kauffmann. 12·13. Harry Bishop. 14. 15 Symbols. Susanne Longer George W Pofts. 16; Bill Regan 18. taught us, are the very Nancy Ney. 21; Mary Toy/or. 33 essence of human On the Cover: Norman Mailer. WI/liam consciousness. Styron, and Francine du PlessixGray THE PRISONER OF TEXT Nine distinguished writers discuss the subtle relationship between fiction and nonfiction By Paul Baumann Clockwise from upper left William McPherson, Norman Moiler. Renata Adler, Joe McGinniss, William Styron, Barbaro Grizzuti Harrison. 2 adventuresome nonfiction writer: scene- readers. The personality of the writer became inseparable from the event. Most writersdo not considerthem- by-scene construction, reliance on dia- A good many writers brought the same selves stage. performers, and many a logue, the use of detail to create character sense of personal engagement, even ad- revered novelist has become tongue-tied in and "fooling around" with point of view. vocacy, to journalism in the 1960's and the presence of an admiring audience. Con- These literary devices have traditionally after. Tom Wolfe, who excoriated Leonard se.quently, the literary symposium stocked been reserved for the omniscient narrator Bernstein and the fashionable Left in ~lth gold~plated names does not always in fiction. But over the last 20 years, a live up to Its billing. promiscuous transposition of fact and fic- Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) and extolled the astronauts Any such worries about the writers' con- tion has become common. Many of the in The Right Stuff (1979) is perhaps the ference at Connecticut College September conference's authors-among them, invi- writer most readily identified with the 19~?1.' ~owever, proved to be misplaced. tees hold four Pulitzer Prizes, a National bravo style of so-called new journalism. Fictionj Nonfiction: A Troubled Rela- Book Award and an American Book But the nonfiction novel, fiction that tionship" was the subject of the conference Award-ha ve carried it off with great skill. boldly appropriated historical figures, part .of the College's 75th anniversary cele~ When did the controversy, the "trouble" appealed to writers like Gay Talese (Honor bration. The nonfiction novel, what some between fiction and nonfiction, begin? Thy Father), E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime) call "the novel as history," and the new and, perhaps most prominently, Norman journalism were among the issues of Mailer, another of the symposium's featured debate. speakers. The talking started on Thursday at 4 Capote, it is generally agreed, did not p.m. and continued until Saturday after- invent the whatchamacallit. According to noon. The talkers-Norman Mailer McGinnis, 19th century authors like Charles William Styron, Joe McGinniss, Renat~ Dickens and Feodor Dostoyevski frequently Adler, Alexander Cockburn, William blended real and imagined events and McPherson, Francine du Plessix Gray, characters. Capote "kind of rediscovered Barbara Grizzuti Harrison and Thomas this idea," McGinniss said. Winship-are among the most important Mailer, who along with Styron is prob- voices in contemporary American writing. ably the conference's best known author, "What's the difference between how you has dabbled in virtually every kind of writ- think as a novelist and as a journalist?" ing, from the orthodox, naturalistic war asked Connecticut College writer-in-res- novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) to idence Blanche McCrary Boyd, the prin- his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Execu- cipal organizer of the conference. tioner Song (1979), an account of the life "I know the difference when I'm doing s of Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer one or the other," said Boyd, 39, who has executed by a Utah firing squad. published two novels and a collection of Mailer knows his way around the essays. "But how do you actually enter the "novel as history" and has always written a point of view of people you're writing profuse, highly personal and disputatious about? These are really living, working kind of journalism. In 1968 he received the questions for writers." "What's the difference National Book Award for The Armies of Blanche Boyd tells her writing students between how you think as a the Night, a vivid account of a protest that their fiction should be so good the march against the Pentagon in which he reader will think it's true and their nonfic- novelist and as a journalist? masterfully evoked the third person to des- tion so unusual the reader will conclude How do you actually enter the cribe his own thoughts and actions. that it had to be made up. point of view of people you're Like Mailer, Styron is part of the genera- There has long been an uneasy relation- writing about? These are really tion of writers that emerged after World ship between fiction and nonfiction, though living, working questions for War II. Styron, born in the South but a one conference participant, Joe McGinniss, long-time Connecticut resident, achieved author of Fatal Vision (1983) and The Sel- writers," his most conspicuous success in 1979 with ling of the President (1968), shied away -Blanche Boyd the best seller Sophie's Choice. He made a from the implications of the conference precocious literary debut in 1947 with Lie title. Most people point to the appearance in Down in Darkness, a novel published when "I'm not so sure what the trouble is," he 1965 of In Cold Blood, what its author he was only 26. said. Truman Capote labeled a "nonfiction Styron's involvement in the fiction! non- "Certainly there's a difference between novel" and what novelist and critic Wilfrid fiction debate began in 1966 with the publi- the two," said McGinniss, whose second Sheed later teasingly referred to as cation of his Pulitzer Prize work, The Con- book, The Dream Team, was a novel. "You "Capote's whatchamacallit." fessions of Nat Turner. Styron called this really use an entirely different set of mus- Capote's compelling recreation of a re-imagining of a bloody 183l s-lave revolt cles" writing fiction.