Robert Hunter championed the cause of ordinary working people during America's first encounter with a rapidly widening gap between the rich and poor, unregulated corporate power, unresponsive political parties, and the undue influence of money in the political arena. Aside from campaigning successfully to ban the employment of children in mines, factories and , his pioneering book, Poverty (1904), documented the existence of widespread poverty in the midst of the unprecedented wealth of the Gilded Age. His proposed solutions — including a living wage, unemployment insurance, workplace safety regulations, workers' compensation for industrial injury, and pensions for widows, orphans, and the elderly — were adopted by many states and municipalities, foreshadowing a number of federal programs later included in President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Many wealthy people like Hunter fought for remedies to what they saw as an unjust economic system that had gotten out of balance, was causing too many social casualties, and was undermining democracy in America. While the proposed solutions seemed radical at the time, they saved the free market system from the consequences of its worst flaws, and ended up staving off more revolutionary action. Hunter wrote several books and countless magazine and newspaper articles advocating the social reforms that he believed were necessary. In addition to Poverty (: Macmillan 1904), the following are the most important and still instructive today: Socialists At Work (New York: Macmillan, 1908), Violence and the Labor Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1914), Labor in Politics (: Socialist Party of America, 1915) Why We Fail As Christians (New York: Macmillan, 1919), The Links (New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1926), Revolution: Why, How and When? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940). In addition to his social reform activities, Hunter wrote what has become a classic book on golf course design (The Links) and created some of the most beautiful golf courses in the world, including the at Pebble Beach, California. Source: Brawley, Edward Allan, Speaking Out for America's Poor: A Millionaire Socialist in the Progressive Era (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2007).

1 ACTIVIST SAVES BROTHER FROM TB DEATH SENTENCE AND INITIATES A NATIONAL PREVENTION CAMPAIGN

Edward Allan Brawley

Things could not have looked blacker for Robert Hunter as he and his mother readied themselves, just over a hundred years ago, for the long train trip from the Midwest to Arizona to visit his dying teenage brother. Initially sent home from Phillips Exeter Academy, his prep school in New England, with a diagnosis of severe bronchitis, the youngster was later found to be suffering from tuberculosis. This was a virtual death sentence in those days, the prevailing medical view being that this was a hereditary and incurable disease. Such was the opinion of the imminent specialist consulted by the Hunter family. The best that could be hoped for young Hunter was that whatever brief time he had left would be more bearable in Arizona’s clear, hot, desert air than the harsher climate of his home state of Indiana. At the time this family crisis occurred, Robert Hunter was working as a social worker in Chicago and living in , the famous settlement house founded by prominent social reformer and Nobel Laureate . During the late-1800s and early-1900s, the settlement house movement reflected the Progressive Era’s concern for securing a living wage, safe working conditions and sanitary housing for American society’s most needy residents, especially those who had migrated from rural areas or, more often, from foreign countries to seek economic opportunity in the booming and teeming industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. College-educated young people like Hunter took up settlement house work out of the altruistic urge, usually based on religious principle, to assist and uplift the poor. However, many quickly found their attention drawn to the appalling conditions under which their poor neighbors lived and worked and the desperate need and insecurity that plagued young and old, healthy and sick, hard-working and indolent, discouraged and dissolute alike. In Hunter’s case, his brother’s health crisis occurred when he was in the midst of a systematic study, under the tutelage of Addams, of the appalling conditions of most of Chicago’s low-income housing. The 2 findings and recommendations flowing from this study were published in his book, Conditions in Chicago, in 19011 and immediately established his reputation as a competent researcher and effective social reformer. In preparation for his trip to Arizona, Hunter gathered all the books, pamphlets and research reports that he could find on tuberculosis, including the most up-to-date findings. His thorough study of the literature revealed that there was a growing body of medical research which was showing that it was an infectious disease that could be controlled and, more importantly for Hunter’s brother, could be cured, if caught in time. Upon their arrival in Arizona, Hunter and his mother found the boy in terrible shape and, to add to their dismay, the care he was receiving reflected the old thinking that nothing much could be done for him. Casting desperately about for some hope, they discovered that a Major Appell who headed the U. S. Army Hospital near Silver City, Nevada, was obtaining good results by employing the new treatment methods with the tuberculosis patients under his care. Civilians were ordinarily ineligible for treatment in military hospitals but, given the perilous state of the young man’s health, he was admitted under a clause in the Army’s regulations that permitted the treatment of life-or-death cases. Under Dr. Appell’s care, he recovered in three months and, with continuing rest, a healthy diet, and regular outdoor activity, he was expected to make a full recovery which, in fact, he did. In the meantime, armed with the new medical research findings on the causes, prevention and cure of tuberculosis, Hunter returned to Hull House and convinced Addams to take the initial steps in what they hoped would be a campaign to stamp out TB in Chicago. With the assistance of Anita McCormick Blaine, heiress to the McCormick (International Harvester) fortune, a dinner meeting of the City’s most imminent physicians whose support would be needed was held at the Blaine home. After dinner, Hunter addressed the gathering on what he had found out about TB and exhorted them to immediate action. Unfortunately and perhaps not surprisingly, most of the distinguished physicians present did not take kindly to being lectured by a brash young man completely lacking in medical credentials. Several of them attacked him mercilessly, in response to which he became even more impassioned but increasingly ineffective in advancing the cause he was championing. In the end, he succeeded only in offending the doctors present and embarrassing himself 3 and Addams by his inexperience and lack of diplomacy. As he later recorded in his memoirs, “The evening was utterly disastrous and after we boarded the street car on the way back to Hull House, Miss Addams was silent and distressed. From that day until the day I left Hull House, the subject of tuberculosis was never again mentioned.”2 Aside from this unfortunate incident, Hunter had a remarkable record of social reform successes in Chicago, especially for a young man still in his twenties. In addition to the campaign against slum housing reported in Tenement Conditions in Chicago, he established the country’s first municipal shelter for homeless people and developed a network of free dental clinics for poor children. Based on these achievements, he was recruited to be the Head Resident (that is, the Director) of the University Settlement in . While Hull House was more famous than the University Settlement, the latter was older and more prestigious, having Rockefellers and Roosevelts among its sponsors and on its governing board. It was there that Hunter met his future bride, Caroline Phelps Stokes, daughter of one of the richest men in America and heiress to a multimillion-dollar share of the Phelps-Stokes-Dodge fortune that flowed in part from substantial mining and railroad interests in the Southwest. Based on his growing reputation as an effective social activist, immediately upon his arrival in New York, Hunter was tapped to head the campaign to end child labor. Under his leadership, the crusade quickly secured passage of comprehensive State legislation banning the employment of children in factories, mines and sweatshops. The laws passed in New York set the benchmarks for the rest of the nation. Shortly thereafter, in 1904, his pioneering, best-selling, and most influential book, Poverty, was published.3 The plight of poor children had been brought shockingly to the public’s attention by the photographs of ,4 Lewis Hine5 and Ernest Poole,6 all of whom were allies of Hunter in the successful fight for effective child labor laws. However, in Poverty, Hunter documented, for the first time, the magnitude of the problem — at least ten million, and perhaps as many as twenty million, Americans did not have enough food, clothing and shelter to maintain them at a minimal level of health, decency and productivity. Furthermore, he identified the causes of this situation and the consequences of allowing it to continue in the midst of the unprecedented wealth of what had come to be called America’s Gilded Age. He also demonstrated convincingly, contrary to 4 prevailing beliefs, that the vast majority of poor people were poor through no fault of their own and that their plight could be prevented by appropriate government intervention. His proposed remedies – banning child labor, enforcing factory and mine safety, providing unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation for industrial injury or death and widows’ pensions — were adopted by many states and localities and foreshadowed the national programs enacted in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. A New York Times reviewer stated that the message of Poverty was so important that it deserved to have a million readers7 and H. G. Wells said it should be read by every wealthy American.8 The book made Hunter famous and his advice on social problems was sought by the country’s political leadership, including President who invited him to the White House for consultation on pressing national issues. It also catapulted him into the cultural and literary elite of the day and he became lifelong friends of such luminaries as Mark Twain, John Dewey and . Because of their distress at the condition under which America’s poorest members had to subsist and their belief that corporate abuses by such “robber barons” as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were largely to blame, many prominent people, including Hunter, Twain, Dewey and London, allied themselves with the socialist cause during the first decade of the last century. These folks saw no contradiction between their own wealth and their wish to change radically the system that created it. In Hunter’s case, he appears to have been completely unfazed when confronted by the apparent paradox of enjoying a life of wealth and privilege and his concern for the poor. Dr. Arnold C. Klebs, one of the Chicago physicians whom Hunter tried to interest in mounting the anti- tuberculosis campaign there, confronted him with this issue. As Klebs later recalled in a letter to Caroline Hunter,9 he asked Robert, “How can you harmonize your love for marble bathtubs with your eager desire to help the poor?” to which Robert “modestly” replied, “I want all the poor to have marble bathtubs also.” Hunter’s battles against child labor and poverty and the acclaim that accompanied these activities did not prevent him from continuing to focus on the need to mount an effective anti-tuberculosis campaign. Sadder and wiser from the ill-fated effort in Chicago, he approached the planning 5 process in New York differently. Soon after his arrival in the City, he met with Robert de Forrest and Edward Devine, President and Executive Secretary respectively of the New York Charity Organization Society, and advised them how to enlist the leaders of the City’s civic and medical establishments whose active support would be essential to an effective campaign. At the initial meeting of this group, which would subsequently form the nucleus of the nation’s first anti-tuberculosis campaign committee, Hunter stayed in the background, deferring to the medical experts present and simply offering his support as a concerned citizen. That support included a check for $1000 (a substantial sum a hundred years ago) from Caroline Hunter to help kick off the campaign. As Hunter later recalled, “I had learned from sad experience in Chicago the wisdom of modesty and, as a layman, presented humbly a simple concrete plan of action (which) was unanimously adopted with real enthusiasm.”10 Hunter’s plan, with the title “An Anti-Tuberculosis Crusade,”11 was published in the March 1902 issue of The Commons, the monthly magazine of the . Thus was born the campaign to eliminate tuberculosis in America.

Edward Allan Brawley [email protected]

6 1 Hunter, Robert, Tenement Conditions in Chicago: Report by the Investigating Committee of the City Homes Association (Chicago: City Homes Association, 1901).

2 Memoirs (unpublished), Robert Hunter Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

3 Poverty (New York: Macmillan, 1904).

4 Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890).

5 Freedman, Russell, Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Campaign Against Child Labor (New York: Walker, 1967).

6 Poole, Ernest, The Street: Its Child Workers (New York: Child Labor Committee, 1904).

7 Markham, Edwin, “Review of Poverty by Robert Hunter,” New York Times, January 7, 1905.

8 National Cyclopedia of American Biography, “Robert Hunter” (New York: J. T. White and Company, 1984).

9 Klebs, Arnold C., Letter to Caroline Hunter, March 11, 1935. Robert Hunter Papers, Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana.

10 Hunter, Memoirs.

11 Hunter, "An Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign," The Commons 7 (1902), 1-3

7 COCHISE (C.1810–1874) Donald K. Sharpes

(This article is adapted from my book Outcasts and Heretics, Profiles in Independent Thought and Courage, to be published by Lexington Books, 2008.)

Native Americans were all considered outsiders as European Americans moved into their territory and found excuses for exploiting them and the land. They might not be the best exemplars of how to defend against oppression through guerilla warfare, but they are representatives of a people who did stand up for their rights. Cochise is one example of how native peoples courageously defended their people and lands to death or exile. The Apache rangeland in the 19th century extended roughly from today’s Phoenix, Arizona east to Socorro, New Mexico, south to Chihuahua in Mexico and east again to Hermosillo in Mexico, an area roughly the size of Arizona or New Mexico, a region of arid deserts and daunting mountains. This untamed and unsettled desert belonged to the Spanish until the latter part of the 19th century, home to countless bands of Apaches, and visited only by a few lost or intrepid explorers. The main settlement was Santa Fe founded by the Spanish in 1607. A few other settlements had been established as early as 1654. The territory then became a part of Mexico after its independence from Spain in 1821. In 1846 the U.S. Cavalry invaded during the Mexican-American War.1 Cochise was the chief of the Chiricahua Apaches whose homeland was southeastern Arizona. Cochise was taller than most men in his tribe and had more leadership stature based on his courageous exploits against Spanish, Mexican and American invaders. Geronimo, another Chiricahua Apache of the next generation, is more widely known because of movies and legends.2 Cochise and his affiliated Apache tribes were relatively peaceful until Mexicans killed his father, and the Americans hanged his brother and murdered his father-in-law. For decades there were revenge killings on both sides accompanied by raids to secure food and provisions. The Apaches were not a settled agricultural people like their adobe cousins in the north or natives in southern Mexico who grew corn. Apaches were nomadic, supplementing hunting by gathering berries, nuts and fruit as the seasons provided. From about the 1780s to the 1820s, the principal adversary of the Apaches had been the Spanish who had more than two dozen presidio forts and settlements in the southwest. The Spanish policy was to pacify the natives, who generally stole horses and cattle to keep them from raiding. To avoid these raids, the Spanish offered staples of food, weapons for hunting, and liquor. This pattern of providing provisions was later adopted by the Mexicans and Americans. Accepting rations from the Spanish or Mexicans kept the relative peace, reduced travel for Apaches to find food and establish encampments, and reduced raids on presidios and settlements. Throughout this extended period Apaches learned about Spanish and Mexican customs, and many even learned to speak Spanish.3 When the Mexicans won independence from Spain in 1821, the conditions for the Apache intensified. The war had drained the coffers and the men to staff the northern regions so Apaches did not receive the accustomed allotments of food and equipment. By the mid 1820s Apaches were raiding settlements again to survive. Cochise honed his skills as a young warrior during the 1830s. For a few decades the Indians raided settlements throughout northern Mexico, southern Arizona and New Mexico to obtain supplies, and the Mexicans, depending on the strength of their finances to raise men and their own equipment, periodically tried to contain or subdue them from overrunning presidio settlements. A civilian trader named James Kirker organized countless war parties against the Apaches in northern Mexico in the 1840s. When he and his group of mercenaries recruited from farmers and settlers killed over 130 Apaches in 1846 in the settlement then known as Galeana in Chihuahua, Mexico, hostilities commenced again and became revenge killings and not just raids. In May, 1846 the U.S. Congress declared war on Mexico, which then had to divert its limited resources to fighting the American invaders at the lower end of the Rio Grande River south of Corpus Christi Texas and around Matamoros. As the Mexicans fought the Americans in 1846, northwestern Mexico became a raiding playground for Apaches. Typically in this tenuous relationship, there would be an Apache raid, then a peace offer when the Mexican town would supply provisions, then an incident in which someone, or a scouting group, or members of a supply wagon team would be killed, then a revenge raid in Apache territory. This pattern of raids by Apaches for sheep, cattle and horses in which Mexican men, women and children were killed, and the inevitable Mexican military team that followed Apaches into their strongholds to avenge the killings, lasted throughout this period. Typically, Mexicans accepted peace, the Apaches entered the town, everyone got drunk, someone got killed, and the slaughtering cycle repeated itself. Eventually, the Apaches reached out to Americans, a relationship feared by the Mexicans because it meant that their two enemies would be aligned, with Americans providing the Apaches with arms and ammunition. The Apaches could not entertain the prospect of having enemies on both sides of the border. The American presence was strengthened by mining activities, the presence of Fort Buchanan about 45 miles southeast of Tucson, and the Butterfield Overland Mail Company that crossed through Apache territory. By 1860 the Butterfield stagecoach system stretched 2,800 miles from St. Louis to with over 200 stage stations approximately 20 miles apart manned by a total of over 2,000 employees. Because Mexican forts in Sonora had been fortified to avoid Apache incursions, Cochise and his warriors knew that raids south would be more difficult and costly in life. But the peace pacts Cochise made with the Mexicans and Americans were always fragile. Revenge was the motive and killings and pillage the main activity. By 1862 in the middle of the Civil War, parts of the southwest like Santa Fe and Tucson fell into the hands of Confederate troops. The Congress of the Confederate States had passed a law declaring for extermination of all hostile Indians, giving Confederate troops legal authority to massacre.4 Brig. General James Carleton, with 2,350 troops commanding the California Column came in 1862 to drive out the Confederates from the southwest and re-establish federal control and re- vitalize commerce in the region. American policy towards the Indians pursued opposing directives. One policy, manifested by the welfare handouts of blankets and provisions at reservations and Indian Bureau offices after the Civil War, encouraged compassion, a doctrine promoted by church groups who sought to convert Indians. Settlers in the Southwest, however, with the backing of the military, pursued a policy of extermination. Cochise was able to seek refuge occasionally in places like Fort Apache and receive provisions and offers of peace between raids and the killing of stagecoach employees, farmers and mine workers. In time, the military’s countless incursions in his territory hunting him and killing small parties of his people, convinced Cochise that he needed to make peace to survive and keep his band from total annihilation. It would have been impossible to be a chief and a pacifist, although eventually Cochise surrendered in the face of superior forces, convincing his tribal members that they would have to live on reservations or be exterminated. Cochise himself was certainly responsible for the deaths of many innocent victims. But he is no different than a George Washington commanding the Minutemen militia of the Revolutionary War as each presided over the defense of the homeland. The ghosts of those he killed may cry foul for this reasoning, but many of them would have tried to kill him too if they could have. Cochise eluded capture for decades from both Mexicans and Americans until he witnessed the slow decimation of his tribe and sued for peace shortly before his death in 1874. Except for regional historians he is a largely unknown and neglected figure in American history. But his courage and resourcefulness in the teeth of survival in a harsh landscape and extinction by American soldiers of his tribe and people is a testament to heroism in any culture.

Notes 1. The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo at the close of the war in 1848 gave the California, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The Mexicans realized the danger they were in when Gen. Stephen Kearny and his army of 300+ men captured Santa Fe in August 1846. Capt. Cooke left Santa Fe with his Mormon battalion of 340 men headed to California. The U.S. then purchased additional territory from Mexico (The Gadsden Purchase) in New Mexico and Arizona in 1853 to rectify the southern boundary of the U.S. where the border is today. 2. Geronimo. Geronimo, His Own Story (S.M. Barrett, Ed.) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970). 3. E. R. Sweeney, Cochise, Chiricahua Apache Chief. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 4. Sweeney,195. PUNC ART

Charles Dantzig, Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (Paris: Grasset, 2005)

This book may well be the last single-author encyclopedia to be written (a claim which has doubtless been made before). It was an unlikely best- seller in France when it was published in 2005, but it’s easy in retrospect to see why. Dantzig is enormously erudite and seems to have read every obscure French author as well as an enourmous mass of critical and bio- graphical writing (cited at the ends of the articles), extending his remarks often to sources illuminated only by a spark across an imaginative syn- apse. Dantzig (b. 1968) is a novelist, poet, translator (Fitzgerald and Wilde), and editor of a series of essays by young clacissists on ancient Greek and Roman literature. From a medical family, he did his disserta- tion at Toulouse on the law of broadcasting.

Dantzig’s prose is seemingly smooth and approachable, full of witty re- marks and turns of phrase, but on closer scrutiny proves remarkably knotty and allusive. This is a good collection of bedside reading, but it will repay careful exploration sitting up, as well. Here is a short article which will convey a sense of the plums awaiting those who might stick a thumb into this pie. [676-680, my translation]

Despite the supposed finality of rules for punctuation, people have their own styles and can be quite fierce about enforcing them, as anyone who has edited a literary journal like this one can testify. The experience of up- dating the TLS Reviewer’s Handbook reinforced that editor’s view that “punctuation lends rhythm to a sentence, and rhythm may be elegant or not. Punctuation is therefore a musical element. Or to set it to a different tune: Punctuation is, therefore, a musical element.” (J.C. 27 July 2007, 32)

The idea that punctuation has something to do with discerning the mean- ing is quite recent. Some languages do without it completely, as did Eng- lish for a long while. To be sure, there is some connection between punc- tuation and clarity, but that is primarily the result of our dislike of ambigu- ity. This dislike is in turn a by-product of the cultural script for the in- compatibility of cool objectivity and warm emotions, ambiguity being warm and dubious. This is derived from the increased cultural authority of the sciences and dates only to the early 18th century. (Anna Wierzbicka, English: Meaning and Culture, 31-33, 46-50 et seq. Oxford University Press, 2006)

When Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was being published [1848] the cultural norm for punctuation was changing from a medieval system based on the length of pause to a grammatical system. The grammatical system is rule- driven; the other is musical and discretionary. Thackeray wrote in the older style and his book was treated by its editors in the same imperious fashion as your English teacher does now — it was repunctuated.1

However, lest you think the older system is dead, here is the advice on the use of semicolons from style book of The Economist.“Semi-colons should be used to mark a pause longer than a comma and shorter than a full stop. Don't overdo them. Use them to distinguish phrases listed after a colon if commas will not do the job clearly.”2

And then there are innumerable personal practices. Poets’ use of lineation must be called punctuation. There are no rules for it, but woe upon the of- ficious copy editor who knows better.

Punctuation is an art.

— Charles Brownson, January 2008

1 Natalie Maynor, "Punctuation and Style In Vanity Fair: Thackeray Versus His Com- positors" English Language Notes 22.2 (Dec 1984) 48-55 but it may be generally encoun- tered in criticism and scholarly editions of the novel. There is some opinion, cited by Maynor, that Thackeray simply intended to leave matters to the compositors. The original punctuation for chapters 1-6 and 8-13 may be found in Peter Shillingsburg’s edition (New York: Garland, 1989). 2 Retrieved 25 November 2007 from http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/ Punctuation Charles Dantzig

Punctuation, no more so than the style of which it is an element, is no add- on. It gives the rhythm, that cadence to which thought marches. I am generally in favor of less punctuation. Few rhythms enchant me like that sentence of Stendahl’s in Souvenirs d’egotisme: “His small and expressionless eyes always had the same mien and that mien was evil.” It is free of punctuation, but still there exist traces of the imperative: when the thought contained in a phrase has been expressed, necessarily there is a period, but what prohibits me from placing a period before the thought has run out, or writing a series of word-phrases in order to evoke the dis- jointed movement of a character’s mind, for example? “At the sound of that voice, he took care not to turn around. Stared fixedly at a bottle of whiskey suspended on its base above the bar. Contemplated that. Noted it. Turned around.” The only requirements are those of the story we are tell- ing . The ellipses (…) at the ends of paragraphs recall those people who nudge you when they tell a really good one.Laforgue, by intensifying his use of these, made it an aesthetic system. Toulet is that rare writer who places the ellipsis at the beginning of his verses or phrases, with astonish- ing effects. Dashes are for me hiccups. “Lucien — who had taken off his tie, turned toward Ludivine — she was looking at her ankle — and they…” Certain proofreaders or copy editors have a mania for wanting to use then in place of the commas which surround clauses: too much dancing! Thought is work! One reproach which might be made to the editors of the new Pléiade edition of Stendahl (2005) is for changing the punctuation. They have modified all the sentences like this one: “So you want the death of my immortal soul, Inès said to him?” (Le Coffre et le Revenant) to “So you want the death of my immortal soul? Inès said to him.” Well, Stendahl’s version, placing the question mark after the last word, as we would in conversation, has a much more natural tone, a matter on which he greatly insisted. It seems that, in French literature around 1830, the colon began to be replace by the comma in sentences of this sort: “Astolphe was too anxious, he drank a glass of vodka.” Stendahl is full of these: (“She hadn’t any idea of such sufferings, they troubled her mind.”), which one finds in Balzac and in Chateaubriand. Couldn’t this tendency have been taught them by Saint-Simon, whose Mémoirs had just been published posthumously? Commas, charming snakes: if one lets them proliferate, they will numb the sentences. Used rarely they provide us intoxicating nuances such as this one from the Journal of Jules Renard (4 November 1908): “Bourges believes himself a bit misunderstood, just as Barbey d’Aurevilly.” Punctuation is a recent refinement. After all, Latin was not punctuated; French was only perfected quite late. Until the 18th century, we took no notice of punctuation practices which were not native; the most egocentric writers did not care much about this. Flaubert is one of the first to give it much attention but, after him, Proust did not accord punctuation much weight. (His brother, who corrected his proofs after his death, supplied his marks of punctuation.) This suggests what, pressed by death, he thought important to attend to as essential to his work. Pierre Albert-Birot entirely suppressed the punctuation in his novel Grabinoulor. He explained this not very convincingly in a preface to a later edition. “Punctuation is a very recent invention which to some degree can be attributed to an age of decadence.” Fewer and fewer readers are capable of reading without punctuation, but that has less to do with grasp- ing the meaning than with economizing the parsing time over that of the Latin reader, if it had been natural to Romans to know how to read.Fi- nally, to associate refinement with decadence: what about the decadence of beasts?As to how one can defend an objection to punctuation in a punctuated preface, Birot says “doesn’t one see the essential difference between writing which I characterize as logical and a poetic idea?” As if poetry were vague, eccentric, flabby. Birot makes absolute a practice needing discretion. Sometimes it is necessary to punctuate, and at others it is perhaps useful not to do so. Of that which we do not read out loud, Birot concludes: “the question of breath is therefore not to be considered.” Not so, because one breathes through the eyes! We have all tried to read un- punctuated books, where the poor eye searches pantingly for a period, a comma, any edge of a bench on which to sit down. Birot is more restrained than he supposes; in his book, he retains the chapters, the spaces and indentations, therefore the perfect absence of punctuation consists in writing all the lines one after another. Certain writ- ers of the 1960s did that: books printed from the first to the last page as if one had cut out so many yards of material. That was interesting, and then after a few pages, one got the impression of athletes at a meet. They don’t waste their endurance; they conserve their capital letters at the beginning so as to find in themselves enough breath for the beginning of a new sen- tence. There is in these experiments a desire to restore what was called the avant-garde now become a dream of the rear guard. And the pretext? Oth- erwise, books would seem more exactly what they are: a thing, a sculp- ture. By a sort of prudery we put up our sentences behind a curtain. Unless it is a desire to be theatrical. A major argument in favor of punctuation is that its absence, which at first makes for high spirits, something to make us jump, finishes in mo- notony. Punctuation brings about rhythmic variety. I speak of prose: the brevity of most poems will support an absence of punctuation. Paul Valéry, who placed between commas or semi-colons incidental parentheses (“to the things which surround it, (whether it be a question of material nature or of living beings), tend to […]” Variété III) makes use of the two horizontal periods of Mallarmé without clarifying their signifi- cance. Raymond Queneau invented an irony-mark which fortunately did not catch on, it was an aberration as much as it lacked utility: doesn’t irony cease to be ironic when it is marked? I read that the mark was in re- ality invented by Alcanter Brahm, a poet, author of l’Ostensoir des iro- nies, a title which suffices to reveal that he was born in 1868. I can’t estab- lish it any closer than the date of his death. Péguy shows how one can muffle the cymbal clash of an exclamation point by replacing it with a simple period. Likewise, the arm-pulling na- ture of the question mark. Punctuation is perhaps a hint. That gives a sort of calm assurance to the thought, it seems to me. The same sign may have different meanings, it is only necessary to choose which. Max Jacob suggests for his purposes an exclamation point after the subject, which makes it resemble a little soldier in a Disney movie. “We! sing of the little whale the color of a cadaver” (Le Labora- toire Central). Typography is a form of punctuation. The spaces between paragraphs, the indentations, the harmony of the letters and symbols all participate in the rhythm. Charles Cros separates the stanzas of some of his poems with stars, as does Valery Larbaud between the paragraphs of certain essays. By this sign, different from an asterisk, they seem to want a longer pause, a meditation. And all this hardly counts, because a hundred years after we die, if there occurs to someone the far-fetched idea of reprinting our work, we will undergo the proofreader’s rake, the shrugs of the best of editors, and the distant gaze of our heirs turned towards the ledger pages. Bah! the ditty will pass despite that!

That is, if punctuation is a refinement and a product or indicator of decadence, what are we to conclude concerning the punctuation practices of the yet more decadent beasts? [Translator’s gloss] Emeritus Voices submission guidelines

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Upon acceptance, the author will receive a letter restating these rights and specifying the issue number and date in which the ms. is to appear. This is to be signed and returned. As a courtesy, other information might be added, such as the publication format (htm/pdf) and access, the appearance of a paper copy and the cost of that, and other things which occur to us from time to time, constituting the current state of a FAQ about the journal.

Work accepted for publication will be silently edited in small matters (such as obvious typos). Larger revisions may be requested. Work will not be accepted provisionally.

2. Submission guidelines, editorial policy, style, etc.

Work submitted for publication should be sent electronically to the editor in Microsoft Word™ format. Prose text should be single-spaced, with paragraphs marked by indentation. Any references, citations, or notes should appear at the end of the ms. and should be constructed with the Word reference features; this will automatically create internal links when the ms. is converted to htm and pdf formats.

Illustrations should be in jpg format and either appended to the ms. or submitted in a separate file, to be inserted at points marked in the ms. If the author wishes to try his/her hand at formatting visual material within the text please do so, but these insertions are often disturbed by proofreading and other modifications, so the separate file is wanted in any case. Visual material should have a resolution of at least 200 and be, if possible, somewhere between 500 and 1000 pixels in dimension as optimum for electronic publication. Photographs may be enhanced for best appearance by the journal. Poetry ms. should carry clear indication of correct lineation; if it is impractical to mark up the electronic ms, submit a paper backup copy formatted according to the author’s wishes.

Citations should follow the Chicago style manual by preference, but this is not insisted on: Emeritus Voices is not a scholarly journal, but a journal of literature and opinion. Such scholarship as is submitted, or material requiring expertise to evaluate, will be sent out for peer review at the editor’s discretion. This may delay acceptance or publication.

Emeritus Voices prefers not to publish polemical material or anything in support of a particular ideology or cause. Authors wishing to argue a position are advised to clearly remove their arguments from polemical intent with the conventional methods of substantiated scholarship and full citation of sources. At the same time, the journal sees no reason to confine discussion and opinion to scholarly ground. Be advised that on occasion, work may be returned with a request for additional documentation.

Work will be published as received, with the author’s punctuation and language intact, except that obvious mistakes will be silently corrected. The editor may suggest revisions or attach his/her comments to the published article. The author may refuse these. Proposals will not be accepted on condition of any sort.

Questions concerning journal policy and practices should be directed to the Editor using the e-mail address [email protected] revised 7 January 2008