Fall 1965 $1 the CARLETON MISCELLANY

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Fall 1965 $1 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Vol. VI, Number 4 Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota 55057 Published by Carleton College Editor: Erling Larsen Associate Editor: Wayne Carver Managing Editor: Carolyn Soule Editor, Department of American: Wayne Booth Consulting Editor: Reed Whittemore Vol. VI, No. 4 Fall 1965

In Fourteen Lines I Hail Your Eighty Years 5 June 1965 Two poems by John Lucas 2

Others, story by Robley Wilson, Jr 4 Poems by Lawrence P. Spingarn, Ernest Kroll, John Pauker and Ralph S. Pomeroy 30

The Virgin in the Woods, essay by Harold Bordwell 36 Poems by Laurence Lieberman, Barry Spacks, Daniel Hoffman and Mona Van Duyn 50

The Kiss, story by Robert Lowry 58 Poems by Larry Rubin, Constance Urdang, Andrew Oerke and Kenneth Pitchford 61 Reviews by Forbes Hays, David Porter, Robert Diebold and Wayne Carver 69

A Garland of Letters 107

Cover drawing by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

The Carleton Miscellany is published quarterly. Rates are as follows: $1.00 a copy; $3.50 a year; $6.00 for two years. It is distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. De Boer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey. All volumes available on microfilm through University Microfilms, 313 N. First St., Ann Arbor, Michigan. Manuscripts should be submitted to The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, as should subscriptions. Manuscripts are submitted at the authors risk, and will not be returned unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. The Carleton Miscellany is not an official publication of Carleton College, nor are the views expressed in its columns necessarily those of the college. The editors assume no responsibility for the views expressed by contributors to die magazine. Member of the Association of Literary Magazines of America Copyright, 1965, by Carleton College Second-class postage paid at Northfield, Minnesota 55057 John Lucas

IN FOURTEEN LINES I HAIL YOUR EIGHTY YEARS

(30 October 1965)

Tribe troubadour, before the worst or first Of our curst world's conflagrations burst

Your clarion declaration to engage On every front entrenched convention, pact Unmentionable till precision had

Enfranchised the true image of this age. Zeros may multiply but cannot add, Real figures divide, seldom subtract — And empty ciphers least resemble you,

Primary pigment, vital integer. Outrageously you gave the common tongue Uncommon utterance, poetic due — Never forgetting, just as music should stir Dancers to dance, so verses must be sung. 5 JUNE 1965

Gaudier-Brzeska has been killed at Neuville St. Vaast, and we have lost the best of the young sculptors and the most promising. The arts will incur no worse loss from the war than this is. One is rather obsessed with it. —Ezra Pound to Felix Schelling (London, June 1915)

Your genius is beginning to enjoy A fame the standard fifty years deferred. We recognize that alabaster boy Kneeling to shoulder coney, that bronze bird Devouring fish, that hieratic head Of seer Ezra, that red-stone dancing-girl. Your young self scarcely half a century dead, The marble miracles start to unfurl.

Now we recall how with a pocket-knife Out of a captured German rifle-butt There at the front before they took your life You carved one last Maternity — though what A walnut masterpiece was cast away, Along with its creator, who can say?

The portrait drawing of Ezra Pound used in this issue was made by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and is reproduced by courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., of London, England. This page

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[email protected] Lawrence P. Spingarn

VATERLAND, VATERLAND

A fifth cousin to my father (perhaps), he brought The name, the stature, and the square cranium By way of Hong Kong and San Francisco a century Later, not too late. He saluted me briskly, Fixed the monocle in his eye, barked an order To sit down and drink a cup of lukewarm tea. Beside photographs, his album held three locks Of human hair, what was left from Auschwitz Of love and family, but he pointed with pride To the picture of himself, surrounded by men, In the uniform of a hauptmann, taken in 1915 Somewhere on the Western Front. He wept easily, Though we'd only just met, and asked in tears: "What did I do that was wrong? Gentleman, soldier, Good citizen — can you tell me, please?" Our tea Was cold, the room buzzed with his questions, But I fled the answers, blood on my shaking hands.

30 Ernest Kroll

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3i John Pauker

DREAM POEM (for Holly Stephenson)

Some time ago he came to me in a dream: "I am Vasco de la Fernaye and I deplore "The lack of moral stature in your age "So I have set myself the task of guiding you "And by my presence lending stature to "You and through you to the entire age "Until my company turns the world moral "An onerous task which however I gladly accept "Until you require my company no longer" I feared to see what was behind that vizor

He was still there when I awoke and is with me still He disconcertingly goes with me where I go I pay a double carfare on the bus It has made awkwardnesses at my office The girl I was to marry has said no And while I value the distinction he confers I must conclude that moral stature has its drawbacks Not least among them being the discomfort Of never drawing a breath except in pain Sometimes I find my vizor hard to manage

32 ORIENTATION POEM (for Nina Hagen)

We have measured every distance accurately. We have mapped the world precisely as it is, Synchronized clocks, posted signs everywhere. The rest is up to you, to lucky you. + As we go charging through the world, Te-tum, As we go racketing through the world, Te-tum, As we go charging through the world With roll of drum and flag unfurled How sad that we are always hurled Smack back where we started from, Te-tum.

AVIARY POEM

I cast my net over every imaginable place You were not bird enough to be caught

33 John Pauker

SEPARATE POEM

In view of what is lost, a union, the point Is salvage something of what is left. One feels

Like such a scavenger, rifling Nothing of value. The nothing one takes, one steals. + I am attached to that bench. It means nothing to you But I want to take the bench. I had it at college,

Which is more than you can say of the children, whom You take. They had years to form an attachment to

The bench, which they did not. So I shall take it, And you the children. I call it my mourners' bench. + I insist on taking the books. But as I look At the books I keep asking myself why the books Did not cure me of wanting to keep them. As I look At myself in the mirror I do not like how I look.

34 Ralph S. Pomeroy

DWARF CATTLE

Watching the dwarf cattle in the campus pen standing around

with their pushed-in faces and telescoped legs letting hunky

chests and haunches show to the most advantage, I thought: Hurrah!

Another year and there they are, still standing around and here

we are, still watching with gaping amazement . . . No one, armed with

a grant and a syringe, has decided to breed us any

smaller than we are now or any bigger than we've any

decent right to be. 35 Harold Bordwell

THE VIRGIN IN THE WOODS

Like most parochial schools, Saint Michael's was built on the twin foundations of religious discipline and moralistic learning. As a transfer student who had already been to two other parochial schools in the Middle West, I had no trouble in accustoming myself to the atmosphere at Saint Michael's. The first few days were merely a matter of getting used to a new set of faces remarkably like my own. Besides, I was luckier at Saint Michael's than I had been at the previous schools, be cause I arrived at the start of the school year and not in the middle of the term, when it is impossible not to feel like an intruder and to be treated as one. I believe that I considered myself fortunate to get through the first days without being overly noticed, and that I knew how to get home when the day was over. In the beginning the long walk home was the happiest time of the day. At Saint Michael's none of us knew —or had the time to consider — that we were having our characters molded for us; without our knowing it we were becoming persons. We did not stop to ask — nor were we asked — if we wanted the par ticular kind of character we were being given. It is well known that children will readily accept whatever is handed to them, and we were no different at Saint Michael's. Why should we have been? After all, there was not one among us who could have truthfully said that he was really unhappy. Though Saint

36 Michael's was no paradise, we realized that it was infinitely better than a public school. None of us knew exactly why this was so, but since the Sisters constantly reminded us of the probable misfortunes that would dog us once we went beyond the yellow-brick walls of Saint Michael's — into the world of Protestants and God knows what else, we needed no further proof of our good luck. Those of us who had friends who actually went to public schools were often puzzled by the fact that they seemed as happy and as good as we were — or no worse; but we knew that they were keeping something from us. Perhaps, like the Masons (about whom we heard unspeak able stories from time to time) they took oaths and swore them selves to secrecy. And of course we had God on our side, and this, we knew, made any conflict with the other world a pushover for us, though we might have to suffer martyrdom to triumph. It was easy for us to picture ourselves as little martyrs who gladly accepted the central hard fact of faith: that, if necessary, one must die for it. Not only was this command theoretically correct, but it had actually been put into practice. Early Church history, which we studied fitfully, seemed like a procession of martyrs into the arena to be eaten by lions or impaled by flaming brands. And we learned of Joan of Arc and Maria Goretti, who had accepted death rather than surrender her chastity. Though Protestants seldom put Catholics to death anymore, there were others — known as atheists — who delighted in doing so. What was happening in Russia today might be happening in America tomorrow. From the facts we were given, it was obvious that fighting against martyrdom in these countries (wherever they were) was out of the question. For one thing, it was useless; for another, it was foolish. Martyrdom meant heaven, and only a fool would pass up heaven, even at the age of ten. How brave any of us would have been if we had been put to the ultimate test of our faith, I do not know; but I do remember that I often felt let down by the ease with which I could practice my re-

37 ligion. It was almost as if the others didn't care about my be liefs one way or another. Discipline at Saint Michael's rested on the principle that the stricter it was the better we would become. There was no brutality, of course. Some of us may have been shoved around now and then, or even mildly struck, but there was no un reasonable physical punishment. There was, however, a general feeling among us that some of the Sisters (whom we named to ourselves) would have liked to hit us, and that someone higher in authority — our parents or the pastor — restrained them. We had already been taught about the sacredness of our souls, and that our bodies were the temples of the Holy Ghost; conse quently, it was out of respect for this subtle conjunction of spirit and flesh that our bodies were being spared. Or so we imagined. Without a soul it might be different, as it was for animals. There was the danger that we might, if we were bad, lose our souls, and then become beatable little bodies. But this was only romantic speculation. Besides, we had all heard at home that parents who strike their children suffer more than the children do, and we transferred this truth to read that the teacher who raises a hand against one of her students does so with the knowledge that the real pain will be her own. Her own. For all of us at Saint Michael's were under the control of women, those dedicated Sisters with odd names and equally odd faces and lumpy bodies who have refined the raw material of Catholicism in this country for so long. Who among parochial school graduates does not have a recurring mental picture of one of these betes noires storming down an aisle, veils flying, the unpainted boards creaking beneath her heavy shoes, in pursuit of some hapless creature? By contemporary standards, the image of an enraged Sister is certainly not terrifying. But this leaves out of the picture the fact that a child finds his terrors where he can, and nothing frightens him as much as an angry adult. The popular Catholic press pictures the Sister, and the average parish priest, as a vision of radiant

38 happiness with a few harmless failings. Look at the illustrations of Sisters and priests in Columbia and St. Anthony Messenger or one of the other perennial Catholic publications and you will see what I mean. But the child who faces the average Sister minus ecclesiastical makeup day after day knows better and will, on occasion, tell the truth about her. What the popular image leaves out is that Sisters are human beings —warts and all — and that dedication to God does not insure an equal dedi cation to man. At Saint Michael's one often got the feeling that the two were antagonistic. As hard as I try, I cannot remember more than one Sister during my years at Saint Michael's who really seemed to love children — and she was the only one who, through a series of maneuvers called the delegation of authority, had me struck by a bigger and more fearless Sister. I am sure that in her own way she loved children as much as any mother, and yet she was wise enough to know that this love could get out of hand. If she herself was timid about applying force, she knew where force, only too willing to be pressed into action, could be found. And it was obvious (to me at any rate) that she was genuinely sorry to see me in tears and clutching my shoulder foolishly (the blow ricocheted off my skull and landed with its dimin ished impact on my left shoulder). The next day, with my humiliation still burning strongly, she smiled at me with real tenderness and concern. And this was easy for her to do, I be lieve now, because she was not smiling at the physical me (as another teacher might have done) but at my immortal soul, which, by her lights, needed improving all the time to get into heaven. The child who was struck or threatened was becoming a better person, even if it didn't seem so to him. (Nor can I forget the boy, till then unknown to me, who caught me leaving the school that day crying, and asked, with a smile on his face, "Which one got you?") Unlike other teachers, the Sister is charged not only with with teaching nondenominational subjects like English and

39 algebra but with paving an access route to salvation. At Saint Michael's salvation was foremost. The little faces that seemed to be eternally looking for guidance and help to understand the world were in reality looking anxiously toward eternity, and the Sister knew it was her duty — mission really — to turn them in the right direction. And for all those who toed the line and began the long march toward salvation, there were others who, out of ignorance or perversity, had decided to proceed in the opposite direction. I vaguely remember a chart depicting the path to heaven. (Later, Belloc's "Path to Rome" seemed much finer and easier to get to.) The path to heaven the chart showed wound through an ascending plain of broken bottles and brambles, thorns and rocks with jagged edges, toward a sunrise on the horizon that the student was supposed to have no trouble in identifying as his eternal reward. And it was quite clear that the path to heaven was filled with dangers and strewn with temptations. But it was possible to get there, we were told. We could make it. What the chart did not show was that there was another path that went to hell. We knew it was a hideous though popular place. Many people, and most of the movie stars who had married more than once, would go to hell unless they repented on their death beds, which was also a popular place to repent. At Saint Michael's the Sisters implied that one or two of us might not follow the path to heaven. All of us lived in fear of being a failure, of course, but there were some of us who seemed to sense that they were unworthy no matter how hard they tried. They were the incorrigibles and the only reason they would graduate from Saint Michael's was because the Sisters wanted to get rid of them. The incorrigibles were often very intelligent, which was puzzling, and they were usually fun to be with. To court their company, however, was as bad as going to see a Condemned Movie. The real danger was that by as sociating with them one ran the risk of becoming evil, for corruption was a fact of life: we were told that the good can

40 become bad easily enough, though the bad must struggle hard to become good. Hence the precarious state of the good, and of ourselves. The warnings we received to avoid bad com panions, it was assumed, meant avoiding a good many non- Catholics. (It was also a matter of faith that non-Catholic girls were more likely to be "loose" than Catholic girls.) But it was pointed out to us as well that a few of our fellow Catholic class mates were untrustworthy. Naturally, there were times when it was impossible to avoid associating with bad persons. We were told to be on our guard at such moments by saying as little as possible and by saying no to any suggestions to do anything. As a result, evil and those who gloried in it were able to assume frightening though hazy proportions in our minds. The world slowly became a place in which God and the Devil com peted for men's — and children's — souls. It was small consola tion to be told that God would not let any of us be tempted be yond our will to resist. What will to resist? We already knew that we had no will of our own; the very reason we were in school was to have what flabby will we possessed fashioned to conform to the hard tenets of Christianity. School was the place where one learned to obey by getting rid of odd little whims that could develop into great big sins. This lasted from eight o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. Then, when we were free, and evil was certain to be more active, one's will was supposed to return, having flowered to maturity in hidden, mysterious ways. During the day one was safe at school; will power was needed only after-hours when one came face to face with the world as it really was. Then one called upon one's will power to resist and if possible to subvert Satan's plans. The difficult part of the problem was that Satan was extremely sly, and so one never really knew which were real temptations and which were not, though any sexual feeling had to be regarded as monstrously wicked. In general, the rule was to avoid every thing that looked suspicious. Here again suspicions were hard to pinpoint; they simply might be mistakes in vision. But in

4i case you were utterly confused there was always confession . . . "Father, I looked at dirty pictures one time." "Where did you get them?" "From a friend." "Where did he get them?" "I don't know, Father." "You realize that looking at dirty pictures is a serious sin?" "Yes, Father." "Then why did you look at them?" "I don't know, Father." "What were the pictures like?" "They were dirty." "Do you still have them in your possession?" "No, Father. I threw them away." "You must not look at dirty pictures." "Yes, Father." "Do you promise not to look at dirty pictures again?" "Yes, Father." "For your penance ..." But even confession left out a lot. Anybody knew dirty pictures were evil, but these were, so to speak, subhuman. What about evil human beings? How did one recognize them? The eye naturally searched for physical signs of evil — deformities, for instance —but the search was always frustrating. At last one was forced to admit that evil was as elusive as the Devil him self, and that in its grander forms was to be found in some capital of Europe, notably Paris. It was best to try to get the idea of evil out of one's mind by concentrating on school work and hoping for the best after three o'clock.

"The dirty handkerchief side of life" — George Orwell's striking phase — is often the only side of life a child knows. Life is all running noses and skinned knees and not getting to the toilet in time and incomprehensible words chalked on walls. At Saint Michael's the dirty handkerchief side of life

42 found its clearest expression in two small human beings who must have realized that they had no chance at all. Once you got over wondering about the peculiarity of his name, Anthony Anthony came into focus as an ugly, com plaining, snivelling little boy. He was the smallest boy in the class year after year, and he wore the thickest glasses and had the most unmanageable black hair. He was a poor student and could not, no matter how hard he tried, learn to spell. Since I was the second smallest boy in the class, I always found my self sitting immediately behind Anthony Anthony, and like some casual anthropologist I was able to observe his habits. His hands were always dirty and he picked his nose openly, after which, so it seemed, he liked to scratch his head. He had no friends, and when he did manage to insinuate himself into a game during the lunch recess, a fight usually followed. An thony had found only one way to defend himself, and this was by kicking. Kicking however was unfair, and only confirmed everybody else's suspicions about him: he was a dirty, unfair person. I only saw Anthony Anthony cry once, even though he was constantly being punched and getting bloody noses, and that was the day he broke his glasses. They lay at his feet on the macadam, and as he picked them up piece by piece he began to cry. Everybody stopped playing to look. It was one of the few times that the rest of us genuinely felt sorry for him. But in his hateful way he refused to accept our condolences. He moved away from us like an animal with a piece of meat, to mumble over the fragments that had once corrected his sight. For a number of days afterward, while he waited for a new pair of glasses to be ground, Anthony Anthony attained a hands-off privilege; no one tried to pick a fight with him until, once again, he was armed with his glasses and could see the facts of his life with what must have been agonizing clarity. And yet once in his life at Saint Michael's Anthony Anthony rose in the estimation of his fellow classmates to a height that had been, until then, unthinkable. One day, as usual, he had

43 not done his homework, and the Sister told him to stay behind while the rest of us went to lunch. For a second he sat at his desk, looking about cautiously. We were silent, and the Sister, who was thin and diffident, must have realized that something was going to happen. She moved toward the door, as though to block it. The bell rang and we got up and stood by our desks, as was the rule. Anthony got up too, and when the Sister told him to sit down he said he wasn't staying. Since Anthony was in the first row, near the door, it was obviously going to be a problem to prevent him from shooting out with us. The Sister told one of us to run up the hall and get Sister Mary Immaculata. Anthony watched the messenger —a girl — leave the room, her eyes downcast. Then the Sister approached Anthony to take his arm, which he flung away from her. When Sister Mary Immaculata suddenly arrived, old and wheezing but big and overpowering, it was like being in the presence of a hooded executioner. As soon as the situation was explained to her she seized Anthony and tried to push him into his seat. He somehow managed to remain upright, grab bing for his desk and yelling "No!" As he did he swung his foot back and then forward, landing what seemed like a brutal kick on Sister Mary Immaculata's shin. Her reaction was cy clonic: she spun him out into the hall. As we listened in amaze ment to his shouts and the sounds of bone and muscle in con flict, we knew that in spite of our admiration Anthony Anthony was a dirty, unfair person — he kicked. If Anthony Anthony was a potential traveler on the road to perdition, as we sometimes believed, Gardner Smith was a potential candidate for sainthood. He was feeble-minded and quite unconcerned with the schoolboy competitions the rest of us engaged in. He danced by himself, he talked excitedly to himself, he liked to skip, and there was in his baffled stare at people and things a profound hopelessness. Where, after all, could he go, what, after all, could he do, in life? In the winter his mother attached his woolen gloves to the cuffs of his jacket

44 sleeves with safety pins. He had a sister, a couple of years younger, who was brilliant, and when the two of them were together, brother and sister, everyone felt embarrassed. Gardner was tall and uncoordinated. Though he liked to skip and dance, he was awkward. He never participated in any of the games we played. Sometimes he brought a tennis ball from home and bounced it against the school building. He was hard to talk to. If he had any special interests, he kept them to himself. He might have collected coins or stamps (though no body knew for certain), but he surely didn't build model planes or dabble in a home chemistry set. Yet he was a great reader, and during the most inappropriate moments in class he used to blurt out the titles of the books he had read or was reading. To the Sisters he was no trouble at all. Whatever they told him to do he did, once he understood what it was they wanted him to do. Sometimes, since he lived in the same direction from school as I did, we walked home together. It was difficult to keep up with him, for though he was thin and weak-looking, he con cealed within him deep sources of nervous energy. As he bounced along I tried to think of something to say, but it was hopeless. A friendship with Gardner was a friendship based on silence. It could have been a friendship of smiles and ges tures and unexplained dances, but there would have been no talk and, oddly enough, no laughter. The dull-witted are often pictured as laughing their heads off most of the time, but Gardner never laughed. If something pleased him he smiled broadly and said a few words to himself — that was all. None of us believed that Gardner did well in his marks, and yet at the end of each year he passed into the next grade with the rest of us, pursuing his own private studies. During class he seldom kept his eyes on the blackboard or a textbook for more than a few seconds. The only time he was called to the blackboard to work a simple addition problem, he casually scratched his genitals. When he was censured for looking out

45 the window he only smiled, as though he were being compli mented. Whether he was paying attention or not made little difference. If he was called on to answer a question, he an swered, "I don't know," in a happy voice. He took all the tests, but his papers were a mess, and it must have been saddening for the Sisters to correct them again and again and again with no hope of ever seeing much improvement. And yet when one looked into his face, so clownish and flat (he had a mild, al most nonexistent nose), there was nothing to do but smile. As likely as not, Gardner would smile back. For Gardner there seemed to be no ups and downs, only one flat stretch of existence that he would probably identify one day, in a moment of clairvoyance, as "my life."

The two great historical events of the modern world, the Sisters at Saint Michael's led us to believe, were Lourdes and Fatima. The real world, the world that truly counted after the shouting died down, was a world of miracles and apparitions, of holy children like Bernadette Soubirous and Lucy Dos Santos and her two cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, pure and beautiful children who had talked to the Blessed Virgin. The miracle at Lourdes was especially popular with the Sisters, and we knew (for she had mentioned it to us) that Sister Mary Immaculata had a bottle of Lourdes water in her room at the convent. We were urged, should we get to France some day, to go to Lourdes and bring back a bottle of water from the stream. Yet we were pretty much unimpressed. Why none of us felt too excited about Lourdes, and even less interested in Fatima, was something of a mystery to the Sisters. We should have been intelligent enough to see that these children were Catholics and that their faith had brought them into closer touch with God than the faith of a Mohammedan boy or a Protestant girl had for them. And yet we seemed to miss the point of it all. It was only years later that I finally did learn exactly what happened at Lourdes and Fatima, in spite of the 46 fact that the Sisters told us the famous stories over and over again. For some reason, I must have stopped listening as soon as Lourdes and Fatima were brought up. In contrast, during the fall and early winter, when Notre Dame was getting ready to take the field, interest in this aspect of the Church was in tense, even among the Sisters. Notre Dame — the Fighting Irish, this was something all of us could talk about sensibly, and of course a victory on the playing field at South Bend was translated into a victory for Catholicism. (And secretly I rooted for Navy every year —my father, not a Catholic then, had served on a ship during the First World War.) Lourdes — on the other hand Lourdes was a small town somewhere across an ocean in a country where nearly everybody, so it seemed, saw apparitions; or where at least you had a better chance of seeing the Blessed Virgin in person. The Sisters made subtle references to the fact that in America even a saintly person had less chance of seeing an apparition. To counteract feelings of complete unworthiness in us, however, they added that by prayer and love of God and the Holy Family we too might one day see a statue move, as the juggler had in Anatole France's story, which we all knew. How many of us, I wonder now, sat in church on Sunday and hoped for a tear to come to the eye of the Blessed Virgin, standing there on the side altar, cast in the most obvious of molds? Probably more of us than would admit it today. I know I did. It seemed natural to me then to hope that I might be blessed with such an apparition, though I knew that I did not pray fervently enough and that I swore to myself at times and took delight in dirty jokes. All the same, and acknowledging my faults, I felt that I had something of a right — if anybody I knew did — to see a tear fall from a statute. To judge from the way the Sisters talked there were miracles happening everywhere; why not to me too? There was always a flurry of excited questions and knowing smiles among us when the newspapers reported that a woman

47 on a small farm in Wisconsin or Oregon or New Mexico — somewhere far from where we were — had seen the Virgin in the woods near her home. Here at last was what we had been waiting for . . . "Do you think it's true, Sister?" "We will have to wait for a decision from Holy Mother the Church." "But it might be true?" "God's ways are always mysterious." "But we can't be sure yet, can we?" "Not yet. Sometimes misguided people make up stories." "Do you think the Virgin the woman saw was life-size?" "I wouldn't know." "Can She speak English?" "Perhaps." The same kind of questions continued as long as the story received front-page treatment; but then as the weeks passed the excitement we had once felt began to ebb until one morn ing we learned that there had been no apparition in Wiscon sin. The poor woman who had claimed she spoke to the Blessed Virgin was now being given a mental test, and we were warned once again that many persons pretended to be holy to get rich or become famous. Part of the thrill we had felt in talking about the apparition had come from the belief that it was happening "right here in America"; when the bubble burst we were forced to realize that America was not like Spain or France or Ireland. Neither our saints nor our apparitions were worth much. It was a relief to be told that you did not have to believe in most miracles, but it did not solve the problem. There were simpler solutions to your confusion, and they came with time. The change in attitude if not in faith was inevitable, and no amount of prayer or religious pep talks could defend you from it. You began to grow up; it did not require a special kind of vision to see that others thought differently about the world, 48 that Fatima and Lourdes were not the principal capitals of the world, and that you were not going to see an apparition. The crust of childish faith that had become part of you began to crack; you went into church and you didn't care too much whether the statues did or did not move. Anyway, you started to notice that the statues were very ugly. Rules of another sort were beginning to assert their rights. We are told now that schools like Saint Michael's are a thing of the past, that the old attitudes that made the parochial school a citadel of the faith are being slowly replaced by new ones that are in great part borrowings from the outside world. We hear talk of "fresh breezes," "emerging laymen," and "a new generation" that refuses to accept the cliches of an inbred faith. Yet I know of one Catholic grade school in which the children are placed in three reading groups: the Blessed Mary's (for excellent readers), the Saint Joseph's (for average ones), and the Saint Jude's — Saint Jude, the patron saint of desperate and hopeless cases. It is pleasant to reflect that the days at Saint Michael's are over and done with. But those desperate and hopeless cases! How often do temptations, sex, the others, and how often do thoughts of misfits like Anthony Anthony, and of the path to heaven, come drifting back, like unhappy spirits!

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[email protected] Robert Lowry

THE KISS

This day he had been hanging around with Candy Sunday and Walt Bamber in the bottoms — they had a kind of lean-to built among the trees at the point where the mud road which Hutton Street dwindled into turned left and went down to Duck Creek, and they used to get down there in their lean-to and talk about girls and shotguns and automobiles, and now here they came up out of the bottoms, all of them suddenly hungry for dinner. As they came up the mud path towards their houses, Buttons saw Alice sitting on her front porch and his heart jumped up practically into his mouth. He waited close to his door until he saw the other two disappear into their yards and then he went across the street. "Hello," he said. She had acted as if she were looking up the street all the time and hadn't invited him over, but nevertheless at the sound of his voice when she had to turn her head to him she couldn't help smiling, she was so glad to see him. She liked him because he was set well on the ground, with broad shoulders; and she liked his kind of blond hair and the way his eyes and nose acted when he laughed. "Hi," she said. "What are you doing?" he said. "Nothing. What are you doing?" "Oh . . . nothing," he said. "I was just down to the shack, messing around." Suddenly when he looked into her pretty face with the big gray eyes and rather pouting red lips he felt really good and his heart jumped and spilled all over inside of him till he could only sit there staring at her. This em barrassed her so much that she had to look away from him.

58 "You ought to be in eating your dinner," he said to her finally. "I already ate it," she said. "My mother went to town, I had to get my own." She looked at him as if debating whether to tell him or not, then she said, "You know what I got inside?" "What?" he said, thinking of some kind of animal — like an alligator — maybe she had an uncle in Florida like Coopy. "Fudge," Alice said. "I made some nut fudge." "Some nut fudge?" Buttons said. "I could give you some, if I wanted to," she told him. "I know you could," Buttons said. There was an old green Dodge bouncing down the street, filled up with a big family that lived on the next street. "I'll give you some," she said, and got up. "I'll bring it out," she said, but he followed along right after her into the house. The house was dark and it was different from his house, it smelled of cloves and spices and it was nice and strange like he thought of her; he had been in the house a couple of times before, once when her grandma died and he came in shined up and with a red, white and blue tie on, and just said hello very quietly when he saw her sad pale face and eyes red from weeping, and all her aunts and uncles standing near the coffin. The kitchen was bright with sunshine, there was an ironing board set up by the window where someone had been ironing dishtowels, and there was bright new-scrubbed red-and-brown lineoleum on the floor — it was all so beautiful and clean, cleaner even than his own kitchen across the street. The fudge was in the middle of the table, sliced up into cubes on a white platter. Two cubes had been eaten. There were walnuts stuck on top of the fudge that made his mouth water. Everything in that room smelled good — the gingham tablecloth and the green chairs, the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall and the pretty red-and-white curtains. And the girl, she was a little bit embarrassed because she hadn't expected him to walk right in

59 — she stood half looking at him, and he knew that she would smell good too, like all this world she lived in. "Have a piece," she said. He took a piece. "Boy, it's good," he said, chewing obviously for her. "Did you really make it?" "Sure I made it," she said. "It's awfully good," he said. They stood looking at each other for a few moments and suddenly, for the first time that he had ever noticed, she blushed and her face seemed to bloom like a pink rose. In that moment he stepped forward and put his arms around her and kissed her very lightly on her red pouting pretty mouth, afraid of hurting her. Her mouth remained unresponsive and he felt that no boy had ever kissed her before. Suddenly she stiffened and then he too became aware that his mother was calling him. "Take some fudge with you," she said, picking up three pieces and putting them into his hand. She seemed anxious for him to go quickly, but she let him kiss her again at the back door, and then he went down the porch- steps and around the house. Well, that April day passed and others came and went — the first days of leaves falling in Autumn, and high school and going there on the bus again, and that was the Autumn that his parents sold the house and they moved away from that street forever. But when he was older and had a job driving a Grey hound bus and was married to someone else, that day of the fudge lingered in his mind and he never completely forgot it. He remembered that day more even than he remembered the big fire at the paper mill, or Nagel's kid brother getting drowned in Duck Creek, or even the rabbit hunting, remem bering how clean her kitchen was that day and the big bar of soap on the white sink and how good her fudge was that day when he was fifteen and lived on Hutton Street and was in love with her.

60 Larry Rubin

THE MORTICIAN'S APPRENTICE

His job is simple. The boy reclines On the padding, facing upward, eyes Open; they close the lid, and he looks for light. Like rents in a dream, any cracks filter Through as slits of sunlight, and then they know The box is not watertight. Wood Has flaws, like other things, and sunken sleep Can be disturbed by seepage. The job has value In all directions: eternal benefits To clientele, earnings useful now, Practice for the perfect seal to come.

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61 Constance Urdang

LITTLE REQUIEM FOR A WITCH

I knew a witch who used to stroll Next to the beach In the mild sweet summer evenings With the husband she had carved out of wood. His Painted pale blue eye was fixed On the pale-blue saucer-rim Where the water became sky. The witch, The wife, twittered and glittered like a wind-harp.

Together, they went past Pebbles, snail-shells, mussel-shells, crab-shells, Driftwood, beach-grass, brilliants of broken glass Tangled in the seaweed alongside the water, Mother-of-pearl, till it swallowed the sun.

Now they are gone. No sand takes the print of their feet. Her high, harsh cries, like a seagull's, are not heard On any of the uncounted shores of the world. The painted light is gone out of the husband's eye. Not even her ghost walks abroad in henna and rouge. Where the round red sun slides nightly under the water She slid from sight, as he rose in a puff of smoke.

62 THE PICNIC IN THE CEMETERY

In the bad times, I have been comforted By the illustrious dead.

We used to play among the stones In the cemetery, picnicking And reading poetry-books; that Was no profanation! The graves Lulled us with their stillness. We were respectful. That turf, on August afternoons, Smelled sweet as hay.

Afterwards, they, The fathers, were furious! Today I understand that rage, outrage, for I have heard In the distance, the dirge Sung by the power-mower Under this chalk-blue sky. 63 Andrew Oerke

MOUSE HUNT

When I was a bachelor and lived All alone, I harbored a mouse In my pantry. We never bothered Each other and I seldom saw Or heard him; he was a quiet guest Whose life, though he partly annoyed, Partly amused, me, I respected. In those days I would have let A rattlesnake go unmolested.

But now I am not a bachelor, And I do not live all alone. I have a wife and son and things Are different. I would not now let A rattlesnake escape, for fear That my baby should meet him on Any terms. Lately, we have Had mice in the house, who might Bring disease to those I love best.

So I find myself doing what I would not be inclined to do For myself. Such double standards Are not easy. One of them I Have caught, and killed with a blow from My shovel; the other I have Poisoned. Here they lie on the grass And I can only hope it wasn't Painful. I dig an impromptu grave, Neat and sanitary, for that part of me. 64 A SESTINA ABOUT THE SESTINA ABOUT THE SESTINA

Hang you all, Donald Hall and all the rest Who have written sestinas about the sestina (And that goes for you, too, Alan Ansen). I'd rather talk about mountains and valleys, Water and islands, cities and sorrow. I'm sick And tired of in-bred bleeders and crossword readers.

Whoever heard about a community of Swiss readers, Because they believed some tale about warm rest On the top of mountains, and how it cured the sick Of their fevers, getting together like a sestina And deciding to abandon their homes and green valley? They leave their pretty buildings to rot in the sun.

It gets colder and colder the closer they climb to the sun, The winds knuckle the crags more than those readers Had bargained for, and behind them the green valley Freezes blue. Thinking that they will have no rest Until they organize like any sestina, They hurry toward a remedy for their kind of sickness.

The six elders, who are surely the sickest Of the group, keep mumbling the same word to the sun. Their footsteps trail behind them like lines in a sestina; And some begin to stumble now like poor readers. Those who look behind see a huge white rest Flinging its shawl across a vanished valley.

It is too late to go back to the green valley; They are committed to the vision of their sickness. Behind them only snow, in front of them the rest That will fall so far short of the promised sun

65 As to become merely a legend to readers, Who may marvel at, but will not want to be, sestinas.

Finally, the stumbling little community sestinas Out and hardens into place in a remote valley Higher up and white to perfection. Let all readers Reflect that here could there be no more sickness Than there is life, and that, when the predictable sun Shines on these baffled blocks, it shines at rest.

If this sestina should reach some with a sickness Living in other green valleys under the sun, Let us hope they will only read it and forget the rest.

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[email protected] REVIEWS

Who Speaks for the Negro? By Robert Penn Warren. Random House. $5.95. Mississippi Black Paper. Foreword by Reinhold Niebuhr, introduc tion by Hodding Carter III. Random House. $1.95. Adam Clayton Powell and the Politics of Race. By Neil Hickey and Ed Edwin. Fleet Publishing Corporation. $6.50. Manchild in the Promised Land. By Claude Brown. Macmillan. $5.95.

Since the Supreme Court's landmark school-desegregation decision in 1954, literature on America's racial problems has proliferated at an ever-increasing rate. Especially since the so-called Negro Revolu tion moved into its "second phase," involving sit-ins, freedom rides, demonstrations, and other forms of direct action, dating from about 1960, has curiosity and concern mounted. The spate of books and articles published in the wake of Birmingham, riots at Ole Miss, the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act clearly indicate that the Negro Revolution has "arrived" in the public consciousness. The books reviewed here are among the more significant recent contributions to this literature. Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro? is one of the most interesting and substantial contributions to this literature that this reviewer has seen for some time. It is another illustration of the ability of a sensitive novelist and poet to probe the subtle dimensions of complex human problems better than many social scientists armed with bloodless abstractions.

69 Warren first approached the subject of race in an essay published in 1930 in I'll Take My Stand, the manifesto of the southern agrar ian movement centered at Vanderbilt University. Here he viewed segregation as capable of being basically a humane institution, and stressed the need for the Negro's economic independence as a means of achieving a workable separate but equal society. He now admits this was an idealized view, written while he was in England and removed from immediate contact with the problem. In 1956 Warren returned to the South to write a brief but penetrating essay titled Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, based on interviews with a widely varied group of Southerners of both races, laced to gether with Warren's insightful comments. The same technique is used on a more elaborate scale in the present book. His stated purpose is "to find out something, first hand, about the people, some of them anyway, who are making the Negro Revolution what it is." He conducted extensive interviews with a large number of Negro leaders, north and south, including both "the big brass" (Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Adam Powell, James Farmer, Malcolm X, et al.) and "leadership from the periph ery" (Judge William Hastie, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Carl Rowan, et ah). He also includes chapters on Mississippi and the 1964 summer project, and on attitudes of Negro youth, based on similar interviews. Much of the book is a verbatim record of the most sig nificant portions of Warren's interviews. They are tied together by his comments and analysis, forming a coherent whole rather than talks set down seriatim. His eye for subtlety, nuance, and shadings of meaning comes through again and again, making the difference between a book of this kind written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and one written by an ordinary journalist. Warren's interviews are generally free-wheeling and relatively unstructured. Certain questions are brought out in all of them — the Negro's quest for identity, non-violence, the role of whites in the Negro movement, the use and abuse of demonstrations, bussing pu pils in northern ghettos, and so on. To elicit reactions, he repeatedly cites to his subjects Dr. Kenneth Clark's psychological criticism of Martin Luther King's doctrines of non-violence, W. E. B. DuBois' characterization of the Negro as a split psyche, Gunnar Myrdal's views on what Reconstruction should have been (he would have compensated former slave owners, among other things), the ration- 70 ale of slogans like "Freedom Now" — and other aptly chosen themes. The richness and variety of the responses defy summarization. They reveal substantial diversity within the civil rights leadership on practically all major questions. The book richly demonstrates that the Negro Revolution is far from a monolithic movement. Views range from the sophisticated socio-political realism of the leaders of the older established organizations to the disciplined spirituality of Dr. King, to the vague idealism of those for whom activism, struggle, and total commitment become ends in them selves. There are significant differences of emphasis in the goals that are stressed — from racial justice in the context of prevailing social norms to the use of civil rights as the opening wedge in a massive program of radical social change. Differences emerge on the Negro's need for self-improvement. Where Roy Wilkins calls for Negroes to act to put down crime and vandalism, and Martin Luther King calls for a Negro "Operation Bootstrap" in a desegregated society, others say, in effect, that it is not the Negro who must change his standards but that those of white middle class society must be drastically altered. (Warren sees a dangerous confusion of the con cepts of congenital inferiority and of de facto inferiority in the views of some radical integrationists on this question.) Nor do Negro leaders agree on what society should look like upon consummation of their revolution. These carefully articulated divergencies, taken as a whole, underscore the intellectual force and integrity that come through in most of the interviews. Warren's careful drawing out of diverse viewpoints of Negro leaders is keenly important for understanding the future course of the civil rights movement as well as its present shape. He eschews prophecy on this score, and offers little discussion of the organiza tional and political aspects of the movement, but he provides a body of data that is bound to generate provocative questions. Warren's concluding chapter touches on a number of funda mental issues. He is, on the whole, very favorably impressed with both the intellectual and moral quality of Negro leadership. Throughout the book, however, the reader senses a muted concern about the problems of power —the temptation of the holders of new-found power to "over-reach"; the degeneration of a justified sense of outrage and moral superiority into an overweening, pos sibly fatal, pride. Similar concerns are voiced more explicitly in

71 his conclusion. He clearly dissociates himself from the stand-pat cliches that attitudes cannot be legislated, or that desegregation cannot (or should not) be forced by law, but he is disturbed about the danger of overstating the role of force in securing Negro rights. He observes that "It is all too easy to call for force; it is sometimes hard to know how to pick up the pieces afterwards." He might have added that extremes breed extremes (which helps to explain some of the more questionable tactics of the civil rights movement), and that radical revolution may produce Thermidorian reaction rather than reconciliation. He also questions the lack of encouragement of "responsible local ism" and the increasing centralization of power consequent on the Negro's understandable demands for federally sponsored solutions. This is not the Confederate war cry of states rights a la Calhoun; Warren seems to favor with some enthusiasm most of the federal actions that have been taken. This seems rather a note of caution and concern voiced by one who does not share the apparently fash ionable view that the strictures of Jefferson and Lord Acton are anachronistic. Perhaps a Southerner is in a peculiarly favorable position to appreciate the corruptibility of unchecked power —he inherits the sorry memory of Reconstruction, on the one hand, and on the other he knows in his inner being that under Jim Crow the powerless Negro is inevitably brutalized. In any case, the machinery of centralized power may be used later for purposes other than those intended; there is perhaps a legitimate fear that civil rights can be over-legislated into the matrix for a police state. Finally, Warren exposes the most common forms of sentimentality in viewing the race question. The mainspring of sentimentality is vanity, Warren says, and this is an unreliable basis for a social movement. His catalog of sentimental fallacies will discomfit many pious and well-meaning fellow travellers of the civil rights move ment, and would probably generate some controversy among leaders as well. Every self-professed white liberal, in particular, should read this debunking of several common stereotypes. Mississippi Black Paper is a collection of fifty-seven statements and notarized affidavits concerning incidents of alleged police bru tality and official lawlessness in Mississippi. Many of those involved were participants in the Mississippi summer project of 1964. The statements included were selected from among 257 such declarations

72 filed in support of a Federal Court lawsuit to have federal marshals appointed to oversee Mississippi's local law enforcement. The ac counts are tersely written, without comment or excessive elaboration. This reviewer lacked the stomach to read through all fifty-seven statements. They are sickening indictments of Mississippi law en forcement. Perhaps the most typical reaction to these papers would be a whopping Orwellian "hate" directed at Mississippi. Yet this leaves us bereft of much needed understanding. This is admittedly Mississippi at its worst. There is a need, not so much for "the other side," since no justification can possibly be provided for the acts described in this book, but for some understanding of the total con text of these events and the prospects for redemption of this society. A Foreword by Reinhold Niebuhr and an Introduction by Hodding Carter III, of the Greenville, Mississippi Delta Democrat Times, offer a few reflections on this theme. Niebuhr expresses horrified outrage, and suggests that only the larger community (presumably meaning the federal government) can save Mississippi. Carter's in troduction is less shrill and has traces of irony which reflect his liv ing close to the problem over a period of time. He attributes Mis sissippi's "summer of shame" to the silence of good men — the reluctance of respectable citizens to take a firm stand, not against segregation, but against rank lawlessness. He cites various hopeful signs (including the effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) which indicate that Mississippi's climate is improving, that the summer of 1964 was probably the low point for the state. Moderate voices are belatedly beginning to be heard. White Mississippians, above all others, should read this book. Its principal asset is its shock value, and these are the people who most need to be shocked. It could be argued that the allegations in this book may be exaggerated, that some of these claims would be put in a different light under cross-examination, that these acts were provoked by the invasion of the state by meddlesome agitators and assorted beatniks. If all this were granted, the moral massiveness of these testimonies is only very slightly reduced. This book under scores the point that in a state like Mississippi the ultimate price of bitter-end resistance to desegregation is loss of law and order. In an interview with Robert Penn Warren, Adam Clayton Powell noted that two-thirds of the Negroes in America live in the north. Powell also claims that the Negro revolution in the South is pri-

73 marily a middle class phenomenon, whereas in the north it is more of a mass movement. Many Negro leaders would dispute this, but most see key differences in the two situations. Several Negroes sug gested to Warren that there was more hope for a meaningful racial accommodation in the South than in the North. The political dimensions of the Northern Negro community are effectively illustrated in a new biography of Adam Clayton Powell. Neil Hickey and Ed Edwin, two experienced journalists, have pro duced a thoroughly competent political biography of the flamboyant Harlem Congressman — A dam Clayton Powell and the Politics of Race. It is a well-researched and objective account of Powell's career. Powell's rise to prominence against the background of Harlem during the depression and early war years is traced. He became pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church (succeeding his father), wrote an influential newspaper column (which leaned far left until the Moscow trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact), and was elected to the New York City Council in this period. He was a leader of Negro protest movements and was associated with several gains made by Negroes among some of the city's larger employers. He was elected to Congress in 1944. His turbulent career is dispassionately traced — his tiffs with the DAR and with Harry and Bess Truman, his tax troubles, his attempts to move in on Puerto Rican politics and nudge Munoz Marin, Tammany's attempted purge, his uneasy re lations with other Negro leaders and his moves toward an embrace of Malcolm X, his feuds with J. Raymond Jones over politics and with Dr. Kenneth Clark over control of the HARYOU-ACT pro gram, and, of course, his well-publicized junkets and strained rela tions with Congressional colleagues. A high point in Powell's career was attainment of the chairmanship of the House Committee on Education and Labor in 1961, a position which has enabled him to have an important role in shaping several major pieces of legis lation. The authors demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the political environment in which Powell has acted, including the tacit institutional norms of the House of Representatives and the tangled morass of New York City Democratic politics. Powell emerges as neither saint nor devil but as an intelligent and able politician whose power position is based on race as surely as Senator Bilbo's was. The authors' thesis is not a novel one, but

74 it is well developed and presented. Powell is viewed as a ghetto phenomenon, a leader who could voice the frustrations of the black masses, whose peccadillos and irresponsibilities provided those masses with vicarious satisfactions. They explain particularly well the psychological dymamics of Powell's mass appeal. Powell has represented his district well, if election returns are in dicative. In 1964 he did not campaign and yet won re-election over three opponents by a margin of more than ten-to-one. His effective ness in reaching the rank and file of Harlem is evident when his Negro critics rally to his defense when he comes under attack from the white community. The authors imply that the Negro movement is passing Powell by, hence his denunciation of established civil rights organizations and his approaches to Malcolm X in an effort to win national prominence as a mass leader. Although he may be a product of an era that is ending, Powell repeatedly points out that the great masses of Negroes are not involved in or committed to any of the established civil rights organizations. The authors show how Powell has failed to become a nationally prominent mass leader; but if Powell has failed, so have all others thus far. Perhaps the successes of the civil rights movement will remove any need for such a leader; if not, the era of Powell-type politicians is not at all necessarily over.

Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land is an autobio graphical account of growing up in Harlem. Brown is the son of a Southern sharecropper who has come north. He was born and brought up in Harlem and somehow manages to escape it and make good in the larger community. The book's dust jacket says that Brown recently graduated from Harvard University and is entering law school. This book is in many ways the most hopeful of this group. Brown took to the streets at about the age of five. His first-person account, written in the argot of the streets, traces his growing up. He is precocious in the ways of the streets and shrewd in his under standing of the people there. He does everything (including getting shot) — fighting, stealing, gambling, narcotics, and the rest. He spends a term at the Wiltwyck School and three terms in reform school, where he was usually one of the leaders among the inmates.

75 When he gets out, he continues the same general pattern of life, still "on the street." Somehow Brown manages to escape. He loves the teeming vitality and variety of Harlem, but senses its hopelessness and the dead end character of life on the streets. He gets out, moves to Greenwich Vil lage, and ultimately succeeds in finding himself and a worthwhile life. It is hard to identify precisely the reasons that he moves out and eventually "makes it." The odds against it were overwhelming. He wants to avoid a criminal record; after sixteen he would have a "sheet" if caught on the wrong side of the law. His precocity was probably a factor, in that he earned the reputation of being tough at a very early age. Because of this, he did not need to go on heroin to prove that he was "hip" — he already had a "rep." (He records the tragic toll that heroin took in Harlem during the 1950s.) The en couragement of sympathetic teachers and counselors was perhaps a factor (the book is dedicated to the Wiltwyck Training School). Fear, too, played a part. Most of all, though, it was Brown himself, who comes through as an intelligent, ambitious, and compassionate person. There is happily no special pleading or axe-grinding in this book. Brown does not feel sorry for himself nor does he manifest the fas tidious alienation which is nowadays so fashionable to impute to ghetto dwellers. He is well aware of prejudice and discrimination but these are neither an obsession nor a psychological crutch. Brown is too human and too credible to be a black Horatio Alger; but his story does show that there may still be a little mileage in the much- debunked virtues of individual initiative. Although not written with this in mind, necessarily, the book is something of an antidote to the sentimental environmentalism that encourages the projection of all failings and shortcomings onto that great scapegoat, Society. This book provides a fascinating portrayal of the sub-culture of the Harlem streets. Brown's account is natural and graphic, but he is more than a camera —he offers sensitive insights generated by keen intelligence and observation. This picture of the life of the Harlem masses is an effective complement to the Hickey-Edwin biography of Powell. Together they provide a cultural and political view of Harlem that is far more meaningful and reliable than the angry rhetoric of propagandists on either side.

76 The most fundamental goals of the Negro revolution have been achieved. The Court decisions and the legislation of recent years embody these achievements. Segregation vs. integration is no longer a real issue in any fundamental sense. To be sure, some tough mop- ping-up operations will have to be carried out in some areas, but the issue is no longer in doubt. Many problems remain, and will remain for a long while. The continuing problems of creative adjustment to a desegregated so ciety are numerous and complex. They are in many ways more subtle, less dramatic, less clear-cut in their moral implications (whites should have equal rights too) than the great issues of the recent past. This may mean that a role of increasing significance will be assumed by the older established organizations and that a decline in the emotional pitch of the movement may be expected. The effective lifespan of extreme militance is probably connected fairly precisely with that of lawless redneck sheriffs, the Ku Klux Klan, and non-Registrars of Negro voters. It is not impossible that some branches of the civil rights move ment will continue to press militantly on other fronts (foreign policy, for example) and develop a new radicalism in American politics. For the present, this seems implausible. In a time of un precedented national affluence, an administration with broad sup port is highly sensitive to the needs of the depressed and oppressed and is promoting perhaps the boldest non-emergency program of socio-economic innovation in American history. Seldom has the climate for a new radical mass movement seemed less auspicious. However this may be in the long run, the next phase in civil rights would seem to require less free-floating sentimentality and less emphasis on generalized emotional concern. Realism, detach ment, compassion, and a sense of human frailty and fallibility are more likely to help deal with the many undramatic specific issues that must be faced. The realism of all the books reviewed here, the human sensitivity of the Warren and Brown books, and the political sophistication of the Powell biography are contributions to the kind of understanding all of us need. FORBES HAYS

77 Dialogues with Leuco, by Cesare Pavese. Translated by William Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross. The University of Michigan Press. $5.00.

Dialogues with Leuco, now available in English for the first time in this able translation, has been called the "most beautiful, most achieved effort"1 of the Italian novelist and poet, Cesare Pavese, an estimate with which many critics have agreed. Pavese himself in a 1950 radio interview referred to Dialogues as his most significant work,2 and in Pavese's own journal, The Burning Brand? it is Dialogues which seems to claim more of the author's attention than any of his other works. Moreover, even a cursory reading of this journal makes it clear that Dialogues with Leuco represents the inevitable culmination and conjunction of many of the author's life-long concerns. For one thing, its series of brief, often apparently unrelated con versations between a great variety of figures drawn from classical mythology and literature is the natural outgrowth of Pavese's con stant interest in the myths and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and its classical combination of Dionysiac passion and tur bulence with Apolline control and clarity would seem to be the result of long acquaintance with the many classical authors whose names dot Pavese's journal. The individual classical influences are as many and diverse as the characters of Dialogues itself. As early as 1936, for instance, Pavese comments in his journal on the unity of Homer's poems but wonders if it is not possible to attain a similar unity in a group of poems on various subjects: "What re mains is to seek out, in a group of poems, the subtle, and almost

1. Leslie A. Fiedler, "Introducing Cesare Pavese," Kenyon Review 16 (1954), 548. 2. Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi (Turin, 1953), 295. 3. The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950 (New York, 1961), tr. A. E. Murch. Dated references in the text are to this work. 78 always hidden, affinities between the subject and the clarification" (Feb. 17, 1936). It is this ambition of unity within diversity which Pavese in effect realizes in Dialogues with Leuco, and it is interesting that one of the means by which he attains that unity is that same Homeric technique of the repeated verbal formula which in his February, 1936 comments on Homer he singles out for special mention. In 1942-43 we find Pavese searching for the same goal, but now his inspiration is Plato: "The unitarian composition I am seeking could be the platonic development of 'a discourse within a discourse' " (June 4, 1942); "The story must not proceed according to a naturalistic sequence of events, but through abrupt changes, platonically construed" (April 2, 1943). In addition, Plato's in fluence seems obvious from the title of Dialogues with Leuco, and one suspects that Pavese's formal combination of myth and dialogue may owe much to Plato, even though this combination is often used in a highly individual and very un-Platonic fashion. The role of the Greek historian Herodotus would appear to be even more cru cial, as one might expect in an author who asserts in his journal that not Homer but Herodotus is the greatest Greek story-teller (March 22, 1947)4: the way in which Pavese's series of brief and seemingly unrelated conversations in Dialogues gradually reveal a highly organic inner unity and assume an almost archetypal sig nificance is very reminiscent of the way in which Herodotus' ap parently irrelevant and inconsequential anecdotes and digressions so often contain central thematic relevance and profound human insight. Nor is it only Pavese's various classical interests which find ex pression in Dialogues with Leuco. Equally important is his study of such authors as Shakespeare and Melville in bringing him to the point where he can write of himself on January 1, 1946, "You have . . . discovered a new form that weaves together many different threads (the dialogue of Circe)." In 1943, for instance, we find him reading through the plays of Shakespeare and analyzing the devel opment of Shakespeare's dialogue technique (October, 1943).5 And 4. Cf. April 23, 1945: "The religion of Herodotus. So many countries, so many portents. This is not only the book of the 'grande route,' but also the book of the breathless quest for a fatherland, for the footprints left by the ancestors." 5. Cf. his comment on Feb. 23, 1936, that Shakespeare, like Homer and Dante, is the master at attaining "differentiated unity." 79 in a 1932 essay on Melville, an author whom he studied all his life and whose Moby Dick he translated into Italian, Pavese finds part of Melville's excellence to lie in the same mingling of savage and civilized, of primitive and cultured, of Titanic and Olympian, for which he is striving in Dialogues.6 No less significant than the multitude of literary influences which led Pavese to Dialogues (and the list would include such diverse authors as Rousseau, Kafka, Fraser, O'Neill, Kierkegaard, and es pecially Dante) are the various personal preoccupations of Pavese himself which fill the pages of his journal and which are echoed hauntingly in Dialogues. The words of Teiresias in the third con versation, for instance, "Sex is ambiguous and always equivocal" (p. 17), recall all too vividly the tormenting sexual disillusionment and frustration of Pavese. Achilles' conversation with Patroclus ("A boy can kill himself, but he doesn't know what death is. Then sud denly comes the day when you understand, death is inside you, and from that moment on you're a grown man," p. 53) echoes Pavese's constant concern with the dividing line between boyhood and man hood. And the fact that the next to last dialogue is between the poet Hesiod and Mnemosyne (Memory) recalls the important role that the theme of memory plays throughout The Burning Brand.7 Perhaps Pavese's crowning obsession, and the one that led ultimately to his suicide in 1950, is with death, and in a sense Pavese's Dia logues, like Cocteau's Orphee, can be called "une meditation sur la mort."8 A recent reviewer has lamented with some reason that the translators of Dialogues did not include an introduction of any sort,9 but it may be countered that the only necessary introduction to the work, and indeed the ideal one, is already available in English in the author's journal. The ultimate significance of Dialogues is not, however, merely that it plays so crucial a role in Pavese's development. For one thing, it possesses a far wider significance in that it is a major con tribution to the growing stream of twentieth century literature, art and music based on classical myth. In this respect it is interesting 6. "The Literary Whaler," Sewanee Review 68 (1960), 407-18 (translation of one of four essays on Melville in Pavese's La letteratura americana). 7. See, for example, the entry on Feb. 12, 1942: "Modern art —for what it is worth — is a return to infancy. Its perennial theme is the discovery of things, a discovery that can come about, in its purest form, only in the memory of infancy." 8o to observe that Pavese is strikingly similar to many other twentieth century authors both in his reasons for returning to the Greek myths and in the themes and motifs which he chooses to emphasize in those myths. Pavese's Foreword to Dialogues, for instance, contain ing an apology for his extensive use of myth, could well stand as a statement of purpose for many of the contemporary writers who have returned to the Greek legends for their inspiration: Myth, it seems to me, is a language of its own, an instrument of expression. ... It is a seedbed of symbolic forms, possessing, like all languages, its own range of meanings which can be conveyed in no other way. When we retell an old myth —a proper name, an action, a heroic feat — we are expressing, with the utmost economy of means, a general and comprehensive fact, a core of reality which quickens and feeds a whole organic growth of passion and human existence, an entire conceptual complex. One is reminded especially of the words of Icarus in Gide's Theseus, written at about the same time as Dialogues with Leuco: There is another, truer, eternal plane on which time does not exist; on this plane the representative gestures of our race are inscribed, each according to its particular significance. Icarus was, before his birth, and remains after his death, the image of man's disquiet, of the impulse to discovery, the soaring flight of poetry. . . . What happens, in the case of a hero, is this: his mark endures. Poetry and the arts reanimate it, and it becomes an enduring symbol.10 Or to take another example, many of Pavese's characters in Dia logues display the same desperate eagerness to assert their identity, to plunge headlong into life regardless of the pain and suffering this may entail, which animates so many contemporary characteri zations of mythological heroes. Compare, for example, the words of Pavese's Virbius, "It's life I want, not happiness" (p. 106), with those of Sartre's Orestes, "What do I care for happiness? I want my share of memories, my native soil, my place among the men of Argos."11 Again, several of Pavese's characters find their glory in the same persistent rebellion against ineluctable fate which Camus' Sisyphus 8. Jean Cocteau, Five Plays (New York, 1961), 3. 9. Lionel Casson, "Night Thoughts from Olympus," Saturday Review, Tune 5, 1965, 25. 10. Andre Gide, Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus, (New York, 1958), 82. 8l displays so magnificently; and Camus' comment on Oedipus, "Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins,"12 could well describe Pavese's Oedipus also. Pavese's Orpheus, like Anouilh's, intentionally looks at his Eurydice, and Pavese's Meleager finds himself condemned by the same sort of hereditary determinism which condemns O'Neill's Mannons in Mourning Becomes Electra. Indeed, it is in general the apparent fatalism of much Greek mythology and literature which constitutes for Pavese, as for so many contemporary authors, a central aspect of their appeal. Pavese's statement, "The theme in Greek tragedy is: what should be, must be" (Sept. 26, 1942), is very similar to the Chorus' statement in Anouilh's Antigone, "In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquillity."13 My final reason for recommending Dialogues with Leuco is not, of course, that it illumines the literary history of its author and its period but that its own intrinsic merits make it well worth reading, and rereading. Indeed, if my experience is a guide, it is a work so subtle and sensitive that only repeated readings will reveal the remarkable unity behind its apparent diversity or the tortured anguish behind its mask of irony and nonchalance. Dialogues is a work eminently characterized by indirection and irony in its approach, and although it treats a number of important themes, it is quite impossible to isolate one of these as central. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons for the work's almost magical fascination is that, unlike so many works based on myth, it does not try to find in a myth one "meaning" but rather concentrates on letting the myth itself speak in all its original ambiguity and mystery. The entry in Pavese's journal which includes the eventual Foreword to Dialogues contains also the following description of poetry: An amazing counterpoise of truths, all on the verge of being expressed, all rich with infinite possibilities, immi nent, inexhaustible. . . . Poetry is not a sense, but a state; not understanding, but being (Feb. 20, 1946). Moreover, Pavese's comment that Dialogues is a series of con versations in which some classical myth is evoked and interpreted 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York, 1955), 90. 12. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York, 1955), 90. 13. Jean Anouilh, Five Plays, Vol. I (New York, 1958), 24. in all its "problematic and tortured ambiguity"14 also suggests that we are to look in the work for ambivalence and irony rather than for some straightforward "message." In this connection it is interesting that Pavese's own comments on the themes of the work reveal the same ambivalence of attitude that the reader senses in the work itself. On February 24, 1947, for example, his journal entry clearly sides with the Titanic gods against the Olympians ("You have always considered reality as a titanic idea, or rather as a human-divine Chaos, which is the perennial form of life. You present the gods, who were Olympian ... as the spoil-sports of humanity"); but a few months later he writes, "Your idea that 'savage' means 'superstitious,' something no longer acceptable morally ... is still the burden of your song, with the 'savage,' the titans, the brutal and reactionary, replaced by the citizen, the Olympian, the progressive" (July 10, 1947).15 The work begins with a mortal lusting for a goddess and ends with the gods envying man his mortality, and in the interim all the possible variations on these contrasting positions are explored. Pavese himself has written, "In the Dialoghetti, the mortals sigh for divine attributes, and the gods for human qualities. . . . The work is a conversation between divinity and humanity" (Oct. 31, 1946); and like so many of Plato's Dialogues, these conversations frequently introduce and explore rather than solve a problem. Dialogues with Leuco in its ambivalence of theme, its at times indefinable bonds of unity, and above all its mysterious charm, seems at times to partake more of poetry than of prose (a quality preserved in much of the trans lation), and one of the author's journal entries in his final year nicely summarizes both its technique and its achievement: "The theme of a work of art cannot be a truth, a concept, a document etc., but only, once again, a myth. From myth directly into poetry, without passing through theory or action" (Feb. 9, 1950). DAVID PORTER 14. La letteratura americana e altri saggi, 295. 15. But even this entry contains the statement, "Dialoghi con Leuco lis] the fruit of your yearning for 'savage' things — the country, the titans." And on August 4, 1947, he points out that in Dialogues he sides with the Titans and argues against the Olympians.

83 The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited, with an introduction, by N. Scott Momaday; also with a critical foreword by Yvor Winters. Oxford University Press. $6.50.

Readers of the Miscellany may be interested to know that a literary exhumation has recently taken place. Exhumed is F. G. Tuckerman (1821-73), who lived a retired and secluded life as an obscure New England poet, a sort of male Emily Dickinson. When not writing poems, he seems to have spent most of his time either puttering in his herbarium (he was an amateur botanist, and brother of the botanist for whom Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington is named) or brooding in woodland paths. Such occu pations kept him out of the way of fame, or even notice, and only recently has he begun to attract much attention. Edmund Wilson had some kind words to say about him in Patriotic Gore (1962), and now Oxford has made his complete body of poetry available for the first time, edited by N. Scott Momaday. Momaday seems to be a protege of Yvor Winters; both Winters and Momaday contribute polemical introductions, and the interest of the present volume is about evenly split between Tuckerman's poetry and their rhetoric. The poetry is easier to take than the rhetoric. It is not bad poetry in its way, its way being pretty much what one could ex pect from the gentleman whose portrait appears on the dust- jacket. The portrait shows a youngish man with delicately hand some features, large melancholy eyes, his back held straight and firm, his clothes stiff, heavy, dark, formal; he seems a bit un comfortable, and perhaps sad — though one is not quite sure why. It's the man who wrote the poems, all right: decorous, ruminative, darkly suggestive, but bearing up with stoic good manners, no trouble to anyone. He tends to work in accepted forms, especially the sonnet, the ballad, the ode. The first poem in the volume (the first of several series of sonnets) finds the poet "winding slow by brook and bower, / Beating the idle grass," and soon asks why he should gather flowers ("Bloodroot, king orchis, or the pearl-

84 wort pale") for his poems: "What avail / Is the swan's voice if all the hearers fail?" It concludes with philosophical consolation. Poetry like that is in what used to be called the genteel tra dition, but it should be said that this poem is not altogether representative of Tuckerman: it represents a tendency rather than the limits of his achievement. By and large, he has more intel lectual vigor, and sharper sensory awareness, than the tradition is generally thought to accommodate. Winters suggests, and with some cogency, that Tuckerman shares some of the qualities of the French symbolistes, particularly Verlaine and Mallarme; cer tainly he has a gift for the kind of suggestive imagery intended to reveal fairly complex emotional states. Winters cites a poem focused on a man not otherwise identified than as having "terror and anguish" as his lot; the poem ends: "Nor can I drop my lids nor shade my brows, / But there he stands beside the lifted sash; / And with a swooning of the heart, I think/Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs / And, shattered on the roof like smallest snows, / The tiny petals of the mountain ash." Winters says simply that "somehow the sensory details express the sickness of the man; the tiny details are the items on which he can concentrate." But the lines express more than sickness: they are a meditation on shattered things as a source of beauty. On the preceding page, Tuckerman writes of "Dank fens of cedar .../... mosses, wringing wet, / Beds of the black pitchpine in dead leaves set / Whose wasted red has wasted to white away, / Remnants of rain and droppings of decay" as things which "hold . . . my heart" and are "dearer far / Even than all lovely lights and roses are." Taken all in all, Tuckerman probably ought to be more widely known; Oxford and Momaday have rendered good service in making him available. Unfortunately, however, the present volume insists on presenting Tuckerman within a critical or rhetorical framework that does little service to the cause it wishes to forward. Winters and Momaday seize upon the unfortunate Tuckerman as an occasion for presenting their special view of literature, one which seems unusually combative and noisy. Reading his poetry after read ing their introductory rhetoric is a bit like trying to listen to a little sonata for oboe in your study while a brass band plays military marches in the adjoining hallway.

85 Theoretically, Winters and Momaday assume different tasks in their respective forewords: Winters discusses the aesthetic qualities of Tuckerman's poetry, while Momaday places it in its historical context. But the difference is merely one of emphasis: not only do they encroach on each other's territory, but they also develop pre cisely the same line of argument, which is that Tuckerman's defects are those of his century, but his virtues are his own. Subtract the century and what is left is good poetry. Winters goes so far as to do the subtraction line by line. For example, he takes the following five lines from Tuckerman — The wild rain enters, and the sunset wind Sighs in the chambers of their loveliness Or stabs the pane — and in the silent noons The glass falls from the window, part by part, And ringeth faintly in the grassy stones. — and proceeds to assert that four of the lines are original and ex cellent, but one (the second) is the product of the nineteenth cen tury, and is a "falling off" from the rest of the poem. The theoreti cal basis for deciding that the nineteenth century produced "Sighs in the chambers of their loveliness," but did not produce "The wild rain enters, and the sunset wind" (the line the second one most immediately falls off from) or "And ringeth faintly in the grassy stones" is not made clear. Apparently you simply have to share Winters' intuitive grasp of what kind of poetry the nineteenth century is likely to produce. One thing is clear: Winters does not like nineteenth century poetry; furthermore, Winters does not like the second line; therefore . . . Momaday does no substraction, but he is prone to similar sentiments. It seems, for example, that he does not like Tennyson, and also that he has his doubts about some of Tuckerman; the conclusion is inevitable: "But he was also a poet of the nineteenth century, and one who admired Tennyson above all others. There is a good deal of bad writing in Tuckerman." Stu dents of rhetoric will have noted the unstated assumption of that enthymeme: admirers of Tennyson write badly. The Winters essay is a parade of shrill aesthetic judgments. It opens with a flourish: Tuckerman, we are told, "was one of the three most remarkable American poets of the nineteenth century. The others were Jones Very . . . and Emily Dickinson." One won- 86 ders how Dickinson got on the list. Jones Very could be expected; he was Winters' discovery, his Tuckerman, several decades ago. As for Dickinson: Winters hastens to note that "she was a country girl with exasperating mannerisms," but admits that "her natural genius was great and she wrote a few great poems." That sentence reveals one of Winters' most characteristic ploys, which is to admit the presence of natural genius but maintain that it was thwarted by false ideas. "Emerson," for instance, "had talent, which was badly damaged by foolish thinking." And most of the Americans were in fluenced by the same kind of thinking: "Of Poe and Whitman, the less said the better." The parade of judgments continues through out the essay: "Wordsworth, the poet of nature, popularized nature but almost never saw it";"most readers today regard the bad writing of the nineteenth century (such as we find it, for example, almost everywhere in Keats and Wordsworth) as great writing. . . ." Tuckerman (lucky for us) apparently had few, if any, false ideas. Winters is willing to make extravagant claims for him. To return to an earlier metaphor — it seems that while you are trying to listen to the plaintive little oboe, someone is trying to persuade you that it is really (if you get the right perspective) a symphonic orchestra. After being so snippy about Wordsworth, for example, Winters proclaims that Tuckerman's poem "The Cricket" is "the greatest poem in English of the century." Such language places a con siderable burden on the unfortunate Tuckerman, as can be illus trated by what happens when the reader turns, in astonished antici pation, to the poem itself. While he is hurriedly trying to recall the titles of some nineteenth century poems — The Prelude} "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Don Juan? Prometheus Unbound? "Ode on Inti mations of Immortality"? — his eyes are greeted by the following lines: The humming bee purrs softly o'er his flower; From lawn and thicket The dogday locust singeth in the sun From hour to hour: Each has his bard, and thou, ere day be done, Shalt have no wrong. So bright that murmur mid the insect crowd. Muffled and lost in bottom-grass, or loud

87 By pale and picket? Shall I not take to help me in my song A little cooing cricket? That poem needs all the sympathetic help it can get. It consciously risks cuteness in its choice of subject matter; the opening lines bring the poet's uneasy self-consciousness about that fact into the poem itself, where he can attempt to deal with it. There is a very delicate problem of tone, one which Tuckerman eventually handles with a fair amount of success. But it is not the kind of problem likely to make for poetry deserving of so formidable an epithet as that be stowed by Winters, and the unfortunate Tuckerman is not helped when Winters pretends otherwise. The Winters essay is followed by Momaday's. Momaday claims that "If Tuckerman is to emerge completely in our literature, he had best be revealed for the right reasons." Chief among those rea sons is: "First, he stands in historical opposition to the mainstream of nineteenth-century American Romanticism." "That fact," he continues, "ought now to account for his renown as, for the better part of a century, it has accounted for his anonymity." One is re minded of the lines from The Mikado about the mighty troops of Titi-Poo: when the banner of the mighty troops of Titi-Poo arrives on the scene, all other banners are defied. Again, a pretty consider able burden is placed on the unfortunate Tuckerman: he is asked to supplant the whole body of classic American literature. But probably Momaday is not intellectually serious at this point: he does not really want us to stop reading Moby-Dick, which is surely in the "mainstream," or Walden or The Scarlet Letter. For one thing, you know from the rest of the essay that when he says "main stream," he really means only "Emerson," his master's whipping boy from way back. In the Winters school of criticism, the mighty troops of Titi-Poo are generally sent to make war in Concord. It seems that Emerson, or whatever he is a symptom of, is responsible for "spiritual drifting," a phenomenon which manifests itself in various forms, notably laxity in morals, vagueness in reasoning, and loose revery in writing. Victims of Emersonianism, directly or in directly, include such figures as Hawthorne, Melville, Frost and Hart Crane, all of whom tend to find themselves adrift on the open sea. In each case, subtract Emerson, and what is left is a good firm writer. To find Emerson, look for signs of spiritual drifting and loose writing. The duty of the critic is to locate the evil principle (Emerson) and root it out. It is therefore no surprise to find that most of Momaday's essay is in fact devoted to Emerson. His strategy is to summarize the posi tions of Emerson, and then imply that Tuckerman's are different. Except by implied contrast, Tuckerman's positions are never made clear; one gathers only that they have something to do with the defense of reason, which is no surprise since Momaday's master happens to have written a book called In Defense of Reason. He does not explain how Tuckerman defends reason, and in reading of the poetry no such defense leaps immediately to the eye. Ap parently Momaday is remembering the fact, which he often recalls for us, that Tuckerman kept an herbarium. This means that he was a scientific observer of nature. Get it? He doesn't just look at flowers in an amateurish kind of way, like Emerson; not at all — he knows their scientific names, and scientific characteristics. Emerson would look, tiresomely, for their symbolic significance. But Tuckerman sticks to facts. For example, Tuckerman has a poem on twelve plain brown beans; he does, indeed, compare them to the plainness of his verses, but he does not get carried away by the metaphor. He sticks to facts:

The bean, the garden bean, I sing, Lima, mazagan, black-eye, late and early, Bush, butter, black eye, pole and string, Esculent, annual, planted yearly.

Momaday's summary of Emerson leaves something to be desired. Winters is free to indulge in matters of opinion, but he leaves to his disciple the thankless task of supporting his witty remarks by a discussion of American literary history, and Momaday seems to have trouble seeing that history through the dust thrown up by his master's invective. One gets the impression that perhaps the master-disciple relationship did not work out too well in this case. Perhaps Winters finds so little acceptance for his ideas that when he gets a receptive graduate student, he fails to criticize his work properly. At any rate, there is some error and confusion in Moma day's discussion. It is, for example, simply wrong to say, as Momaday does, that Emerson "believed science to be invalid." Emerson did no such thing; the essays are full of allusions to

89 scientific evidence in support of larger spiritual truths. It's true that Emerson believed, along with most of the romantics, that what they called the transcendental Reason or Imagination was a higher power than the Understanding, the faculty of science, but that is not at all the same thing as believing science to be "in valid." Momaday's version is careless to the point where it ought to be criticized. The same is true of such statements as: "Again and again [Emerson] preached that nature is the vital force of the universe, the absolute unity of all being," or "Emerson found realized in nature the transcendent spirit of the universe." One recognizes the Emersonian vocabulary, but not the way the words are thrown together. They are thrown together meaninglessly, in a way appropriate to parody, but not to scholarly summary. But Momaday does not seem to be writing parody, one of whose re quirements is that it be mildly amusing, or at least look as if it were trying to be. Is Momaday really trying? The strategy of Winters and Momaday, the calculated defiance of all other banners, is especially odd because of the highly de rivative nature of Tuckerman's poetry. One of his characteristics is that he has a nagging way of reminding you of most of his con temporaries: he is prone to large affirmations of faith reminiscent of Emerson or Tennyson or Bryant; he has some of the harsh, crabbed syntax of Dickinson; he ponders death and identification with the sub-human world, in ways that recall Poe and Beddoes; his best poem is an ode complete with classical allusions in the manner of Keats. Subtract the nineteenth century from Tuckerman and there is not much left. One of Tuckerman's charms is precisely that he is a period piece, as much a part of the period as the old daguerrotype that decorates the dust-jacket. Winters is right about one thing: his best successes lie in the use of sharp sensory imagery to evoke complex emotional states. His skill in finding correspondences between the inner and the outer worlds probably owes a lot, ironically, to the encouragement of Emerson. There's some evidence that Tuckerman thought so too. That's prob ably why he sent his poems to Emerson for approval. ROBERT DIEBOLD

cOL> 9° NOTES ETC. ON BOOKS ETC.

• The Modern Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature, edited by Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson, Jr. Oxford University Press. $13.75. An expensive, expansive anthology of nearly a thousand pages, this book belongs in the library of any one interested in what makes and forms modern literature and who does not already possess a library of very large size. In the first section of the first section, for instance, indeed within sixty- six pages, the book has selections from Wilde, Rilke, Picasso, Malraux, Kant, Coleridge, Arp, Blake, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Yeats and Klee. Some of the selections are short, as of course in a book covering as large a subject as does this one they naturally have to be. (Joyce is represented by the "stasis" argument in Stephen Hero and A Portrait and by a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Zola by nine pages from "The Experimental Novel.") The book's index is by author and not, alas, by subject. One sus pects that the book is designed to be read rather as a continuing or continuous argument than to be used for reference. The table of contents, however, is full and arranged as in a lawyer's brief (al most, anyway) so that to find material on given subjects is not as difficult as it might otherwise be.

• Danger: Men Talking, by William H. Schneider. Random House. $3.95. Mr. Schneider is an advertising executive who ap parently thinks about his business. He has taken to writing car toons about it, and about other things. Some of his work has ap peared in ETC., A Review of General Semantics. (S. I. Hayakawa writes an introduction: "... what passes for communication is not communication at all . . . we hurt ourselves and others when we talk nonsense. . . . But I must stop lousing up a cheerful little book with moralistic reflections . . ." And it is a cheerful book, and filled with useful drawings as well. The student after only a short time spent with this work will be able whenever he sees one to recognize immediately an Unshakeable Conviction, an Informed Circle, a Hard Sell, a Working Hypothesis, even a Modern Novel. • New York University Press may be starting a new series. At least, they now have published two volumes of critical essays, one called

9i Kipling and the Critics, edited and with an introduction by Elliot L. Gilbert, and one called Robert Penn Warren, a Collection of Critical Essays, edited and with an introduction by John L. Long- ley, Jr. The Kipling sells for five dollars in hard cover and for $1.95 in paper, the Warren for six dollars and $2.25. The Warren volume might be a straw in the wind, a trend-indicator, a fresh-field opener: it prints an uncut version of the 1957 Paris Review inter view.

• On the Poet and His Craft, published by the University of Wash ington Press ($3.95), comprises "selected prose of Theodore Roethke," and is "edited with an introduction" by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Included are reviews, lectures, such essays as "The Teaching Poet" and "How to Write Like Somebody Else." Two pseudony mous pieces, one a review of Dylan Thomas's In Country Sleep and Other Poems are also here collected.

• Festschrift for Marianne Moore's Seventy Seventh Birthday, by various hands, edited by Tambimuttu. Tambimuttu and Mass. $4.95. Among the various hands are Stanley Kunitz, John Ciardi, Conrad Aiken, Kenneth Burke, James Laughlin, Allen Ginsberg, David Ignatow. Some write verse and some prose. The final effect, as anyone who has tried to run or tried to run while reading a symposium will know, is uneven. A remarkable Richard Eberhart sentence indicates something: "And when she came to stay with us for her reading at Dartmouth, I remember her wonderfully good looks as she strode up our back walk to the kitchen door, seen through the lens of a movie camera she was observing me peering through, the results of which make a good showing to this day."

• Crucifix in a Deathhand, by Charles Bukowski. New poems 1963- 65. A Loujon Press Award Book. Lyle Stuart, Inc. $7.50. The Loujon Press of New Orleans both printed and published an earlier book of Bukowski poems, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, in an edition of 777 copies, the type hand-set, the pages hand-fed and the book hand-bound by Louise and Jon Webb. This new book is larger, taller, but in format much like the earlier one, printed on papers of various colors and with a wrap-around binding. The new book differs also in having between sections not reproductions of the Bukowski holograph manuscripts but etchings by Noel Rockmore.

92 The poems are those of a man talking about himself, sometimes to himself, but with an absolute lack of self-pity and with an almost terrifying honesty. • About the House, by W. H. Auden. Random House. $3.00. This is Mr. Auden's first book of poems since 1960. About half of the poems concern a new house, rooms in it, gadgets found about it. Hymns to bath and to bedroom, among those in the first section, are followed by occasional poems, among them "Iceland Revisited," "On the Circuit," and translations. Scattered throughout the book are very short poems sometimes called "Postscripts" or "Symmetries and Asymmetries." Example: "In a brothel, both / The ladies and gentlemen / Have nicknames only." • The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, by Lorraine Hansberry. Random House. $3.95. The play that ran for 101 nights by reason of financial help from friends and free TV advertising by Arthur Godfrey and others is here published with a long introduction by Robert Nemiroff, who was Miss Hansberry's husband and one of the co-producers of the play. Mr. Nemiroff tells the story of the struggle to keep the play alive, explains why the play never became a "success," and gives as background for all this the moving story of Miss Hanberry's own failing struggle against death by cancer. • From Sensibility to Romanticism, essays presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom. Oxford University Press. $9.75. A carefully arranged symposium of essays concerned with the development of English poetry from Pope to the great romantics. About a third of the way along the reader is pre sented with three new ways of looking at Gray's Elegy. • All the collected short poems by Louis Zukofsky. W. W. Norton and Company. $6.00. The short poems written and published be tween 1923 and 1958. This is a large book, as books of poetry go, of 157 pages, and contains an index of titles and first lines. The poetry is that of a tough mind looking at the world through a sharp eye. Admirers of it will have met it in many little magazines and in more than a dozen small volumes. People who don't know it might be attracted by a vague statement to the effect that it makes one think of Williams and Pound. That statement is not enough, of course.

93 • Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness, by Bob Kaufman. A New Directions Paperbook. $1.60. Reprinted here is the "Abomunist Manifesto," which might be described as a seminal utterance in the San Francisco Movement or as a pale imitation of honest Dada. The "Abomunist Manifesto" declares, among other things, that "Abomunists never carry more than fifty dollars in debts on them." Among the "Notes Dis- and Re- Garding Abomunism" are "Abomunists who feel their faith weakening will have to spend two weeks in Los Angeles" and "When attacked, Abomunists think positive, repeating over and under: 'If I were a crime, I'd want to be committed . . .' " Among items on an "Abomnewscast" are "Cu bans seize Cuba, outraged U. S. acts quickly, cuts off tourist quota . . ." and "Remember your national emergency signal, when you see one small mushroom cloud and three large ones, it is not a drill, turn the TV off and get under it." The poems in the volume are angry in the North Beach manner but are written with more wit than might be expected, and sometimes with more tenderness. Among the thirty-four "Jail Poems" written in San Francisco City Prison, Cell Three, in 1959 is number twenty-seven: "There, Jesus, didn't hurt a bit, did it?"

• Cockerell, by Winfrid Blunt. Alfred A. Knopf. $7.50. This biog raphy of Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, who was knighted for his work as Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, is also a glimpse into the byways of culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Cockerell was also a collector of shells and medieval manuscripts, a librarian, press-engraver, biblio phile, calligrapher; and these interests led him to Ruskin, Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, and other promi nent men. He also collected his diaries and letters which record with less than Boswellian genius his friendships with these men whom he approached with more than Boswellian audacity. Blunt quotes liberally from the records as he follows Cockerell along these byways.

94 IN PEPSI VERITAS: A FAIRLY LONG NOTE AND A REVIEW OR TWO

Having considered the problem of the Younger Generation for perhaps — all told — half an hour over the last couple of weeks, I am delighted to conclude that there is nothing to worry about. Oh, there may be a ripple here and there, now and then. Goaded, no doubt, by aging congenital minors and those whom Jack Newfield calls "The Intellectual Mau-Maus," the Young shall continue to tell us all about justice and love through clenched teeth and bulg ing jaws and the Old shall continue to throw a series of fits. But over the long haul, things shall remain about as they are. My dull notion is that we are dealing with an old and recurrent pattern. (All right. Archetype, then!), and if you are disappointed in the issue of my meditations, what do you think I am? For I embarked on my perilous voyage of thought in the hope that I would achieve, at least, one of those Paul Goodman-like seminal insights resulting in a book that would be read by all the fiercely authentic members of the Pepsi Generation on their surf boards and picket lines. But I shall be lucky if I can swell my dis covery into a review. Such are the risks of the thinking life. I am not surprised. It is an off-season for insights here in Northfield. We are not even coping with the cats and mosquitoes. It is summer, and all the big thinkers are at the lakes or watching the Twins or sharing their thoughts with others like themselves at conferences throughout the land. Surely things will pick up in the fall; but just now we here on the still warming tundra could scarely remem ber what a seminal insight is like if we did not receive regularly The New York Review of Books with its deep, creative, and insight ful disclosures of the malignancies lurking behind the facade of such devious state documents as — say — a White House guest list. So we are grateful for that. It may be, of course, that I am dead wrong, that the only part of my dull vision to come about will be the Old throwing their series

95 of fits. Certainly that will be the last part to change of the pattern described by the wars between the generations. Even if everyone under twenty-five were made an honorary scientist and given an NSF grant — so that there would be no more philosophy, English, history, sociology, religion, etc. majors to sit-in, walk-out, over come, en-gage, and say dirty words (Where, I ask, oh where, are the riots at Cal Tech, the demands for human dignity at MIT, the crumpled IBM cards at Rensselaer) — if, in other words, the Young in one anothers' sweatshirts suddenly belonged to the great going enterprises of our time, what would the poor Elders of the tribe do then, poor things? Well, they would have fits, as they did in the dear dead days of the pre-Sputnik Fifties and cry "Conformity! Conformity!" to the now washing and shaving Young; and Paul Goodman could stay yet another threat to the superannuating of his adolescence by becoming the darling of the PTA's and the Rotary clubs with his heady message for creative living: "Growing up? Absurd!" But we do grow up. Or some do. Not well, not even gracefully, let alone with wisdom. But we do. And now I have to confess that I think it is our business to learn that difficult trick and that we must learn it better than we have. I shall risk a convocation unctiousness and say that I don't have anything to offer here except a sense of urgency. When I read the projections for the world's population over the next few hundred years and consider that time when each of us is standing upright on our own one square yard of earth (I'm feeling eternal tonight. Then there are the children. Yes. The children.) the cosiness will be more attractive if we are, in addition to upright, very mature indeed. I used to think Hell would be like Kansas in July. Then I moved to Minnesota and enlarged my imagi nation. Later, having become domesticated and grown comfortable, I speculated that a perfect notion of Hell would be an eternal din ner party with a logical positivist on one side of me, a YMCA Sum mer Camp Recreational Director on the other, and at the far end of the table a venerable speaker going at it about the Problems of Youth and how it was when he went to school. But now in those three o'clock in the morning glimpses of what is to be unless I mend my ways, I see myself on my square yard of turf, to my left Mario Savio explaining the Whole Truth into a microphone; to my left, Bobby Dylan pelting me with black rain; behind me Judy 96 Collins sniffling her fear that the world is not mommy's womb (She's right.), and in front of me Paul Goodman incessantly reading from Making Do. And there I stand, notes and books teetering on a trimmed-down bird feeder, trying amidst all that to work out a piece on the moral implications of the symbolism in The Golden Bowl. We have not a moment to lose. In the meantime, though, I have this faith that I like to call the Faith of the English Department that somehow we shall muddle through, that just as English teaching has matured from the log and the chalk to the casebook and the overhead projector, so shall the race find itself in good time. But surely this is faith in the sense of the substance of something wished for, the hope for something all but unseen these days. The news reports aside — and I don't think I have to explain that — the novels that I've read about the Younger Generation in America are too busy exploiting their new subject matter and new vocabulary to do anything more serious by way of dramatizing a tendency than to strut about like that boy last year at Berkeley with the very explicit sign. We now have college girls and boys together in phone booths talking to ministers on the phone while they attempt to unblock each other's energy systems, but it made a silly novel for all that. There have been a few stories in some of the magazines and in manuscript that appear to have as their main intent to celebrate the fall of the Olympia Press in Paris; and if this heady new freedom should ever get explicitly involved with the Old-Young separation, we could have a series of genito urinary encounters, equally motivated against parents, against ad ministrators of schools, and for the participants, the way sex became a matter of whole social classes going to bed in English fiction after D. H. Lawrence taught it how really to bring it off. In the collusion of the new freedom with the current agitation, we might expect an increasing complexity of outlook; but I have my doubts. Once pornography becomes a weapon in a war, it is likely to have the effect of sharpening the lines of division rather than causing them to meet and contend with each other. And since the one infallible way to prolong adolescent attitudes is to protect them from opposi tion and since with new licensed situations and language the uni lateral path can be so much simply bully fun these days, I do not think our fiction is going to deal with the issues of the New Youth at all, except polemically and self righteously. Novels about young

97 people are likely to assert an unequivocal right against an unequivo cal wrong — or stupidity. This makes me sad.

II It is just this absence of moral priggishness on either side that I like in fifty-two year old Vasco Pratolini's latest novel, published in this country as Bruno Santini* but in Italy as La Constanza della Ragione (The Constancy of Reason), a much more useful title. In some ways it is a difficult novel, that is to say, a complex one. The complexity is both substantive and formal. Pratolini attempts to ac count for a young Italian boy from his birth in 1942 until he is twenty, to render dramatically the many contradictory pressures on a boy in post-war Florence. Another aspect of the novel that makes the reader dig in and hang on at times, especially in the early part, is the narrative manner, a reconstruction by Bruno of his life—parts of which he must learn through conversations with his mother, parts he tries to remember for himself, parts he learns from friends, and, of course, much of which he experiences on his own, best authority. This reconstruction is made all the more difficult by the protective dissembling of his mother and others. Since the focus throughout is on the present, the technique has the effect of making the past and the present concurrent. Though the method is difficult to grasp at first, the technique succeeds wonderfully in giving formal presence to the idea informing the story: that one is the ever-changing prod uct of a complex and inescapable causality. Bruno Santini, then, is the familiar story of the education of a young man, an account of what he thinks he knows absolutely, what he has to remember, what he has to forget, and the suffering, sordidness, and disgust that attends the rites of passage into ma turity. I can already hear the cries that would go up from my class room if I were to read it with my students, for the rites of passage have nothing to do with them; this is not Samoa, for Christ's sake! From their embattled visceral position within our parochial moral superciliousness, they would call Bruno, at the end of the book, a rat fink, at least, for he reaches the conclusion that "The desecration •Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1964, 313 pages, $5.95. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. 98 of our feelings introduces us to maturity." It is, of course, an out rage to have one's feelings desecrated. Is nothing sacred? Yes, but not one's feelings, one's desires. The knowledge of reality is sacred. It is earned with too much agony to be any less than that. The knowledge that one's life is lived in either acknowledged or un acknowledged complicity with others — regardless of what one's own heart's desires in the matter may be — that is the "constancy of reason." "Constant" because it is always there, silently judging our vanities. The title is from Dante's Vita Nova, XXXIX. Bruno's life begins in the ambiguities of family and political dis order. The son of a fascist killed in the war, he learns a rough American speech from negro soldiers billeted in the Rifredi quarter of Florence, the quarter of Pratolini's most distinguished works. From his father's best friend and his mother's companion, Milloschi, he takes both his precocious communism and his ambition to be come a skilled machine operator in the Gali plant. Under Millo's tutelage, he develops a genuinely aristocratic love for tools and workmanship, and one of the impressive incidental features of the novel is the elevating of the workers through their impeccable train ing, skill, and artistry into a force superior to the professional classes. This elevating gives genuine moral, political, and dramatic power (absolutely without leftist sentimentality) to a scene where in con ference with his mother and Millo, Bruno chooses to become a plant artisan rather than the school teacher his mother had hoped he would become. His earliest friend is Dino whose father keeps a stall in the straw market. "Bloated with an aimless resentment," Dino declines into a male prostitute in the Cascine, where some readers may remember Isabel Archer walked with Gilbert Osmond before their marriage. Bruno's other friends are Armando whose parents own a restau rant; Joey, a mulatto (his father, from Dallas, was killed in the war) and a Catholic; and Benito, a neo-fascist who deserts his pack of black leather squadristi, new style. Bruno reads Captain Nembo comics, admires Tony Curtis, Marilyn, and hangs the picture of Eva Marie Saint on his wall. He becomes one of the many lovers of an Italian-Greek girl Electra who kills herself and of another, Rosaria, who does not but who, with Dino, turns pro in the Cascine instead. He falls in love with Lori. Buffeted by every one of the

99 turbulent forces of the post-war years, Bruno nourishes his sense of superiority to everything that has gone before him. Especially his love for Lori is to be a hermetic love, pure, youthful, un touched by the world, apart from sorrow or pain. They become lovers in Hell and swear it shall last forever. Every novel, a novelist once told me, could be called Fathers and Sons. I suppose so. With a little joyless Freud, Moby Dick was once so read. But neither Pratolini nor his readers need Freud. "We are not guilty," Bruno says over and over. It is, rather, the Old Ones who have consumed their lives "amid compromises and contradictions . . . prisoners whom we are forced to visit every day, to whose outbursts we must listen . . . and through which they would like to mould our characters." Lori, though she tolerates opera ("Isn't it stuff for the old ones?" Bruno asks) as "something absurd, an invention," seems to con cur: "To build [life] day by day, to be better than anyone, and only ourselves — clean." And Bruno again. "One thing is sure: we're not guilty of any thing. We're suffering from the sins of others, that's why we rebel." The fall from this peak of hubris is swift, sure, and much too complicated to sketch briefly. But in the fall, all the oppositions that have seemed so authentic to Bruno turn out to be, like Mel ville's turtles, just opposite sides of the same thing. Lori is taken ill, and suddenly the neat Youth-Age separation no longer makes sense. Illness is unfair, it is subtle, it won't come out and fight. ". . . it doubles around you, bores inside you, dries you up and hollows you out. Illness is part of old age, when the body is putrid and fatally decays. ..." Just before she dies of acute and spreading miliary T.B., "Her beautiful face . . . was incinerated, in every sense . . . covered with a thick bluish tint, spotched with red on the cheek bones . . . her half-opened lips were dry and full of sores, her neck and her eyelids livid; and at the corners of her eyes a yellowish ooze, like curdled tears, a rotten secretion." But the important corollary to the joining of youth and age is the joining of innocence and evil. Bruno who can help Electra toward her death without his precious superiority being fazed, who in high moral indignation can spit in the face of Dino, now has to face the facts of Lori's moral as well as physical degradation. He

100 learns that ready and ripe and fifteen, and ambiguously motivated by the high purpose of saving her sister from a marriage that seems to her (Lori) to fall short of the perfection of love, Lori has become the mistress of her sister's fiance. And has remained his mistress. As Luigi (the husband) and Bruno lean over the death bed, Lori stirs, cries out "Bruno, Darling," rises up and kisses Luigi on the mouth. It sounds a little corny as I summarize it, I admit. But it is a fine scene, and in the cry and the kiss is contained the shifting ambiguities of an innocence that is authentic and a turpitude that is just as real as the innocence. Like sickness and age, evil and in nocence refuse the tidy abstract categories of the heart's desire. "I have grown up just to get old at nineteen," Bruno says. If this is tragic, it is redeemed by his knowledge of what has hap pened. In the rapid denouement, other chasms are filled: parents, communism, Catholicism, friends, work, nothing remains what he was certain it had been. Near the end of the book Bruno remem bers Lori and though the passage is a little florid, it is worth giving whole. It is Bruno's yield of wisdom from nineteen years of sowing the cobbly fields of the Rifredi: "Ours has been a poor adventure, like that of the people who surround us, infinitely repeatable, and in its way, brimming with evil besieging that world in which we dreamed we could live free, perfect and clean. She loved both of us [he and Luigi], a great purity and a dissolute darkness lived together in her soul, the evil was in her, so that I found it frighteningly just that she would die now, disfigured and deformed in her dearest possession: the perfection and beauty of her body. I would remain, persecuted by her memory, guilty of my cowardice, but forever disenchanted, ready from now on to see the evil in its most perfect disguises and to confront it with cunning. To pay it back with ferocity. And ma ture enough to once more believe humbly in the elementary truths: in the work of everyday, in the ideas whose defeat is unimportant so long as they are questioned and support us and we continue to fight for them; and to believe in the affections, set on a plane of absolute intransigence, yet, if it becomes necessary, sustained by complicity." Well, I didn't think you would like it. For some of the windy involutions there, let's blame the translator.

101 Ill Pechorin, Lermontov's great Byronic natural heroic force, of course, could accept everything that Bruno says but he would simply wonder what all the fuss was about. Primordial forces do not reconcile dichotomies, as any of our contemporary Pechorin's coming from a Nietzsche seminar will tell you; they obliterate them. They do not speak of purity and guilt or innocence and evil. These natural men simply exist and when they cannot exist any longer they will cease to exist. Like Ivan Karamazov (not one of them in every other way), they simply "return the ticket.' In a wildly rhetorical play, "The Strange One,"* that Lermontov wrote when he was in his teens, Vladmir is arguing with his father to recognize for one last time his wife whom he has disowned because of her unfaithfulness. The old one refuses. Vladmir says, "Oh, if I could put all my feelings, my heart, my soul, my breath, into one single word — into one sound — that sound would be a curse on the first moment of my life! It would be a thunderbolt that would shake your very entrails, Father, and cure you forever of calling me 'son'!" And a little later: "You gave me life. Take it back! Take it back, if you can! Oh, what a bitter gift!" Vladmir later goes mad and dies. This is sensible. Once you recognize as a part of reality something you cannot possibly live with, something has to give, and give entirely. Vladmir gave. Was he a great man or, as someone insists, "a strange one, that's all."? Great, strange, and dead, perhaps. But of Pechorin there is no doubt. He is great, strange, and very much alive. He may be as Lemontov said in the introduction to the second edition of A Hero of Our Time, "... a portrait composed of all the vices of our generation in the fullness of their development." Reading that intricate and energy-filled set of stories, the reader can easily forget that Pechorin is a development of vices. But, of course he is. The one vice he does not have is moral superciliousness. He does not tell people how to live. He lectures not, neither does he yearn for days that are no more. He engages in no conversations about values. He is as incapable of Bruno's awareness of the necessity for complicity as an astronaut is of reeds on the creek bank that are *In A Lermontov Reader. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Guy Daniels, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1965, 303 pages, $7.50

102 adding cubits to their stature by taking thought. He is the anti thesis of smugness, though his manners are bad. Mr. Daniels' an thology (full of excellent things, and what must be the liveliest translations of Russian poetry available anywhere) makes it now possible for us old admirers of Pechorin to see him in his pre- Caucasus years in the unfinished novel Princess Ligovskaya. It's a society story of love intrigue, not at all exotic, unless French ro mances are exotic. But Pechorin is there, running down clerks in his sled, unsettling rooms of people with his dark looks, exuding contempt for all the procedures of accommodation. "In every situa tion one must know how to choose the middle way," a lady simpers to him. "I hope you marry a man who shares that opinion." He walked away. The whole point is in that "He walked away." He is the rebel, not the reformer. On my square yard of turf, in that cozy Malthusian future, I could study my James surrounded by Pechorins and Brunos. Un derstanding I can take. Contempt I can take. Just don't try to tell me how great you are. WAYNE CARVER O

103 A new national review of arts, letters, and opinion The Northwestern TRI-QTJARTERLY Spring issue: Creativity in the Soviet Union Unpublished translations of two new long poems: Andrei Voznesensky's OZA Joseph Brodsky's ELEGY FOR JOHN DONNE and others Other new translations of Yuri Kazakov, Evgeny Evtushen- ko, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Bulat Okudshava by George Kline, Lydia Pasternak Slater, Denise Levertov, Anselm Hollo, Gabriella Azrael, and others Articles: PETER VIERECK - RUSSIA'S REBEL WRITERS ANDREW FIELD-MARINA TSVETAEVA'S POEMS TO BLOK DEMING BROWN - VASILI AKSENOV AT 33 DAVID JORAVSKY-THE SILENCES OF ACADEMICIAN PRIANISHNIKOV NORRIS HOUGHTON - CREATIVITY AND CONTROLS IN THE SOVIET THEATRE Commentary: PETER YAKOVLEVICH CHAADAYYEV — Letters on the Philoso phy of History BORIS PASTERNAK — "To Friends East and West" Poetry: John Stewart Carter, Maurice English. Plus: Erich Heller on 'The Artist's Journey into the Interior: Rilke' Leslie Epstein on 'The Unhappiness of Arthur Miller' Sondra Fargo on 'The New Feminism' Thomas I. Cook on 'The New Conservatism' Some recent contributors: Stephen Spender, Lionel Trilling, W. D. Snodgrass, Kenneth Patchen, Leslie A. Fiedler, James T. Farrell, Maxine Kumin. Some recent articles: The Nov els of James Baldwin, The Quest of Zen, Buddhism and the Western World, Humanism vs. Behaviorism, a Symposium. Coming: W. B. Yeats Centenary Supplement, New French Writing, New African Visual Arts. Single Copy $1.50; a year's introductory subscription of 3 issues for $3.00. Tri-Quarterly, University Hall 101 Northwestern University, Evanston, 111. A GARLAND OF LETTERS

It all began when we got a letter from Wayne Booth. It was dated from Chicago on 3 December 1964. It read as follows:

Dear Erling: I'm sending you, under separate cover, a copy of a book of poems by Maurice English, one of the editors at the Uni versity of Chicago Press. I know Mr. English personally, which is one reason why I'm sending them along under my name rather than simply having him send them to you himself. But the more important reason is that I have read many of his poems and think they are certainly worth a close look by a competent reviewer of poetry — which I am not. If you agree, after you glance at them, I hope you can find somebody who will give him the serious attention that he is seeking. He's had some good reviews in the past, but I think he feels — like most poets — that poetry gets short shrift. Anything you can do for him I will appreciate. Of course, I am not asking you to review the poems favorably. I gather that Maurice would be pleased even with an un favorable review, provided it came from somebody who had obviously taken the trouble really to read the poems — he's had too many Sunday supplement reviewers. Sincerely, Wayne

I forwarded this letter to Reed Whittemore, who was at that time in Washington, D. C. At the foot of the letter I wrote, in longhand:

Reed — Would you like to do this? We would, I am sure all of us, be pleased. The poems, I think, have some in terest. At a word, we shall forward the book. Deadline is February one. Best. Erling 105 Mr. Whittemore agreed to review the book. He said so in a footnote to a letter about another matter. That letter is some where in the files. And the review was delivered, and printed in the Spring, 1965, issue of The Carleton Miscellany. Anyone curious about it may look it up. In fact, if you are interested in the rest of this garland of letters it might be a good idea that you do look it up. And read it. After the review appeared, we received a letter from Chicago addressed to Mr. Reed Whittemore, Editor, Carleton Mis cellany. For obvious reasons we opened the letter and, having read it, for equally obvious reasons put it into a fresh envelope and mailed it to Washington. It was from Maurice English and it was dated from Chicago, 25 March 1965. It read:

Dear Mr. Whittemore: I've never been quite sure what the proprieties are, in regard to an author's responding to a review which sur prises him — and, in my case, surprise is the word. But I read your comments on Midnight In the Century also with appreciation for the attention you gave it, and I thought you might be interested to hear something of my reactions. I would be, if the roles were reversed, and your readers might be. I must warn you, though, that my reply will not come from the quarter you expect. Far from being besieged, I'm not even a resident of the city you tell me is under attack. I'm involved in a campaign in another part of the country, and I think I am winning it. You can take this as a dispatch from the field: Various readers, including some of our fellow-poets known and unknown personally to me, have by now com mented, in print or privately, on Midnight In the Century. They tend to single out for attention the long dramatic narrative, comprising five sections, called The House of Mirrors, and also various dramatic lyrics such as the four that end the book. What interests them, I gather, is pre cisely the direct expression of feeling, the absence of codes, modes and subterfuge (though not of image and symbol), which these poems offer. I was struck by the fact that of 106 these poems, you mentioned only one, Memorial Verses, and praised that in passing, while describing it (in a signifi cant mistake, I think) as a "meditation." It is a dramatic lyric, which presents the life-begotten obsessions and re criminations of a dying rabbi. It is true that the ideas it deals with are as old as Job; the events which re-animate them, however, occurred in this century, with a rigor which — as the poem says — foreclosed the element of hope and redemption found in the Book of Job. I would suggest, in fact, that the considerations you put forward in your review are relevant, if at all, only to a few of my poems. Even then, I would argue that you have unin tentionally drained "Go, Little Book . . ." of much mean ing, by focussing on, and simplifying, the intellectual (rather than emotional and psychological) point. This poem swiftly contradicts the solipsistic statement with which it begins, and in doing so offers an indication of how art solves the dilemma of human communication. In what sense The Day That I Stood On My Head is a "coded" poem, I defy you to specify. It seems to me, to state the central issue, that "academic poetry" (I suspect you will promptly agree) is a contradic tion in terms. A poem cannot be "academic" and really be alive as a poem. I say this with no disrespect for the "academy" which has virtues I lack and envy. But they are essentially at cross-purposes with the writing of poetry. (Besides having nothing to do with my personal experi ence: from the time I left college in the early thirties, I have had no contact with academic life until I joined a university press a few years ago). At any rate, I wish that the readers of the Carleton Mis cellany might judge between us, on my assertion that the concept of "academic" is irrelevant to the poems I have mentioned, and in general, to my book. So, if I may press the point, is the notion that these poems are either "difficult" as a whole, or much encoded; even — this really stopped me — that "not one . . . could be cleared of the charge of unnecessary subterfuge." I realize that you have other poems to read, and your own to write; but this is an injurious accusation, if mistaken. I wish you would look again at, for example, Form Was the World, On the Beach at Nantucket, The Flowing World, or those

107 Memorial Verses you found to your taste. Not only are they not deeply "encoded" — they are to a high degree, direct statement with a minimum (not an absence) of allusive language. There is, however, one statement you made, with which I strongly agree, and without code, mode, or subterfuge. The poems in Midnight In the Century are not written in "the common mode." No real poems ever are, or can be, written in "the common mode" — not those of Words worth, or Whitman, or William Carlos Williams, for example, nor those encoded verses in the Spring issue of Miscellany entitled The Seven Days, nor any poems you have ever wanted to remember. Naturally, a poet must use the materials life gives him, including his native language. But if he does not somehow make it uncommon, he will not make poetry. "Somehow"? Largely out of certain obses sions, I would say, which differ from poet to poet — they reveal themselves in the reading — and which, together with his sense of form, drive him to intensify his language, and often like Hopkins and Thomas, to distort it. His language becomes, if he is a real poet, uncommon, and if it does not, he will not be expressing anything genuine either in himself or in the experience of his age. If I may interpret you in another sense, I, too, feel that an impressive aspect of contemporary poetry is its determi nation to dispense with cosmetics, hairdoes and rehearsed attitudes, and to present its subjects — all its subjects — as they really are, with only such intensification as the poet's visions, or passions, may add. This involves a purging of the language of poetry of the pretentious, the fake and the academic. It does not involve dispensing with all the resonances of language and tradition, in favor of the stripping down of language into "the common mode," which reduces so much current verse to the mere notations of anonymous sensibilities. At any rate, real events and related feelings, including love and its violations, public and private, are what Mid night In the Century is about. In intention at least, the book offers meat and drink, not codes and abstractions. Readers who turn to poetry (as you indicate you do) in search of new ideas, are likely to be disappointed. (They will find a few, at that, but these are not the heart of the 108 matter). On the other hand, readers who would like to consider one possible direction our poetry may take in the immediate future, will be interested particularly in The House of Mirrors, and may wonder how you could have reviewed the book in terms so irrelevant to its character, and to others of my poems. I hope a few of them accept the closing recommendation of your review, which I appre ciated, and look at the book for themselves. Sincerely yours, Maurice English P.S. You may be interested in another view of Midnight In the Century, which appeared in a recent literary supple ment of The Chicago Maroon. I enclose it.

In response to this, Mr. Whittemore sent to the Miscellany a short note, asking that we forward it to Mr. English. This had been typed on the letterhead of the Association of Literary Magazines of America. We forwarded it. It read:

Dear Mr. English: I don't know if the fault is yours or mine, but you mis understand me. I used the phrase "academic poetry" throughout with the qualifications that I thought I at tached to it in the first paragraph, where I said that it was a phrase some of my lesser students might apply. The word "code" I similarly attributed to them, at least as it might be used invidiously, and then went on to say that all speak ing was a form of coding, and that, as poetry codes go, yours was not, I thought, an unusually secret one. You defy me to find a code in the poem I quoted, and I simply reply that I don't believe you really jumped out of your skin or covered your eyes with ears; therefore you were speaking metaphorically or in a form of code. I am sorry that I imposed the vision of the "outraged student" upon you. I have what is perhaps a nasty habit of talking about literary criticism even as I criticize. I must, however, stick to my guns and say that what I said in the review is what I would say again. What I regret is that you seem to have construed my remarks about codes and so on as essentially uncomplimentary. Reed Whittemore 109 That Whittemore letter was undated, but I suspect it was written in the first week of April. The reasons for my thinking so are implicit in the longhand note which I wrote to Mr. English when I sent him the Whittemore letter. My note was dated April 19, 1965. It read:

Dear Mr. English: I am very sorry to have been as slow as I have about your business. I did forward your letter to Reed Whitte more as soon as it arrived, but after that a variety of matters in Washington and here stood in the way of promptness. For one thing, I've been out of circulation for a couple of weeks with what the doctor calls pneumonia, and am obviously going to take a couple of more weeks to catch up again. Anyway, with apologies, I send you finally Reed's re sponse to your letter. The main reason for the delay is that all the correspondence was funnelled through my feverish, quivering hands. Sincerely yours, Erling Larsen

From Chicago, dated 27th April '65, came a letter:

Dear Mr. Larsen: Many thanks for your note accompanying Mr. Whitte- more's letter. I appreciated your taking the trouble, with pneumonia and all; I hope recovery is quicker than your doctor thought likely. I have answered Mr. Whittemore, and as you are the editor of the Miscellany, I thought it not inappropriate to send you a copy of my reply. As you will see, I am asking that you find space to run my answer to his review, for the reason I state in both my letters. I'm sure you will not think I am presuming to tell you your job, if I say that — apart from my serious personal interest in being given a chance to state my case — I do think that publication of correspondence of this sort is an appropriate and indeed welcome part of editing. After all, we are after some kind of rapport between editors, re-

110 viewers, readers and the reviewed, are we not? My handy home medical guide says also that setting letters of this sort in print is excellent pneumonia therapy, and generally hygienic for soma and psyche alike. I will look forward to the next issue of the Miscellany. Sincerely, Maurice English

The copy that Mr. English referred to reads:

Dear Mr Whittemore: The problem, I am afraid, is not any personal misunder standing between us, but the objective fact that your re view gave an utterly distorted impression of Midnight In the Century to your readers. I say 'objective fact' because I am not relying on my own opinion, nor that of my uncles and my aunts, but on the response of disinterested readers, including some who could not be expected, a priori, to favor my interpretation of the sense and effect of your review, rather than your intention (as explained in your letter). The explanation you give of why The Day That I Stood On My Head is a coded poem does not, I'm afraid, help your case. On the contrary, it illustrates why I feel that you have, unwittingly but cripplingly, misrepresented my book. You surely did not indulge in all that discourse about 'codes' merely because I use metaphors. Your point was the use of metaphors and other figures in a deliberately ob- fuscatory way. But the expression 'jumped out of my skin' is not even a specifically poetic metaphor — it is a part of our daily idiom —and therefore a transparently clear ele ment of a poem which transparently describes an aspect of the daily life of Maurice English, Reed Whittemore, and every other self-aware person who finds his daily behavior at odds with his secret bent. It is, in other words, not coded except in the sense that all speech is a code — which is not what you meant. On the other hand, your flip reference to this verse as "perhaps a comic parable about code-making" was an ob- fuscatory one, calculated to blur whatever small meaning and illumination this little poem might otherwise offer.

ill The point (excuse my insistence) is that it is indeed mis leading for you, as you now say, to 'let some of your lesser students' consider Midnight In the Century as 'academic poetry' without you — as a teacher even more than as a re viewer — pointing out that this is a mistaken concept to apply, above all, to the longer poems in this volume, for example, The House of Mirrors, Life As Languages, 'Quand C'est Minuit dans le Siecle', Memorial Verses, The Flowing World, The Diver, and a number of others among those which give my book its particular character, good or bad — and only one of which you mentioned. You mention your 'nasty habit of talking about literary criticism' in reviewing. I agree that this puts reviewing at one further remove from the real life of literature; but I was, and am, appealing to you merely not to introduce themes which have little to do with the book under review — a book, in this particular case, which has moved habitual non-readers of poetry to state that their pleasure is in poems which speak clearly, movingly and without codes — themes which serve as a pretext for scoring points valid, if at all, in some other context. I do not need to remind you of how very difficult it is, under the best of contemporary circumstances, for a poet to find an audience. A reviewer — above all, a reviewer who is himself a poet — ought not to drop additional curtains between another poet and his audience. My letter was written in the hope that, having, however unintentionally, cut me off from whatever readers I might hope to find among your subscribers, you would let me speak for the seriousness and integrity of my poetry; above all, for its existence in a different world than that in which you seek to place it. My letter was, as it happens, approximately the same length as your review; and, if I may say so, serves one purpose on which you may congratulate yourself as an editor — that of provoking a response which (as Henry Adams said during his stint as an editor,) is one test of the existence of a real rapport between editors and writers and readers. I ask that you give my original letter space in the Carlton Miscellany. Maurice English

112 Mr. Whittemore replied:

Dear Mr. English: I really don't know what you expect of me. I am an academic person writing on a subject of some academic interest to an essentially academic audience. I describe you as an academic poet and then both praise you for being so and try to defend the notion of academicism from assaults by persons who think of academic persons narrowly and with rancor. Then the assault comes from you, and the rancor. If you expect me to recant, that is, to agree that I have misrepresented you in calling you academic, you ex pect too much; I cannot. Not only does the tone of your remarks suggest to me that the misrepresentation is yours rather than mine (I mean simply, to put it in code, that you have made a mountain of a molehill), but the blindness of your reception of my remarks about academicism leads me to think that I could not possibly argue with you about the meaning of that word. You insist upon attributing a nar row and invidious meaning of the word to me, when it clearly is the larger program of the review to combat such attributions. As for how academic your background is, or mine — this is of no relevance, though I will be glad to meet you on some other battlefield and attempt to determine which of us is the least academic in the villainous sense. As for codes, you keep denying what I explicitly said, that "there are no statements which are not codes." Perhaps the real question is not what you expect of me, but of a reviewer, any reviewer. I am sufficiently antago nized by this little episode to regret having reviewed the book at all, or, having agreed to review it, to regret having rather scrupulously avoided commenting upon a good many features of your book which I do not find congenial. Depressed as I am by the amount of unwarranted vicious- ness and general ruckus which fills contemporary reviewing pages, I have for a long time been anxious not to add my weight. Now I find someone determined to tell me I have added my weight. I have no more to say.

And Mr. English wrote on 3 May 1965:

113 Dear Mr Whittemore: Of course there is no point in my pursuing the matter further, and in fact I had no intention of doing so after my last letter. My purpose, of course, was not to convert you to my point of view, but to suggest that my case was well enough founded to merit being put before your readers. I still think so. In any event — and this is the main thing I would like to assure you of in bowing out — you are mistaken in thinking that I was moved by rancor. I protested as vigorously as I could against what I consider a misleading treatment of my book, and may have indulged in a spirit of irony along the way. You are yourself, I believe, no stranger to this mode of discourse and may concede that it is not inevitably ran corous. If in fact my letters were personally offensive in tone, as I do not believe they were, I offer you my apologies, sincerely meant. I note your regret that you bothered to review Midnight In the Century at all. I persist in regretting that you did not do so. If you had, I think that I would probably have learned something from it. Maurice English

Mr. Whittemore had written earlier that he had "no more to say." The argument was closed. But we still had to decide whether or not to print the first letter from Mr. English. We actually held an editorial conference, after which I wrote the following letter:

Dear Mr. English: I am sorry that you have not been appeased, or, to ex press myself more precisely, I should perhaps say that I am still sorry that you are still angry or annoyed with Reed's review and with the way your book of poems was handled in our columns. I am not sure we are obliged to give you the space you want, but your arguments about rapport and so on, together with my own feelings that a magazine ought in one way or another to provoke its readers to thought — even though the only one on record as being provoked in 114 any way by Reed's review is apparently yourself — convince me to give you the space even though the argument you are engaged in seems a little more private than public and not likely deeply to interest our readers. I guess what I am talking about really is some sense of fairness to you as the injured and vocally protesting poet rather than any sense of editorial urgency. We do have a couple of problems, however. The first is that, perhaps largely through my own slowness, we have no space in the immediately forthcoming issue for any of the correspondence relating to the Whittemore review. . . . The next problem is that one of editorial interest. I have talked about this with my associates and we have decided that some larger interest might be given to the whole busi ness were we to print the entire correspondence. I should therefore like to print first Wayne Booth's letter asking us to review the book and to follow this with your objection to the review, then with Reed's reply, my note to you, your note about pneumonia therapy, your response to Reed's reply and Reed's last (he says it is) word. This will make a fairly large part of the magazine, but then the original letter you ask to have printed is pretty long anyway. Be sides, not even TLS permits injured authors to complain without its giving the complained-about reviewer a chance to explain or try to explain. Please let me know if this is agreeable to you. If it is not, our inclination would be to retreat into our editorial fast ness and argue that your first letter by itself is not enough to print, not dealing with a large or public enough prob lem, and that certainly it could not be printed unless followed by at least Reed's first paragraph of response. But much better than this, we think, would be the printing of the whole series of letters. This would give our readers some sort of drama — some sort of semantic drama perhaps but still drama, a kind of blow-by-blow report of the be ginning and the growth of a literary quarrel. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely yours, Erling Larsen — The procedure I propose would of course make it neces sary for you to return my hand-written note to you and of "5 course Reed's reply to you as forwarded by me. I am sorry that you have the only copies of these. If you want them for your files, we should be happy to return them to you as soon as the printer is done with them.

Mr. English replied, and I quote now only a part of his letter, that our proposal was "quite acceptable — preferable to only publishing my first letter, for the reason you suggest." And therefore, here we print the correspondence. And when we had got this far with it all, we remembered that we had had from John Lucas, in Rome, a note about that Spring issue. Wanting to close in hope and with brightness, we asked Mr. Lucas for permission to quote him. He, too, agreed. He wrote, on 8 May i965:

I enjoyed the latest Miscellany even more than usual. Reed's longish effort holds up nicely. Witt and Fitts are right up to par. Bell rings true and Bates is great. And bully for that short poem Reed prints at the end of his English review.

116 NOTES ON SOME OF THE CONTRIBUTORS JOHN LUCAS, a frequent contributor to the Miscellany, still lives in Rome. Through his efforts it was that we obtained a photographic reproduction of the portrait used on our cover. . . . ROBLEY WILSON, JR. lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, but spent a month of last summer in Sanford, Maine. . . . MONA VAN DUYN was recently awarded the Helen Bullis Prize for Poetry by Poetry Northwest. . . . ROBERT LOWRY writes that "In 1965, Boston University established the Robert Lowry collection consisting of manuscripts, correspondence, private papers and proofs. Many of my book manuscripts and proofs are a part of the American Literature Collection at the Univer sity of Southern California." . . . CONSTANCE URDANG writes: "I've finally had a book, Charades and Celebrations. . . . I'm working now on some translations of a Polish poet (fe male), who wrote in French; and . . .I'm contemplating, with much hesitation, a novel — anyhow, a prose work." . . . AN DREW OERKE is "now working as Manager of Education Services for Look Magazine." . . . KENNETH PITCHFORD's first book of poems was published by Scribners. He is now at work on a novel. . . . FORBES HAYS, DAVID PORTER, ROBERT DIEBOLD and WAYNE CARVER teach at Carle ton College.

SWORN OWNERSHIP AND CIRCULATION STATEMENT a. The editor of The Carleton Miscellany is Erling Larsen, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. The managing editor is Carolyn Soule, of the same address. b. The Carleton Miscellany is entirely owned by Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. c. There are no bondholders, mortgagees or other security holders. d. The average number of copies of each issue of the publication sold and dis tributed through the mail or otherwise distributed to paid subscribers during the preceding twelve months was 815. I certify that the above statements made by me are correct and complete. Witnessed by: Stanley I. Minde Erling Larsen Editor, The Carleton Miscellany 117 BOOKS REVIEWED Dumitriu, Petru. Incognito (Wayne Carver) I, 100 English, Maurice. Midnight in the Century (Reed Whitte more) II, 105 Feinman, Alvin. Preambles (Robley Wilson, Jr.) II, 108 Gait, John. The Common Ground (Robley Wilson, Jr.) ... .II, 108 Ginsburg, Mirra (Ed.) The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Sat ires (Owen Jenkins) Ill, 123 Hickey, Neil and Edwin, Ed. Adam Clayton Powell and the Politics of Race (Forbes Hays) IV, 69 Hochhuth, Rolf. The Deputy (Robert Tracy) I, 105 Lermontov, Mikhail. A Lermontov Reader (Wayne Carver).IV, 96 Pavese, Cesare. Dialogues with Leuco (David Porter) IV, 78 Pratolini, Vasco. Bruno Santini (Wayne Carver) IV, 96 Rutsala, Vern. The Window (Robley Wilson, Jr.) II, 108 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Words (Donald Schier) II, 101 Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard. The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Robert Diebold) IV, 84 Turbayne, Colin Murray. The Myth of Metaphor (Gary Iseminger) II, 94 Warren, Robert Penn. Who Speaks for the Negro? (Forbes Hays) IV, 69 Mississippi Black Paper (Forbes Hays) IV, 69

INDEX TO VOLUME VI, 1965 (first number is issue; second is page) Aaron, Daniel, essay, "The Treachery of Recollection" Ill, 3 Aaron, Jonathan, poems Ill, 70 Algren, Nelson, letter I, 104 Allen, Dorothy, 1930's Symposium I, 9 Ames, Russell, 1930's Symposium I, 12 Appel, Benjamin, 1930's Symposium I, 19 Bates, Scott, poem II, 92 Bell, Marvin, poems II, 84 Booth, Wayne, Department of American Ill, 116 Booth, Wayne, letter IV, 107 Bordwell, Harold, essay, "The Virgin in the Woods" IV, 36 Botkin, B. A., 1930's Symposium I, 26 Bradford, Sax, poem I, 2 Brand, Peter, story, "Bobby Shaftoe" I, 90 Bruell, Edwin Georgrichard, 1930's Symposium I, 32 Cardwell, Guy A., story, "Starling's Nest" Ill, 86 Carver, Wayne, review I, 100 Carver, Wayne, review IV, % Conroy, Jack, 1930's Symposium I, 36 Cowley, Malcolm, 1930's Symposium I, 40 Dejong, David Cornel, 1930's Symposium I, 50 Dejong, David Cornel, poems Ill, 110 Derleth, August, 1930's Symposium I, 53 Elliott, George P., letter II, 117 English, Maurice, letters IV, 107

118 Evans, Paul "Doc," 1930's Symposium I, 57 Farrell, James T., poem I, 25 Fitts, Dudley, poem II, 88 Frost, Richard, poems II, 46 Galler, David, poems II, 42 Gliner, Robert, poems II, 87 Hagglund, Ben, 1930's Symposium I, 62 Hays, Forbes, review IV, 69 Hernton, Calvin C, poem I, 74 Hoffman, Daniel, poem II, 45 Hoffman, Daniel, poem IV, 54 Ignatow, David, 1930's Symposium I, 69 Ignatow, David, essay, "L. C. Woodman: A Personal Memory" Ill, 47 Iseminger, Gary, review II, 94 Jenkins, Owen, review Ill, 123 Kroll, Ernest, poem IV, 31 Larsen, Erling, letters IV, 107 Lechlitner, Ruth, 1930's Symposium I, 77 Licht, Fred, story, "A Semblance of Authenticity" II, 54 Lieberman, Laurence, poem IV, 50 Loeb, Harold, essay, "Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: A Critical Reminiscence" II, 27 Lowry, Robert, story, "The Kiss" IV, 58 Lucas, John, poems II, 52 Lucas, John, poem Ill, 85 Lucas, John, poems IV, 2 Montgomery, Marion, poem II, 91 Oerke, Andrew, poems IV, 64 Pauker, John, poems IV, 32 Petrie, Paul, poems II, 50 Piercy, Marge, poems Ill, 108 Pitchford, Kenneth, poem IV, 67 Polite, Frank, poem Ill, 115 Pomeroy, Ralph S., poem IV, 35 Porter, David, review IV, 78 Rood, John, 1930's Symposium I, 82 Rubin, Larry, poems IV, 61 Sandy, Stephen, poem II, 42 Schier, Donald, review II, 101 Spacks, Barry, poems IV, 52 Spingarn, Lawrence P., poem II, 90 Spingarn, Lawrence P., poem IV, 30 Sward, Robert, poems II, 80 Touster, Irwin, drawings Ill, 73 Touster, Saul, poems Ill, 73 Tracy, Robert, review I, 105 Traver, Robert, 1930's Symposium I, 87 Turco, Lewis, story, "Pleasant Dell" II, 72 Urdang, Constance, poems IV, 62 Van Duyn, Mona, poem IV, 55 Wagner, Geoffrey, essay, "Ford Madox Ford: The Honest Edwardian" . . II, 12 Ward, John William, essay, "Lindbergh, Dos Passos and History" Ill, 20 Wheatcroft, John, poem Ill, 113 Whitbread, Thomas, poems Ill, 114 Whittemore, Reed, poem II, 3 Whittemore, Reed, review II, 105 Whittemore, Reed, letters IV, 107 Wilson, Robley, Jr., poem I, 114 Wilson, Robley, Jr., review II, 108 Wilson, Robley, Jr., story, "Others" IV, 4 Witt, Harold, poems II, 48 Young, David P., poem Ill, 72

119 SERIES

Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period ERwTN R. GOODENOUGH Volume 12: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS. The sum mation, which may also be read as an introduction, to Pro fessor Goodenough's monumental and penetrating study of Hellenistic influences on early Judaism. $6.00 Birds ST.-JOHN PERSE The French text, with a translation by Robert Fitzgerald. With four illustrations in color by Georges Braque. Initially inspired by a series of Braque color etchings, Birds is the Nobel Prize-winning poet's most recent work. $10.00 Aurora Comsurgems A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy. Edited, with a Commentary, by Marie-Louise von Franz. Translated by R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Glover. A medieval treatise of psychological signifi cance as interpreted by C. G. Jung. Originally published as part 3 of his Mysterium Coniunctionis. $6.50

Please order from your bookstore. Published by Bol lingen Foundation. Distributed by Pantheon Books, 22 East 51st St., New York City 10022. For detailed catalogue, write to Bollingen Series, 140 East 62nd St., New York City 10021.

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