Scholastic. Special Issue March I, 1974

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~; , Scholastic. Special Issue March I, 1974

Bruce Jay Friedman Sean Lucy Norman Mailer Francis J. O'Malley Notre Ernest Sandeen . Robert Siabey '. Dame T.C. Treanor' Diane Wakoski' Review Ronald Weber Thomas Werge .

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Francis J. O'Malley At Christmas 4 Norman Mailer (with David Young) An Interview 5 Sean Lucy Incident on a Rail Journey 10 (with Sean O'Riada) Liam O'Reilly II Late Sleep /I Ronald ~eber Seeing Signs 12 Bruce Jay Friedman An Interview 16 Thomas Werge Solzhenitsyn: His Book and 19 His Readers To the Reader: Diane Wakoski To Harry Lewis ... 22 Literature, from its earliest moments, Robert Siabey John Cheever: The Swimming 23 was intended to entertain, to distract,. and and His Readers to speak truly of the human conditIon .. Re Ernest Sandeen Posture 28 cently, much· of literature. has become Invitation 28 Undone, Doing 28 subject only to scholarship: Our purpose is T. C. Treanor Images and Shadows of 29 not to ignore the scholarship, but rather to Divine Things present literature and its scholarship to a .{ Sean Lucy Visitation 39 general audience. We wish to thank the Scholastic and its editor Kerry McNamara for. giving us this issue to give birth to the Editor-in-Chief, Francis J. O'Malley Notre Dame Review. Student Editors, Joseph Runde and John Wenke -The Editorial Board Editorial Board Carvel Collins Katherine Sullivan Edward Vasta Ernest Sandeen Richard Sullivan Ronald Weber

Art Director, James Purvis Layout & Cover Design, Nan' Smith

Acknowledgements Kip Anderson Thomas Furlong. John J. Niederman T. J. Clinton Professor John Garvick James F. Pauer Professor Donald Costello James Gresser John Phelan Janet Cullen . Karen Kolber Patrick Roach Jean deSmet. . Mark Luppino Professor'J~mes Robinson . Professor Joseph Evans Eileen MacKrell George Stratton Ray Funk . Mrs. Connie Maher Gary Zebrun John Murphy

Second-class postage paid at Notre Dame, Ind. 46556. The magazine is represented for national advertising by National Educational Advertising Services, 360 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017. Published fortnightly during the school year except during vacation and examination periods, the SCHOLASTIC' Scholastic is printed. at Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Ind. 46556. The subscription rate is $5.00 Volume 115, No. 10 March I, 1974 a year and back numbers are available from the SCHOLASTIC. Please address all manu Notre Dame, Indiana scripts to the SCHOLASTIC, Notre Dame, Ind. 46556. All unsolicited material becomes the Kerry S. McNamara, Editor property of the SCHOLASTIg'., .. ' copyright © 1974 Scholastic Vall rights reserved / none of the contents may be re produced without permission

L 'r..------Notre Dame Review

Art Director, James Purvis Layout & Cover Design, Nan' Smith

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A Section of An Interview Between Norman ,Mailer and, David Young .Francis J. O'Malley

David Young is a painter who lives in New York gathering. It's· a Saturday night party and it's City)'and is a long time friend of Norman Mailer.· profoundly religious and a: tremendous amount of leg pulling being put on as music, dancirig, this Interviewer: Well perhaps the best thing we can do eroticism, this healing-it's an all around bag. And as artists now is to persist in making that notion it's the onfyexperience I ever had directly that I available. For example, a lot of the movements, would ever consider profoundly religious and ecological, et cetera, are spreading and are, I think, extremely human. It made me think back on the positive, but there seems to be alack of a coherent nearest thing we had to it years ago in places like At Christmas .. vision going on when you think of all the different the Land Ho Bar in Orleans. And it seems to me ' groups which are trying to make the different . that what's happening here now, with God is Dead changes. I think that lack of vision is fundamentally arid all such stuff is that there has been an a religious one,' I mean the lack of the religious incredible decline, co-incidentally or not, an Let the Christbrand burst! . notion. The whole notion of God has become incredible decline in feeling itself.' And I say that in suspect; I think partly because so many of the terms of ordinary people-to-people contact, not in a: Let the Christbrand blazon! . church systems have degenerated into bureaucra broad sense. But that's what I've noticed in, for Dartle whiteliunder the hearth-fire, cies. The Catholic church is very guilty of that, example, bars, which used to be I can remember Unwind the wind, turn the thunderer, even though they do it with great flourish and 10 years ago much warmer places to be, much pomp, et cetera: . . , . more fun, much more,social intercourse going on And never, never thinning, ' 'and a lot of gaiety, and there would be fights and Forfend fear.-, , Mailer: Except that the Catholic church has these all of that sort of thing too but more vitality. Seems Flare up smartly; fix, flex, bless, inspire, enterprising ministries. The Berrigan brothers with to me now. '. . . " Instar the time, sear the sorcerer, " . their enormous influence on young Catholics. While there are 'many more radicals among the . Mailer: Yes: Ten years ago, particularly in New And never, never sparing, Protestants, such intensity of thinking among York, one could feel we were moving toward an Save all year. .. ' devout Catholics has to be impressive because the exciting world because we knew more about a good Let the Christbrandburst! Church is so structured. Since Catholicism is also life than we saw 'in our society. And we were closer to magic thahProtestantism, profound beginning to have a glimmer of the possible success . Let the Christbrand blazon! changes'in thepower':structure of the Catholic of that life. I think the magic of the Kennedy years church 'are exciting. Given the· Church's extraor was precisely the feeling that, yes, we're getting dinary ability to pass down all the rapids of history; into an interesting world where the government is it may end by leading people out of ecological going to be not that far away from us. We're going disasters: '. ' to be working in the same direction. We used to use , .:> words like expanding, and all too many spoke Interviewer: Of course the worst thing about, (badly) of getting into human possibilities; or enjoying the richness of an interesting rehitionship. ", Protestantism is it eliminated magic. ' So on. I think we were getting rid of that old dead' Mailer: Yes, it eliminated magic. traditional Fifties baggage, absolutely dead. What's happened of course is that as this liberation'began . Interviewer: Church in the 15th Century was a to develop, the drug revolution came along and pretty lively place. It was a place where everybody completely accelerated us out of any natural orbit I, connected. All deals were made all kinds of-it was between man and his government, and flung us into a big',catch-all. And there was the center of life and some extraordinary place where nothing is related I celebration involve a: Iri present day times you find to anything else any more. Not by measure, morals, I that in voodoo in Haiti-no:t voodoo in any of the" or proportion. So nobody has the faintest mU,mbojumbo, but a voodoo sessiqn. It's a confidence today that they contain knowledge, or at 4 I NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974 5 least nobody I know has the confidence they have the first thing we say to ourselves, is "My God, Mailer: I don't know if it's possible. The gulf is in studied, with Lamas, and how the Lamas would knowledge which is necessarily going to improve should we send this out? Wouldn't it be better to the tap root. For instance, we can't even begin to beat the students with bamboo rods if they weren't the world. Of course, there are any number of avoid polluting the intellectual waters?" It's as if teachOarithmetic until we are able to abstract the learning the lesson. I was pondering that, and it revolutionaries, black revolutionaries and women we've become part of the plague. And yet for years' object we're looking at. That means we have to seemed to me, of course! that was indispensable. revolutionaries who feel they have an experience I've been writing that a plague is coming. Of course divorce ourself from any intimate notion of its. The modern pedagogue would exclaim, "What an which will prevail. But there's something in the it's more than a metaphor, but still the metaphor presence. The reason many sensitive children awful way to instruct; these people are learning in character and style of their arguments which I use is cancer. Cancer is the disease which (black children particularly!) have a terrible time fear." And the students will of course be in fear, doesn't give us this confidence. They're so harsh transcends other diseases. I've even argued that with numbers or arithmetic is because they're will have a certain, let's say, ugly incentive to learn and angry. The tone is nihilistic rather than other diseases are solutions. When you get into a giving up a vital faculty of perception about the as well as a fine incentive. That may come closer to revolutionary. Still we listen. For nihilism is chronic psychic imbalance, when the ways in which time they come to say that three apples and four matching the dualities of the student's nature. speaking to the fundamental suspicion that there's your body and mind are collaborating are warped apples make seven apples, and three horses and Perhaps beating with rods is also done for the too much human material on earth. It may still be and out of tune, then the local disease comes along" four horses make seven horses. What they have instructors because, well these instructors are· a valid revolution but for reasons other than the literally as your friend. It stops you. It makes you. had to do is alienate themselves from the presence trying to instruct students in spiritual matters of revolutionaries are arguing. The future real face your own reality. - of the apples and the horses. Which is to say, ignore the utmost delicacy. There's nothing will destroy function of such a revolution might be that it objects that are communicatirig to them. Seven everybody's delicacy more than deadening the cleaned, a lot of people out of there. Too many horses in a meadow speak of many more vital teacher. A teacher who's determined to be kind and people around, too many products, too much Interviewer: I think you're right. matters to a child than numbers. tolerant and humane to his pupils at any cost to pollution. In fact we reach a real cure for some of So if the faculty of measure in science is a . himself, while certainly a lady or a gentleman, is our ecological diseases by wiping out nine tenths of l\lailer: Of course, what's happened with antibiotics species of communIcation, existential communica not necessarily refining his own qualities. . the people on earth. It may be easier for the earth and with the technology of medicine, is that we ' tion/had to be destroyed in order for scientific to rid itself of nuclear wast'es from an absolutely keep evading such a confrontation. I've always felt measure to begin. Natural communication destroyed Interviewer: By not communicating, in effect. disastrous war than for it to go on suffering in our the main reason cancer keeps increasing in spite of to proyide mechanical communication.· The false over-labored, poisonous system of economy and all the money, and research, that goes into it, is assumption that's been made by society was that Mailer: By not communicating the rage a pupil I technology. So ,one of the things one begins to we've gotten so much better at destroying the old ' mechanical communication (which is, by now, arouses in him at an inability to learn. It may be a question in many revolutionary movements is diseases that we keep displacing measles and '. '. ubiquitously, electronic communication) was an '. purification rite for the teacher to whip those . whether their collectively unconscious intent is not 'scarlet fever into unlocatable viruses. Fimilly we addition to all other forms of communication. It's students. Think of the way in which an artist turns to rid the earth of excess. That's one reason we're get to that one disease we can't displace, because, not. It's at the expense of other forms. The ability on himself or turns on others when they fail to respectful of these movements. It may also be why by God, it's there. Cancer. The body has revolted to measure comes out of the fact that we have embody his vision, or how most theatrical stage one doesn't feel any great urge to cry out, "They're against the mind; the body is now developing its destroyed those faculties which once gave a more directors or movie directors are sadistic to their eviL" We've lost entirely the notion that we have . own c~lls, body cells free from mental organization, acute sense of measure. To primitive man, it wasn't artists when they fail to deliver the work. Perhaps some idea of who the good and evil are, or who going off into some biological future which nobody of first importance' whether there were seven the master is entitled to.whip his students. At least even the funny people are. At least in the Fifties we can begin to comprehend. Well I think you can say: horses or five horses in a field. More important was let the question remain open. I don't think we're used to have a feeling that Eisenhower was funny one of the comparable things happening socially is . the communication that he got off that tribe of going to be able to teach children.a great many and there was warmth in the underground, that all sorts of metastasis in the body social, all sorts of horses. That herd. Five horses in a powerful and things so long as we have notions of letting them much we knew. A lot of America didn't know it, but ideas which would have been considered straight dangerous mood are' obviously much more advance at their own rate in a gentle atmosphere, they were going to find out. out nihilism,a hundred years ago ( of the sort that meaningful to him than seven horses placidly advance in the confidence that whatever expression Dostoevski was always attacking with such eating. Again, the mood. That was the only kind of issues from them is going to be a happy expression, Interviewer: All of the black humor came out of accurate paranoid fire)"are now viewed with ' measure to primitive man and it was a true and that all expressions are equal. Perhaps the that period, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and those, dignity. Is it because of this feeling that the world measure 1 would think because it was a non most intense expression of education is to go guys. The violence of those various revolutionary as we know it has to be destroyed? Has to because psychotic evaluation of the field of environment through the experience of being afraid of ateacher, groups now would indicate to me an eruption of we've lost the way, and the only route to find that before him. Number cleaves the brain and' dominated by a teacher, fascinated by a teacher, despair. way again-so goes the unspoken argument of the encourages psychosis. If we are to talk of· teaching and yet be able to transcend that teacher . . . nihilist-is to see what survives? ' children, the present permissive notions of ..' ultimately. It may be the only true education is " Mailer: Well, we feel that we've lost any idea that instruction by which children learn have something, through transcendence. Parents can bring every we might be of use to the world, that our ideas are InterViewer: Don't'you. feel that there is ~I1e thing I think,fatal in them. Fatally dull. For example, " good to their children, can try to teach them in the good, and the real problem is to get our ideas out to we can do now, I mean improve education for" .. you' were talking to me earlier, while we were not tenderest way. But it isn't necessarily incumbent on people. I mean now, whenever we have a new idea, . children? That's a way of seeing what survives~ recording, about some friend of yours who had the educational system to also present children with

6 NOTRE DAME REVIEW. MARcirl;1974 . 7 least nobody I know has the confidence they have the first thing we say to ourselves, is "My God, Mailer: I don't know if it's possible. The gulf is in studied, with Lamas, and how the Lamas would knowledge which is necessarily going to improve should we send this out? Wouldn't it be better to the tap root. For instance, we can't even begin to beat the students with bamboo rods if they weren't the world. Of course, there are any number of avoid polluting the intellectual waters?" It's as if teachOarithmetic until we are able to abstract the learning the lesson. I was pondering that, and it revolutionaries, black revolutionaries and women we've become part of the plague. And yet for years' object we're looking at. That means we have to seemed to me, of course! that was indispensable. revolutionaries who feel they have an experience I've been writing that a plague is coming. Of course divorce ourself from any intimate notion of its. The modern pedagogue would exclaim, "What an which will prevail. But there's something in the it's more than a metaphor, but still the metaphor presence. The reason many sensitive children awful way to instruct; these people are learning in character and style of their arguments which I use is cancer. Cancer is the disease which (black children particularly!) have a terrible time fear." And the students will of course be in fear, doesn't give us this confidence. They're so harsh transcends other diseases. I've even argued that with numbers or arithmetic is because they're will have a certain, let's say, ugly incentive to learn and angry. The tone is nihilistic rather than other diseases are solutions. When you get into a giving up a vital faculty of perception about the as well as a fine incentive. That may come closer to revolutionary. Still we listen. For nihilism is chronic psychic imbalance, when the ways in which time they come to say that three apples and four matching the dualities of the student's nature. speaking to the fundamental suspicion that there's your body and mind are collaborating are warped apples make seven apples, and three horses and Perhaps beating with rods is also done for the too much human material on earth. It may still be and out of tune, then the local disease comes along" four horses make seven horses. What they have instructors because, well these instructors are· a valid revolution but for reasons other than the literally as your friend. It stops you. It makes you. had to do is alienate themselves from the presence trying to instruct students in spiritual matters of revolutionaries are arguing. The future real face your own reality. - of the apples and the horses. Which is to say, ignore the utmost delicacy. There's nothing will destroy function of such a revolution might be that it objects that are communicatirig to them. Seven everybody's delicacy more than deadening the cleaned, a lot of people out of there. Too many horses in a meadow speak of many more vital teacher. A teacher who's determined to be kind and people around, too many products, too much Interviewer: I think you're right. matters to a child than numbers. tolerant and humane to his pupils at any cost to pollution. In fact we reach a real cure for some of So if the faculty of measure in science is a . himself, while certainly a lady or a gentleman, is our ecological diseases by wiping out nine tenths of l\lailer: Of course, what's happened with antibiotics species of communIcation, existential communica not necessarily refining his own qualities. . the people on earth. It may be easier for the earth and with the technology of medicine, is that we ' tion/had to be destroyed in order for scientific to rid itself of nuclear wast'es from an absolutely keep evading such a confrontation. I've always felt measure to begin. Natural communication destroyed Interviewer: By not communicating, in effect. disastrous war than for it to go on suffering in our the main reason cancer keeps increasing in spite of to proyide mechanical communication.· The false over-labored, poisonous system of economy and all the money, and research, that goes into it, is assumption that's been made by society was that Mailer: By not communicating the rage a pupil I technology. So ,one of the things one begins to we've gotten so much better at destroying the old ' mechanical communication (which is, by now, arouses in him at an inability to learn. It may be a question in many revolutionary movements is diseases that we keep displacing measles and '. '. ubiquitously, electronic communication) was an '. purification rite for the teacher to whip those . whether their collectively unconscious intent is not 'scarlet fever into unlocatable viruses. Fimilly we addition to all other forms of communication. It's students. Think of the way in which an artist turns to rid the earth of excess. That's one reason we're get to that one disease we can't displace, because, not. It's at the expense of other forms. The ability on himself or turns on others when they fail to respectful of these movements. It may also be why by God, it's there. Cancer. The body has revolted to measure comes out of the fact that we have embody his vision, or how most theatrical stage one doesn't feel any great urge to cry out, "They're against the mind; the body is now developing its destroyed those faculties which once gave a more directors or movie directors are sadistic to their eviL" We've lost entirely the notion that we have . own c~lls, body cells free from mental organization, acute sense of measure. To primitive man, it wasn't artists when they fail to deliver the work. Perhaps some idea of who the good and evil are, or who going off into some biological future which nobody of first importance' whether there were seven the master is entitled to.whip his students. At least even the funny people are. At least in the Fifties we can begin to comprehend. Well I think you can say: horses or five horses in a field. More important was let the question remain open. I don't think we're used to have a feeling that Eisenhower was funny one of the comparable things happening socially is . the communication that he got off that tribe of going to be able to teach children.a great many and there was warmth in the underground, that all sorts of metastasis in the body social, all sorts of horses. That herd. Five horses in a powerful and things so long as we have notions of letting them much we knew. A lot of America didn't know it, but ideas which would have been considered straight dangerous mood are' obviously much more advance at their own rate in a gentle atmosphere, they were going to find out. out nihilism,a hundred years ago ( of the sort that meaningful to him than seven horses placidly advance in the confidence that whatever expression Dostoevski was always attacking with such eating. Again, the mood. That was the only kind of issues from them is going to be a happy expression, Interviewer: All of the black humor came out of accurate paranoid fire)"are now viewed with ' measure to primitive man and it was a true and that all expressions are equal. Perhaps the that period, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and those, dignity. Is it because of this feeling that the world measure 1 would think because it was a non most intense expression of education is to go guys. The violence of those various revolutionary as we know it has to be destroyed? Has to because psychotic evaluation of the field of environment through the experience of being afraid of ateacher, groups now would indicate to me an eruption of we've lost the way, and the only route to find that before him. Number cleaves the brain and' dominated by a teacher, fascinated by a teacher, despair. way again-so goes the unspoken argument of the encourages psychosis. If we are to talk of· teaching and yet be able to transcend that teacher . . . nihilist-is to see what survives? ' children, the present permissive notions of ..' ultimately. It may be the only true education is " Mailer: Well, we feel that we've lost any idea that instruction by which children learn have something, through transcendence. Parents can bring every we might be of use to the world, that our ideas are InterViewer: Don't'you. feel that there is ~I1e thing I think,fatal in them. Fatally dull. For example, " good to their children, can try to teach them in the good, and the real problem is to get our ideas out to we can do now, I mean improve education for" .. you' were talking to me earlier, while we were not tenderest way. But it isn't necessarily incumbent on people. I mean now, whenever we have a new idea, . children? That's a way of seeing what survives~ recording, about some friend of yours who had the educational system to also present children with

6 NOTRE DAME REVIEW. MARcirl;1974 . 7 ..

tenderness, because to bring up a child in an hostility toward any idea that's new because of the to call them, would have come into existence only Interviewer: Because they were creating a kindred atmosphere of vastly greater geniality than exists fact that he, poor ribbon clerk or hard hat, has had by people forging them, choosing to create them out sense and thereby an enthusiasm? Perhaps the in the world is a dubious venture. You wouldn't no chance whatsoever to test out his own ideas; of hard work. So it would have been a pioneer beginnings of a spell? send armies into battle without having given them I mean, the closest an ordinary. man can come to endeavor in a highly developed urban environment. rigorous training. I think the direction for future • such verification is if he gambles, which is one To the extent people didn't do it, to the extent that Mailer: Well just suppose for example that you education may be for the disagreeable aspects of .. reason for a passion for gambling. If you think a people were apathetic, New York would just have have a community which decided that police were school to emerge more than they do today. Let kids team is better than another, the only way you're changed over from being a city to being a state and too expensive, and they wanted to have their own show what it is to wrestle with a closed system. To likely to remember your perception is if you win. or would still be administered from the top. In other voluntary police system. They had nothing terribly have that closed system killing things in them lose money that day. Well I think if we could get to words, as groups of people came together and valuable to protect in the area. But they wanted literally, so that they have to fight back, develop a point where people could gamble on the kind of decided that they wanted something for themselves, security out on the streets. So they had their own powers of adaptation to cope with a repressive and society they think might work, I think we might wanted a society in which they could live within a, volunteer-their own vigilante system, if you will. difficult system. In compensation, let's have other begin to see some way of opening new possibilities. larger society, so we would have relinquished power Suppose what happens is these guys discover they parts of the educational system freer than today. For example, why can't people who think their / to them. But it WOUldn't automatically have been have to put in one night a week working as a cop We need a sense of opposites. I don't trust any children should be brought up strictly have that conferred upon them. after work. They go out and they're scared stiff and concept of education which assumes there is a way right in their schools just as people who want a they work, and they come back, and they're feeling to teach children better than all other ways. permissive system of education should be able to Interviewer: In other words you would set a lot pretty good. Let us say that night their sex with create their schools froni .thebottom up. People of forces in motion presently stalemated and their wife is a little better. Because the guy feels a who believe that policing city streets is a voluntary stagnant. little closer to a western range rider. Now that Interviewer: I think children haveto be taught to • activity ought to be entitled to live in a particular might begin to illumine a community. Maybe you be agile, to be able to keep their wits, and learn to community where they can do that, where they Mailer: Forces now in statis would have been able can measure a good society by the number of sweet preserve that center of their being, allow it to each serve a certain number of hours. a week as to crystallize. Black people by the way often loved fucks that take place on a given night. Science ' flourish. The education of our future is possibly the policemen on a voluntary basis; Other people who our idea. "Give us the power. We'll show you what wants to measure society, do it that way. It's as one thing that is going to allow a future to be. think that a slight schizophrenic element to modern we can do." I heard that over and over again. Of good a measure as money. Of course you could also life is healthy, and they don't want to see the dirty course the big argument liberals always advanced argue that a lot of these vigilantes might go in for , Mailer: I havea different notion about a viable work, could hire the best or the' cheapest police, freaky or corrupt activity. At least a professional future. I repeat: I think we've lost the way.:I against us was that we'll just have black ghettos force that they want, or even the worst gang of again. Well, we wouldn't be a white authority cop, corrupt as he may be, has his professional suspect we're only going to find out what works by bullies they want. If they prevail where societies' setting up the black ghettos. Black people would be standards, no matter how tarnished they have allowing more variety to the notion of society than founded upon more idealistic impulses don't work, become. And you say what is the answer-I say I , any previous civilization has even begun to choosing to have territories in that city which were that's -interesting too. At least we'll know ,that theirs, where they would run things their way. don't knows the answer. I'm not going to sit here conceive. much. Because we don't know anything now. . -, When it was pointed out that of course there would , and claim vigilante cops are going to be better than , .. Interviewer: A hundred.differentlife styles. be white areas which would make it very hard for a professional cops. I don't know. It may be that it Interviewer: In other words; allow more possibili black man to enter, they would laugh. Because, won't work and people will find they have to hire ties ... , they would say, we don't get onto that turf anyway. ,professionals again. If it does however work, what Mailer: Yes,. but not embodied insects and clans . - , . and groups and secret societies. Rather; have open Of course there would be probably a great majority we will have learned will be incomparable. And if it Mailer: It's not a matter of allowing it. You know,' in the, city to sit on the sidelines and say, "'Hey, doesn't, the police, at least, will be honored with a societies founded on other notions thanthe political one of the notions we could never get across in this· and the economic. That was the idea with which look, I work hard all day. When I come home at bit more value. . mayorality campaign iS,that if we had everwon, it night I don't want to get in\1olved in local . Breslin and I were working when I ran for mayor in isn't as if we then would have sat down with twenty the Democratic primary. The only way New York government. Give me an apartment, a nice big brain-trusters and parceled up New York, here a anonymous building; let me do what I want my own Interviewer: It would also force people a little more could begin to save itself;we argued, was to let little plot for such an idea and this nice terrain for people have a little power over their immediate way." And they would. These crystallizations into, into their own resources. '... that cause. New York would have become, in the, self-elected power would possibly occur very slowly environment. Indeed that's the only way you ever· notion we had, the 51st state-at that point various in the beginning. If the notion worked. It would ; 'l\lailer: Of course, that can not only be healthy but learn. I think one reason why artists sometimes live groups of people might have chosen to incorporate to an old age and are rather. nice looking old men is grow only if people began to believe that 'these killing. People who have been living a lethargic life themselves as hamlets, towns, sees, or compounds., societies forced by mean and/or women having one for too long can be wrecked by becoming too because they are able to try an idea and see the But the peoplein these places would have had to result of it. A man who doesn't have the life of an collective notion on which they could agree, or energetic. That's why apathetic people sometimes come together and 'deCide :what was the common _ even just one collective compromise on which they cling to apathy \yith the last passion left in them. artist lives in this---..:.it seems to me':""-almost . denominator for their enclave. These particular.. unutterable anguish, in an almost implacable could agree, were working more interestingly than They hate the whole idea that you want to make towns, hamlets, principalities, whatever,you want a lot of anonymous societies. them run in the street.

8 NOTRE DAME REVIEW I MARCH 1, 1974' '9 ,[ t4;" . ..

8 NOTRE DAME REVIEW I MARCH 1, 1974' '9 ,[ t4;" . Sean lucy Uam O'Reilly

You remember that day then With the streets full of horsemen Of priests and of friars On the way to my wedding; The fiddle at the table, And the harp's stimulation, And a threesome of fair women To bring my love to his bed. ;~~ , Awidow and a virgin Incident on a Rail Journey I am left still so young, And go say to my people That my treasure was drowned; Had I been in the boat then He lay in straw and smell And my two hands on the sheet Take my word, Mrs. O'Reilly, late. Sleep Stretched on his side ~ One eye to a crack in the thundering cattle-truck, I'd have cured all your grief. To see the world again before he died ..

Around him his companions in the purge Lying at random on a wide bed, . Sighed, cursed, prayed and cried In a late morning, . In desolation~ clouds of misery, In a pink room, Crowds of fear with stiff eyes wide. His back is coiled in loops of ease, His hands are slack, But he watched blue plains under a milky moon· His feet are stone. Swing far through ripples of posts, - Distant lights gentle as moist stars All a warm log he lies in folds, And lines of leafy trees marching like cloudy ghosts. And still the fallow of his brain Lies snoozy in a dozy swoon, .. "Content," he thought, "it is as still as love. His sleep is sweet with lazy sighs Pain is a pilgrim. Silence a waiting friend. His eyes are darkly down as wells, Content. Even my pity must be quiet. His ears are hum with busy far, I will be quiet now in this until the end." His nose is soft with morning air, His feel is peace where the sheetswells. And so it was. And in that grace he later died, "' Comforting many in the slaughterplace. . Incredibly, deep in his dark Salute him armies, His action loaded like a gun He. held on to peace. To rouse him where he lies, So like a tiger itwill come - Lying in straw, And raise him in three minutes time With loving eye, And with these feet walk on the sun. Watching through shaking boards; And with these hands pull down the- skies. To see the world again before he came to die.

10 . NOTRE DAME REVIEW. MARCH 1, 1974 11 Sean lucy Uam O'Reilly

10 . NOTRE DAME REVIEW. MARCH 1, 1974 11 -,

he, should go over to the nuns, extend greetings. Depressing idea. Maybe the hint of a bad sign Seeing" Signs For their part they don't seem inclined to move as well. The articles and the book are behind him;

from comfortable positions. Propped on their el (LordJ grant that they are!) To show. past work bows, sharing a blanket. Smiling, waving, but to Miles Letterman would mean haulmg out all content to stay where they are. his foolish mistakes, his blindness ... hauling it "Hello over there!" he calls out, and lowers out for a stranger and revealing himself for w~at Ronald Weber his chin to his folded arms, able from there to he has been, fraud, deceiver, hollowing-soundmg see the nuns through a corner of his sunglasses. gong. His germinating hope would never with- They must have come to the beach while he was stand the shock. ',. dozing. Have they been watching him? Their , Brother Worden rouses himself, makes for the A modest knocking at first, then a powerful He checks the campus map to get his bear greeting seemed spontaneous, as if they just dis water. Unflattering trunks or not, bad head or rap. He thinks at once: Kittleson. He looks at his ings, sets out for the lake, wa!kin!? slowly to av?id covered', him. He hopes so. Unsettling to think not, he's getting baked by. the sun. The sand watch and though the light in the room is bril jarring movements. The day IS brIght, warm, hIgh they might have observed him for some time, burns his feet as he hurries across it. He prefers liant, golden, moments pass before he decodes the sun in a cloudless sky; sprinklers arch through the sprawled in the sand, badly hung over. to test the water with' a foot but instead, con message: six forty-five. air the spray violet through his new glasses; birds On the other hand, how about them? He scious of the nuns behind him, marches boldly in, Again the solid banging at the door and he sing, nuns pass, lovely smiles for him, even a ~ord didn't keep track but the nuns drank nearly as dives through the green surface; thinks: Kittleson, the fat fairy, is on his way to now and then; tacked to a tree a cardboard sIgn: much as he did-and it wasri't likely (is it?) they * * * Mass. I'm not up to it-neither he nor Mass. He Coffee Hour Every Afternoon-Come Meet Your were more used to it" than he. Brother Worden "How is it, Leoriard?" remains quiet, motionless, fearing the creaking of Fellow Man. But to all, though moved, he gives glances across the' sand for hangover signs" in It takes him a moment, standing at the bed springs, imagining Kittleson outside the door, scant consideration. Not up to it. Can't muster a stead is struck by the fine figures of th~ nuns. How water's edge, to locate the nuns in the carpeting dressed in jogging clothes, heaving for breath, response, to beauty or anythirig. Badly in need -of lovely! Sister' Grace wears a two-piece bathing of ,sunbathers. The beach is crowded. Radios e~itting oily sweat. the serenity of the beach,-a broiling sun to wring suit, a bikini nearly; a bit plump-nothing seri play, the odor of sun-tan lotion laces· the hot air When the knocking ends he turns cautiously out the remains of several martinis. He may be on ous, hardly a major defect-yet a striking woman. . .. he marvels at the beauty of it. Bodies open. to on his side, falls into heavy sleep. . , the right track at Hennipen College but a price is Thin legs and enormous bosom, as he has ob the sun, open to each other, free, relaxed. Living . being exacted-a head racked with pain. When Brother Worden next examines his *-* * served before, but both accentuated by the bikini. . .. Yes, maybe this is what it's like" ' , watch the morning is gone and it's afternoon. He Though no grounds for thinking so, he decides Sister Dorothea calls again, ,"Is it cold?", has missed breakfast and hinch, to say nothing The bath houseis,open, a life guard perched Sister prace has recently lost weight, possibly a The nuns, pushed forward, on their elbows, of Mass and Miles Letterman's workshop. Dis on an elevated chair' at the end of the dock, skin good -deal. To his inexperienced eye she's a shielding their eyes with flattened hands; gazing gusted with himself, he sits up quickly, is nearly brown as tree bark. Few bathers about. The con woman who was once larger. Not so Sister Doro- ' expectantly toward him. Lovely sight. felled by blistering pain at the top of his head. He ference members where they should be, attend thea. Long and thin in a one-piece suit that ap "Just right! Perfect!" , steadies his head in his hands, waits for the pain ing afternoon lectures and discussions, while he's ' pears a shade old-fashioned; in factabout the , ,He should go' up to them, thread his way to subside, awed by:the realization that he's suf here preparing to sun himself~ Can't be helped. same vintage as Brother Worden's. Delicate bones, across the sand, talk a bit-after all, they spoke fering an authentic hangover. For the first time One of the things to do at the beach,if and when long straight girlish legs, very white skin, sharp-: to him, spoke first, and given Father Boyle's party in a not-young life. " ' his head stabilizes, is reflect on the article require featured face turned to the sun, eyes clenched last night they're certainly more than casual ac ment in Miles,' Letterman's workshop. Give shut-an attractive woman too, more so than he quaintances. But his wet trunks sag from his hips, Despite the misery and the wasted morning it thought to somethirig' h~ might do~ has to be counted a goodsign. A sign of progress,: thought last evening. The opposite of Sister Grace water drains on his feet, and his head hasn't been In the bath house Brother Worden pulls on ... but attractive nonetheless. improved by the swim .. All things considered, he of joining the human community. Beginning to. his trunks, a faded green pair, boxer style, that He gives up spying on the nuns, tries to,slip still isn't in proper condition. ' "',' ,', But at the moment he can't,think seriously about have seen better days. Wheri:he gets the rest of back into drowsiness. But the sun is fiercely hot "Just perfect!" he says again, smiles broadly, it, truly inspect the sign, for fear his head will his wardrobe in hand he'll have to get something on his back and he has the uneasy feeling the heads off to find· his tbwel. ' shatter again. Save it for later on. new. A.1ittle more modern styling. And probably nuns may be watching himJ' noticing_ his dis- ., Shaving with deliberate care, holding himself in white. For some reason. * **', state. He considers taking a swim, but -TheBook Nook is deserted. Everyone at the stiffly erect, he decides he's fit for one thing only. He spreads a towel ana piece of beach where ~)fdered with his delicate head is he up to the exertion? beach or lectures. A good thing; if others were The beach. Lying very s'till" soaking up sun, he the sand gives way to '-a tangle of bushes, eases ' Regrets' about his bathing' suit too. Loose and around he wouldn't have the nerve to look. can get himself back together. The hangover may onto his stomach, gently works his toes int!J the .... be an encouraging sign but he can't endure long sand, adjusts his face to the sun. Drowsiness, floppy about the legs, even worse when wet. He Paperbacks arranged by author. Iri the reli- turns over on the bla~ket, face to the sun, tries gion section Brother Worden locates the :lvI's and, in such tender state. _ . . , comes on at' once, bearing him down through to lose himself in thought. What should he 'think proc;eeds slowly; ,lingering over, a title here and At the snack bar in the dining hall he downs - waves of dry heat. He thinks briefly of Sister about? The article for Miles Letterman, for one' there, heading cautiously for the W's. He's cer- two cups of black coffee, proceeds to the campus Grace and Father Finewine -, - an attractive thing. He doubts there's time to write any thing- tain the book wori't be here, silly to even bother. book store, the Book Nook, for a pair of sun , couple, if that's what they are-drops off to sleep. glasses. There's no mirror available so he tries * * * and writeaboutwhat?Re hasn't a single thought. Gone the way of missals, holy cards, scapulars- imagining how the glasses 'will look on him. He And even if he did, could he afford. the tiine and swept away. by the tide of renewal, returned to "Leonard! Hi there!" effort when he has more important things on his publishers, burnt. Goodriddanceto bad rubbish. doesn't' want an enormous pair.:.:....:.astyle for the Less than fifty.feet away, maybe a hundred, young or those pretending to be; but he doesn't , mind? He didn't come to Hennepin College to On,the'otherhand,his ,eye hits on titles,not not far, are Sister, Grace and Sister Dorothea. write articles; it's just the other.way-he came to.. exactly avant-garde that have somehow been want something that looks skimpy on a large head Brother Worden pushes the sunglasses onto his J get away from the ones already written. But that spared-something about the Catholic 'St~dent either. When he catches a view of himself in , forehead to make sure. Yes, on the beach. Sun- a plate-glass window of the store he's pleased' gives him an idea ..'He, could. submit to Miles' ~1ission Crusade, an autobiography of MonSIgnor ning themselves. In bathing suits. Waving at him.' Letterman one of his old printed pieces. Brother!homas Courtney Rourke, a tour guide to Fa enough with what he finally settles on, a wrap- - "Leonard !" ,around pair with thick plastic rims. Thorne might sendhiin one in time-or he might, -"tima.More of th,is hanging 'around th~n h~ kne\~. Brother Worden rapidly ,calculates whether see if the Book Nook hasa copy of: his book. : Maybe they don t know what to do wlthlt, can t 12 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974" 13 bring themselves to let it go. His mother was Brother Worden doesn't respond but the nun "Would you like to see it, Father? The poem Thorne's. I wrote about you?" never able to get rid of funeral crucifixes that lowers her briefcase to the floor, provides an ex Dear Len, accumulated in the family, let them pile up, com planation whether he wants it or not. "It was so He can hardly decline. plicated sliding crucifixes with candles and holy lovely the way you threw that stone . . . such The nun searches her briefcase, removes a Just want to say hello (hello!) and tell you water inside, let them pile up until you couldn't strength and authority.' .. that I had to write a looseleaf notebook with the name Hennepin Col all goes well back at the shop. Election still open an old box without finding one. What will poem about it. 1 get,most.of my inspiration while lege embossed in gold lettering. She explains she set for Monday a.m. God, you should see the happen to them? Will they ever decay, return to I'm out walking. I sat down on a stump and keeps notes and jottings in the notebook plus campaigning! One thing you have to say the blessed anonymous dust? Will his book? wrote the poem straight out." drafts of poems done in the field. She finds the about our colleagues: their bad taste is con page, hands him the book. The poem is carefully sistent. By the time he reaches the W's Brother When Brother Worden still doesn't respond lettered in purple ink. Worden is convinced his book' will be there. He the nun cocks her head fo the. side, looks up at Brother Harold and Sister Mary Alma can feel it, a strong premonition. Yet when he him quizzically. "I hope you don't mind, Father. Tall man of sturdy bone , heavy-set one, in. Social Studies-have been finds it-and not one copy but two-he's struck I didn't mean to invade your privacy." Searching the weed-strewn path alone named poll watchers. They can be trusted. with surprise. There it is, familiar glossy cover, "Not at all," he says quickly, feeling he's. , Finding at last his child's desire: How goes Hennepin? Isn't it everything I his book,but who can believe it would find its behaving foolishly. He doesn't have to encourage Speckl'd, smooth, well-shaped stone. said? I envy you being surrounded with truly way here, to a college book store? More surpris the nun but it can't hurt to humor her. He asks He rises to dignified height creative people. Take advantage! ing, remain after all this time? Incredible 1 if she's in the poetry workshop. Sends the missile on skipping flight Yours in John Bosco, If he has ever been in the presence of a sign, She is. All her life she had been a second Flat across a mirror-blue surface: this is one. His hands are wet with perspiration, grade teacher, but when she retired she decided Bless'd man-child in my sight. J. T. legs rubbery. Does he have the strength to take to take up a hobby and chose poetry. She has the book off the shelf, confront the balding, self come to Hennepin College for six summers in a Brother Worden reads the poem twice, passes P.S.: Brother Maurice hangs on. Strong as a satisfied figure on the jacket? But what the sign row to study under Justin John Smith. "Are you' the notebook back. bull. The doctors say he should have been means, means exactly, eludes him. In one sense it acquainted with him, Father?" "You see the idea I'm working with?". gone two weeks ago. suggests, suggests strongly, that he'll never be able "I'm afraid not," Brother Worden says, and "I'm not sure." to flee his mistaken past, never get the book and explains that he's new to ·the conference. "Of course it needs more work. It's 'only a Sighing deeply, Brother Worden lowers the all it implies, his whole empty self, never get it "Oh, I knew that. I'd have noticed you be first draft." , window shade, removes clothing .down to' his completely behind him. Melancholy thought, fore." The nun takes a step back, examines him Brother Worden explains he's a poor judge of shorts, eases himself into bed, folds a damp cloth dark and tempting. Yet it can't compete with a for a' moment with a professional eye, then draws poetry. Of most other things too, he could just as over his eyes. The room is hot but the best place new interpretation, rising abruptly into clarity. close, confides to him, "If you don't mind my say welL add: to recuperate; he shouldn't have left it in the first Brother Worden thinks: Appearance to the con ing so, Father, you cut a distinguished figure." The nun closes the briefcase, fastens the thick place. Good of Brother Thorne to write; a true trary, I'm no longer the man pictured on the book Brother Worden denies· it but the nun insists. straps. She's late for a poetry reading by Justin friend. But the letter seems as remote as if it came jacket. A man can change his life, he can stop "Very distinguished. You have wonderful things John Smith in Gilley Hall of Fine Arts. Would from Mars-sent from another life, at least'a living a false life, and I'm doing that now. Begin ahead of you." Brother Worden like to join her? different one than the one he's trying to live~ Is ning to. All I have to do is look at the photo- "If you say so." Again he summons a smile. "I'll pass this living. Again he sighs, adjusts himself to the bed. , graph, observe the eyes closely, and I'll feel the "I do." time." If and when he has to write to Brother Thorne, measure of the change that is already taking To change the subject 'Brother Worden asks "Y. ou 'd"l ove It,. F ather.'" write him the truth, explain everything, it's going place. That's the meaning of the sign. It's meant about Justin John Smith. "I'll keep it in mind." to be the hardest thing he has ever done. to give me courage. Resolutely, Brother Worden "A glorious man. He has written fourteen vol "That's a promise now." * '* * reaches for the book. urnes, of poetry." The nun draws even closer, , ** * "Dinner time, Brother. You in there?'" "Father I" touches Brother Worden's~chestwith a pointed It didn't seem very good, the poem, though He lifts an edge of the wash cloth, orange His hand recoils, crowds into 'a pocket with corner of ?er head dress, says in a confessional Justin John, Smith would know more about that gold light still burning against the shade, rec~g- his tobacco pouch. The elderly nun with the black tone, "I don't mind telling you, Father, he has than he. What he wonders· is what it means. nizes Kittlesori's voice beyond the door. . briefcase, the one from the lake, has materialized changed my life. He has brought me to see the Means for him. It isn't every day that someone "Brother?" ". . beside him~ She smiles up from below, flashing world in a new way. When I was younger I would picks you out as subject for a poem, someone you Still limp with sleep, he takes cautioiIs stock brown eyes set in a dough-colored face; Hoping have passed you by at.the Jake without a second don't even know and who doesn't know you. (he of his situation. Head better but skin flushed, in she hasn't noticed the book he's after" Brother thought. I just wasn't aware of the ,beauty and should have told her at, once he wasn't a priest; fact fiery, and a hint of nausea on his stomach. . Worden tunis so that he's blocking her view of wonder in the world." ~" now it would only embarrass her) ; it's the sort New symptoms. Would. the martinis ever drain the W, section-.a movement he knows is silly as . "Hmmm," Brother Worden muses. of thing you have to give serious thought to. You from his, system? With delicate care ,he turns the soon as he makes it. The nun doesn't even know "Justin John Smith is helping me put together have to inspect it .. ~ for a sign. But not just now. cloth over, seeks a lingering· coolness. his name. She doesn't know anything about him. a book. My first one." ,.., Not in his present condition. Best to leave it alone "Brother Worden?" "I'll bet you thought I wouldn't remember . Brother Worden' studies the nun carefully. At until he's back to normal. As for his book,best to Silently he compo~es a,Prayer: In your mercy, you. Now didn't you, Father?" Brother Worden her age making the discovery of the world .. -. a leave that alone too. He knows where there's a Lord, send that man away.·" ~ returns an affable smile but gives the nun no en figure of hope if ever he has encountered one. Yet. copy if he decides to show an article to Miles Later, the room pitch dark, there's another couragement. She's obviously" the kind who'll strangely he feels no hope. Maybe it's his book'" Letterman. Even if he doesn't he can come to the ~ap at ~he door,Father Boyle calls into him, talk your leg off if you give her half a chance. hidden behind, him, his awareness of it. The book'store just to look at the photograph: of'the You there, Leonard?" Brother Worden holds "I knew you the minute I saw you. Tall man of knowledge of futility. If one confidence deserved balding fellow on the jacket ... just to prove to his breat,h and the priest, getting no response, has himself he's making progress. If that's what it IS. the good sense to give it up at once. . . sturdy bone." . another he should take his book from the shelf, " .* * * . . "I beg your pardon?" . say to the nun, Look,.! wrote a book once 'and it r .... '.' - ~ In his room; slid under the . door, a letter. . This is a segment of a longer work of fiction with the "That's what I call you in my poem. Tall man was the biggest mistake of my life. You have same' title. ' of sturdy bone." ., nothing to look forward to but regret.. . He knows the 'handwriting at once as Brother' 14 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974 .15

" . ..~": bring themselves to let it go. His mother was Brother Worden doesn't respond but the nun "Would you like to see it, Father? The poem Thorne's. I wrote about you?" never able to get rid of funeral crucifixes that lowers her briefcase to the floor, provides an ex Dear Len, accumulated in the family, let them pile up, com planation whether he wants it or not. "It was so He can hardly decline. plicated sliding crucifixes with candles and holy lovely the way you threw that stone . . . such The nun searches her briefcase, removes a Just want to say hello (hello!) and tell you water inside, let them pile up until you couldn't strength and authority.' .. that I had to write a looseleaf notebook with the name Hennepin Col all goes well back at the shop. Election still open an old box without finding one. What will poem about it. 1 get,most.of my inspiration while lege embossed in gold lettering. She explains she set for Monday a.m. God, you should see the happen to them? Will they ever decay, return to I'm out walking. I sat down on a stump and keeps notes and jottings in the notebook plus campaigning! One thing you have to say the blessed anonymous dust? Will his book? wrote the poem straight out." drafts of poems done in the field. She finds the about our colleagues: their bad taste is con page, hands him the book. The poem is carefully sistent. By the time he reaches the W's Brother When Brother Worden still doesn't respond lettered in purple ink. Worden is convinced his book' will be there. He the nun cocks her head fo the. side, looks up at Brother Harold and Sister Mary Alma can feel it, a strong premonition. Yet when he him quizzically. "I hope you don't mind, Father. Tall man of sturdy bone , heavy-set one, in. Social Studies-have been finds it-and not one copy but two-he's struck I didn't mean to invade your privacy." Searching the weed-strewn path alone named poll watchers. They can be trusted. with surprise. There it is, familiar glossy cover, "Not at all," he says quickly, feeling he's. , Finding at last his child's desire: How goes Hennepin? Isn't it everything I his book,but who can believe it would find its behaving foolishly. He doesn't have to encourage Speckl'd, smooth, well-shaped stone. said? I envy you being surrounded with truly way here, to a college book store? More surpris the nun but it can't hurt to humor her. He asks He rises to dignified height creative people. Take advantage! ing, remain after all this time? Incredible 1 if she's in the poetry workshop. Sends the missile on skipping flight Yours in John Bosco, If he has ever been in the presence of a sign, She is. All her life she had been a second Flat across a mirror-blue surface: this is one. His hands are wet with perspiration, grade teacher, but when she retired she decided Bless'd man-child in my sight. J. T. legs rubbery. Does he have the strength to take to take up a hobby and chose poetry. She has the book off the shelf, confront the balding, self come to Hennepin College for six summers in a Brother Worden reads the poem twice, passes P.S.: Brother Maurice hangs on. Strong as a satisfied figure on the jacket? But what the sign row to study under Justin John Smith. "Are you' the notebook back. bull. The doctors say he should have been means, means exactly, eludes him. In one sense it acquainted with him, Father?" "You see the idea I'm working with?". gone two weeks ago. suggests, suggests strongly, that he'll never be able "I'm afraid not," Brother Worden says, and "I'm not sure." to flee his mistaken past, never get the book and explains that he's new to ·the conference. "Of course it needs more work. It's 'only a Sighing deeply, Brother Worden lowers the all it implies, his whole empty self, never get it "Oh, I knew that. I'd have noticed you be first draft." , window shade, removes clothing .down to' his completely behind him. Melancholy thought, fore." The nun takes a step back, examines him Brother Worden explains he's a poor judge of shorts, eases himself into bed, folds a damp cloth dark and tempting. Yet it can't compete with a for a' moment with a professional eye, then draws poetry. Of most other things too, he could just as over his eyes. The room is hot but the best place new interpretation, rising abruptly into clarity. close, confides to him, "If you don't mind my say welL add: to recuperate; he shouldn't have left it in the first Brother Worden thinks: Appearance to the con ing so, Father, you cut a distinguished figure." The nun closes the briefcase, fastens the thick place. Good of Brother Thorne to write; a true trary, I'm no longer the man pictured on the book Brother Worden denies· it but the nun insists. straps. She's late for a poetry reading by Justin friend. But the letter seems as remote as if it came jacket. A man can change his life, he can stop "Very distinguished. You have wonderful things John Smith in Gilley Hall of Fine Arts. Would from Mars-sent from another life, at least'a living a false life, and I'm doing that now. Begin ahead of you." Brother Worden like to join her? different one than the one he's trying to live~ Is ning to. All I have to do is look at the photo- "If you say so." Again he summons a smile. "I'll pass this living. Again he sighs, adjusts himself to the bed. , graph, observe the eyes closely, and I'll feel the "I do." time." If and when he has to write to Brother Thorne, measure of the change that is already taking To change the subject 'Brother Worden asks "Y. ou 'd"l ove It,. F ather.'" write him the truth, explain everything, it's going place. That's the meaning of the sign. It's meant about Justin John Smith. "I'll keep it in mind." to be the hardest thing he has ever done. to give me courage. Resolutely, Brother Worden "A glorious man. He has written fourteen vol "That's a promise now." * '* * reaches for the book. urnes, of poetry." The nun draws even closer, , ** * "Dinner time, Brother. You in there?'" "Father I" touches Brother Worden's~chestwith a pointed It didn't seem very good, the poem, though He lifts an edge of the wash cloth, orange His hand recoils, crowds into 'a pocket with corner of ?er head dress, says in a confessional Justin John, Smith would know more about that gold light still burning against the shade, rec~g- his tobacco pouch. The elderly nun with the black tone, "I don't mind telling you, Father, he has than he. What he wonders· is what it means. nizes Kittlesori's voice beyond the door. . briefcase, the one from the lake, has materialized changed my life. He has brought me to see the Means for him. It isn't every day that someone "Brother?" ". . beside him~ She smiles up from below, flashing world in a new way. When I was younger I would picks you out as subject for a poem, someone you Still limp with sleep, he takes cautioiIs stock brown eyes set in a dough-colored face; Hoping have passed you by at.the Jake without a second don't even know and who doesn't know you. (he of his situation. Head better but skin flushed, in she hasn't noticed the book he's after" Brother thought. I just wasn't aware of the ,beauty and should have told her at, once he wasn't a priest; fact fiery, and a hint of nausea on his stomach. . Worden tunis so that he's blocking her view of wonder in the world." ~" now it would only embarrass her) ; it's the sort New symptoms. Would. the martinis ever drain the W, section-.a movement he knows is silly as . "Hmmm," Brother Worden muses. of thing you have to give serious thought to. You from his, system? With delicate care ,he turns the soon as he makes it. The nun doesn't even know "Justin John Smith is helping me put together have to inspect it .. ~ for a sign. But not just now. cloth over, seeks a lingering· coolness. his name. She doesn't know anything about him. a book. My first one." ,.., Not in his present condition. Best to leave it alone "Brother Worden?" "I'll bet you thought I wouldn't remember . Brother Worden' studies the nun carefully. At until he's back to normal. As for his book,best to Silently he compo~es a,Prayer: In your mercy, you. Now didn't you, Father?" Brother Worden her age making the discovery of the world .. -. a leave that alone too. He knows where there's a Lord, send that man away.·" ~ returns an affable smile but gives the nun no en figure of hope if ever he has encountered one. Yet. copy if he decides to show an article to Miles Later, the room pitch dark, there's another couragement. She's obviously" the kind who'll strangely he feels no hope. Maybe it's his book'" Letterman. Even if he doesn't he can come to the ~ap at ~he door,Father Boyle calls into him, talk your leg off if you give her half a chance. hidden behind, him, his awareness of it. The book'store just to look at the photograph: of'the You there, Leonard?" Brother Worden holds "I knew you the minute I saw you. Tall man of knowledge of futility. If one confidence deserved balding fellow on the jacket ... just to prove to his breat,h and the priest, getting no response, has himself he's making progress. If that's what it IS. the good sense to give it up at once. . . sturdy bone." . another he should take his book from the shelf, " .* * * . . "I beg your pardon?" . say to the nun, Look,.! wrote a book once 'and it r .... '.' - ~ In his room; slid under the . door, a letter. . This is a segment of a longer work of fiction with the "That's what I call you in my poem. Tall man was the biggest mistake of my life. You have same' title. ' of sturdy bone." ., nothing to look forward to but regret.. . He knows the 'handwriting at once as Brother' 14 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974 .15

" . ..~": ------~

efforts, and I was never the same after reading those NDR: Singer primarily tells a story. But there's a books. Now, I usually think of influence in:terms of drive now to move away from that type of thing taking courage from someone else'rather than being and get into more of an aesthetic mode. stylistically influenced. I think my influences are more social, geographiCal, familial, film, early-radio oriented. Friedman: Well, I think Singer combines both. To me, An Interview When a book influences me, it's generally a matter the ideal writer, the quintessential writer, must strike " of having seen a writer take a chance and come back that midpoint between the animal and the intellectual, . alive and well. I take courage from that. between the story-teller, if you will, and the thinker. Of all the writers I can think of, he gets closest to NDR: When he was here, Norman Mailer made a that center. He jumps in and tells his "simple" story statement about how he sees the new age of the novel. which turns out to be not that simple. At the same coming because the governmental structures are bear- . time he has all these currents of myth and legend and ing down. He feels this is going to make more writers intellect bubbling through his work. I can think of go into themselves and come up with the great Ameri some writers who are too intellectual for my taste Bruce Jay Friedman can novel. Do you see that as a viable idea? ' and some who are too close to the instinctive and the primal. Friedman: Well, I don't think American novelists have The most attractive thing that's ever been said to be driven into themselves because I believ~ the about me was said by Nelson Algren, who said that Notre Dame Review interviewed Bruce Jay Friedman more jobs that give you more instant gratification, foremost American novelists begin by' being too inter I'm dangerously effective because I don't know what during his appearance at the 1974 Sophomore more instant financial reward. I think that's one of nal, too claustrophobic in their world. ,Unfortunately, I'm doing. The truth is that I know more than I let on, Literary Festival at Notre Dame. the problems. But, there are People who believe that when we get a social and political cataclysm, a and I know less than I'd like to. the theater is dying until Jason Miller writes That Watergate, it's the third-rate novelist who takes on Notre Dame Review: With regard to Steambath, where Ohampionship Season; the novel is dying until l\iario " that subject. Serious contemporary American writers NDR: Earlier you mentioned influences, such as radio do you place yourself in the tradition of ' American Puzo writes The Godfather. If the' novel is dying, I'm never seem .to work on that Tolstoian scale. We and TV and film. Do you see these in any way as drama? going down with the ship, because that's ,still myfirst haven't had any. It would be nice to think that the alternatives to writing? love. I don't think I've·mastered that form at all. I situation in high government would produce a turn Friedman: I don't know. I don't pay very much atten have a novel being published in May, and I'm groping around. But if we go along the way we've been going, Friedman: Well, I was rather rigid on this subject,. tion to traditions., That was simply the next play I my ,way into another one. I would just like to give I'd say the. Watergate novel or the Nixon Adminis but television, for example, is something which you had to write. I don't see a tremendous amount of one example of the power of the novel, the first one tration novel, when it's written, will be written by absolutely must pay attention to. It's just too all theater. I don't feel required to answer that.' For that comes to mind. Recently, I read a book by a the Jacqueline Susanns. It would be nice if Mailer consuming to close your eye to. Now commerCial tele example, that's one of those questions that's just too' woman named Ruth Jhabvala, an English woman :who took/that on.. He may be someone with enough size vision is, no matter what they say about "stepping on grand to answer. Can you ask it another way?,' . lives in India. It's called Travelers, and it seemed to and enough vision. I think the key American novelists, the gas" and getting into adult themes, still twenty me when i finished that novel, thatr had the clearest normally, in this situation, would tend to work on years behind the other media. But I think they'll' be NDR: Why Steambath as a play instead of a novel? argument as to how a single book can capture the a small scale, to wait for the appropriate Watergate brought, kicking and screaming, abreast with film ' spirit and essence of an entire country and, the sen metaphor. ' ,- and the print media. 'And the reason I have to take Friedman: Well; I have to wind the clock back a bit. sibility of that country. In other words, that single something like television seriously - I never have I'm essentially a prose writer. My first love is prose. novel totally outweighs in importance five John Gun NDR: Who do you think are the foremost novelists? before - is that on a single night, in Los Angeles I got involved in theater quite accidentally. I wrote ther guidebooks plus a hundred New Journalism ap County alone, at one showing of Steambath on educa a play called Scuba Duba. It took place over one eve proaches to India. Friedman: ' I pay attention to the same people you tional television, more people, that is maybe a' million ning. It seemed to have a single dramatic conflict, and it pay attention. to. I'm always interested in what Philip one hundred thousand people, saw Steambath, which seemed to work out best with dialogue. It took place NDR: So you see the novel as something that can Roth has .to say, Bernard Malamud, and Nabokov, is by far more people than'saw it in its run in the inone room. All that sounded like a play; So, I just put a whole age into a very. few pages? and I, think right now you have a man here whom I. theater. And so the presentation on television pretty' took a run at it. I wrote it very, very quickly, and consider a giant -Isaac Singer, whose worth,un- . much b'ecomes Steambath, in many ways. Now, of it was produced modestly. ' My wildest ambition was to Friedman: When it's right, there's nothing to surpass fortunately - I,hoperm wrong - but it's almost course, that was educational'television, and in normal have it run for a couple of months. And, Thad this it in my view. I think there have been occasional as though he's one of those fellows who has to be gone theater terms this was not an especially shocking· shattering experience. I had no idea that it would plays that were able to do this throughout .the years; before we appreciate his size. He's someone who play, but it produced almost calamitous results when it have that kind of impact;' It had a long ruri,and I but I'm asnob,and I still feel that when the novelist speaks to me.' was shown on television. It was a writer's dream. began to, think more in terms of theater. I've found is working inhighgear,.he's doing a job that no one I think right now the people I pay most attention . You divided the audience in half; you had half of that, in working as a playwright, i can hold certain else can do. ' <- ," to, rather peculiarly, are the women; The most in them marching on the station, wanting to burn it down, delicate issues at arm's length, whereas working in " teresting drift I see in' fiction right now is in the female and the other half saying it was refreshing, or what prose, working in the novel form, there is a require- NDR: What,novelists have influenced you'C area. It's not the attacking and abrasive quality I'm ever. ment to dig down very much deeper. ' i talking about, but there are a number of young writers Friedman: When I w~s a young man, I went through ! who are potentially important that I've been'· sort of NDR:' How do 'youthink you're going to get the NDR:,You talk aboutthe novel, and there's talk 'today school without paying very,much attention to litera paying attention to. They don't have majestic names American, people to move into '. bringing forth Steam that thenovelis dead or dying. As a novelist, how ture. When I was in the Air Force, I ran into a " as of now,but one healthy spin-off of the so-called bath and other similar things that will make television do you feel about this? commanding 'officer who touted me on to three bookS women's movement is probably the release of these. march forward? that turned me around on a dime, and made me feel voices" so that you're finally getting a look at thereal Fi-iedman:Well, you have tobe some kind of weird what a wonderful thing'it would be to be ,a writer. female sensibility.·I don't mean the Germaine Greer Friedman: I don't feel any sense of responsibility to person t~ closet yourself away for two years or how I don't know whether they would affect me if, I read Kate Millet axis. I'm 'speaking about people like Joy. do that. ,The only responsibility I feel is to work ever long it takes to write a book. You have a mini them'today, 'or if I'd care to read them again: One was Williams,particularly. Esquire recently published an'· honestly· and well and continue working. I. don't know ri mum amount of social contact and you have to live' Oatcher in the RyepAnother was From Here to Eter I arithology called "Secret Life of Our Times," and it's· how that's going to be, done.' In my own case I've - " totally ,within the atmosphere of a' serious novel. It - 'i nity. Another was a Thomas Wolfe novel. I was 21 twentY7five short pieeesof fiction published in recerit > made a couple of passes at commercial television, be I puts great pressure on your personal life. There are aIid my ambitions· at that· time were to' be a 'news~ . cause I've been. encouraged to do so, and I've been I: years in Esquire. The most ,fascinating pieces tome just more jobs today that are avail~ble .t~ the writer; .:. paper reporter, and I saw these three monumental . were the ones that were written by the women. paid for my efforts, and tha~ was the last that was 16 il NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1,1974 17 I' ,! ever heard of the work. I have faith that when you really regret it. It came, about this way. I became in the Soviet Union than we do here. Here we have I like to think that it will be unthinkable, incomprehen do good work, and important work, work that rings a editor of an anthology !l1any years back called Black a tendency to co-opt writers, to pull out their teeth sible, to have to live within certain restrictions. In bell, strikes a chord, that it will win, out somehow. Humor. It. wasn't my idea. It was an excuse, an by somehow absorbing them. Tom Hayden's not a professional writing you do have certain restrictions For example, I've had two full-length plays that were opportunity, really,' to' read some writers I hadn't writer, but you find him now lecturing politely before that you have to pay attention to in order to survive. actually produced. One was Scuba Duba, which had read., I did find some echo going from one to the other senatorial committees. We do that to radical politicians You have to pay some attention, whether you like a long, h~althy, prosperous run, and disappeared. of a certain rage against social imbalance, which was and we do that to writers. That's one reason why I it or not, to the nature of the various publications, et Steambath had a much bumpier time in New York, treated in a somew.ha~ harsh, comedic way. That part myself would be leery of involving myself with foun cetera, et cetera. You do have an editorial check. and we kind of limped along for a while. ,The audiences of it, I think, still holds. I work that way sometimes. dation grants or whatever. In my own way, I try to There are the requirements of certain magazines that -down there seemed to like it very much, but it was a In other words, sometimes I take a cold-blooded look be as' independent as possible, which is not so possible. you have to keep an eye on in order to function. struggle. And yet that play, which seems to have at some ridiculous aspect of society, and use a short But, in the fictional world, the purely creative world, something in it that strikes that chord that I'm talking story form, or short play form, to take it to its Ultimate once again it's very easy to sit here at the Morris Inn NDR: Well, this is a question getting back to courage about, just keeps,bobbing to the surface, and won't go lengths, and show its ridiculousness. 'I still do ,that. and be brave. No one knows what he'd do under the and Solzhenitsyn, regarding his image of courage away. And that play, with a much more modest run, But the main thread ,of my work is, I think, or I gun, when the ante goes up, and the personal stakes rather than of America's deplorableness. The way I is, performed all over the place, because there's some would like to think, in the formal tradition, itwould become excruciating. You'd like to think that you see it, and I'd like to have your response, the response thing in there, for all of its imperfections, that- speaks seem to me, of telling a story, using my particular simply couldn't look at yourself in the mirror if you of America is deplorable insofar as it takes some to people, whereas the other play had that effect view, my own voice, in the traditionill framework. changed as much as a semicolon in deference to some thing like that to make a country like America free to temporarily, but addressed itself to a particular time, outside authority in a purely creative work. I know see the work of a writer capable of bringing a country and the issues in it no longer seem to be germane. that in the few instances I can think of where I've NDR:To change the subject, there has been an un to its kriees. It's almost absurd to think that could hap altered my work, and once again I put fiction and a usual strain on this Festival week" with the happenings pen here. Do you win a sense of courage from Solzheni NDR: Well, what do you think is,that central core, , purely creative work in a somewhat different category, in the USSR. As a writer, how do you feel about the tsyn's plight? What can Solzhenitsyn mean to a writer? as the father of that play? but in those few instances where I've literally altered way Solzhenitsyn has been treated? How do you If tomorrow you find yourself in that situation, would a single word to placate some standard which I con compare your situation in this country to his there? you have the courage to write, to say your truth? Friedman: I think it's a play that struggles with the sidered outlandish, I've paid a heavy, heavy price, central question of existence. John F. Kennedy made and I lost something as a result - lost sleep, self Friedman: I read the press accounts - here are a speech to the Military Academy before he died, 'Friedman: I'd like to feel I could. But you never respect - and became less of a man in those few people using words like "deplorable." It makes me and he said, "Life is unfair." And that's what this know what, you're going to do until you're tested. instances. play addresses itself to. ,You have a situation in Ameri aware of the inadequacies of language. It's almost can cities, America generally, where violence is usually as if you said, "What do you think of the elimination senseless, nameless, committed without cause. It's 'of six million Jews in World War II?" and I answered, impossible to understand. A character in the play "I think it was deplorable." It seems to me that lan says to God: "Well, you know I've turned my life guage becomes obscene in that case, and it makes us inside, out. I've done this wonderful job on myself, regret all the times we've said "great" and "terrific" and here I am, dead. It's wrong, it's unfair." And the and used language casually.. To me, we have no, lan Solzhenitsyn: His Book and His Readers entire play is a struggle to come to grips with that. guage to dear with the incomprehensible idea of a It has a comedic overlay, but to me it's a very serious man being unable to do his work. It would be like play. It tends to have ferocious impact on people stopping his breathing apparatus. It's totally unthink who've had some unexplainable loss, who absolutely , able. So that's how I feel on the one hand, and I'd can't deal with it. This is my attempt to wrestle with feel idiotic if I were to say I find itvery "unattractive." that question. That's the same as saying when it rains, everybody gets' ~et. On the other hand, I don't feel smug, and NDR: My response was that it moved something I don't think any of us here should feel smug about it, between man and God which can't be lost, and which because there are other ~ays to stifie, to .imprison. is hard to do for a human - to give a human being We shouldn't say "naughty, naughty" to the Soviet Thom.asWerge something to plug into, for meditation, some way of Union, where we have a situation in which we now explaining. That's what the play did to me. It made know an administration takes writers with unfriendly me laugh, too, which is good, and I guess that is the views and looks at their tax returns with an eye effect you were shooting at. towards crippling them economically. That's another ((The idea o/making the century's great crime[s] The sales staff of Harper and Row, we learn form of imprisonment. We don't know at this moment look dun is not banal. Politically, psychologically, from Time, is busy "drumming up" advance orders what the real story is on Abbie Hoffman, for example, [it was 1 an idea of genius. ,The banality was only for the first, volume of the English translation, of Friedman: I never feel particularly funny. I never awaiting trial on drugs .. If it were to come out at think of myself necessarily as a comic writer. It's camou;/lage.What better way to get the curse out Alexander SoIZhenitsyn's The GuUig Archipelago. the trial that he was set up ... That wouldJ~ave,been just that my way of looking at the world strikes people of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, To be sure, Solzhenitsyn wishes his revelations to a paranoid thought in the Sixties, but we now have or trite? With horrible politiCal insight they found affect as many 'readers as possible. But Time's as funny, makes them laugh. But, if that were the the record before us. It's almost logical to assume on be-all and end-allof the work, I wouldn't feel as if a way to disguise the thing. Intenectuals do not phrase locates the reality: books are commodities, the basis of daily evidence in the press that he's been understand . ... Banality is the adopted disguise of readers are consumers. The pitches are endless: in I were doing my job. 'I'm usually after some game or set up by the narcotics people. That represents another other. a very powerful will to. abolish conscience. In such stant liberation; instant mental health; instant sex':' form of imprisonment. I'm not feeling very smug, a project, trivial? ,Only if human life is trivial." ual ecstasy; instant demon ism, exorcism, salvation. at the moment. I don't feel like saying "Russia's bad :-Mr. Sammler, replying to the glib use o/Hannah They are hawked like pennants at a ball game. NDR: I felt sort of strange reading all the press that - we're good." We're not so terrific either; ,One other, Arendt's phrcise~ ((the banality of evil/"in Bellow's The suffering and the soul of Gulag may meet preceded you here which referred to you as a "black thing I'd like to say, one thrilling thing is the idea: Mr.Sainmler's Planet.' ' ~, the same end. Medvedev's claim will not be won comic." I couldn't figure out what. that might be. that a writer can more or less bring a country to its dered at as profound and astonishing; it will be a Black humor is' something that means practically " ., knees. There would be no equivalent in this country. ' ((Few people, naving read The Gulag Archipelago, useful blurb. It is 'not exaggerating to suppose that nothing. If, someone calls Nixon and Ford homosexual lovers, win be the same as whfJn they began the first page. the ad man's dream would be to "book" Solzen he is patted on the head, and, given an assistant In this respect, it seems to me that nothing, in itsyn, who is now a "personality," even a "hot Friedman: Well, it was a tag, that's all. I don't know professorship. at some university. What it shows in a Russian and world ,literature can compare with _property," on the talk shows. He might be sand whether it was a mistake or what. 'I guess I don't· , . curious way is that they have more respect for writers Solzhenitsyn's book.~'-RCY1J Medvedev wiched between Venerable Comedian and Newest 18 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1" 1974 ' 19

sri,' ever heard of the work. I have faith that when you really regret it. It came, about this way. I became in the Soviet Union than we do here. Here we have I like to think that it will be unthinkable, incomprehen do good work, and important work, work that rings a editor of an anthology !l1any years back called Black a tendency to co-opt writers, to pull out their teeth sible, to have to live within certain restrictions. In bell, strikes a chord, that it will win, out somehow. Humor. It. wasn't my idea. It was an excuse, an by somehow absorbing them. Tom Hayden's not a professional writing you do have certain restrictions For example, I've had two full-length plays that were opportunity, really,' to' read some writers I hadn't writer, but you find him now lecturing politely before that you have to pay attention to in order to survive. actually produced. One was Scuba Duba, which had read., I did find some echo going from one to the other senatorial committees. We do that to radical politicians You have to pay some attention, whether you like a long, h~althy, prosperous run, and disappeared. of a certain rage against social imbalance, which was and we do that to writers. That's one reason why I it or not, to the nature of the various publications, et Steambath had a much bumpier time in New York, treated in a somew.ha~ harsh, comedic way. That part myself would be leery of involving myself with foun cetera, et cetera. You do have an editorial check. and we kind of limped along for a while. ,The audiences of it, I think, still holds. I work that way sometimes. dation grants or whatever. In my own way, I try to There are the requirements of certain magazines that -down there seemed to like it very much, but it was a In other words, sometimes I take a cold-blooded look be as' independent as possible, which is not so possible. you have to keep an eye on in order to function. struggle. And yet that play, which seems to have at some ridiculous aspect of society, and use a short But, in the fictional world, the purely creative world, something in it that strikes that chord that I'm talking story form, or short play form, to take it to its Ultimate once again it's very easy to sit here at the Morris Inn NDR: Well, this is a question getting back to courage about, just keeps,bobbing to the surface, and won't go lengths, and show its ridiculousness. 'I still do ,that. and be brave. No one knows what he'd do under the and Solzhenitsyn, regarding his image of courage away. And that play, with a much more modest run, But the main thread ,of my work is, I think, or I gun, when the ante goes up, and the personal stakes rather than of America's deplorableness. The way I is, performed all over the place, because there's some would like to think, in the formal tradition, itwould become excruciating. You'd like to think that you see it, and I'd like to have your response, the response thing in there, for all of its imperfections, that- speaks seem to me, of telling a story, using my particular simply couldn't look at yourself in the mirror if you of America is deplorable insofar as it takes some to people, whereas the other play had that effect view, my own voice, in the traditionill framework. changed as much as a semicolon in deference to some thing like that to make a country like America free to temporarily, but addressed itself to a particular time, outside authority in a purely creative work. I know see the work of a writer capable of bringing a country and the issues in it no longer seem to be germane. that in the few instances I can think of where I've NDR:To change the subject, there has been an un to its kriees. It's almost absurd to think that could hap altered my work, and once again I put fiction and a usual strain on this Festival week" with the happenings pen here. Do you win a sense of courage from Solzheni NDR: Well, what do you think is,that central core, , purely creative work in a somewhat different category, in the USSR. As a writer, how do you feel about the tsyn's plight? What can Solzhenitsyn mean to a writer? as the father of that play? but in those few instances where I've literally altered way Solzhenitsyn has been treated? How do you If tomorrow you find yourself in that situation, would a single word to placate some standard which I con compare your situation in this country to his there? you have the courage to write, to say your truth? Friedman: I think it's a play that struggles with the sidered outlandish, I've paid a heavy, heavy price, central question of existence. John F. Kennedy made and I lost something as a result - lost sleep, self Friedman: I read the press accounts - here are a speech to the Military Academy before he died, 'Friedman: I'd like to feel I could. But you never respect - and became less of a man in those few people using words like "deplorable." It makes me and he said, "Life is unfair." And that's what this know what, you're going to do until you're tested. instances. play addresses itself to. ,You have a situation in Ameri aware of the inadequacies of language. It's almost can cities, America generally, where violence is usually as if you said, "What do you think of the elimination senseless, nameless, committed without cause. It's 'of six million Jews in World War II?" and I answered, impossible to understand. A character in the play "I think it was deplorable." It seems to me that lan says to God: "Well, you know I've turned my life guage becomes obscene in that case, and it makes us inside, out. I've done this wonderful job on myself, regret all the times we've said "great" and "terrific" and here I am, dead. It's wrong, it's unfair." And the and used language casually.. To me, we have no, lan Solzhenitsyn: His Book and His Readers entire play is a struggle to come to grips with that. guage to dear with the incomprehensible idea of a It has a comedic overlay, but to me it's a very serious man being unable to do his work. It would be like play. It tends to have ferocious impact on people stopping his breathing apparatus. It's totally unthink who've had some unexplainable loss, who absolutely , able. So that's how I feel on the one hand, and I'd can't deal with it. This is my attempt to wrestle with feel idiotic if I were to say I find itvery "unattractive." that question. That's the same as saying when it rains, everybody gets' ~et. On the other hand, I don't feel smug, and NDR: My response was that it moved something I don't think any of us here should feel smug about it, between man and God which can't be lost, and which because there are other ~ays to stifie, to .imprison. is hard to do for a human - to give a human being We shouldn't say "naughty, naughty" to the Soviet Thom.asWerge something to plug into, for meditation, some way of Union, where we have a situation in which we now explaining. That's what the play did to me. It made know an administration takes writers with unfriendly me laugh, too, which is good, and I guess that is the views and looks at their tax returns with an eye effect you were shooting at. towards crippling them economically. That's another ((The idea o/making the century's great crime[s] The sales staff of Harper and Row, we learn form of imprisonment. We don't know at this moment look dun is not banal. Politically, psychologically, from Time, is busy "drumming up" advance orders what the real story is on Abbie Hoffman, for example, [it was 1 an idea of genius. ,The banality was only for the first, volume of the English translation, of Friedman: I never feel particularly funny. I never awaiting trial on drugs .. If it were to come out at think of myself necessarily as a comic writer. It's camou;/lage.What better way to get the curse out Alexander SoIZhenitsyn's The GuUig Archipelago. the trial that he was set up ... That wouldJ~ave,been just that my way of looking at the world strikes people of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, To be sure, Solzhenitsyn wishes his revelations to a paranoid thought in the Sixties, but we now have or trite? With horrible politiCal insight they found affect as many 'readers as possible. But Time's as funny, makes them laugh. But, if that were the the record before us. It's almost logical to assume on be-all and end-allof the work, I wouldn't feel as if a way to disguise the thing. Intenectuals do not phrase locates the reality: books are commodities, the basis of daily evidence in the press that he's been understand . ... Banality is the adopted disguise of readers are consumers. The pitches are endless: in I were doing my job. 'I'm usually after some game or set up by the narcotics people. That represents another other. a very powerful will to. abolish conscience. In such stant liberation; instant mental health; instant sex':' form of imprisonment. I'm not feeling very smug, a project, trivial? ,Only if human life is trivial." ual ecstasy; instant demon ism, exorcism, salvation. at the moment. I don't feel like saying "Russia's bad :-Mr. Sammler, replying to the glib use o/Hannah They are hawked like pennants at a ball game. NDR: I felt sort of strange reading all the press that - we're good." We're not so terrific either; ,One other, Arendt's phrcise~ ((the banality of evil/"in Bellow's The suffering and the soul of Gulag may meet preceded you here which referred to you as a "black thing I'd like to say, one thrilling thing is the idea: Mr.Sainmler's Planet.' ' ~, the same end. Medvedev's claim will not be won comic." I couldn't figure out what. that might be. that a writer can more or less bring a country to its dered at as profound and astonishing; it will be a Black humor is' something that means practically " ., knees. There would be no equivalent in this country. ' ((Few people, naving read The Gulag Archipelago, useful blurb. It is 'not exaggerating to suppose that nothing. If, someone calls Nixon and Ford homosexual lovers, win be the same as whfJn they began the first page. the ad man's dream would be to "book" Solzen he is patted on the head, and, given an assistant In this respect, it seems to me that nothing, in itsyn, who is now a "personality," even a "hot Friedman: Well, it was a tag, that's all. I don't know professorship. at some university. What it shows in a Russian and world ,literature can compare with _property," on the talk shows. He might be sand whether it was a mistake or what. 'I guess I don't· , . curious way is that they have more respect for writers Solzhenitsyn's book.~'-RCY1J Medvedev wiched between Venerable Comedian and Newest 18 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1" 1974 ' 19 sri,' ! . ,-. Starlet. "Heeere's Alex ..." ing the soul? is bound up with the spirit and not with the polit power. It views and fears its publication not as a What makes the scenario grotesque is that Solzhenitsyll would have his readers begin by ical state. It would be altogether appropriate, if literary game but as an apocalyptic event; The ~ Soviet state takes words seriously as vehicles of Solzhenitsyn has been willing to suffer and even to presupposing the existence of the truth and the miraculous, if America were to read Solzhenitsyn die for the words we cheapen. He has said that the soul. Orwell once remarked that the twentieth cen with the insight, recognition, and ultimate concern propaganda whose only meanings are those as- Soviet destruction of the manuscripts he left be tury frightened him not so much because it found his book demands. , signed them by the Party. It takes words even hind, would be 'fspiritual murder." He, has "de it difficult to write the truth about history, but be There is no denying the difficulty of individual more seriously when they are written and spoken clared" the present regime in Russia to be illegiti cause it assumed that there were no such things as Americans committing' themselves to such an act by one who believes that writing is an act of re mate and a mockery. Our talk shows - hideous truth and history.Solzhenitsyn's vision, like Dos of faith. "Our America," writes Emerson, "has a ligious rather than socialist faith, that words are phrase, when one thinks on it - babble forever' toyevsky's, is rooted in the soul and in the soul's bad name for superficialness. Great men, great na moral, and that they are given their deepest sig"; ads shriek; print is everywhere, the bamil rhetori~ struggle to see the truth of its' world. Virginia tions,- have not been boasters and buffoons, but per nificance when they are made to serve the truth. of this week's performer inescapable: Riggs Ali Woolf rightly says that the soul is the main char ceivers of the terror of life, and have manned The Soviet government, however, has no pre Ervin, Simon, Baker, Buzhardt, Steinem,Wh~ever: acter in Russian literature, and that this precise themselves to face it." SoIzhenitsyn ends The mium on the use of language to obscure and to de " 'Personalities,' " wrote T. S. Eliot, "succeed one fad often makes Russian literature alien to us. The First Oircle with a fatuous observation by a West ceive. In the same way, neither the terrifying nor another in interest. Ris difficult to conceive of any soul is not a statistic. It cannot be bought, sold, erner in· Russia. He sees a meat truck arid notes the redemptive quality of Solzhenitsyn's "one word age (of many ages) when human beings cared ... peddled. Its utterances are, speech rather than that provisions in Moscow must be excellent. The of truth" may be restricted to a narrowly polemical about the salvation of the 'soul,' but not about each prattle, religious and not slick. Its suffering does "meat truck" in fact is loaded with people who are or political interpretation.' This does not excuse or other as 'personalities.''' The media as barkers not respond to glib cures. But Solzhenitsynis knowl destined, like cattle, for the slaughter or for a slow minimize the monstrous sins of Stalinism. It was reality as medicine show. ' edge of its reality anchors his insistence 'that his madness in one of Stalin's prison camps in the vast to reveal those sins that Solzhenitsyn wrote Gulag. SoIzhenitsyn's words, like Dostoyevsky's," are tory, or the story of literal souls in a literal past, is , "archipelago" of Stalinist terror and death. Yet the ultimate revelation goes deeper still. written to "save" others, and" again like Dostoy as real as the souls who comprise it. Truth is ' r Yet Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn indict their The oppressions and terrors of moral blindness and evsky's words, they almost killed their author. Dos equally real. Dictators may dismiss them as fic own land in the same way Emerson indicts Amer deliberate evil are inner and universaL, They are toyevsky was to be shot for three crimes: knowing tions and commit the greatest obscenities on the 1 ica. The enemy consists of those who will not see the embodied in certain political regimes as assump of plans to set up a printing press; conversing se grounds that they are fictions, but, as Solzhenitsyn clear and hidden terrors of life as well as those tions and as conscious policies. In Stalinist Russia, cretly about the censorship; and reading a letter de has shown, their substance and reality will not be whose tyrannies are satanic. In the framework of those policies of terror and evil brought about clared to be treasonous. Solzhenitsyn spent eleven seeing and blindness, we ought to anticipate the suffering and death on an unimaginable scale. denied. , Solzhenitsyn asserts that the evils of Czarist Rus years in prison camps for a single phrase. In a In these days, the corruption of language· and English publication of The Gulag Archipelagonot letter, he called Stalin "the man with the mous sia did not begin to compare to Stalin's systematic meaning..;, and the corruption of man are syriony~ as /a financial coup for, a:n American p,.ublishing tache." Eleven years fora sardonic phrase. At least house or as a literary "occasion," narrowly, de 'murders, acts of terror, and devastating programs mous. Our malaise, runs· far deeper than such whose victims were selected by Stalin's caprice one of Solzhenitsyn's friends committed suicide symptoms as the infamous "inoperative." But see- ' fined, but as a kind of religious event; It is a large when· discovered by the KGB as she was reading ing Solzhenitsyn's work as the result of his act of but just claim. It would also, be a large but just alone. the manuscript of GUlag. Several others may have claim to suggest that our right reading of SoIzhen If SoIzhenitsyn's vision of hell begins and ends faith may allow us torecover some sense of what itsyn would join us to him ina dialectic of recogni with a particular political state, however, his vision been executed or· incarcerated in insane asylums "the word" once meant and what it still may mean, for the same crime. His words were born in pain tion: In recognizing and thereby overcoming the is not itself limited to political forms. Solzhenit for him and for us. His book would become a rev corruptions of relative political languages,' we syn's great and continuing theme is the ,struggle and redeemed in suffering. They have meaning elation rather than an 'item. It would be a real would be affirming once again an absolute and uni between demonic evil and goodness, falsehood and and value. When Solzhenitsyn says in his Nobel truth uttered by an equally real voice and soul. ' . speech that "one word of truth shall outweigh the, versal moral language. truth, in the human heart and in the manifesta whole world," he means it. To us, it may seem The presence~ of Solzhenitsyn seenisto be are Our physical risk, of course, will be less than tions of the human heart in history. The "god and abstract; to him it is, as we sometimes say a mat- alization of the first and· hopeful part of Kierke Solzhenitsyn's has been and continues' to be, and devil" within man's nature struggle for dominance. terof life and death. ' gaard's earlier statement on the disjointed speed of less than that of his sympathetic readers in Russia, The political structures man creates reflect ,the The power of the word remains for SoIzhenitsyn our age and the dominance of print rather' than for whom the act of reading is a crime against the dominance Of one or the other of those forces, or, as awesome as it was for the prophets. Whether "word'~: "We shall hope for the appearance of state. But if his own faith is to be even partially indeed, reflect a precarious balancing. of the· two. we hear his voice is another question. We are in a strongly armed men' who will win back' the lost, vindicated on earth, it will be no less important. The structures themselves may and do intensify hurry, and the din and speed of our time are tre 'power and meaning of words, just as Luther 'won Solzhenitsyn in a real sense has resurrected in his man's inclination to good or evil. But they do not mep.dous: 'The charac!eristic discovery of the age," back the concept of faith 'for his age." His arialogy words all. of those Stalin had killed and· buried. impose or create his polarities, his capacity for writes Klerkegaard, "IS felt everywhere: the speed is significant; The aCt of writing or speaking neces He has said that he has fulfilled his obligation to goodness and malevolence, and his inner conflicts. of the printing press; it is even noticeable in the sitates a faith that one's words possess some degree the dead. Yet for the living to fail to hear Solzhen- These forces are in Solzhenitsyn, as they are in ... .. form 'of reflection into which this ,age has of significance; tcilose all faith in 'language is not . itsyn, and, through him, the dead, would be a great Dostoyevsky, the elements of the soul, the battle fallen, as· a result of which its expressions are al-. a semantic but a religious' crisis; 'Conversely, Sol I er betrayal and torture than any the Soviet state ground, - where good and evil wage their war for ways being limited and in the end rrieim nothing." zhenitsyn sees the act of writing as a religious'act, could inflict' on him. The state, at least, ,knows· and supremacy.. , . , SoIzhenitsyn's image of his oppressors, "standing an act of faith. He is "strongly armed." 1 fears the .potential power of SoIzhenitsyn's word Solzhenitsyn's theme pervades our own 'tradi . on tp.e~r lies behind a fortress of newsprint," poses In :the nineteenth century, the . Russian . and and book. ,It has been as vicious in attacking tion. His preoccupation with the soul echoes our th.e~ problel11~ Newsprint as propaganda, "person , Americari:souls were close. ,They stillll,avestrong SolzhEmitsyn as .' our government, and all govern- . literary and religious history and his teacher, Dos alItIes as momentary soporifics deceive· and are 'and, profound affinities, including 'their mystical ments, who do not risk their interests to speak for toyevsky;' To hear Solzhenitsyn's voice and to 'see gone. How then locate the thlth in the midSt of and ambivalent sense'of their nation, and their' individuals, has been' mute in defending. and prais his vision may be to recover our own memory as the lies? How forget, and dfscard the person deepest consciousness of man as . a religious and ing him. In seeking to crush or to discredit his well as the Russian past. To hear it will be to re alities even while. seeing, remembering, and keep- suffering creature, whose salvation or destruction book - and him - the state acknowledges tl?-at discover -- or to discover - our own souls. ' '.' ".. " .

20 NOTRE , DAME REVIEW, MARCH,l, 1974 21 ! . ,-. Starlet. "Heeere's Alex ..." ing the soul? is bound up with the spirit and not with the polit power. It views and fears its publication not as a What makes the scenario grotesque is that Solzhenitsyll would have his readers begin by ical state. It would be altogether appropriate, if literary game but as an apocalyptic event; The ~ Soviet state takes words seriously as vehicles of Solzhenitsyn has been willing to suffer and even to presupposing the existence of the truth and the miraculous, if America were to read Solzhenitsyn die for the words we cheapen. He has said that the soul. Orwell once remarked that the twentieth cen with the insight, recognition, and ultimate concern propaganda whose only meanings are those as- Soviet destruction of the manuscripts he left be tury frightened him not so much because it found his book demands. , signed them by the Party. It takes words even hind, would be 'fspiritual murder." He, has "de it difficult to write the truth about history, but be There is no denying the difficulty of individual more seriously when they are written and spoken clared" the present regime in Russia to be illegiti cause it assumed that there were no such things as Americans committing' themselves to such an act by one who believes that writing is an act of re mate and a mockery. Our talk shows - hideous truth and history.Solzhenitsyn's vision, like Dos of faith. "Our America," writes Emerson, "has a ligious rather than socialist faith, that words are phrase, when one thinks on it - babble forever' toyevsky's, is rooted in the soul and in the soul's bad name for superficialness. Great men, great na moral, and that they are given their deepest sig"; ads shriek; print is everywhere, the bamil rhetori~ struggle to see the truth of its' world. Virginia tions,- have not been boasters and buffoons, but per nificance when they are made to serve the truth. of this week's performer inescapable: Riggs Ali Woolf rightly says that the soul is the main char ceivers of the terror of life, and have manned The Soviet government, however, has no pre Ervin, Simon, Baker, Buzhardt, Steinem,Wh~ever: acter in Russian literature, and that this precise themselves to face it." SoIzhenitsyn ends The mium on the use of language to obscure and to de " 'Personalities,' " wrote T. S. Eliot, "succeed one fad often makes Russian literature alien to us. The First Oircle with a fatuous observation by a West ceive. In the same way, neither the terrifying nor another in interest. Ris difficult to conceive of any soul is not a statistic. It cannot be bought, sold, erner in· Russia. He sees a meat truck arid notes the redemptive quality of Solzhenitsyn's "one word age (of many ages) when human beings cared ... peddled. Its utterances are, speech rather than that provisions in Moscow must be excellent. The of truth" may be restricted to a narrowly polemical about the salvation of the 'soul,' but not about each prattle, religious and not slick. Its suffering does "meat truck" in fact is loaded with people who are or political interpretation.' This does not excuse or other as 'personalities.''' The media as barkers not respond to glib cures. But Solzhenitsynis knowl destined, like cattle, for the slaughter or for a slow minimize the monstrous sins of Stalinism. It was reality as medicine show. ' edge of its reality anchors his insistence 'that his madness in one of Stalin's prison camps in the vast to reveal those sins that Solzhenitsyn wrote Gulag. SoIzhenitsyn's words, like Dostoyevsky's," are tory, or the story of literal souls in a literal past, is , "archipelago" of Stalinist terror and death. Yet the ultimate revelation goes deeper still. written to "save" others, and" again like Dostoy as real as the souls who comprise it. Truth is ' r Yet Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn indict their The oppressions and terrors of moral blindness and evsky's words, they almost killed their author. Dos equally real. Dictators may dismiss them as fic own land in the same way Emerson indicts Amer deliberate evil are inner and universaL, They are toyevsky was to be shot for three crimes: knowing tions and commit the greatest obscenities on the 1 ica. The enemy consists of those who will not see the embodied in certain political regimes as assump of plans to set up a printing press; conversing se grounds that they are fictions, but, as Solzhenitsyn clear and hidden terrors of life as well as those tions and as conscious policies. In Stalinist Russia, cretly about the censorship; and reading a letter de has shown, their substance and reality will not be whose tyrannies are satanic. In the framework of those policies of terror and evil brought about clared to be treasonous. Solzhenitsyn spent eleven seeing and blindness, we ought to anticipate the suffering and death on an unimaginable scale. denied. , Solzhenitsyn asserts that the evils of Czarist Rus years in prison camps for a single phrase. In a In these days, the corruption of language· and English publication of The Gulag Archipelagonot letter, he called Stalin "the man with the mous sia did not begin to compare to Stalin's systematic meaning..;, and the corruption of man are syriony~ as /a financial coup for, a:n American p,.ublishing tache." Eleven years fora sardonic phrase. At least house or as a literary "occasion," narrowly, de 'murders, acts of terror, and devastating programs mous. Our malaise, runs· far deeper than such whose victims were selected by Stalin's caprice one of Solzhenitsyn's friends committed suicide symptoms as the infamous "inoperative." But see- ' fined, but as a kind of religious event; It is a large when· discovered by the KGB as she was reading ing Solzhenitsyn's work as the result of his act of but just claim. It would also, be a large but just alone. the manuscript of GUlag. Several others may have claim to suggest that our right reading of SoIzhen If SoIzhenitsyn's vision of hell begins and ends faith may allow us torecover some sense of what itsyn would join us to him ina dialectic of recogni with a particular political state, however, his vision been executed or· incarcerated in insane asylums "the word" once meant and what it still may mean, for the same crime. His words were born in pain tion: In recognizing and thereby overcoming the is not itself limited to political forms. Solzhenit for him and for us. His book would become a rev corruptions of relative political languages,' we syn's great and continuing theme is the ,struggle and redeemed in suffering. They have meaning elation rather than an 'item. It would be a real would be affirming once again an absolute and uni between demonic evil and goodness, falsehood and and value. When Solzhenitsyn says in his Nobel truth uttered by an equally real voice and soul. ' . speech that "one word of truth shall outweigh the, versal moral language. truth, in the human heart and in the manifesta whole world," he means it. To us, it may seem The presence~ of Solzhenitsyn seenisto be are Our physical risk, of course, will be less than tions of the human heart in history. The "god and abstract; to him it is, as we sometimes say a mat- alization of the first and· hopeful part of Kierke Solzhenitsyn's has been and continues' to be, and devil" within man's nature struggle for dominance. terof life and death. ' gaard's earlier statement on the disjointed speed of less than that of his sympathetic readers in Russia, The political structures man creates reflect ,the The power of the word remains for SoIzhenitsyn our age and the dominance of print rather' than for whom the act of reading is a crime against the dominance Of one or the other of those forces, or, as awesome as it was for the prophets. Whether "word'~: "We shall hope for the appearance of state. But if his own faith is to be even partially indeed, reflect a precarious balancing. of the· two. we hear his voice is another question. We are in a strongly armed men' who will win back' the lost, vindicated on earth, it will be no less important. The structures themselves may and do intensify hurry, and the din and speed of our time are tre 'power and meaning of words, just as Luther 'won Solzhenitsyn in a real sense has resurrected in his man's inclination to good or evil. But they do not mep.dous: 'The charac!eristic discovery of the age," back the concept of faith 'for his age." His arialogy words all. of those Stalin had killed and· buried. impose or create his polarities, his capacity for writes Klerkegaard, "IS felt everywhere: the speed is significant; The aCt of writing or speaking neces He has said that he has fulfilled his obligation to goodness and malevolence, and his inner conflicts. of the printing press; it is even noticeable in the sitates a faith that one's words possess some degree the dead. Yet for the living to fail to hear Solzhen- These forces are in Solzhenitsyn, as they are in ... .. form 'of reflection into which this ,age has of significance; tcilose all faith in 'language is not . itsyn, and, through him, the dead, would be a great Dostoyevsky, the elements of the soul, the battle fallen, as· a result of which its expressions are al-. a semantic but a religious' crisis; 'Conversely, Sol I er betrayal and torture than any the Soviet state ground, - where good and evil wage their war for ways being limited and in the end rrieim nothing." zhenitsyn sees the act of writing as a religious'act, could inflict' on him. The state, at least, ,knows· and supremacy.. , . , SoIzhenitsyn's image of his oppressors, "standing an act of faith. He is "strongly armed." 1 fears the .potential power of SoIzhenitsyn's word Solzhenitsyn's theme pervades our own 'tradi . on tp.e~r lies behind a fortress of newsprint," poses In :the nineteenth century, the . Russian . and and book. ,It has been as vicious in attacking tion. His preoccupation with the soul echoes our th.e~ problel11~ Newsprint as propaganda, "person , Americari:souls were close. ,They stillll,avestrong SolzhEmitsyn as .' our government, and all govern- . literary and religious history and his teacher, Dos alItIes as momentary soporifics deceive· and are 'and, profound affinities, including 'their mystical ments, who do not risk their interests to speak for toyevsky;' To hear Solzhenitsyn's voice and to 'see gone. How then locate the thlth in the midSt of and ambivalent sense'of their nation, and their' individuals, has been' mute in defending. and prais his vision may be to recover our own memory as the lies? How forget, and dfscard the person deepest consciousness of man as . a religious and ing him. In seeking to crush or to discredit his well as the Russian past. To hear it will be to re alities even while. seeing, remembering, and keep- suffering creature, whose salvation or destruction book - and him - the state acknowledges tl?-at discover -- or to discover - our own souls. ' '.' ".. " .

20 NOTRE , DAME REVIEW, MARCH,l, 1974 21 , "

TO HARRY LEWIS WHO SAID, John Cheever: The Swimming of America "Art cannot ask for indulgence. It must in fact be an attack on that very thing." begging the indulgence of , Ted Enslin who invented this form Robert Slabey Have you, by the way, looked up the meaning of that word, Harry? "indulgence"? U. .. the story of Rip Van Winkle has never touch with basic forms of existence as well as in been finishedJ and still awaits a final imagi the center of our culture. He charts-the peregrina something which is g~anted out of generosity or compassion native re-creation.n-Constance Rourke tions of American life - from town to city to the a pardon suburbs to Europe to "America." His special leeway or tolerance UlndeedJ the 'central fact about America in theatre, ,however, is suburbia where the meta 1970 is the discrepancy between the realities morphosis is not of Irving's sleepy Dutch into busy And what can art ask for? " ' _ of our society and our beliefs about them. Americans but of workaday city businessmen into (As much as the artist needs?) The gap is even greater in terms of our fail weekend "country gentlemen." Yes, you are right. I am twisting your words. ure to understand the possibilities and poten On one level, Cheever's fictions are comedies of Deliberately. tial pf American life.n-Charles A. Reich manners recording the objects and occasions of For you have deliberately suburban life: supermarkets, swimming pools, com misrepresented mine. muter trains, thruways, cocktail parties. Beha I vioral nuances function as in manners fiction; for Chosen to ignore More than a century after Washington Irving example, a "loss of social esteem" can be discerned what is really there, described the Catskills as "fairy mountains" with when a hired bartender gives rude service at a if words are facts "magical hues" produced by seasonal and diurnal party. In spite of satiric possibilities toonu and ideas are landscapes. atmospheric changes, John Cheever has taken that You have chosen an easy, ' D·lane', Wakosk·. merous to be resisted, Cheever's primary impulse is enchanted vicinity as the locale for some of his not to ridicule the silly surfaces. He suggests and shall we say -, best fiction. In this continuation of Hudson River' sometimes depicts loneliness and despair as well as "indulgent" mythology, Cheever's territory, like Irving's, is mysterious and sinister realities. Suburbia is built way somewhere between fact and fantasy, the mundane over the abyss from which the powers of darkness of looking at me. and the marvelous, "modern" life and ancient leg occasionally emerge. Recall the strange accident in end. And while both writers mix comedy and sad Bullet Park. when a commuter waiting on a station But would it be fair to deny you? ness, Irving's vision gravitates towards the first platform is sucked under the wheels of the Chicago No, pole, Cheever's towards the second. They are both express; Cheever's reality here and elsewhere is of course. in the company of- American writers who find closer to Kafka than O'Hara. He exposes ,the And I am indulgent. ' "reality" at the crossroads of actuality and myth. nightmare behind Norman Rockwell's Saturday You have said so yourself. '- In ,addition, Cheever's magical transformations Evening Post "America." Though Cheever's alle Not examining, perhaps, as most poets would have cultural roots in Ovid and Cotton Mather as giance is to the tradition of Romance, ,his vision the roots of your words" well as in American Romanticism. Like Irving (though not his style) resembles William Dean their literal meanings; - , Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Faulkner-Cheever has Howells' depiction. of the troubled day-to-day ex Adopting a pose as serious researcher taken aregion and a time and, without diminishing istence of the middle class: those who live on the looking for their importance, has made them stand for the thin surface hiding terror and violence and pain OBJECTIVE TRUTH. larger meanings of American reality. His basic in their endlessly renewed attempts to plug along Well, sorry old man, , exploration has been into the depths of the Amer with honor in a chaotic world. Cheever depicts the poetry doesn't have any to offer. ican experience; he can see the meaning of the "more smiling aspects of life," which' (according But I will indulge in the, most decent way I can. ..", country in the way ordinary people live their daily to Howells) were the more American - and some Responding to your lives. times the more terrifying. accusations , In a career spanning more than four decades, Cheever's people are ordinary, weak, foolish, which are either too sweet or too sour, Cheever ·has published over one, hundred short shallow; for the most part lonely, sad, disap like home-made wine. stories (most of them in TheNewYorker)J six story pointed, inarticulate, they muddle through after collections, and three novels. A conscious craftsman barely avoiding disaster. But since they have a Where I live right now, and a brilliant stylist, he has encounteredsubstan capacity for love and goodness, to their creator one only mentions the weather when it isn't raining. ' tial success but only spare attention by academic their lives are, finally, worth, saving. In Cheever's - And you always smile and say hello to someone you've met, critics. "The Swimmer," a fifteen-page tale which view Good and Evil are both powerful forces. Life, even when he is your neighbor will be the focus of the present study, is, according he writes, is "a perilous moral journey." The freaks arid you know he beats his wife, to its author, the product of two months' work and along the way are those who have fallen from or is a thief. 150 pages of notes. He is, I think, probably the grace. William Peden calls Cheever "a wry ob most underestimated - and sometimesmisunder server of manners and mores [who] is more sad stood ~ of contemporary fictionists. Cheever's dened than amused by the foibles he depicts with mastery of art and theme places his best work in" understanding and grace."- Cheever attempts to MARCH 1, 1974 23 22 NOTRE DAME REVIEW I • • define "the quality of American life" or '~How We the unconscious, and the imagination. Both men At the crowded, regimented Recreation Center journey recalls Bunyan's archetype ubiquitous in Live Now." His stories, according to Alfred Kazin, meet regional "natives" there whose "hospitable the pool reeks of chlorine (in contrast with the American literature. Neddy, however, faces not are "a demonstration of the amazing sadness, futil customs and traditions ... have to be handled with pure waters of private pools) and Ned is subjected the primitive forces of the wilderness but pools, ity, and evanescence of life among the settled, diplomacy."-;- ~ip's overnight sleep covers twenty to the lifeguard's rebukes. America's natural re gardens, and highways. His pool expedition is a moneyed, seemingly altogether domesticated years, Ned's. long' day's journey compresses sources have become crowded, polluted, and "col Madison Avenue packaging of Emerson's call to people in [Suburbia]." Cheever's people, latter several years. The,' Big Sleep becomes the Big lectivized,", troutstreams cut up and sold by the "enjoy an original relation to the univerSe," his day neighbors of Irving's and Wharton's, in class Hangover, each signifying the central hollowness yard (as at Brautigan's Cleveland Wrecking Com naturism just as ersatz as the nudist Hallorans and consciousness closer to Howells' and Lewis' of each man's middle years,' the American empti pany). Next, at the Hallorans', the beech hedge is reading the Times. By the 1960's the Frontier is are revealed in the mode of Hawthorne with the ness between the Pepsi generation and. the Geritol yellow; Ned is cold, tired, depressed" and his trunks something not lived but read about" a vision en insight of Fitzgerald.. set -, feel loose. It is definitely autumn with falling leaves riched by memory. Ned's desire is to go back in and woodsmoke;, At the Sachs' he barely finishes time and space, to move outward and inward, while II Rip's encounter and sleep and Neddy's suburban swim are mythic experiences that have indexes in his swim and, desperately needing a drink, he an onerous world moves forward and downward. One of Cheever's most famous, most striking, heads for the Binswangers.' The Merrills had al and most original stories "The Swimmer"eluci both psychology and reality. On one level, Rip's Cheever omits the final movement of the arche afternoon in the mountains and Ne~dy's swimsaga ways refused their invitations, but now Ned finds type (Rip's reconciliation with the new life of the dates his characteristic artistry as well as his ver that he is the one, to be snubbed at the party. In sion of American existence. The basic situation is epitomize their lives, each experience significantly town), but he plays out the full, darker implica initiated with drinking. For Cheever every subur addition, the dark water of the pool has a "wintry tions. The everyday world, re-established at the well known: Neddy Merrill's decision to swim gleam." Then after his former mistress refuses his eight miles home via a series of pools. But by the ban Sunday is the same, duplicating the sameness conclusion of "Rip Van Winkle," is irretrievably of every business day in the city. , While Rip has I request for, a drink, he is exhausted and for the lost at the end of "The Swimmer."Irving created time he is finished, years have passed and his house first time he has to use the ladder getting out of a is empty. Neddy's arrival home is an example of an aversion to all profitable work, Ned represses all a legendary past (based on European myths) to unpleasant facts from his consciousness. Both time pool. The flowers and constellations are unmis enrich the texture of a raw, new present. Cheever Cheever's suburbanite" here falling through the takably those of autumn. He, is unable' to surface into the abyss over which his life has been travellers' escape because of similar psychological imagined a mythic alternate to explode an unreal inabilities to face adult responsibilities and to com dive into the last pools. Miserable, cold, exhausted' present. Irving's dream-world is, finally, not be precariously structured, while others undergo I bewildered, he weeps. He has been "immersed to~ magical transformations. Neddy makes the once mit themselves to dull actuality. They want to lieved in, while for Cheever myth, dream, and the leave behind everyday existence, domestic troubles, long." The temporal drift is ever downward, with unconscious are more "real" than objective exist in-a-lifetime discovery that he has won the race summer, the time of physicality and material pros but lost, his "life." He is the seemingly self-confi loneliness, advancing age. / Like generations of ence. After 140 years, Cheever has replaced his Americans they have taken to the woods -'- to I perity, giving way to, the season of decline and de tory, Irving's primary allegiance, with mystery. dent conformist whose life-style is, identified'with cay. During his odyssey Ned loses a sense of time his environment; he is a thorough creature of his hunt, to fish, to camp out, to contemplate the According to Richard Poirier the most interesting wild'erness, and/or to' find the "real America." r just as "his gift for concealing painful facts let him American writings are an image of the creation of culture. Neddy -is, moreover, athletic, with "the I forget that he had sold his house, that his children especial slenderness of youth.... He might have N eddy's swim is obviously just a more domesticated I America itself: "They are bathed in the myths of form of woodcraft. He leaves ~echnopolis :for Aro: were in trouble, and that his friend [Eric Sachs] American history; they carry the metaphoric bur been compared toa summer day, particularly the had. been ill." His affair with Shirley Adams had last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis cadia, history for pastoral; but now the machine I den of a great dream of freedom - of the expan ,has been setup in the garden (in the form of the been terminated "last week, last month, last year. sion of national consciousness into the vast spaces racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely He COUldn't remember." one of youth, sport, and clement weather." pool filter). ' ' , of a continent and the absorption of those spaces The 'purpose of, his, swim is to enhance the Irving's storied Hudson is replaced by the fan I During Neddy's swim, he loses everything - into ourselves." By taking his protagonist outside beauty of the summer day, but his experience turns, tasied Lucinda, a "river''-of swimming, pools. Both wife, children, home, friends, mistress, job, invest of society and by moving his fiction into myth, out to be closer to Houseman's Athlete Dying "Rip :Van Winkle" and "The Swimmer" contain ments, youth, hopes, dreams, self. At the end he Cheever has secured a place in the major tradition Young. than to Shakespeare's young man. His mythic thunderstorms and cyclic seaSonal imag "had done what he wanted, he had swum the coun of American literature with its minority, counter newly discovered route home will be named the ery. For Ned the starting point in- a fine midsum try," ,but his house is dark, locked, and empty, culture vision of society. Through action, image, Lucinda,River (to honor his wife), but it is ac mer day at the Westerhazys'. Cheever, like Irving" recalling Rip who discovered his house abandoned and allusion he creates a literary, mythic, and cul tually to be a celebration of his own fading youth' manages subtle and skillful shifts from actual time and in decay and found himself alone in the world, tural context. The Hudson, Concord,. Mississippi, and an expansion of. diminished possibilities. ' and place to the world of Nature, myth and the I puzzled by "such enormous lapses of time." The Thames, Nile, and Ganges mingle in' the creative The narrative begins on "one of those .mid imagination, time measured by sun and season in Lucinda River, like the Hudson, represents time consciousness. summer Sundays when 'everyone sits around say stead of clocks and commuter trains., But the key and change; the waterway of "light" and new be-, ing: 'I drank too much last night.' " And like "Rip to meaning in Nature's rhythms and rituals'is ginnings becomes the river of darkness, and de III VanWinkle" there is a description of "magical lost to Ned as it had oeen to Rip. At the first pool spair. Cheever has carried the identityless, which , In his fiction Cheever presents the symptoms of hues": "It was a fine day. In the West there was a where the apple trees are in bloom, Ned has aI- Irving ultimately averted, to its finale. The con stituents of actuality have slipped away. All that contemporary anxiety' and ennui "but only implies massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen , ready gone back even further than spring -' to the causes. His men suffer from that American from a distance - from the bow of an approaching Eden, which, had been a "world of apples." From he thought he had is lost; all relationships have inability to make sense out of life that derives from ship - that it might have a name. Lisbon. Hack-' here he progresses' to the Bunkers' party where , come to naught. "He is left with emptiness. "Every a failure to recognize the unreality of their lives' ensack." Cheever's,' protagonist, along, with, he is welcomed, to the Levys'where theparty,is thing" was never enough: now it is nothing. While They are, however, evidently tired of an existence ' IrVing's tale ranks not only as a classic but as a Rip" is an avatar of the amiable good fellow, the over and the maple leaves are red and yellow, to' that does not fulfill, of living without imagination. shallow American who drinks too much and "lives" the Lindleys' riding' ring" overgrown "with grass. national resource for cultural 'reference, "The They have been working and residing and playing , -j too little; Neddy Merrill is not the lazy dropout, Then the Welchers' pool is dry,the bathhouse Swimmer'.' is no less rich and includes areas beyond Irving's attention. in artificiality, regimentation, in a plastic "unre but heis an escapist and a dreamer (and part-time locked, and the house:' "for sale," prefiguring' the ality." All of their life-pursuits - 'success, status, I "pool bum"). Ned has material abundance, but that,' end of his journey. Ned's most difficult portage is , Neddy is the depth less dreamer and organiza sex-ignore reality and are in fact fantasies. Free.;. he finds, is not enough; he shares with many of. the highway where the motorists harass and tion 'man, but he also acts out the frontier myth of dom, "happiness, achievement are 'illusions. - Sub ridicule him, but by then he has reached the point exploration" independence, individualism, 'endur II, Cheever's protagonists a vague' discontent. His stance is frittered away through' absorption in de escape froni' cares and responsibilities and from, of no return. His desire for a drink is mocked when ance, and self-reliance.' He even sees himself "as' taiL The suburbanite, above all, dwells in cultural I time is similar to Rip's, the cocktail party Ned's he is assailed by an empty:beer can., To mobile a: legendary' figure." "Making his way home deprivation, in 'a synthetic environment, with I equivalent ,for Rip's pub. Rip's dream of a per Americans (asH. L. Menckenprophesied) Nature by an uncommon rou~egave him the feeling, that "neither the beauty and serenity of the country petual men's club has its correspondence in Ned's has become a place to toss beer eans on Sunday,,' he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a des side, the stimulation of the city, nor the stability dream of, a permanent poolside party. Both' go 'on, afternoons. But all those cars on the Turnpike are tiny." Another Columbus, he has only ,imagi and sense of community of the small town."Ned I to have 'extraordinary experiences in the "en':' - if we believe Paul Simon - looking "for Amer- nary charts to follow. A pioneer, he confronts the has the civilized man's psychic need' to rebel I chanted mountains," in a dream-world of the past, ica.'" ' challenge of nature. alone. And as a pilgrim, his , against his plastic surroundings and the organized i i 24 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1,1974 25

I! IiJ define "the quality of American life" or '~How We the unconscious, and the imagination. Both men At the crowded, regimented Recreation Center journey recalls Bunyan's archetype ubiquitous in Live Now." His stories, according to Alfred Kazin, meet regional "natives" there whose "hospitable the pool reeks of chlorine (in contrast with the American literature. Neddy, however, faces not are "a demonstration of the amazing sadness, futil customs and traditions ... have to be handled with pure waters of private pools) and Ned is subjected the primitive forces of the wilderness but pools, ity, and evanescence of life among the settled, diplomacy."-;- ~ip's overnight sleep covers twenty to the lifeguard's rebukes. America's natural re gardens, and highways. His pool expedition is a moneyed, seemingly altogether domesticated years, Ned's. long' day's journey compresses sources have become crowded, polluted, and "col Madison Avenue packaging of Emerson's call to people in [Suburbia]." Cheever's people, latter several years. The,' Big Sleep becomes the Big lectivized,", troutstreams cut up and sold by the "enjoy an original relation to the univerSe," his day neighbors of Irving's and Wharton's, in class Hangover, each signifying the central hollowness yard (as at Brautigan's Cleveland Wrecking Com naturism just as ersatz as the nudist Hallorans and consciousness closer to Howells' and Lewis' of each man's middle years,' the American empti pany). Next, at the Hallorans', the beech hedge is reading the Times. By the 1960's the Frontier is are revealed in the mode of Hawthorne with the ness between the Pepsi generation and. the Geritol yellow; Ned is cold, tired, depressed" and his trunks something not lived but read about" a vision en insight of Fitzgerald.. set -, feel loose. It is definitely autumn with falling leaves riched by memory. Ned's desire is to go back in and woodsmoke;, At the Sachs' he barely finishes time and space, to move outward and inward, while II Rip's encounter and sleep and Neddy's suburban swim are mythic experiences that have indexes in his swim and, desperately needing a drink, he an onerous world moves forward and downward. One of Cheever's most famous, most striking, heads for the Binswangers.' The Merrills had al and most original stories "The Swimmer"eluci both psychology and reality. On one level, Rip's Cheever omits the final movement of the arche afternoon in the mountains and Ne~dy's swimsaga ways refused their invitations, but now Ned finds type (Rip's reconciliation with the new life of the dates his characteristic artistry as well as his ver that he is the one, to be snubbed at the party. In sion of American existence. The basic situation is epitomize their lives, each experience significantly town), but he plays out the full, darker implica initiated with drinking. For Cheever every subur addition, the dark water of the pool has a "wintry tions. The everyday world, re-established at the well known: Neddy Merrill's decision to swim gleam." Then after his former mistress refuses his eight miles home via a series of pools. But by the ban Sunday is the same, duplicating the sameness conclusion of "Rip Van Winkle," is irretrievably of every business day in the city. , While Rip has I request for, a drink, he is exhausted and for the lost at the end of "The Swimmer."Irving created time he is finished, years have passed and his house first time he has to use the ladder getting out of a is empty. Neddy's arrival home is an example of an aversion to all profitable work, Ned represses all a legendary past (based on European myths) to unpleasant facts from his consciousness. Both time pool. The flowers and constellations are unmis enrich the texture of a raw, new present. Cheever Cheever's suburbanite" here falling through the takably those of autumn. He, is unable' to surface into the abyss over which his life has been travellers' escape because of similar psychological imagined a mythic alternate to explode an unreal inabilities to face adult responsibilities and to com dive into the last pools. Miserable, cold, exhausted' present. Irving's dream-world is, finally, not be precariously structured, while others undergo I bewildered, he weeps. He has been "immersed to~ magical transformations. Neddy makes the once mit themselves to dull actuality. They want to lieved in, while for Cheever myth, dream, and the leave behind everyday existence, domestic troubles, long." The temporal drift is ever downward, with unconscious are more "real" than objective exist in-a-lifetime discovery that he has won the race summer, the time of physicality and material pros but lost, his "life." He is the seemingly self-confi loneliness, advancing age. / Like generations of ence. After 140 years, Cheever has replaced his Americans they have taken to the woods -'- to I perity, giving way to, the season of decline and de tory, Irving's primary allegiance, with mystery. dent conformist whose life-style is, identified'with cay. During his odyssey Ned loses a sense of time his environment; he is a thorough creature of his hunt, to fish, to camp out, to contemplate the According to Richard Poirier the most interesting wild'erness, and/or to' find the "real America." r just as "his gift for concealing painful facts let him American writings are an image of the creation of culture. Neddy -is, moreover, athletic, with "the I forget that he had sold his house, that his children especial slenderness of youth.... He might have N eddy's swim is obviously just a more domesticated I America itself: "They are bathed in the myths of form of woodcraft. He leaves ~echnopolis :for Aro: were in trouble, and that his friend [Eric Sachs] American history; they carry the metaphoric bur been compared toa summer day, particularly the had. been ill." His affair with Shirley Adams had last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis cadia, history for pastoral; but now the machine I den of a great dream of freedom - of the expan ,has been setup in the garden (in the form of the been terminated "last week, last month, last year. sion of national consciousness into the vast spaces racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely He COUldn't remember." one of youth, sport, and clement weather." pool filter). ' ' , of a continent and the absorption of those spaces The 'purpose of, his, swim is to enhance the Irving's storied Hudson is replaced by the fan I During Neddy's swim, he loses everything - into ourselves." By taking his protagonist outside beauty of the summer day, but his experience turns, tasied Lucinda, a "river''-of swimming, pools. Both wife, children, home, friends, mistress, job, invest of society and by moving his fiction into myth, out to be closer to Houseman's Athlete Dying "Rip :Van Winkle" and "The Swimmer" contain ments, youth, hopes, dreams, self. At the end he Cheever has secured a place in the major tradition Young. than to Shakespeare's young man. His mythic thunderstorms and cyclic seaSonal imag "had done what he wanted, he had swum the coun of American literature with its minority, counter newly discovered route home will be named the ery. For Ned the starting point in- a fine midsum try," ,but his house is dark, locked, and empty, culture vision of society. Through action, image, Lucinda,River (to honor his wife), but it is ac mer day at the Westerhazys'. Cheever, like Irving" recalling Rip who discovered his house abandoned and allusion he creates a literary, mythic, and cul tually to be a celebration of his own fading youth' manages subtle and skillful shifts from actual time and in decay and found himself alone in the world, tural context. The Hudson, Concord,. Mississippi, and an expansion of. diminished possibilities. ' and place to the world of Nature, myth and the I puzzled by "such enormous lapses of time." The Thames, Nile, and Ganges mingle in' the creative The narrative begins on "one of those .mid imagination, time measured by sun and season in Lucinda River, like the Hudson, represents time consciousness. summer Sundays when 'everyone sits around say stead of clocks and commuter trains., But the key and change; the waterway of "light" and new be-, ing: 'I drank too much last night.' " And like "Rip to meaning in Nature's rhythms and rituals'is ginnings becomes the river of darkness, and de III VanWinkle" there is a description of "magical lost to Ned as it had oeen to Rip. At the first pool spair. Cheever has carried the identityless, which , In his fiction Cheever presents the symptoms of hues": "It was a fine day. In the West there was a where the apple trees are in bloom, Ned has aI- Irving ultimately averted, to its finale. The con stituents of actuality have slipped away. All that contemporary anxiety' and ennui "but only implies massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen , ready gone back even further than spring -' to the causes. His men suffer from that American from a distance - from the bow of an approaching Eden, which, had been a "world of apples." From he thought he had is lost; all relationships have inability to make sense out of life that derives from ship - that it might have a name. Lisbon. Hack-' here he progresses' to the Bunkers' party where , come to naught. "He is left with emptiness. "Every a failure to recognize the unreality of their lives' ensack." Cheever's,' protagonist, along, with, he is welcomed, to the Levys'where theparty,is thing" was never enough: now it is nothing. While They are, however, evidently tired of an existence ' IrVing's tale ranks not only as a classic but as a Rip" is an avatar of the amiable good fellow, the over and the maple leaves are red and yellow, to' that does not fulfill, of living without imagination. shallow American who drinks too much and "lives" the Lindleys' riding' ring" overgrown "with grass. national resource for cultural 'reference, "The They have been working and residing and playing , -j too little; Neddy Merrill is not the lazy dropout, Then the Welchers' pool is dry,the bathhouse Swimmer'.' is no less rich and includes areas beyond Irving's attention. in artificiality, regimentation, in a plastic "unre but heis an escapist and a dreamer (and part-time locked, and the house:' "for sale," prefiguring' the ality." All of their life-pursuits - 'success, status, I "pool bum"). Ned has material abundance, but that,' end of his journey. Ned's most difficult portage is , Neddy is the depth less dreamer and organiza sex-ignore reality and are in fact fantasies. Free.;. he finds, is not enough; he shares with many of. the highway where the motorists harass and tion 'man, but he also acts out the frontier myth of dom, "happiness, achievement are 'illusions. - Sub ridicule him, but by then he has reached the point exploration" independence, individualism, 'endur II, Cheever's protagonists a vague' discontent. His stance is frittered away through' absorption in de escape froni' cares and responsibilities and from, of no return. His desire for a drink is mocked when ance, and self-reliance.' He even sees himself "as' taiL The suburbanite, above all, dwells in cultural I time is similar to Rip's, the cocktail party Ned's he is assailed by an empty:beer can., To mobile a: legendary' figure." "Making his way home deprivation, in 'a synthetic environment, with I equivalent ,for Rip's pub. Rip's dream of a per Americans (asH. L. Menckenprophesied) Nature by an uncommon rou~egave him the feeling, that "neither the beauty and serenity of the country petual men's club has its correspondence in Ned's has become a place to toss beer eans on Sunday,,' he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a des side, the stimulation of the city, nor the stability dream of, a permanent poolside party. Both' go 'on, afternoons. But all those cars on the Turnpike are tiny." Another Columbus, he has only ,imagi and sense of community of the small town."Ned I to have 'extraordinary experiences in the "en':' - if we believe Paul Simon - looking "for Amer- nary charts to follow. A pioneer, he confronts the has the civilized man's psychic need' to rebel I chanted mountains," in a dream-world of the past, ica.'" ' challenge of nature. alone. And as a pilgrim, his , against his plastic surroundings and the organized i i 24 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1,1974 25

I! IiJ world of logic, reason, and technology. He seeks ad converted into ego-,logy. a new metaphor for the westering impulse as walk "the quality of a dream" while his reveries have venture, freedom, and peace in nature. Filled with ' .. Cheever's story, probably the most important ing, floating, running, riding, and driving had the "literalness of double-entry bookkeeping," euphoria and wanderlust, a need to expend energy use of the swimming pool in American literature, served other writers. The quest for the real Amer wants "to identify . . . not a chain of facts but an and experience, a richer mode of response, he is an imaginative vision of American reality in the ica (if one exists) is again an exploration of inward essence ... to grant [his] dreams, in so incoherent, wants to re-establish contact with life. His attempt interplay of person and object. (To Cheever's shores. Neddy's westward swim is into the eternal a world, their legitimacy." He finally accepts the at renewal is analogous to mythologized sex, "the people, of course, the pool is an index to affluence country of the imagination. world in which he lives as a dream and the dream supreme elixir, :the painkiller, the brightly colored and status;) In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby the he has as real. In Cheever's view fiction is that pill that would put the spring back into his step, swimming pool is also connected with the pro IV intersection of "reality" and the imagination. the joy of life in his heart." His swim, more tagonist's character and quest. Gatsby and Neddy Cheever's aesthetic credo requires that he pre With increasing frequency he has commented on over, expresses an artistic impulse, the attempt to are the lustrous but naive American fools doomed sent not the facts but "the truth"; his role is not the challenges that the American fictionist faces do something unusual, to create an alternate re by time, mortality, and history. Both wish to that of the historian but that of the storyteller re today, suggesting that the "trumped-up" stories of ality. It illustrates the subconscious knowledge achieve the transcendent moment when dream and capitulating "the verities." His novels and stories generations of storytellers can never "hope to cele Cheever described in "The Seaside Houses": ". . . reality are one. But both attempts at transcendence are, therefore, less a depiction than an expression brate a world that lies spread out around us like we are, as in our dreams we have always known are foiled by transience, water in the pools symbol~ of his time. The fictions in Some People) Places) a bewildering and stupendous dream." In his later ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers." Neddy's izing flux and mutability. All quests for El Dorado, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next work the discernible progress is into more inno swimming the "quasi-subterranean stream that like DeSoto's, end at the grave; The whole world I Novel explicitly concern the writer's problem in vative techniques and a bleaker vision. He has curved across the county," seems like a movement is insular, only an island in time. Neddy's swim, . rendering modern life in fiction: moved deeper into the darkness of the American through the womb-like unconscious. like Gatsby's final plunge, is an encounter with funhouse. Many of his best later stories are self There is also nostalgia for an old innocence and that new world, but one already fallen. The dream- ... Fiction is art and art is the triumph over conscious, reflective, metafictional. Prose narra for the "green breast of the new world." Ned wants er is betrayed by reality and by his own dream. chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this tive forms, which date from about the same time to start again, to make a new beginning and would "The Swimmer" like Gatsby -ends with a deserted only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, as explorations of the New World, have always swim nude if he could. His epic swim, like his house in a Paradise garden overgrown with weeds. but in a world that changes more swiftly been journeys of discovery: new worlds and new morning slide down the bannister, is an attempt Gatsby's mansion is not only the millionaire's than we can perceive there is always the modes of perception and new forms. Fiction is, as to -slow down the encroachment o{ age. Youth is, palace with an obscenity. scrawled on the steps but danger that our powers of selection will be Lionel Trilling has said, "a perpetual quest for re after all, the best time ~ the brightest and most also an epitome of Western European culture. mistaken and that the vision we serve will ality." And for the postmodernist writer Reality blessed. He wants neither to grow old nor to grow Neddy's, on the other hand, is the family domicile; come to nothing.· We admire decency and we itself is the theme. up; he regrets lost youth and fading machismo. His it is revelatory to recall that his swim included despise death but even the mountains seem John Cheever follows in the line of fabulist and athletic prowess is his last valuable possession. A parties, neighbors, friends, and a mistress,but only / to shift in the space of a night _and perhaps mythopoeic writers, participating in the chief busi return to nature ("In the woods is perpetual casmil references to his family, with. whom his con- the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut ness of American fiction: the creation of American youth," -according to Emerson) also betokens a re cern had been as shallow as Rip's with his. Like and Elm Streets is more significant than the Reality. America - and Reality - are composed turn to the "childhood" of America and to a sim Fitzgerald-Faulkner,Hawthorne, Irving-Chee- lovely women with a bar of sunshine in her of change, flux, chaos, contradiction. Reality some pler, more "real" existence, the evolution of the race ver believed and proved that the real history of hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in times seems like a comedy of the Absurd. The encapsulated within American history. Neddy. America, not yet recorded in _history books, is in the nightingale's cage. Just let me give you American experience has been . an existential en feels the need to believe in the myth of a Golden our literature. "The Swimmer" is an elegy not, as an example of chaos and if you disbelieve counter with the dark territory of a continent, with Age, a legend accepted as fact, and has the opti Mark Schorer suggested "for· Sundays in Subur- me look honestly into your own past and see history, and with the self. America itself is an mist's faith that all problems have solutions. Sim bia" 9ut for America and for life. - . if you can't find a comparable experience. absurd creation: Is it a place? a people? a· fact? a ilarly the Lucinda-River, like the Northwest ?ass -- Neddy's personal dilemma has both· psycho faith? a disease? a nightmare? an idea? a moral age, exists, and all he has to do is swim it to make logical and cultural roots. His crisis of conscious condition? To Fitzgerald, France was a land, it real. "America" itself was named before it was ness is shared by his culture. "The Swimmer" ., The absurd events which he narrates in "The England a people, America an idea. Richard Braut explored. probes a trauma-· deep in the national- character. Death of Justina," Cheever· claims, could "only igan, who like Cheever always writes about In "The Swimmer" the American Dream is the The story of the American is, like the many adap have happened in America today." "The Brigadier "America," suggests that it is "often only a place creation of one's own reality - the dream of living tations of "Rip Van Winkle," an "unfinished" story and the Golf Widow," the first and titular story in in the mind," echoing Emerson's America: "a poem out one's imagination. Americans, in their minds, still awaiting its '!final· imaginative re-creation." the volume containing "The Swimmer," begins: "I in our eyes." At the conclusion of "Boy in Rome" are still en route to the Promised Land. In the "The Swimmer" is neither rewriting nor updating would· not want to be one of those writers who begin Cheever has his young American, whose planned present the only way to start anew is via the imag of "Rip,'~ an~_ more than "The Enormous Radio" is each morning by exclaiming, 0 Gogol, 0 Chekhov, return home has been foiled, remembering an old ination. The mythic America that never existed is a mOdernizatiori of "Young Goodman Brown"; o Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have lady in Naples "so long ago, shouting across the now lost; the good old days have only led to the both stories are re-visions of archetypal Americans made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four water [to a departing ship], 'Blessed are you, bad times. With the closing of the Frontier, the and situations which link the destiny of characters plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three com blessed are you,youwill see America, you will dreamer-explorer is left with nowhere to go except with the meaning of American history. Like Ir position gnomes with long beards and red mob see the New World,' and I knew that large cars and "passage to more than India," no guide to' follow ving's classic, CheeveJ:'s tale endures in the reader's caps?" frozen food -and hot water were not what she except the -Transcendentalist injunction: "Build memory with its artistry, itS psychologicalimpli "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not meant. 'Blessed are you, blessed are you,' :;he kept therefore your own world." Ned shuts exterior cations, its cultural resonance, and its penetration Appear" in his next novel includes, as examples, shouting across the water and I knew that she -malice out of his personal wonderland - a neigh of. the currents of existence. Cheever, moreover, the pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby thought of a place where there are no police with borhood Disney-world sufficientto satisfy a middle gives the reader many of therewards of traditional game, all parts for Marlon Brando, all homosexuals, swords and no greedy nobility and no dishonesty class "capacity for wonder." He creates a myth of fiction along with the peculiar pleasures of contem' and all alcoholics: "Out they go, male and female, and no briberies and no delays and no fear of cold . private satisfaction to counter a public despair (a porary metafiction. There is probably more in this all the lushes; they throw so little true light on the and hunger and war and if all that she imagined situation recent surveys have found characteiistic story about "How We.Live Now" than in any other 'way we live." The narrator of "A Vision of ·the was not true, it was a noble idea and that was the of contemporary Americans). Ecology again gets work of comparable length. Swimming has become. World," who finds that the externals of life have main thing."

. NOTRE DAME REVIEW_ 26 MARCH 1, 1974· 27 world of logic, reason, and technology. He seeks ad converted into ego-,logy. a new metaphor for the westering impulse as walk "the quality of a dream" while his reveries have venture, freedom, and peace in nature. Filled with ' .. Cheever's story, probably the most important ing, floating, running, riding, and driving had the "literalness of double-entry bookkeeping," euphoria and wanderlust, a need to expend energy use of the swimming pool in American literature, served other writers. The quest for the real Amer wants "to identify . . . not a chain of facts but an and experience, a richer mode of response, he is an imaginative vision of American reality in the ica (if one exists) is again an exploration of inward essence ... to grant [his] dreams, in so incoherent, wants to re-establish contact with life. His attempt interplay of person and object. (To Cheever's shores. Neddy's westward swim is into the eternal a world, their legitimacy." He finally accepts the at renewal is analogous to mythologized sex, "the people, of course, the pool is an index to affluence country of the imagination. world in which he lives as a dream and the dream supreme elixir, :the painkiller, the brightly colored and status;) In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby the he has as real. In Cheever's view fiction is that pill that would put the spring back into his step, swimming pool is also connected with the pro IV intersection of "reality" and the imagination. the joy of life in his heart." His swim, more tagonist's character and quest. Gatsby and Neddy Cheever's aesthetic credo requires that he pre With increasing frequency he has commented on over, expresses an artistic impulse, the attempt to are the lustrous but naive American fools doomed sent not the facts but "the truth"; his role is not the challenges that the American fictionist faces do something unusual, to create an alternate re by time, mortality, and history. Both wish to that of the historian but that of the storyteller re today, suggesting that the "trumped-up" stories of ality. It illustrates the subconscious knowledge achieve the transcendent moment when dream and capitulating "the verities." His novels and stories generations of storytellers can never "hope to cele Cheever described in "The Seaside Houses": ". . . reality are one. But both attempts at transcendence are, therefore, less a depiction than an expression brate a world that lies spread out around us like we are, as in our dreams we have always known are foiled by transience, water in the pools symbol~ of his time. The fictions in Some People) Places) a bewildering and stupendous dream." In his later ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers." Neddy's izing flux and mutability. All quests for El Dorado, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next work the discernible progress is into more inno swimming the "quasi-subterranean stream that like DeSoto's, end at the grave; The whole world I Novel explicitly concern the writer's problem in vative techniques and a bleaker vision. He has curved across the county," seems like a movement is insular, only an island in time. Neddy's swim, . rendering modern life in fiction: moved deeper into the darkness of the American through the womb-like unconscious. like Gatsby's final plunge, is an encounter with funhouse. Many of his best later stories are self There is also nostalgia for an old innocence and that new world, but one already fallen. The dream- ... Fiction is art and art is the triumph over conscious, reflective, metafictional. Prose narra for the "green breast of the new world." Ned wants er is betrayed by reality and by his own dream. chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this tive forms, which date from about the same time to start again, to make a new beginning and would "The Swimmer" like Gatsby -ends with a deserted only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, as explorations of the New World, have always swim nude if he could. His epic swim, like his house in a Paradise garden overgrown with weeds. but in a world that changes more swiftly been journeys of discovery: new worlds and new morning slide down the bannister, is an attempt Gatsby's mansion is not only the millionaire's than we can perceive there is always the modes of perception and new forms. Fiction is, as to -slow down the encroachment o{ age. Youth is, palace with an obscenity. scrawled on the steps but danger that our powers of selection will be Lionel Trilling has said, "a perpetual quest for re after all, the best time ~ the brightest and most also an epitome of Western European culture. mistaken and that the vision we serve will ality." And for the postmodernist writer Reality blessed. He wants neither to grow old nor to grow Neddy's, on the other hand, is the family domicile; come to nothing.· We admire decency and we itself is the theme. up; he regrets lost youth and fading machismo. His it is revelatory to recall that his swim included despise death but even the mountains seem John Cheever follows in the line of fabulist and athletic prowess is his last valuable possession. A parties, neighbors, friends, and a mistress,but only / to shift in the space of a night _and perhaps mythopoeic writers, participating in the chief busi return to nature ("In the woods is perpetual casmil references to his family, with. whom his con- the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut ness of American fiction: the creation of American youth," -according to Emerson) also betokens a re cern had been as shallow as Rip's with his. Like and Elm Streets is more significant than the Reality. America - and Reality - are composed turn to the "childhood" of America and to a sim Fitzgerald-Faulkner,Hawthorne, Irving-Chee- lovely women with a bar of sunshine in her of change, flux, chaos, contradiction. Reality some pler, more "real" existence, the evolution of the race ver believed and proved that the real history of hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in times seems like a comedy of the Absurd. The encapsulated within American history. Neddy. America, not yet recorded in _history books, is in the nightingale's cage. Just let me give you American experience has been . an existential en feels the need to believe in the myth of a Golden our literature. "The Swimmer" is an elegy not, as an example of chaos and if you disbelieve counter with the dark territory of a continent, with Age, a legend accepted as fact, and has the opti Mark Schorer suggested "for· Sundays in Subur- me look honestly into your own past and see history, and with the self. America itself is an mist's faith that all problems have solutions. Sim bia" 9ut for America and for life. - . if you can't find a comparable experience. absurd creation: Is it a place? a people? a· fact? a ilarly the Lucinda-River, like the Northwest ?ass -- Neddy's personal dilemma has both· psycho faith? a disease? a nightmare? an idea? a moral age, exists, and all he has to do is swim it to make logical and cultural roots. His crisis of conscious condition? To Fitzgerald, France was a land, it real. "America" itself was named before it was ness is shared by his culture. "The Swimmer" ., The absurd events which he narrates in "The England a people, America an idea. Richard Braut explored. probes a trauma-· deep in the national- character. Death of Justina," Cheever· claims, could "only igan, who like Cheever always writes about In "The Swimmer" the American Dream is the The story of the American is, like the many adap have happened in America today." "The Brigadier "America," suggests that it is "often only a place creation of one's own reality - the dream of living tations of "Rip Van Winkle," an "unfinished" story and the Golf Widow," the first and titular story in in the mind," echoing Emerson's America: "a poem out one's imagination. Americans, in their minds, still awaiting its '!final· imaginative re-creation." the volume containing "The Swimmer," begins: "I in our eyes." At the conclusion of "Boy in Rome" are still en route to the Promised Land. In the "The Swimmer" is neither rewriting nor updating would· not want to be one of those writers who begin Cheever has his young American, whose planned present the only way to start anew is via the imag of "Rip,'~ an~_ more than "The Enormous Radio" is each morning by exclaiming, 0 Gogol, 0 Chekhov, return home has been foiled, remembering an old ination. The mythic America that never existed is a mOdernizatiori of "Young Goodman Brown"; o Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have lady in Naples "so long ago, shouting across the now lost; the good old days have only led to the both stories are re-visions of archetypal Americans made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four water [to a departing ship], 'Blessed are you, bad times. With the closing of the Frontier, the and situations which link the destiny of characters plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three com blessed are you,youwill see America, you will dreamer-explorer is left with nowhere to go except with the meaning of American history. Like Ir position gnomes with long beards and red mob see the New World,' and I knew that large cars and "passage to more than India," no guide to' follow ving's classic, CheeveJ:'s tale endures in the reader's caps?" frozen food -and hot water were not what she except the -Transcendentalist injunction: "Build memory with its artistry, itS psychologicalimpli "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not meant. 'Blessed are you, blessed are you,' :;he kept therefore your own world." Ned shuts exterior cations, its cultural resonance, and its penetration Appear" in his next novel includes, as examples, shouting across the water and I knew that she -malice out of his personal wonderland - a neigh of. the currents of existence. Cheever, moreover, the pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby thought of a place where there are no police with borhood Disney-world sufficientto satisfy a middle gives the reader many of therewards of traditional game, all parts for Marlon Brando, all homosexuals, swords and no greedy nobility and no dishonesty class "capacity for wonder." He creates a myth of fiction along with the peculiar pleasures of contem' and all alcoholics: "Out they go, male and female, and no briberies and no delays and no fear of cold . private satisfaction to counter a public despair (a porary metafiction. There is probably more in this all the lushes; they throw so little true light on the and hunger and war and if all that she imagined situation recent surveys have found characteiistic story about "How We.Live Now" than in any other 'way we live." The narrator of "A Vision of ·the was not true, it was a noble idea and that was the of contemporary Americans). Ecology again gets work of comparable length. Swimming has become. World," who finds that the externals of life have main thing."

. NOTRE DAME REVIEW_ 26 MARCH 1, 1974· 27 Images and Shadows of Divine Things

Ernest Sandeen

Posture T.C. Treanor

He hammers his tambourine against his ankles, "not abjectly," he says, "but serenely, , I am Edward T. Lattimore, archaeologist and logges, that we myght have shelter. Nor have we historian. I am thirty.;four years old; beene pestered by the Salvages, thate otheres risking what 'my posture We have 'reached lande this mourning, have made so muche of. Once my sonne thought may confess " throughe ~ the vertue and grace of Almightie that I don't know." he saw a salvage hiding in the bushes, but we Undone, Doing GOD. We bowed downe upon a colde and rockie gathered some men together, and marched out His look just shy of pride, shore, and there gave thankes. ' there, and saw' nothing. he bangs his rhythms I have recently been employed by the Uni , This, then, was my assignment-to seek out inside the dance, versity of Pennsylvania, as an assistant professor the convoluted waterways of the southern lip of When he helped her carefully undo of history. I have done i work for National Geo the Hudson Bay, and to search for the signs of he stoops among those bodies .., her dress, she would not admit. graphic, and have been published by several past civilization. It was easily the most exciting vertical, aswirl, those of any but minor, creatures scurrying; scholarly magazines" (American Historical Re assignment. of my career-a chance to definitely upright leapers, snatchers at stars. would contend how kittens swirled view, Journal of the American Archeologist, Sci and definitively prove or lay to rest this long to hide their eyes in paws of small fur. entific American). My specialty is colonial North standing rumor. My recent work had kept me out The bones of his spirit America. . . of touch with my family, so I took themall with he bends down. "The. many When he kissed, lightly of course, Barlie a thirde is left of our partie, and we me for a working vacation. mouths ,of God," he says, e,ich nakedness unleafing one by one,. have been seperated for three monthes from our At this point I think I should try to tell you she still felt only in miniatures . "must breathe along this floor syster s~yppe. Yet our safe landyng at thys deso something about myself-'why I am what lam. a~ if to define a shrill of crickets . late place must surlie meane that GOD's holie where feet are twinkling." warming into nooks of an autumn house. I'm an archaGologist because-I don't know. I'm plan is moving along its inexorable pat he. not certain. I'm an archaeologist because .. : it's , And she allowed gladly, , I am fourteen years married, to the former a distraction. I don't know what I'm distracted still in praise of little scamperirigs, Kathrine Johannes. V\Te have two children-Me from. It's just that when I have my hands on when he folded the whole body lissa, ten, and Sean, eight. some artifacts I can think about them. Just them. · of love (he called it) completely . U ppnthe termination, of our worshyppe, we It's the closest thing to purity I've ever experi I ilvitation · over her, fantasy to foot. began to gather sticks for a fyre, that, we myght enced. I guess that's why I'm an archaeologist. be warmed. My wife is a puffy beauty, with artificial rosy She wo~ld h'av~ argued the'n , There is a legend, now given some credence cheeks and chemical black hair. The cheeks have · to remember the first-year squirrels', by the scientific community, that those Puritans little valleys in them, marks of tear-erosion, flesh Murderer, I welcome you. , that they circled grass and bark . who escaped from. England left in not one but erosion, and of the barren soil in the valleys. I read of your exploits every day. and kept balance, twig to branch., ... two ships -. the famous Mayflower, and her Her lips are puffy, too, and plastic-red. There I save the clippings. I know Her mind, bulging with body, fingered doomed sister ship; the Veritie. According to the is a blind glea'm to her eyes-I. forget what color you are always at large legend" the Veritie was blown even more off they are. She's plump, and loud, and smells like taking your joy. the hard-shelled meats pouched in their jowls; And some oHhese (as she lay playing) course than the Mayflower, and was driven to a powder factory. She used to be prettier. I the southern lip of the Hudson Bay - where a , She rode in the front seat with me,' and sing Why then do you deny me? she guessed the tiny claws would bury and forget so that solemn-rooted trunks . colony established itself, prospered, sickened,and songed my life's instructions: turn right at the I keep my doors carefully might gro~ to the shade of hiCkory orof oak. perished inexplicably-.all within the space'of a intersection; Melissa shutup; Ed you're going too I fast; I think they should go to the bathroom now. . unlocked. The dark night darkens I year. with my desire. I offer my blood We have beene on thys lande, that GOD gave And so on. . free. I'm unarmed, I'm naked, I us, for three mon!/les now. The lande is riche in I come now to my personal narrative, wherein I'll be asleep. Please come -! vergin forrest,' and the stronge backs and younge I e:'Cplain how it is that I set out into thys wilder and enjoy yourself. arms of thys cf!mmunitie' have lashed together nesse, and submittedmys~lfe to the great GOD

28 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1,1974, 29

'.. "-- Images and Shadows of Divine Things

Ernest Sandeen

Posture T.C. Treanor

28 NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1,1974, 29

'.. "-- I set out wyth my wyfe~ my lyfe~s helpmate~ and jabber! , with Sean." out of words. my two smalle childeren~ a fulle year ag.o. We Sean was a different matter, I think. Sean " "Normal boys," whispered urgency in her At that precise moment,Melissa came back were torne asunder from alle that we ken ned ; was-diffident, ,a little, and-gentle, a little ... voice (that's how it's done in soap operas) "don't from the john. We did not have a pleasant ride our lande~ and our h~mes~ and our.families. My he . . . this is difficult to put down . . . he sur walk into pails. Normal boys don't sit silent for to our motel. Kathrine had teares in her eyes when she left her prised me, and ... he comforted me, sometimes, hours at a stretch ..." Our supplie of the fruites of the ground wille aged parents~ for she knewe that she would never in ways I'd never expect and, never be able to "No, you're getting mixed up. For you to sit soon give out~ and we must raise a goodlie crop see them again in this worlde. Yet gladlie did she thank him for. It was like-his eyes were fixed for hours at a stretch and not talk-that's not of short-season vegetables. Elseways, there wille suffer to go with me~ and meeklie did she subject on something distant, that I couldn't see, and normal. Sean, however, has picked up the absurd be scurvie-and I do not want that. I saw the herselfe to the wille of the Father of us alle. So whenever conditions seemed intolerable, he'd just notion that if one has nothing to say, one says dread scurvie in my youth, when I sailed on too did my two childeren~ Jonathan and Melissa, put his eyes on that thing and draw all his nothing." HMSthe Sir Francis Drake, and it was' not sturdilie meet theire fate~ saying good-bie to strength and gentleness in and all the bitterness, "Sean," she shrilled. "Come over to your prettie. The victim growes great red blotches theire childe-ish friends and to all the thyngs of out. Nothing ever excited him much, or shocked mother." , underneathe his skin~ and the blotches grow unto theire childe-hood~ for they knew that it was time him; all the stuff that sent Kathrine and Melissa Sean was picking himself leisurely from the each other~ untill he is a masse of red, at whiche to put on the thyngs of an adult. into frenzies were just-part of everything for cement. He wasn't hurt, wasn't distressed. He was pointe, he expires. We were about 150 miles into Canada when him. Hc-I don't know what to describe here; vaguely-,distracted. These days are therriost difficult: I have men I pulled over to the curb and lost my temper. I I'm an archaeologist, not a psychiatrist or a poet "Sean," she said, crossing her arms protec tioned them before, and I sumineryze them here: don't like to talk about it now, but I was really or anything. tively around his shoulders when he arrived, we landed, made campe,· made worshyppe, and angry, and the combination of bad conditions and I don't think there was anything dark about "why didn't you say anything on our ride? Were settled. bad company drove me to action. I pulled Me-'-, him. It was as though he took all the oil in his you sulking?" I have been able to make some observations lissa out of the car, and warmed her backside. hair and)n his eyes and' in his skin and gave it to "No, mother," he said, respectfully removing about the fauna of thys, our new home. Thursday Since she had hit me on the back of the head Melissa. His eyes we~e just God's, blue, and his her arms, "no." ,last my sonne and I travelled downeto a swamp with a block, I figured it was an even trade,' but hair was alinost white .. It was the same for fat. It "Then why didn't you say anything in the lande, to finde food. Whyle we were so travelling, Kathrine kept a stone quiet sulk on for a hundred wasn't there: before he was born he said to car?" She was hurt, but it would take her a while we chanced upon a cat-lyke creature, consuming miles-a mixed blessing-I missed two turnpike Kathy and Melissa: Here mom. Here sister. Take to understand why she was hurt. an herbivore. My minde thought, "how can the connections . . . all this stuff. I'm not going to need it! "I was thinking." goode GOD permit such disorder." My sonne, I founde~ that the journie into thewildernesse 1 would lyke to descrybe the special relation "Thinking! About what?" theough, rebuffed my unspake thought, saying, had drawn us alle together. Where~' priorly~ I ship I developed on.the days of the journie~ wyth "About," he formed his words slowly, and "How lyke ourselves does this animal kill to eate! hadde thought of my wyfe onlie as my helpmate; mysonne. He~ even above other members of my suddenly I realized: he doesn't think in words, I lower myselfe before the Lord's nature!" I could see she was the beloved of GOD as much owne familie~ won· my special love with the and that's why he spoke so cautiously, "moving." We repaired to John Haggerty's for a drink, as 1. And as for my childeren~ they~ seeing my , bynding love of his owne. While the childeren of "Moving?" which I, for one, needed. The kids soon disap obedience to the Father, were obedient unto me. the journie struggled with theire scriptures~ he I' "Moving. When you're dead. Daddy," he said peared with John's trio, and Kathy and I joined Thus we all shared in the Father's love. absorbed them as theough he were the prickley decisively, and asked, "do you move-on the in John and his new girlfriend, Paula somebody, in Kids can be a pain in the ass, sometimes, and bush~ and they water. He grew fat with God's I side-when you're dead?" his living room. Melissa certainly was this time out. While her wiird~ and wyth His lo've. When the other chil . "I b.' • what do you think?" I asked weakly. I They were playing Rachmaninoff. I hate mother was mercifully silent, she sang television deren played games amoung themselves,: he glanced at Kathy, who glared back at me, and Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff is waiting in a liv commercials, asked to eat every two hundred feet, would speake in·a quiet corner wyth me~and . then I closed my eyes. 'ing room while your dinner is being cooked. The taunted Sean wIlo God-love-him ignored her, and aske me of the great Father of us Alle. I would "I think you don't. 'Cause if you're in heaven smell is coming in and you're, saying hungry generally made herself a candidate for execution. answer those questions tis best I could, alle the you're just at the place you're the happiest, and hungry hungry but the food is' always cooking, How many more miles? and: What time is it? while thynking.~ Fair-haired childe of love, I am if you move, you move, you go out of that place, never ready. Rachmaninoff, is waking from a and :V\'hat time is Captain Wilmo on? and: Can well pleased wyth thee. , you' krlOW? And if you're in hell, it's the same dream just as you are about to make love to we see him in Canada? We hit our destimition-a backwater town thing, only it's the unhappiest." Racquel Welch. She was getting fat. She looked like her called Back~ater-at 4:56. It took us 10 hours I opened my eyes. I was full of the day's Anyway, the Rachmaninoff. And the seven mother, but with none of her mother's saving and 43 minutes -from 'Philadelphia, and r· was sweat, and sick with the smell of the highway. and-sevens. And John. John was, and is, my sexuality. She was a lump of plastic, with loud bushed. Melissa had to go to the bathroom, so But he seemed as clean and as dry as he was when neighbor in Philadelphia, a forty-seven-year-old speakers set in the middle of her head apd no we stopped at a gas station. Sean went into the we left at six this morning. two-time divorce. He's like the aerosol pine scent volume control. She was one big want, one black garage, and picked up' a comic book - THE "That-makes sense, Sean. 'We'll talk about it you put on aluminum Christmas trees. He has the haired candy-smelly pug-nosed whelp, and I MAGNIFICENT HULK. But the things he later. You,get candy for all of us-here's half a Cadillac hearse dealership for Eastern Pennsyl helped whelp her. She was a radio set' at the could see-that we all could see-never seemed dollar." vania, and he's richer than hell. He's' always giv wrong station, and I would have preferred to to hold his attention for very long, and thus he When he had gone Kathrine turned to me, ing parties for people who aren't as rich as he is, listen to static. put it down after a few seconds. He stood up,· really frightened. "Ed, that boy needs help." . and, showing off one new thing or another: an God knows I had tried to do all I could with stretched, zipped his fiy, turned, around, imd '. T shook my head ruefully. "We wanted him addition to his art collection (his taste is hor her. I had taken time off from work to play with walked into the janitor's. rrioppail, knocking the to take his religion seriously," I joked weakly. ' rible), a new stereo, 'a new' car, a new woman. her, Thad read to her, I had tried to plumb every mop and himself over. "Not so that he becomes morbid," she spat, He's the sort of person who doesn't surprise you possible hidden recess of her mind for merit. I "Edward," Kathy said, breaking a two-hour "not until he's thinking about death for hours on when you find out that he wears a toupee-but even took her to a 'shrink' once. But it didn't silence, "what's wrong with Sean?" end. Not' ..." and then she made some inarticu you're certain that he bought it at the best place. work. All there was to Melissa was jabber-jabber- We had done this before. "Nothing's wrong late squacks: p!uph quick shizzle. She had run Looking at him" I wasn't sure that his moustache 30 NOTRE DAME REVIEW, MARCH 1,1974 31 I set out wyth my wyfe~ my lyfe~s helpmate~ and jabber! , with Sean." out of words. my two smalle childeren~ a fulle year ag.o. We Sean was a different matter, I think. Sean " "Normal boys," whispered urgency in her At that precise moment,Melissa came back were torne asunder from alle that we ken ned ; was-diffident, ,a little, and-gentle, a little ... voice (that's how it's done in soap operas) "don't from the john. We did not have a pleasant ride our lande~ and our h~mes~ and our.families. My he . . . this is difficult to put down . . . he sur walk into pails. Normal boys don't sit silent for to our motel. Kathrine had teares in her eyes when she left her prised me, and ... he comforted me, sometimes, hours at a stretch ..." Our supplie of the fruites of the ground wille aged parents~ for she knewe that she would never in ways I'd never expect and, never be able to "No, you're getting mixed up. For you to sit soon give out~ and we must raise a goodlie crop see them again in this worlde. Yet gladlie did she thank him for. It was like-his eyes were fixed for hours at a stretch and not talk-that's not of short-season vegetables. Elseways, there wille suffer to go with me~ and meeklie did she subject on something distant, that I couldn't see, and normal. Sean, however, has picked up the absurd be scurvie-and I do not want that. I saw the herselfe to the wille of the Father of us alle. So whenever conditions seemed intolerable, he'd just notion that if one has nothing to say, one says dread scurvie in my youth, when I sailed on too did my two childeren~ Jonathan and Melissa, put his eyes on that thing and draw all his nothing." HMSthe Sir Francis Drake, and it was' not sturdilie meet theire fate~ saying good-bie to strength and gentleness in and all the bitterness, "Sean," she shrilled. "Come over to your prettie. The victim growes great red blotches theire childe-ish friends and to all the thyngs of out. Nothing ever excited him much, or shocked mother." , underneathe his skin~ and the blotches grow unto theire childe-hood~ for they knew that it was time him; all the stuff that sent Kathrine and Melissa Sean was picking himself leisurely from the each other~ untill he is a masse of red, at whiche to put on the thyngs of an adult. into frenzies were just-part of everything for cement. He wasn't hurt, wasn't distressed. He was pointe, he expires. We were about 150 miles into Canada when him. Hc-I don't know what to describe here; vaguely-,distracted. These days are therriost difficult: I have men I pulled over to the curb and lost my temper. I I'm an archaeologist, not a psychiatrist or a poet "Sean," she said, crossing her arms protec tioned them before, and I sumineryze them here: don't like to talk about it now, but I was really or anything. tively around his shoulders when he arrived, we landed, made campe,· made worshyppe, and angry, and the combination of bad conditions and I don't think there was anything dark about "why didn't you say anything on our ride? Were settled. bad company drove me to action. I pulled Me-'-, him. It was as though he took all the oil in his you sulking?" I have been able to make some observations lissa out of the car, and warmed her backside. hair and)n his eyes and' in his skin and gave it to "No, mother," he said, respectfully removing about the fauna of thys, our new home. Thursday Since she had hit me on the back of the head Melissa. His eyes we~e just God's, blue, and his her arms, "no." ,last my sonne and I travelled downeto a swamp with a block, I figured it was an even trade,' but hair was alinost white .. It was the same for fat. It "Then why didn't you say anything in the lande, to finde food. Whyle we were so travelling, Kathrine kept a stone quiet sulk on for a hundred wasn't there: before he was born he said to car?" She was hurt, but it would take her a while we chanced upon a cat-lyke creature, consuming miles-a mixed blessing-I missed two turnpike Kathy and Melissa: Here mom. Here sister. Take to understand why she was hurt. an herbivore. My minde thought, "how can the connections . . . all this stuff. I'm not going to need it! "I was thinking." goode GOD permit such disorder." My sonne, I founde~ that the journie into thewildernesse 1 would lyke to descrybe the special relation "Thinking! About what?" theough, rebuffed my unspake thought, saying, had drawn us alle together. Where~' priorly~ I ship I developed on.the days of the journie~ wyth "About," he formed his words slowly, and "How lyke ourselves does this animal kill to eate! hadde thought of my wyfe onlie as my helpmate; mysonne. He~ even above other members of my suddenly I realized: he doesn't think in words, I lower myselfe before the Lord's nature!" I could see she was the beloved of GOD as much owne familie~ won· my special love with the and that's why he spoke so cautiously, "moving." We repaired to John Haggerty's for a drink, as 1. And as for my childeren~ they~ seeing my , bynding love of his owne. While the childeren of "Moving?" which I, for one, needed. The kids soon disap obedience to the Father, were obedient unto me. the journie struggled with theire scriptures~ he I' "Moving. When you're dead. Daddy," he said peared with John's trio, and Kathy and I joined Thus we all shared in the Father's love. absorbed them as theough he were the prickley decisively, and asked, "do you move-on the in John and his new girlfriend, Paula somebody, in Kids can be a pain in the ass, sometimes, and bush~ and they water. He grew fat with God's I side-when you're dead?" his living room. Melissa certainly was this time out. While her wiird~ and wyth His lo've. When the other chil . "I b.' • what do you think?" I asked weakly. I They were playing Rachmaninoff. I hate mother was mercifully silent, she sang television deren played games amoung themselves,: he glanced at Kathy, who glared back at me, and Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff is waiting in a liv commercials, asked to eat every two hundred feet, would speake in·a quiet corner wyth me~and . then I closed my eyes. 'ing room while your dinner is being cooked. The taunted Sean wIlo God-love-him ignored her, and aske me of the great Father of us Alle. I would "I think you don't. 'Cause if you're in heaven smell is coming in and you're, saying hungry generally made herself a candidate for execution. answer those questions tis best I could, alle the you're just at the place you're the happiest, and hungry hungry but the food is' always cooking, How many more miles? and: What time is it? while thynking.~ Fair-haired childe of love, I am if you move, you move, you go out of that place, never ready. Rachmaninoff, is waking from a and :V\'hat time is Captain Wilmo on? and: Can well pleased wyth thee. , you' krlOW? And if you're in hell, it's the same dream just as you are about to make love to we see him in Canada? We hit our destimition-a backwater town thing, only it's the unhappiest." Racquel Welch. She was getting fat. She looked like her called Back~ater-at 4:56. It took us 10 hours I opened my eyes. I was full of the day's Anyway, the Rachmaninoff. And the seven mother, but with none of her mother's saving and 43 minutes -from 'Philadelphia, and r· was sweat, and sick with the smell of the highway. and-sevens. And John. John was, and is, my sexuality. She was a lump of plastic, with loud bushed. Melissa had to go to the bathroom, so But he seemed as clean and as dry as he was when neighbor in Philadelphia, a forty-seven-year-old speakers set in the middle of her head apd no we stopped at a gas station. Sean went into the we left at six this morning. two-time divorce. He's like the aerosol pine scent volume control. She was one big want, one black garage, and picked up' a comic book - THE "That-makes sense, Sean. 'We'll talk about it you put on aluminum Christmas trees. He has the haired candy-smelly pug-nosed whelp, and I MAGNIFICENT HULK. But the things he later. You,get candy for all of us-here's half a Cadillac hearse dealership for Eastern Pennsyl helped whelp her. She was a radio set' at the could see-that we all could see-never seemed dollar." vania, and he's richer than hell. He's' always giv wrong station, and I would have preferred to to hold his attention for very long, and thus he When he had gone Kathrine turned to me, ing parties for people who aren't as rich as he is, listen to static. put it down after a few seconds. He stood up,· really frightened. "Ed, that boy needs help." . and, showing off one new thing or another: an God knows I had tried to do all I could with stretched, zipped his fiy, turned, around, imd '. T shook my head ruefully. "We wanted him addition to his art collection (his taste is hor her. I had taken time off from work to play with walked into the janitor's. rrioppail, knocking the to take his religion seriously," I joked weakly. ' rible), a new stereo, 'a new' car, a new woman. her, Thad read to her, I had tried to plumb every mop and himself over. "Not so that he becomes morbid," she spat, He's the sort of person who doesn't surprise you possible hidden recess of her mind for merit. I "Edward," Kathy said, breaking a two-hour "not until he's thinking about death for hours on when you find out that he wears a toupee-but even took her to a 'shrink' once. But it didn't silence, "what's wrong with Sean?" end. Not' ..." and then she made some inarticu you're certain that he bought it at the best place. work. All there was to Melissa was jabber-jabber- We had done this before. "Nothing's wrong late squacks: p!uph quick shizzle. She had run Looking at him" I wasn't sure that his moustache 30 NOTRE DAME REVIEW, MARCH 1,1974 31 --,------

was real, or that his gold tooth wasn't actually about the tea groups. fellow-pilgrims to this Cytte Upon a Hille. And "I even tried it once." plastic. , " Which we did. John and Paula, having dem not once has one of them betrayed me, or I them. "Indeed?" I said, hoping to sound dry. Kathy Gold tooth: his two ex-wives should have onstnited enough social grace to listen to my We have had differences, but we eache know that was wide-eyed. She had never seen a grown-up been, recalled before they were issued. Either of obsession, returned to their own. The tea 'group, the others onlie carie is for our wearie groupe. as adventuresome as John. "What was it'like?" them, with a little practice, would have been a it turned out, had nothing to do with tea at all. We, like our br.other reformers, knowe that we _ "Frankly, it didn't doa thing for me," he have been sent to found a communitie of love so very good vacuum tube. They were doomed with Instead~ it was a meeting of people, who had said, and he looked genuinely baffled. It didn't that some day all Europe will stare to the w~st do a thing for him, and it was supposed to. Then ., the advent of transistors. At that point they were undergone psychoanalysis. They sat around, as (( h J both floating along on John's alimony, waiting near as I could understand, discussing each an d say, t ese,surely, are GOD's chosen peo- his face brightened. "But hey! If I-a respectable for someone to subsidize them. other's neuroses. It struck me that receiving ad ~~ " " businessman-can ..." . ,,' , John has three of the scariest kids I ever met. vice from a man who was no more stable than These past several weeks I have gone to bed ,"John, your're not ten years old," I inter None of them actually talk. The oldest kid has you was no better than receiving no advice at all, late so that I would not have to have sex with rupted impatiently. "If you were, and if you were a case of terminal acne. I don't think she's worn but instead of giving voice to that objection, I ~athy, and so that I would be spared the indig my child, I'd be plenty mad." shoes in three years. I keep looking f9r hair be excused myself to fix another seven-and-seven. mty ~f allowing her to see me lose grips on my Paula's tennis-match eyes were following us tween her teeth, but she never opens her mouth These past several days, I have thought .often, ' COnSCH)USness. I had fallen so deeply out of love again, but Kathy, surprisingly, spoke next. ,long enough for me to look-except when, she's that alle we see is but an image or a shadow of a with her that my sexual performance had been . "It seems like ... such hypocrisy-you know, eating, and then looking wouldn't be polite. , Divine thing. Thafe is, God, who is in alle places, affected. So she' had bought a manual. ((The for us to drink, and to deny them ..." If she is a Coolidge, her two half-brothers are makes Himselfe manifest by each thyng whiche male-superior and female-superior positions are "Dammit, Kathy, if Melissa was drinking at worse. I've visited John at his home, looked at He creates. There/ore, I have applied myselfe to hardly the .only ones which have given couples age ten I'd be just as angry. When you're ten them stretched-out staring into space on his den the seeing of GOD, not only in my sonne and in satisfaction over the years," it said, ((some couples years old you're supposed to be ..." but I looked floor, visited with John for an hour and a half, the rest of my familie, but in His most humble have been satisfied by sex standing up, with one up and saw Kathy' and John and Paula Psycho and seen them in exactly the same positions when creations-the rocke) the shrub, and, the' toad. partner's wrists lashed to the shower nozzle. drama staring at me, and I concluded that my I left. Now, Sean is quiet, too, but when he isn't Trulie, as the philosopher says, there' are ((ser Others report their extreme delight with what lecture on ten-year-old innocence would have to doing something active he's thinking. I don't mones in stones, and bookes in running brookes." we call the_ ((whiplash" position, in which the wait for a less strenuous moment. think these kids think at all. I don't think they do I was forciblie remin'ded of thys Truthe, as male squats on the floor with his back to the bed.• "L'et s go, "1 sal·d· III a weary VOIce,. an d anything. They certainly don't do anything I did was usuall, by- my sonne. Thys mourning, when a,nd the female wraps herself around his thighs, turned my back.,', " " . when I was nine or seven. There's no innocence the aire was heavie withe the wette, he en buttocks, and genitals like a boa constrictor/' , "Don'tgo away mad," John said anxiously. ' there. There's no ..' . treatieth me toO joine him in a walke about, the Kathy had turned our bedroom, thus, into gym I forced a smile. "I'm not,", I said. "I'll get in "A T-group!" Kathy gushed. "What about valley. I upbraided him on account of thewette, nasium. Well,' if she wanted' sex like that, she touch with you later this week." that, Ed? How very interesting!" , but he reproached me, saying, ((Father, out there could go lay Batman. We rode home in silence. " People were expecting me to say something. the hand of GODwil be palpable upon us, for And I didn't want to have any more children. For the first time that afternoon I brought the the wette is just one aspect 0/ His greate selfe.~' E~~ , ' , I have just finished reading Jonathan' Ed room into focus. There, beyond Joh~'s and Aye, my' sonne. And you are the chiefest as- ~ kid' ten years' old is too young to smoke ward's essay, Images and Shadows of Divine Paula's anxious peering faces, beyond the fatuous pect. . manJuana. Period. No matter what John Hag Things, in which he attempts to find the hand of red couch, was the plastic panelling that looked' John keeps his liquor in the kitchen, so that gerty and Paula whatshername from the psy God in everything he sees in' the world-an echo just like real wood. Somewhere, vague in the air, you have to be fairly ostentatious about helping chotic group has to say. No matter, even, what of Augustine's "sermons in stones, and books in was the smell of aerosol pine. The Rachmaninoff yourself to seconds. He usually has only one drink, my own wife has to say. running brooks." But the, hand of God is not in was over. The ice had melted in my seven-and- which he nurses over an' "intolerable length of I was livid when I broke into their den. I the broken rocks and the plastic plasma para seven, making it watery and impotent. ' , time. That is-he only has one drink at his house, called John loudly enough for him to hear me in dises we see arourid us. Maybe the hand of the " "I_say, old man," John said uneasily in en when he's buying. , Alberta; And he-,to his everlasting credit-put devil is. More likely, the hand of indifference, of forced limc:y, "you seem to have gone off into one I was surprised" to see Sean at the kitchen on a good show, coldly silencing them and send wholly random series riot amenable to any at ing them to their rooms. tempt-human or divine-to put it in order. Not of your academic trances;~' t~ble, puzzling over a chessboard. I had taught " "No. No. I'm sorry," I said, reddening for hIm how to play two years ago, but he quickly - I dragged Melissa into the car, and hardlv sermons in stones,- and books in running brooks, Kathy's. benefit. "Really. I was just looking at reached a stage where beating meis no real big thinking, locked her in. She could have gotte~ but stockholders in sorrow, and dialectics in dying your-VIew. Please tell me about your tea group;" thing-if it, ever _was. He had just the introspec olit, I suppose, but what would have been the eclectics. '. _ , ,,' , "You were thinking about your grand proj tive personality t~at was perfectly suited for chess point? She knew we were going to leave, and she What was it in these early. Puritans that gave ect," John said slyly. "Or, about some wench -or for art, for that matter. : ,- must have gathered that there would be little them such great faith? vVhy did, they so believe you're keeping on the side." He leered at Kathy. "Sean! Why aren't you with the others?" solace forher. at Haggerty's. in their God, ,and in themselves? What made "I'm reasonably certain it's not a, wench," "I didn't want to have any." "We had better-go, John," I huffed when I ' them believe that they were about to find a Citv Kathy pronounced dryly. ' --, "Any what? Who's winning?" returned to his, summer-home. "And' I'm sorry Upon the Hill; that the America for which they "Well, then, tell us about those investiga "Bobby Fischer." Fischer was always white, about blowirigup like that just now." lay the groundwork would someday be a moral tions," John said,', while Paula looked anxiously, Spassky black, as they played an eternal series in , . '~~hat's all right,Jella," he said, doing an uri beacon? Where could they find' such a will, to conscIOUS parody of N elsonRockefeller. "I, was fight the. evil and-keep the faith? _ ,:" ' first at John, the~ at me, as though the words we this boy's mysterious mind. He looked up.' "I exchanged would have any bearing upon her ca didn't want to have any pot.'" ~- pr,~ttyupset the first time I caught my kids doing Oh, ,Pilgrims, if you could see your America It. . ." " " '.. _', .. reer as a groupie for quasi-millionaires., '/ have been strucke,during our lyfeon' thys now! ILyou could see hard Cleveland and oily , So I told .them the legend of the V eritie:; how rockie shore, biehow much ·we have all growen , ; , "This isn't the first time?" I said uneasily. Detroit; bilious Chicago and vacant Los Angeles ,it set' off with the Mayflower .. . and that was to truste and to ,love one another: I meane not, _ ,,"Hell, no," he boomed, "but what are you go- and ,the nightmare vistas of New York! Where: quite enough for Kathy, thank you, with all those onlie thecharitiewhiche GOD has commanded , ing to do? It'sthe..:~UITent thing, I guess. Every: then; would your "irriage',' be, and your shadow? Puritan oppressions and repressions. She; God eache to have to ·the :other,but' an agape.! have' body'~smoking it, everybody's turning on; To tell And your faith-what would happen to that? A love -the ,child of Freud, wanted to hear'more come to relie upon, but not take for granted, my the· truth," he lowered his ,voice confidentially, shadow? All of America is in a shadow! It is in 32 'NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974 33 the shadow of a transparency; the shadow of Ebenezer Dalton' Mourningstar, town derelict. I in a thousand different, crisscross patterns star A hairdresser. Another hairdresser. Drinks. television and business and hundred-thousand met him as I walked to the town's general store ing across it, sweet and fresh. He stared ~cross Drinks. Drinks. It was hotter. I gave Kathy an dollar summer cabins; it is in the shadow of to pick up a copy of the Toronto Star. . the air, the naked air, the invisible substance that other highball-and noticed three empties next· distractions; booze, pot, academics, romance, op He had a corrugated, desiccated face and a love of God which cast no shadow; stared ~cross to her. She was intent on John; ignoring me. timism; it is in the shadow of the invisible mist of waxy, flaxen beard, white sparse hair and craven the sweetness of the air, the hickory smell of More people. More drinks. More heat. Over an aerosol pine can. blue eyes. His Illind was more suited for bridge growing things, the sugar coldness of the air; near the window, someone was trying to get a Puritans, how could you have faith? than for chess, so eager was it to grasp at first Stared underneath the blue cloudless sky stared songfest started. . I would, I thought with grim resolve, stake impulsive utterances, so disdainful was it of the beneath the unhindered sun, stared bene~th the My wild Irish Rose, myself upon this mystery, staying with it until mental convolutions of reflection. He sat on a sky of strength, of pure blue and yellow, of real The sweetest Rose I know . .. either it or I am broken : not just the mystery of three-legged stool, blank-faced. He was dead ~lue ~nd yellow, stared across to clumps of green; More people. My head hurt. The room the Veritie, but the mystery of faith.· drunk.- '. tmy Islands of real'. and unhindered life strong smelled like an underarm factory. Haze from So resolving, I went to bed. As I walked past him, he stood up like a and fresh and good. Stared there, and beyond. stale cigarettes obscured my vision, but I thought supermarket door opening. His face lit up· i~ Stared. All day. Stared. . that the corner Kathy and John had been in was Watching her sleep, I remembered all the automatic animation, and, putting out his hand now unoccupied. An insurance executive grabbed things that had drawn me to Kathy. The moon like a Disney creation, he said, "Hi! Wanna spit When the' darkness came, when the glittery me.by the arm. .' light streamed across her face, touching her long on the ground for Gillette?" moon arose, when our first guests arrived Sean "You the host? Great little party you have black hair and streaming with it to the edge of "What?" . an? Melissa had already gone to bed. The~ were here !" the bed. Her face-ivory-white in the moonlight "I'd like you to help me show our apprecia gomg to stay awake in their rooms instead of "Thanks. Thanks. I'm glad you like it." --was unlined. Her lips parted in thick half tion for Gibby Gillette, star of stage, screen, ·and downstairs where they would be in the way. "Yep." He patted himself expansively. "Sure opened innocence. I knew that she was naked television. I'd like to ..." suddenly he spat on the John Haggerty. and Paula were the first to is good to get into the great outdoors and smell underneath the covers. Her stated dislike of ground. . . arrive, 'along with a dry-goods operator and his that fresh air. Sure is good to get out of the city. clothes-any clothes-'had excited me beyond I grinned. "Old-timer, you look like you wife. Those two looked like toadstools' with You from Philadelphia, too?". . measure fifteen years ago, and the fact that she haven't,seen Gibby Gillette for several years." glasses, and smelled like bad cheese. "Urn-yeah." When it became apparent that wore the legal minimum in any situation kept me He laughed uproariously. He put his hands on They were followed, in their turn, by some more would be required, I said, "Philly, born and in a state of constant agitation. Long after I knew my shoulders; and was barely able to stand. "Seen body who did Alka-Seltzer advertisements for tele raised." that part of her to be an artifice, I knew that him?" he choked, "Seen him?" and suddenly his vision, an insurance executive, a professional art "Me, too. City you love to hate. C'mon beneath all the contrivance was a sort of caramel hand tightened around my shoulders; he stood ist and critic,another insurance executive, and an where would we be without Philadelphia? Got loveliness. ImpulsivelY·l bent down to' kiss the bolt upright and glared full furious into my face. un~ertak.er. And wives, wives, wives-pushy, de my start with Metropolitan Life there-workin' mother of my children.· " "I haven't been able to escape him for twenty- termined women armed with gush, swinging the on the 01' actuary tables ...." But just at that moment she let out the most· sev~n years!" . . gush around like pillows at a slumbe~ party. I strained to see the center of the room. The malodorous fartT have ever experienced, and it Then, just as suddenly, he sat down a~d K~thy, with much wasted motion, got them all artist-a. huge Russian bear of a man, with wild set me bolt upright: So noxious were the fumes stared straight· ahead, as though 'someone had drmks' and gushed right back at them. eyes and wild hair and carelessly beautiful fea- that I was obliged to open the window before I unplugged the drain on his energy. He. was "a ~hey weren't doing anything, and I was tures-was booming out a story. I could catch it went to sleep. Lincoln model after the show, all empty. afraId that John was going to start a party game, -fragmented, and within the framework of the I backed away uneasily, walked into the Gen so I broke right in and told them about Ebenezer other man's history.' We are all doomed. eral Store, bought a Star and a cup of coffee. I l\10urningstar. "Right. In America, there are artists and We learned of our fate this. mourning, at a spent- the, rest of the· morning finding out about It worked. In order to avoid talking with me, there are artists. But as far as I know, there was counsell meeting. Mr. BROCKINGTON, who Mr. Mourningstar.. ' _ they started a little conversation among them only one real artist. ...". . had served as captain's mate while we were And what was that?, Not much. I reviewed it as selves-and thus saved us all, for the nonce, from " ... used to have to update the actuaries braving the Atlantic, toide us that our hoides had I drove back home;he used to be a Classics pro John's inane games. every day in '62~ They don't train you for that no short:-season vegetables. Some-one on the May:. fessor at an Ivy League university,he had written Meanwhile, Kathy had let five or so more in . the Universities! 'Course, I have nothing flower, in order to assure that boate o/safe a glittery best-selling novel, and had, through a guests in, and I got them drinks. They. were all against higher education ...." , passage, had taken our seedes. long chain oLevents, ended up in Backwater. For pasteboards from the shadows of Philadelphia, " ... he used to paint horses and carriages. Withoute seedes, and withoute vegetables, we a wild moment, I though of inviting him to the apologetic and crude, obnoxious and bubbling, They were beautiful horses, and beautiful car wille surelie die. Thys is as final! as anything that party (!) what an impression that would be-a full of stupid questions: ("Well, how are you lik riages. If anyone ever got the horse down to its hath been writ. Thys is as finall as judgemente. retired Ivy League Classics professor (-!) -on ing this' temperature we're having?" My re most essential form, he did ...." T~e scurvie shall triumph over thys bande of pil John and his friends. But I gave up the idea' as sponse: "Are we voting on it this year?" my real ". . ~ can you imagine anyone doing that? grzms. too precarious-given the state of things between response: "Why, it's lovely! Is it like this all Cheat-the actuaries-by trying to fix 'em. Of Never in my lyfe have I felt closer to despair. Kathy and me. ' summer?"), vaguely stupid themselves. The un course, if they-hey, do, you mind if I have For me, the day passed in desultory fashion. loveliest from unlovely America, sitting semi-live another drink?" We moved into a cabin three days after. our Kathy busied herself with makework projects. on my living-room couch. ' The haze grew thicker. arrival in Backwater-and four days after our Melissa practiced screaming. I read my abstracts, It had grown noticeably hotter, and I had "Here. Finish mine." . arrival we· had a party. The party was Kathy's formulated a plan of attack, mentally ran dOWIl taken off my sports coat. The glasses were pre "Thanks. Hey, you look kind of pale ...." idea-implicitly, to make up for my behavior. the list of locals who 1 knew had archaeological cipitating little water bulbs on their exteriors. "B eg pardon?". .' John and Paula were invited; of course,' arid al experience. And Sean :..' Sean seemed to be Kathy was in the corner with John and the un:- "I say, you look kind of pale. Are you sure j- most everyone else who was to come was their thinking harder than ever that day, staring over . dertaker's wife. They were laughing loudly and you're all right?" , friend, since we knew hardly anyone in the com- the stiff cliff that fronted our cabin, staring across sweating. "Huh? Oh" yeah." munity. .' .. the clear and fresh. water that flowed gently in More people came. Another undertaker. A " ... but eventually, people got tired of look I say hardly anybody - I knew somebo-dy. front of us, staring across it as it mirrored the sun . contract engineer. An interior decorator. Wives. I . . ing at horses drawing carri~ges. Besides, the auto- I 34 NOTRE DAME REVIEW I MARCH 1, ·1974 35 I 1_ ------~------~.----~------~--~------the shadow of a transparency; the shadow of Ebenezer Dalton' Mourningstar, town derelict. I in a thousand different, crisscross patterns star A hairdresser. Another hairdresser. Drinks. television and business and hundred-thousand met him as I walked to the town's general store ing across it, sweet and fresh. He stared ~cross Drinks. Drinks. It was hotter. I gave Kathy an dollar summer cabins; it is in the shadow of to pick up a copy of the Toronto Star. . the air, the naked air, the invisible substance that other highball-and noticed three empties next· distractions; booze, pot, academics, romance, op He had a corrugated, desiccated face and a love of God which cast no shadow; stared ~cross to her. She was intent on John; ignoring me. timism; it is in the shadow of the invisible mist of waxy, flaxen beard, white sparse hair and craven the sweetness of the air, the hickory smell of More people. More drinks. More heat. Over an aerosol pine can. blue eyes. His Illind was more suited for bridge growing things, the sugar coldness of the air; near the window, someone was trying to get a Puritans, how could you have faith? than for chess, so eager was it to grasp at first Stared underneath the blue cloudless sky stared songfest started. . I would, I thought with grim resolve, stake impulsive utterances, so disdainful was it of the beneath the unhindered sun, stared bene~th the My wild Irish Rose, myself upon this mystery, staying with it until mental convolutions of reflection. He sat on a sky of strength, of pure blue and yellow, of real The sweetest Rose I know . .. either it or I am broken : not just the mystery of three-legged stool, blank-faced. He was dead ~lue ~nd yellow, stared across to clumps of green; More people. My head hurt. The room the Veritie, but the mystery of faith.· drunk.- '. tmy Islands of real'. and unhindered life strong smelled like an underarm factory. Haze from So resolving, I went to bed. As I walked past him, he stood up like a and fresh and good. Stared there, and beyond. stale cigarettes obscured my vision, but I thought supermarket door opening. His face lit up· i~ Stared. All day. Stared. . that the corner Kathy and John had been in was Watching her sleep, I remembered all the automatic animation, and, putting out his hand now unoccupied. An insurance executive grabbed things that had drawn me to Kathy. The moon like a Disney creation, he said, "Hi! Wanna spit When the' darkness came, when the glittery me.by the arm. .' light streamed across her face, touching her long on the ground for Gillette?" moon arose, when our first guests arrived Sean "You the host? Great little party you have black hair and streaming with it to the edge of "What?" . an? Melissa had already gone to bed. The~ were here !" the bed. Her face-ivory-white in the moonlight "I'd like you to help me show our apprecia gomg to stay awake in their rooms instead of "Thanks. Thanks. I'm glad you like it." --was unlined. Her lips parted in thick half tion for Gibby Gillette, star of stage, screen, ·and downstairs where they would be in the way. "Yep." He patted himself expansively. "Sure opened innocence. I knew that she was naked television. I'd like to ..." suddenly he spat on the John Haggerty. and Paula were the first to is good to get into the great outdoors and smell underneath the covers. Her stated dislike of ground. . . arrive, 'along with a dry-goods operator and his that fresh air. Sure is good to get out of the city. clothes-any clothes-'had excited me beyond I grinned. "Old-timer, you look like you wife. Those two looked like toadstools' with You from Philadelphia, too?". . measure fifteen years ago, and the fact that she haven't,seen Gibby Gillette for several years." glasses, and smelled like bad cheese. "Urn-yeah." When it became apparent that wore the legal minimum in any situation kept me He laughed uproariously. He put his hands on They were followed, in their turn, by some more would be required, I said, "Philly, born and in a state of constant agitation. Long after I knew my shoulders; and was barely able to stand. "Seen body who did Alka-Seltzer advertisements for tele raised." that part of her to be an artifice, I knew that him?" he choked, "Seen him?" and suddenly his vision, an insurance executive, a professional art "Me, too. City you love to hate. C'mon beneath all the contrivance was a sort of caramel hand tightened around my shoulders; he stood ist and critic,another insurance executive, and an where would we be without Philadelphia? Got loveliness. ImpulsivelY·l bent down to' kiss the bolt upright and glared full furious into my face. un~ertak.er. And wives, wives, wives-pushy, de my start with Metropolitan Life there-workin' mother of my children.· " "I haven't been able to escape him for twenty- termined women armed with gush, swinging the on the 01' actuary tables ...." But just at that moment she let out the most· sev~n years!" . . gush around like pillows at a slumbe~ party. I strained to see the center of the room. The malodorous fartT have ever experienced, and it Then, just as suddenly, he sat down a~d K~thy, with much wasted motion, got them all artist-a. huge Russian bear of a man, with wild set me bolt upright: So noxious were the fumes stared straight· ahead, as though 'someone had drmks' and gushed right back at them. eyes and wild hair and carelessly beautiful fea- that I was obliged to open the window before I unplugged the drain on his energy. He. was "a ~hey weren't doing anything, and I was tures-was booming out a story. I could catch it went to sleep. Lincoln model after the show, all empty. afraId that John was going to start a party game, -fragmented, and within the framework of the I backed away uneasily, walked into the Gen so I broke right in and told them about Ebenezer other man's history.' We are all doomed. eral Store, bought a Star and a cup of coffee. I l\10urningstar. "Right. In America, there are artists and We learned of our fate this. mourning, at a spent- the, rest of the· morning finding out about It worked. In order to avoid talking with me, there are artists. But as far as I know, there was counsell meeting. Mr. BROCKINGTON, who Mr. Mourningstar.. ' _ they started a little conversation among them only one real artist. ...". . had served as captain's mate while we were And what was that?, Not much. I reviewed it as selves-and thus saved us all, for the nonce, from " ... used to have to update the actuaries braving the Atlantic, toide us that our hoides had I drove back home;he used to be a Classics pro John's inane games. every day in '62~ They don't train you for that no short:-season vegetables. Some-one on the May:. fessor at an Ivy League university,he had written Meanwhile, Kathy had let five or so more in . the Universities! 'Course, I have nothing flower, in order to assure that boate o/safe a glittery best-selling novel, and had, through a guests in, and I got them drinks. They. were all against higher education ...." , passage, had taken our seedes. long chain oLevents, ended up in Backwater. For pasteboards from the shadows of Philadelphia, " ... he used to paint horses and carriages. Withoute seedes, and withoute vegetables, we a wild moment, I though of inviting him to the apologetic and crude, obnoxious and bubbling, They were beautiful horses, and beautiful car wille surelie die. Thys is as final! as anything that party (!) what an impression that would be-a full of stupid questions: ("Well, how are you lik riages. If anyone ever got the horse down to its hath been writ. Thys is as finall as judgemente. retired Ivy League Classics professor (-!) -on ing this' temperature we're having?" My re most essential form, he did ...." T~e scurvie shall triumph over thys bande of pil John and his friends. But I gave up the idea' as sponse: "Are we voting on it this year?" my real ". . ~ can you imagine anyone doing that? grzms. too precarious-given the state of things between response: "Why, it's lovely! Is it like this all Cheat-the actuaries-by trying to fix 'em. Of Never in my lyfe have I felt closer to despair. Kathy and me. ' summer?"), vaguely stupid themselves. The un course, if they-hey, do, you mind if I have For me, the day passed in desultory fashion. loveliest from unlovely America, sitting semi-live another drink?" We moved into a cabin three days after. our Kathy busied herself with makework projects. on my living-room couch. ' The haze grew thicker. arrival in Backwater-and four days after our Melissa practiced screaming. I read my abstracts, It had grown noticeably hotter, and I had "Here. Finish mine." . arrival we· had a party. The party was Kathy's formulated a plan of attack, mentally ran dOWIl taken off my sports coat. The glasses were pre "Thanks. Hey, you look kind of pale ...." idea-implicitly, to make up for my behavior. the list of locals who 1 knew had archaeological cipitating little water bulbs on their exteriors. "B eg pardon?". .' John and Paula were invited; of course,' arid al experience. And Sean :..' Sean seemed to be Kathy was in the corner with John and the un:- "I say, you look kind of pale. Are you sure j- most everyone else who was to come was their thinking harder than ever that day, staring over . dertaker's wife. They were laughing loudly and you're all right?" , friend, since we knew hardly anyone in the com- the stiff cliff that fronted our cabin, staring across sweating. "Huh? Oh" yeah." munity. .' .. the clear and fresh. water that flowed gently in More people came. Another undertaker. A " ... but eventually, people got tired of look I say hardly anybody - I knew somebo-dy. front of us, staring across it as it mirrored the sun . contract engineer. An interior decorator. Wives. I . . ing at horses drawing carri~ges. Besides, the auto- I 34 NOTRE DAME REVIEW I MARCH 1, ·1974 35 I 1_ ------~------~.----~------~--~------•• r;.

mobile was coming into common use, and ..." said, "Excuse me,''- and left. " Stupid Buffalo women, I think, and then' I the middle of the living room, where it described " ... no kidding, I've seen people-perfectly , I would get back to the living room, I thought, see Kathy, hair disheveled; blouse half off, mak- a parabola, broke towards the floor at arc's end, healthy-feel a little sick at a party or dinner.or before -the hurt hit, and drink more than I ever ing frantic hand signals. ' and smashed on the hard surface, obeying the- something, and excuse themselves, and a few mm drank before. lwould get wild drunk. I would natural law. . utes later-bingo! they're dead!" get: so drunk that I would' dance around the "Don't worry," I shout, "It's my wife!" I put my head in my hands. room stupidly, propositioning forty-year-old " ... consequently his sales fell off. Sensitive Buffalo gals won't you come 'out tonight When I took it out, I couldn't believe what man that he was, he vowed to go into seclusion women and being John Haggerty's friend. , And dance by the light of the moon. ' my eyes clearly told me was true. Somehow, until he had created the 'finest work of art Amer,:" A scotch-and-water; And another. Now a shot everything-vacant glasses, empty bottles, slosh ica has ever seen.' Which he did . . ." of scotch. Somebody left, a 'seven-and-seven in "Ed!" she screamed. "Ed! Ed!" ing pails-had grown little legs which were tak " ... listen, buddy, how old are you? I'd be front of me. That goes do~n the great lobotomy Something primal made me stop, and m a ing them into a closed formation. Little mouths able to tell you from the actuaries how many pit. And another-I think. I'm not sure; , strong voice I shouted, "Quiet, please!" twisted and curdled on each one of them. Tiny years you should have left. I memorized them my The guy who wanted to start the song has Curiously enough, everything stopped. arms stuck out on each side, and with fingers self. Watch. I'm fifty. A man born in 1~34 should finally won hjs way. Three or four-undertakc:rs, Sweat and tears flew· from her as she shook pointed in the air, they tilted to forty~five degrees, have a 54.870 chance of reaching age seventy at insurance executives, I don't know, are standmg her head wildly. "Ed! Ed! Ed!" she cried, as the pails spilling water on the floor. this point in time. Same guy, y'know-he should together, singing ,- " though I still couldn't hear her, ((Sean's missing!" And they sang. Buffalo Gals. . have a 53.370 chance of making the age of Somebody let the air out' of the room, and we Except it wasn't Buffalo Gals. The music was seventy-one, 51.970 of making seventy-two, 49.1 70 Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight all collapsed. Buffalo Gals, but the lyrics were something dif- of hitting seventy-three, providin'- he lives right Archaeologists don't describe being alive on ferent-ghastly. . . " Come out tonight -',-I 00 k ,gIve me a year, any year ... Come out tonight " , the pages of a nightmare. And I am an archaeol " ... he went into seclusion for three years, Buffalo gals won't you come .out tonight ogist, nothing more. I remember fragments; re We all obey the Natural Law and when he finally came out, he had invented And dance by the light of the moon. membrances, dreams. I remember sitting wide Natural Law something completely original. A beautiful car eyed and 4runk on the side of a motorboat; cry Natural Law riage, drivenby a delightful young boy, and ..." I bound across the room, embrace: ~ne of the ing out for my lost child. Every few minutes the We all obey the Natural Law " .. '. are you sure you're all right, buddy? singers, and caterwaul again ' motorboat operator would turn down the motor So stick it up your fucking craw Listen, can I get you a drink? Where's the host so that 1 could hear the answering cry. Very con , " Buffalo gals won't you come outtonight siderate of him. There was no answering cry. I reached for a stick with which to smash , "I'm the host."- Come out tonight ' It was only much later that I .learned that I them. But I was still in a state of shock, and they "You are? Well, listen,' mind if 1 have a was the operator of that motorboat. began again almost immediately, a horrible tenor drink?" Come o~t tonight .: I remember driving wildly to the town, to cocktail glass taking the lead " ... drawn by two huge sheep! Two 6f the police headquarters., The police were-closed! bIgges,· t h orSIes . t ..." ' They hesitate-they are confused-'' they don't for God's sake! They were closed for the night. And we don't truck with you my friend I tore myself from the grip of the artist and know who the hell I am. But they soon join ~n ... And I banged and I banged on the door, until You my friend ' the actuary tables; tore myself from the haze and they don't care who the hell I am. ' I heard a familiar wild laughter behind me. You my friend the heat and the humanity, tore myself to the "Spit! Spit!" said Ebenezer Dalton Mourn- And wedon't truck' with you my friend back of my cabin, tQ my own room, for air, for Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight ingstar. "Spit on Gibby Gillette!" , ' So Go~Get-Bent comfort, for rest. - And dance by the light of the moon. ,- - Suddenly I was off after him, certain in ~~me I staggered into my room, closer to death , - visceral way that he knew what had happened to I staggered back to a chair, but it had moved, than'I've ever been. Blindly Iapened the door, , We are an infection, spreading. We link arms. my son. But the old derelict seemed amazingly and joined the others. A disagreeable' baritone swirled around, and, once in the room, leaned it We reach around the -room, grabbing' everyone'. quick and agile, racing just a few feet in front balefully bellO\ved from an ice pail, anticipating closed. Then I turned to face the room. ' Buffalo gals, come on. Nobody escapes. One by of me.' ' . me just as my mouth formed a wordless prayer . John arid Kathy, half-naked, writhed on the one they straggle into our little circle, one by one ' "'Spit! Spit! Spit at Gibby Gillette!" laughed bed. ' they join in the song. ' ' Ebene~er Mourningstar. ,", And we don't traffic with the Holy Ghost I ,chased him up streets and around corners, Holy Ghost 'John saw. me first, and had the decency to Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight' Holy Ghost take her breast out of ,his mouth. Kathy was down alleys and side streets until once he stepped Come out tonight. s0rIlewhere :and ... was gone. Was completely We don't traffic with the Holy Ghost ardently giving his ear a sponge bath _with her Come out tonight - ,- ' So stick it where it hurts the most. gone. as t~acelessly gone. tongue, whispering; unintelligible nonsense. Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight W. John shoved-her upright, not gently. "Good And dance by the light of the moon. And once again, in perfect harmony: I . Igor back. empty to review an empty living i evening," I said, dazed. " "I hope we can be civilized about this, Ed room. Empty, that is, of anything except human Weare dancing; a sort of mad shuffle; Faster excretions; 'crashed tables on the floor, empty We all obey theNatural Law die," John said uneasily. Good old John! Even Natural Law and faster. Click shuffle shuffle Buffalo gals. Click glasses, empty bottles, ice pails half filled with with his shirt off and his pants looking like,apup shuffle shuffle . .. crash! , 'dirty water. _ . ' , " Natural Law tent" he managed to ,sound like he was ~n the We all obey the Natural Law House of Lords. ' - , "Don't worry," J.shout, "It's my house!" ",,_. ""Disgorge'Sean/' I said-~almly. So stick it up your fucking craw. , Kathy was drunk but very quick,. "Ed; I want Click shuffle shuffle Buffalo gaJs~ Click shllffle Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Things a divorce," she said with finality ... ' shuffle. . . . . ~~ , - . were !Ilute, and silent, and .inscrutable. And so I grabbed my eyes, and ... "An appropriate statement, under, the cir , Buffalo gals won't you come ou.t tonight I picked upa glass, vacant of anything recog cumstances," I said; still dazed. We stared, frag Come' out tonight" .' . " , '. nizable. "Disgorge-Sean, please," I told it. I humbly prostrate m'yselfe before GOD, and mented, across the room at each other. Then I Come out tonight'and then another crash. It did nothing. So, casually,. I tossed it toward confess mysynfullnesse. I have beene tempted, 36 - NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974 37 •• r;. mobile was coming into common use, and ..." said, "Excuse me,''- and left. " Stupid Buffalo women, I think, and then' I the middle of the living room, where it described " ... no kidding, I've seen people-perfectly , I would get back to the living room, I thought, see Kathy, hair disheveled; blouse half off, mak- a parabola, broke towards the floor at arc's end, healthy-feel a little sick at a party or dinner.or before -the hurt hit, and drink more than I ever ing frantic hand signals. ' and smashed on the hard surface, obeying the- something, and excuse themselves, and a few mm drank before. lwould get wild drunk. I would natural law. . utes later-bingo! they're dead!" get: so drunk that I would' dance around the "Don't worry," I shout, "It's my wife!" I put my head in my hands. room stupidly, propositioning forty-year-old " ... consequently his sales fell off. Sensitive Buffalo gals won't you come 'out tonight When I took it out, I couldn't believe what man that he was, he vowed to go into seclusion women and being John Haggerty's friend. , And dance by the light of the moon. ' my eyes clearly told me was true. Somehow, until he had created the 'finest work of art Amer,:" A scotch-and-water; And another. Now a shot everything-vacant glasses, empty bottles, slosh ica has ever seen.' Which he did . . ." of scotch. Somebody left, a 'seven-and-seven in "Ed!" she screamed. "Ed! Ed!" ing pails-had grown little legs which were tak " ... listen, buddy, how old are you? I'd be front of me. That goes do~n the great lobotomy Something primal made me stop, and m a ing them into a closed formation. Little mouths able to tell you from the actuaries how many pit. And another-I think. I'm not sure; , strong voice I shouted, "Quiet, please!" twisted and curdled on each one of them. Tiny years you should have left. I memorized them my The guy who wanted to start the song has Curiously enough, everything stopped. arms stuck out on each side, and with fingers self. Watch. I'm fifty. A man born in 1~34 should finally won hjs way. Three or four-undertakc:rs, Sweat and tears flew· from her as she shook pointed in the air, they tilted to forty~five degrees, have a 54.870 chance of reaching age seventy at insurance executives, I don't know, are standmg her head wildly. "Ed! Ed! Ed!" she cried, as the pails spilling water on the floor. this point in time. Same guy, y'know-he should together, singing ,- " though I still couldn't hear her, ((Sean's missing!" And they sang. Buffalo Gals. . have a 53.370 chance of making the age of Somebody let the air out' of the room, and we Except it wasn't Buffalo Gals. The music was seventy-one, 51.970 of making seventy-two, 49.1 70 Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight all collapsed. Buffalo Gals, but the lyrics were something dif- of hitting seventy-three, providin'- he lives right Archaeologists don't describe being alive on ferent-ghastly. . . " Come out tonight -',-I 00 k ,gIve me a year, any year ... Come out tonight " , the pages of a nightmare. And I am an archaeol " ... he went into seclusion for three years, Buffalo gals won't you come .out tonight ogist, nothing more. I remember fragments; re We all obey the Natural Law and when he finally came out, he had invented And dance by the light of the moon. membrances, dreams. I remember sitting wide Natural Law something completely original. A beautiful car eyed and 4runk on the side of a motorboat; cry Natural Law riage, drivenby a delightful young boy, and ..." I bound across the room, embrace: ~ne of the ing out for my lost child. Every few minutes the We all obey the Natural Law " .. '. are you sure you're all right, buddy? singers, and caterwaul again ' motorboat operator would turn down the motor So stick it up your fucking craw Listen, can I get you a drink? Where's the host so that 1 could hear the answering cry. Very con , " Buffalo gals won't you come outtonight siderate of him. There was no answering cry. I reached for a stick with which to smash , "I'm the host."- Come out tonight ' It was only much later that I .learned that I them. But I was still in a state of shock, and they "You are? Well, listen,' mind if 1 have a was the operator of that motorboat. began again almost immediately, a horrible tenor drink?" Come o~t tonight .: I remember driving wildly to the town, to cocktail glass taking the lead " ... drawn by two huge sheep! Two 6f the police headquarters., The police were-closed! bIgges,· t h orSIes . t ..." ' They hesitate-they are confused-'' they don't for God's sake! They were closed for the night. And we don't truck with you my friend I tore myself from the grip of the artist and know who the hell I am. But they soon join ~n ... And I banged and I banged on the door, until You my friend ' the actuary tables; tore myself from the haze and they don't care who the hell I am. ' I heard a familiar wild laughter behind me. You my friend the heat and the humanity, tore myself to the "Spit! Spit!" said Ebenezer Dalton Mourn- And wedon't truck' with you my friend back of my cabin, tQ my own room, for air, for Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight ingstar. "Spit on Gibby Gillette!" , ' So Go~Get-Bent comfort, for rest. - And dance by the light of the moon. ,- - Suddenly I was off after him, certain in ~~me I staggered into my room, closer to death , - visceral way that he knew what had happened to I staggered back to a chair, but it had moved, than'I've ever been. Blindly Iapened the door, , We are an infection, spreading. We link arms. my son. But the old derelict seemed amazingly and joined the others. A disagreeable' baritone swirled around, and, once in the room, leaned it We reach around the -room, grabbing' everyone'. quick and agile, racing just a few feet in front balefully bellO\ved from an ice pail, anticipating closed. Then I turned to face the room. ' Buffalo gals, come on. Nobody escapes. One by of me.' ' . me just as my mouth formed a wordless prayer . John arid Kathy, half-naked, writhed on the one they straggle into our little circle, one by one ' "'Spit! Spit! Spit at Gibby Gillette!" laughed bed. ' they join in the song. ' ' Ebene~er Mourningstar. ,", And we don't traffic with the Holy Ghost I ,chased him up streets and around corners, Holy Ghost 'John saw. me first, and had the decency to Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight' Holy Ghost take her breast out of ,his mouth. Kathy was down alleys and side streets until once he stepped Come out tonight. s0rIlewhere :and ... was gone. Was completely We don't traffic with the Holy Ghost ardently giving his ear a sponge bath _with her Come out tonight - ,- ' So stick it where it hurts the most. gone. as t~acelessly gone. tongue, whispering; unintelligible nonsense. Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight W. John shoved-her upright, not gently. "Good And dance by the light of the moon. And once again, in perfect harmony: I . Igor back. empty to review an empty living i evening," I said, dazed. " "I hope we can be civilized about this, Ed room. Empty, that is, of anything except human Weare dancing; a sort of mad shuffle; Faster excretions; 'crashed tables on the floor, empty We all obey theNatural Law die," John said uneasily. Good old John! Even Natural Law and faster. Click shuffle shuffle Buffalo gals. Click glasses, empty bottles, ice pails half filled with with his shirt off and his pants looking like,apup shuffle shuffle . .. crash! , 'dirty water. _ . ' , " Natural Law tent" he managed to ,sound like he was ~n the We all obey the Natural Law House of Lords. ' - , "Don't worry," J.shout, "It's my house!" ",,_. ""Disgorge'Sean/' I said-~almly. So stick it up your fucking craw. , Kathy was drunk but very quick,. "Ed; I want Click shuffle shuffle Buffalo gaJs~ Click shllffle Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Things a divorce," she said with finality ... ' shuffle. . . . . ~~ , - . were !Ilute, and silent, and .inscrutable. And so I grabbed my eyes, and ... "An appropriate statement, under, the cir , Buffalo gals won't you come ou.t tonight I picked upa glass, vacant of anything recog cumstances," I said; still dazed. We stared, frag Come' out tonight" .' . " , '. nizable. "Disgorge-Sean, please," I told it. I humbly prostrate m'yselfe before GOD, and mented, across the room at each other. Then I Come out tonight'and then another crash. It did nothing. So, casually,. I tossed it toward confess mysynfullnesse. I have beene tempted, 36 - NOTRE DAME REVIEW MARCH 1, 1974 37 ------_._-

and I have surrendered to that tempt~tion. Our Calmly he replied, "I shall go, Father." communities hath beene tempted, and it, also, I protested that he was too younge, but he has surrendered to the devil. Since we have reminded me, thate Our LORD was but two knowen, that our brothers on the Mayflower years older when,He taught at the Temple. Then tooke our seedes, we have given ourselves up to he 'asked for my blessing, but I said that it was he -. asperitie and despair. I am likewyse guilty of who should bless me. Thys he did, saying, "Re those syns. I have spente days trying to forgyve member, Father, that howevere evyl thynges ap those ()n our syster shyppe, and I have failed. At pear, GOD's approval makes them goode. For nyghte, Icursed the darknesse, I cursed the May gyve the trees and forgyve the bushes; forgyve flower, and-have mercy!-I cursed GOD. those on the Mayflower and fo,rgyve our enemies Likeways hath our communitie delivered it in England, and p.erhaps GOD will forgyve thee." selfe into the hands of dread Satin. When we I shall so forgyve, my sonne-if thou wilt for were fyrste tolde, thate we hadde no vegetables, gyve me for bringing thee into thys worlde. manie helde forth in their faithe, proclaiming: Sean lucy "GOD will stand by us, and preserve us from "The cut worm forgives the plow." dread scurvie, untill we growe' more vegetables." William Blake: ,Proverbs of Hell I, however, had seen how fast the scurvie works, and was less sanguine. Stories. I could tell you how we ranged into As time progressed, and as scurvie strucke the night; I could tell you of the sacrifices we downe our townespeople, including manie chil made that week. I could tell you of days of deren - blameless infants, rotund lyttle ones asperity and nights of despair, of endless re healthie just hours before-faithe slowlie left our criminations, of shady days beneath the grey of groupe. M anie women - my owne Kathrine the clouds. I could tell you of futile energy, of . amoung them-also died, and wythe them died convoluted waterways/ tortuously and then tedi muche of the gentle-nesse and spyryt of forgyve ously explored, "of grassland's walked fresh and nesse that had so marked our communitie in stale, of forests punctured and penetrated and .. - . e9-rlier, happier days. We begane to trade re sucked dry, of the horrible possibilities of a quick criminations, and our mistruste of eache other sand swamp we found, and of caves. Yes, I could Visitation made the cooperation we needed to survive im~ tell y~u about the caves. Yes, I could tell you / possible . ... There is a sort of bog nearbie, which about the caves. . sucked downe anythynge thrown into it. In our Stories. I could tell you of the after~ath; of lassitude and despair,' this is where we bury our our divorce, of Melissa growing every day more Small feet you go dead, so that none may know they had ever seen alien, of my drinking, of the tenure denial-of In night wind suddenly the lught of day. It was shortly after my wyfe my loss of reputation, of my advancing :qerelic And move in leaves. died-and shortly before Melissa contracted the tion, of my progress toward the station of Ebe scurvie-that my sonne Jonathan appr.oacheth nezer Mourningstar, of my approach toward me. death. BU,t what would be the point? . . . The mastery of a moment. "Father," he sayeth, "myghte it be true, .as No one ever found Sean. Anywhere. No one was spake earlier, that some Salvages are in this found a trace of him, except-but I'll tell that Clouds blown away from moon at nearly full, area?" later, or not at ·all."They found-caves and rriead-. The mastery of a moment "Trulie, it myghte," I sayeth,shaking my head ows that hadn't been explored before. And they Moves in the lime tree wearilie, "but how doth that helpe us, in our found-God' help us !-"some tenuous remains of Black against the window present condition?" a City upon a Hill, which had' once existed.' ... Caves. What could I tell you, about the caves Wyth those wordes his features spreadeth . And goes wyth joy. "See you not the sweetness of the of our little~Xanadu? There was no'beauty there; planne of GOD, father? Surelie he has sent us no craft. A cave can challenge the imagination Leaving the stillness thys scurvie, so that we myghte push out of our with its strangeness, but this one challenged rriy Of the dark air. Lyttle fort, and go and.meete the Salvages. For, in sanity with its sameness. And darkness. And so doing, we can teache them the true faithe. If thickness. The lights we brought illuminated only weare to be a Cytte on a Hille, everyone of us that which was directly in front of us. Nothing must be a lyttle beacon. Lette us go down to the else. Nothing . . . . . '. valley, and exchange our faithe with the Salvages . Illumination: shall I tell you what we found? for their vegetables!" . , ' \Ve found a thing. The thing w~s wearing the'- I then embraced him~ saying, "Surely Jona ~lothes of my son Scan. The thing was . ; . there, than, you must be beloved of -God to thjmk of a desiccated skeleton -of a human being Scan's such a thing. But who amoung us can undertake size ... but with a hideous grin of the long dead such an enterprise? M anie are sicke, and those ... and a dried asparagus stalk in .its hand.... of us.le/tare. either too younge or busy with the. God help me, it had been dead ,for at least two ill." . _ _ .': .' , - hundred years . ... 38 NOTRE DAME REVIEW ------_._-

~; , Scholastic. Special Issue March I, 1974

Bruce Jay Friedman Sean Lucy Norman Mailer Francis J. O'Malley Notre Ernest Sandeen . Robert Siabey '. Dame T.C. Treanor' Diane Wakoski' Review Ronald Weber Thomas Werge .

. ( . ·1: I ,; l .' i " J ., il .:.~ L ------~------.;----.;.;.,.~------..:.-'------'---~-~~-----~----'---~------