THE CARLETON

ALGREN ALLEN AMES APPEL BOTKIN BRADFORD BRAND

BRUELL WE DO OUR PART w#*ic v tic CONROY COWLEY • • • • DEJONG DERLETH EVANS FARRELL THE 1930s HAGGLUND HERNTON IGNATOW LECHLITNER ROOD TRACY IKMYEK WILSON Winter 1965 $1 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY

Vol. VI, Number 1 Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota 55057 Published by Carleton College Editor: Erling Larson Associate Editor: Wayne Carver Managing Editor: Carolyn Soule Editor, Department of American: Wayne Booth Far Eastern Shore Editor: Reed Whittemore Vol. VI. No. 1 Winter 1965

Whither Bound, Brother Reuben? a poem by Sax Bradford 2 The 1930's, a Symposium (with poems, a story, and reviews) Dorothy Allen 9 Russell Ames 12 Benjamin Appel 19 James T. Farrell 25 B. A. Botkin 26 Edwin Georgrichard Bruell 32 Jack Conroy 36 Malcolm Cowley 40 David Cornel Dejong 50 August Derleth 53 Paul "Doc" Evans 57 Ben Hagglund 62 David Ignatow 69 Calvin C. Hernton 74 Ruth Lechlitner 77 John Rood 82 Robert Traver 87 Peter Brand 90 Wayne Carver 100 Nelson A Igren 104 Robert Tracy 105 Notes Toward Yet Another Theory, a poem by Robley Wilson, Jr ...... 114

Drawings by Rose Graubart

The Carleton Miscellany is published quarterly. Rates are as follows: $1.00 a copy; $3.50 a year; $6.00 for two years. It is distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. De Boer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey. All volumes available on microfilm through University Microfilms, 313 N. First St., Ann Arbor, Michigan. Manuscripts should be submitted to The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, as should subscriptions. Manuscripts are submitted at the authors risk, and will not be returned unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Member of the Association of Literary Magazines of America Copyright, 1964, by Carleton College Second-class postage paid at Northfield, Minnesota 55057 Sax Bradford

Whither Bound, Brother Reuben?

Taormina, Ibiza, Puerto Vallarta, Kona, Montego Bay, Marrakesh. Listen, how the names come off the tongue like Miletus honey while the slick magazine presses roll their glazed pigments down the reaches of Holiday All£e flashing shell pink beaches and emerald palm fronds along the sea. Out there in the Dakotas an agricultural nouveau riche thumbs through the airline folders with the thumbs he just now had hooked (wasn't it yesterday?) into his galluses as he leaned tiptoe to expectorate the warm juice of Brown's Mule or Star bitten from the plug; while along the plazas of Rockefeller Center a shopper pauses to catch the travel window with its naked fishermen out of Paul Jacoulet by Madison Ave. tossing their simulated net into a simulated Tahitian lagoon. Where bound, Yankee countryman? On what lemming feet do you now lightly run to the watery edge of nowhere, carried blind with the crowded murmurous pack, body to brown body, nose lifted to the unaccustomed sky, the scent of far and homeless death? I know you, who you are. Your axe rang through the clearing on the Brandywine, on the Rappahannock and the Merrimack. On the Tom Bigbee, the Little Peedee. I saw your footprint in the leafmold beside the Susquehanna. Your wagon track pressed on the Cumberland fern. You are the riverman. You came down the Ohio molasses and cornbread and sowbelly and jug and all with the waves slapping under the raft and the smell of flotsam near the bank. I saw you in the pecan grove stalking turkey and I saw you crouched in the sedges of the Chesapeake where the geese winged down the wind. You are the prairie man who cut the wildflower carpet at Tiskilwa and at Osage, turning up the gleaming earth. I saw you standing in the golden wheat's horizon. I saw you furred among the tents of the Arikaree and burrowed deep in the bank of the Snake against the cold. I know you. You are the storekeeper at St. Joe, the Saginaw sawyer, the trapper of the Pend Oreille, the Arkansas travel­ er. Remember? Let me take your hand with its calloused palm and lead you back to the spring beside the sycamore. Carefully now, fumbling in your memory. Pick up the dipper. Smell the mint and the cress, and the water. Feel the cold tin against your chin and look up at the whistle of the turtle dove like a gray arrow along the creek. Someone lounges in the wicker chair out front of the marble and glass hotel while the Fiats and Vespas pop up the hill. He is sipping a campari through a straw. Is that you, old man? Is that you, Reuben? Where have you wandered? Let's see, now. It was on the old Tazewell place that morning I saw you carrying the milk across the frosted yard while the rising mist from the branch discovered, one by one, the privy and then the peach orchard and then the shoats looking for the season's last acorns among the oaks. Along the Via Veneto now what are you looking for? Local color? Remember, Pancho, where I saw you on the Salsipuedes. Rolling your bed in the tarp and stirring up the fire for morning coffee while Joe brought in the bay, the black and the pinto, and the wild pigeons wheeled overhead and Pete looked up from wrangling the saddles and said it's like the world was born today. I saw you as mountain morning broke in the Wallowas. I saw you through the cookhouse door putting away a stack of buck­ wheats and karo syrup while the whistle punk outside monkeyed with the donkey engine. Freight train through the Blues. I heard you sing it softly to yourself, soft and easy so Cookie wouldn't hear: Freight train through the Blues Beating up the Grande Ronde River, White steam pluming, black smoke streaming Past the sun-shot ripples, Past the meadow shining like a woman's hair, Past the wild roses and the bloodred poppies and the calling quail Into the tamaracks. Up the Grande Ronde to the narrows where the day comes late, Through the balsam past the dark sliding waters To the Umatilla Pounds the freight train like my heart. Freight train through the Blues. But, wait! That you, Jim-boy, on the palm terrace above Acapulco, in the aloha shirt and the bermuda shorts drinking from a coconut shell? North Platte, Scottsbluff. Tap the wheels and oil the journals. Hook on another Baldwin for the grade to Rock Springs. Hear the long low whistle in the winter air, the drivers moving on the stretch. Out of the smell of the still among the pines and the smell of barnyard manure, the hiss of the hot horseshoe plunged into the tub, the whisper of scythe sharpening on stone; out of the taste of axle grease and the feel of harness leather; out of the square dance called and the fiddling of turkey in the straw and bile them cabbage down and the cry of the drunk in the loft and the whirling whalebone-pinched waists of the girls from town, the lantern light and the scream of the brake shoe on wheel — out of this did you come to the little tea at Rumplemeyer's, to the marzipan in the Sacher sweetshop window off the Opern Ring? You did indeed. That is you with the tight Italian pants and the little boots tripping across the piazza in search of a cappucino and a dish of salted pistachios. Cassis, Cozumel, Patmos. What's In this season? Where are They going now? Hurry. Comb the hayseed from your hair. Get to Cloudland. Get with it. But I know you. I know with you the mockingbird's song and the jasmine and the fireflies by the riverbank; the smoke from the bacon curing; the kerosene lamp and the piano in the parlor where the antimacassars are pinned and the young voices sing Wind of the Western Sea; the aching back and the taste of salt sweat in the corn rows and the sweet noon under the locust, the jug of milk and the watermelon, the wedge of pie wrapped in newspaper. Remember we figured the board feet together, and tended store and taught school and checked the gauges and sawed the ice and stored it in the sawdust? I know you there beyond the buttoned hilton bellboy, you with the zoom lens, automatic finder and flash and the other junk strapped on, slung over the madras jacket. Hello there, Reuben! A PROPOSED SYMPOSIUM

Under this heading, about a year ago, we sent to a number of writers and musicians and editors and other workers of the world a letter that set forth a number of questions we hoped this present symposium would answer. Now that we have read the essays we got in response, we think this heading is the one still to use. As always, the answers recede as the questions multiply and press in upon us. A symposium on the 1930's, it is still our con­ viction, would be a very good thing. We would like to see more answers. We have felt this for a long time. Three years ago here at Carleton under the auspices of the Andersen Foundation in American Studies appeared John Dos Passos, Frances Perkins, Raymond Moley and Gardner Means, all speaking about the Thirties. The Miscellany (Spring 1961) printed a part of what Mr. Dos Passos said during his visit. In that same issue, under the title "Larsen's Second Law," appeared a letter from Arthur Mizener. In this letter Mr. Mizener pointed out an error of fact in an Erling Larsen essay on James Agee (Miscellany, Winter 1961)* and went on to explain how the editors of Life had solicited of him an essay on Fitzgerald but had then with­ out permission "cut, added to, and rewritten" his "account of Zelda's collapse and Fitzgerald's bad years" with such an insensi-

•Larsen's "second law," described on pages 86-97 of that issue, suggested that just as there was a "widespread literary and high-fashion interest" in the Twenties during the Fifties, so there will be a run on the Thirties during the Sixties. tivity that when the essay appeared "all the shading was gone" from it. His story of the editorial butchery Mr. Mizener called "a little moral tale," and on it he erected an eloquent argument about the Thirties, the Fifties and the Sixties. In the Thirties, he pointed out, writers like James Agee had had "an unironic committedness that embarrasses us now," a committedness particularly expressed in the well-known pas­ sage in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that tells of how "ob­ scene and thoroughly terrifying" it was for Agee to think of the editors of Fortune, "an association of human beings drawn together . . . for profit," setting out "to pry intimately into the lives of . . . undefended and appallingly damaged . . . human beings . . . without the slightest doubt of their qualifications to do an 'honest' piece of work." Mr. Mizener wrote that, em­ barrassment or no, "Agee was right. This was the attitude of those 'associations of human beings' in the Thirties, and we hated it then. It was still their attitude in the Fifties . . . but in the Fifties I, at least, did not hate their attitude well enough to keep clear of them. . . . This is still their attitude in the Six­ ties, and therefore it is still true that the only real defense against them is anger and rejection. They are The Enemy, and you make deals with The Enemy only if you are as strong as they are, as we are not." In the Thirties, he wrote, "we were made wise enough by our anger to understand that." Such, then, is the background. Both the Larsen essay and the Mizener response to it agreed that although "the Thirties were genuinely concerned about 'surface matters' (and rightly so; starvation is no joke), they cared as much as they did about them because they believed them 'symptomatic,' the surface manifestations of deep trouble." And against this background, now that we are perhaps deeply enough into the Sixties to understand them a little at least, the editors of the Miscellany posed the questions that went out in that letter under the heading "A Proposed Symposium." "It seems," they wrote, "that a further investigation ... is of interest and importance. Questions rise. What were the Thirties? What was the deep trouble? Did we during the Thirties feel only the symptoms, or were we consciously more sophisticated? Can we say that what we learned during the Thirties has possible application to the Sixties and to the Sixties' problems? And what, after all, did we really do during the Thirties? Or think?" Some of those questions already sound pompous or ponder­ ous or silly. (But look at the answers!) It is, however, a matter of record that we sent them out. We first sent them to friends whom we knew to have been active in the literary and artistic movements of the Thirties and whose addresses we knew. It was with a feeling of typical Sixties emptiness that we discovered we knew the addresses of only a few of them. And when in trying to learn about some of the lost friends we wrote in vain to Chambers of Commerce we thought we saw The Enemy at work if only in his role of aloof non-cooperator and ignorer of non-commercial enterprises. But those people we reached were enthusiastic, and many of them suggested others as possible contributors, and some of them even knew the whereabouts of people we had thought lost. For the statistical department we record here that of all the people who first agreed to contribute answers only two were, for rea­ son, unable to do so. And for the amazement or editorial- abdication department we record that of all the contributions received, whether solicited or not, we here and now print every one. Some of the essays have been cut, but only with the authors' approval. We wish we had room for more. Even now, trying to arrange the material in hand, we wish we had more. We wish the symposium could continue. Perhaps it does continue. Robert Tracy's review of The Deputy, for instance, was not originally intended to be a part of this Thirties issue, but it has a pertinence both literary and historical that we think brings it within the scope of this sym­ posium. So too do the long poems. To us it looks this way, anyhow. Maybe we're falling into our own trap.

8 Dorothy Allen

Even in northern Minnesota . . .

Even in northern Minnesota that summer of 1934 was hot — hot and dry — but the Depression was so deep that people wor­ ried about the coming winter's cold, and about the empty fuel bins, the empty food shelves, the empty barns. The highways were crowded with hungry men and boys looking for work, with truckloads and herds of cattle being moved from rainless coun­ try to country where their owners hoped to find grass and water, with cars loaded down under household goods and entire fam­ ilies hoping to find cheap housing. And ahead of this parade jumped millions of grasshoppers reaping whatever small veg­ etation they found. The Government had already set up agencies to take care of the unemployed and the needy, but as stores of forage were consumed and as pastures and crops burned under the sun it also set out to do something about the livestock. It made ar­ rangements to purchase starving cattle, and soon many small­ town stockyards were filled to overflowing, and the silence of the sleeping towns was broken by the bellowing of animals being herded up the highways to the northern pastures where slight rains had kept the grasses green. But these pastures were soon overcrowded too. And then the rains in the north stopped. The rivers and creeks dwindled to mere trickles. Wells ran dry. The government also distributed grasshopper poison, but it did little good. The great enemies were the drought and the heat; few crops were saved. Even the setting sun brought no relief. Parks and yards were crowded with people hunting for cool places in which to sleep and being kept awake not only by the heat but by their worries about crop failures, growing un­ employment, lowering wage-scales — and the coming winter. Winter came. It was cold and long. Christmas was memorable that year only because it was followed by a month of bitter cold, the temperatures every day far below zero, and by the heaviest snows of many years. The records of the relief agencies would reveal many instances of severe want and the consequent break­ ing down of stubborn pride as one family after another had to ask for relief. One farmer whom I had always considered very industrious and quite able to care for his family even in difficult times can stand as an example both of the pride and of the need for help. Not he but one of his neighbors called the agency for which I worked and told us that the man's family needed food and medicine. We went out to the farm to investigate. Two of us went, for the roads were very difficult and drifts of snow were sometimes as high as the car. When we reached the farm, we found the driveway blocked by snow. We abandoned the car and snowshoed in. The man met us at the door of his house. He was haggard and thin. It was easy to see that these people had been in straitened cir­ cumstances for a long time. The house was furnished only with a wood-burning stove for cooking, a table, a few beds. Orange crates were being used as chairs. But even the empty rooms were clean, as clean as the absolutely empty cupboards in the kitchen. We asked the father for permission to help him and his family. He signed the application for assistance as tears streamed down his face. And we went back to town to buy groceries. As I remember, we bought ten dollars' worth — flour, sugar, butter, eggs, milk, soup meat, vegetables, canned foods, coffee — and because we were going to have to snowshoe again we packed it all into two burlap bags to sling across our backs. The bags were

10 filled too, for ten dollars! After we had got back to the farm and unloaded our bags, we helped the mother, who was ill, to make supper. After that, the farmer asked us out to look at the rest of the farm. In the barn were only two cows, the last of a large herd, and they were so ill-fed that they could no longer stand. The barn was empty of hay or grain. And some of the outbuildings were now only foundations, the farmer explaining that he had chopped them up and used them for fuel, he having no wood-lot and having exhausted his credit for coal. Late in the evening, we started back for town, after promising to send medical care and fuel on the following day. It is hot again today as I write about this incident of the 1930's, and we are again in a dry season. But on frequent trips back to the county I have learned that this once-destitute family has prospered. Their farmhouse has been remodeled and re­ furnished and equipped with modern conveniences and appli­ ances. The barn is filled with cattle, the storage bins are filled with feed, the new outbuildings are filled with farm machinery, and in the garage are a farm truck and a family car. But I am sure that this farmer, as the hot sun beats down upon him, as the ground under his feet becomes hard, thinks often of the long hot summer and the long cold winter of thirty years ago.

11 Russell Ames

. . . notes and sketches relevant . . .

For me in a very important way the Thirties were the Forties — that is, I was intellectually, politically, artistically a product of the Thirties but I began to do "mature" work in the Forties. What I think of as the best American writing of the Forties similarly had its roots in the Thirties —for example the best novels of Howard Fast, of the ever-productive though neglected Albert Maltz and of that little-known and remarkable writer John Sanford whose A Man Without Shoes is, I believe, the finest U.S. novel since The Grapes of Wrath. In this sense the following decade is always the preceding one. The major writers of the Thirties were of course propelled and guided by the winds of the time, but they had been formed, they had matured in the Twenties. In most of the important work of Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Langston Hughes, and Farrell, the smell and flavor, the forms and values and philosophy, whether naturalistic or romantic, came from the Twenties. This not to rate low the energy and direction that they got from the Thirties, which made them, despite all their weaknesses and limitations, a generation unequalled since that of Norris, Crane, London, the early Sinclair and Dreiser, for largeness, force and realism. Surely these big Bow-wows of the Thirties seldom if ever conformed to any stereotype of "proletarian literature," and the lesser writers did not work according to formula either. A very good way to begin an exploration of the period is to read three youthful autobiographical novels published about 1929-30 — proletarian harbingers — Negro, Irish, and Jewish — Langston

12 Hughes' Not Without Laughter, Jack Conroy's The Disinher­ ited, and Michael Gold's Jews Without Money. These books are personal, poetic, and are almost completely untouched by doc­ trinaire politics, economics, plot, characterization, or language. The same can be said of a large body of fiction by artists like Robert Cantwell, Fielding Burke, and Ben Field. Of course there were stories, books, passages in books that did suggest the stereotype — as I remember them, novels such as Halper's The Chute and Union Square, Clara Weatherwax's Marching, Marching, Ataway's Blood on the Forge. I have been literally embarrassed in re-reading some of Richard Wright's early stories about Communists (Bright and Morning Star). The long essay on historical materialism by the radical lawyer in Native Son was certainly a blunt intrusion of ideology. How­ ever, the protagonist Bigger Thomas, far from conforming to any stereotype of a heroic Negro worker, came very close to the stereotype of the razor-wielding rapist. Naturally the enemies of anything stereotype it. But what is sad is when its friends do so also. Especially in the Fifties, goaded by fear, friends of the arts of the Thirties, if they men­ tioned them at all, were wont to dismiss them as crude, insensi­ tive, inartistic, clumsily political.

2.

Michael Gold's Jews Without Money is a true grim beautiful book. It is interesting, if quite unfair, to compare it to Howard Fast's first novel, published in Story magazine, called The Chil­ dren. This was less horrifying and more depressing. Gold was a rich romantic realist, and I suspect that his "Jews without money" will live long after Hemingway's "men without women." I guess, too, that Fast may be known a long time for his early novel about the Cherokee Indians, The Last Frontier, rather than for the famous ones which express more of his nostalgic Jeffersonian liberalism. In discussing the radical writers of the Thirties and Forties,

13 a critic needs just as much sense of complexity, contradiction, and nuance as in any other criticism. The deepest feelings and values of most of them were, I think, opposed to materialist, socialist, and revolutionary theory and practice. This is not to question their sincerity, only their simplicity. Dos Passos, for example, seems to me to show no real sympathy for or liking for workers, for "the masses," in his USA trilogy, and he often pre­ sents them in repellent caricature. Steinbeck adapted himself more easily to the Thirties for he had long been a friend of the lowly, of the outcasts and misfits, but he never grasped the na­ ture of urban, industrial society, of trade union and political organization, of slum and factory, of socialism. Here both he and Howard Fast reveal themselves as far more limited thinkers than Jack London who had as much individualism and roman­ ticism as they but ranged much farther and wider in his themes. I do not wish to suggest that writers were in any important way crippled or frustrated by the Thirties. The times were enormously liberating, and destroyed (or at least banished for a few years) a great many petty and fruitless illusions. The Thirties brought large numbers of the most intelligent and sen­ sitive members of the middle and upper classes into a sharp awareness of "the human condition," the condition of hunger, toil, ignorance, fear, sickness, injustice and oppression. The Thirties supplied writers with an interest in theory and in his­ tory, and a sense of these that they had lacked. And as social conditions grew worse and fascism made wars and threatened world war, a consciousness of social evolution and of the promise of socialism bloomed. Minds moved more freely in time and space. Vision was larger and more social. Whatever else it was, the major fiction was broad and solid. I believe that the work of Dos Passos, Farrell and Steinbeck deteriorated in every way after the Thirties. To me Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is of exceptional importance and interest and is the crowning achievement in fiction of the Thirties in the U.S. I feel certain that Steinbeck could not possibly have written such a big, fine, powerful

14 (should one ever say "great"?) novel except under the special influence of the events, ideas, and other writers, such as Jack Conroy, of the Thirties. The Thirties subdued Steinbeck's weaknesses for the gro­ tesque, the mystical or mysterious, the isolated, the non-social, the sentimental, the Soil —most obviously his weakness for seeing whores, hoboes and alcoholics as the most charming of people. The Thirties directed him, instead, to his Okies, to dis­ possessed farmers struggling manfully against history, the De­ pression, monopoly, for whatever they might win of dignity and hope. In the next decade Howard Fast, a product of the Thirties, chose large historical and moral themes and this was all to the good. But he had the greatest difficulty in making his rebels, revolutionaries, and martyrs the heroes of his books. Perhaps only with Washington in The Unvanquished did he strike his truest vein, for there his (moderate) revolutionary is also a con­ servative, a troubled man of good will who can see "both sides" — in short, the eternal liberal or Fast himself. Not Spartacus, not the Cherokee chiefs, not Vanzetti, but the moderate who is divided within himself, unsure and indecisive, is the central figure in Fast's work.

Of the well-known literary men of the Thirties Mike Gold was extraordinarily consistent, revolutionary, humane, honest and generous. Another fine one was Christopher Caudwell (St. John Sprigg). Perhaps it was just Gold's virtues that have made him the preferred whipping boy for all the "errors" of "prole­ tarian literature" in the Thirties. And I believe it was precisely Caudwell's weaknesses that have brought praise to his study of poetry, Illusion and Reality. Caudwell made the "errors" which have been usually attributed to Gold: he was over-simplified, rigid, and mechanical in his approach. He made a familiar schematic antithesis: poetry is emotion and fancy at the oppo-

15 site pole to the reason and fact of prose, which is at least half- true but altogether too static, too remote from reality as process, as change, as potentiality. It seems that the lesser of Caudwell's main works has been acceptable in U.S. academic circles because its theory is simple and rigid and its language is difficult, esoteric, including anthropological jargon. Caudwell's later Studies in a Dying Culture were mature and flexible, on a level higher than Edmund Wilson's very good and similar but more mechanical sketches in The Triple Thinkers. Michael Gold's The Hollow Men is an excellent book of literary criticism, comparable to Caudwell's and Wilson's. It was handicapped by coming from a Communist journalist, from a direct personality who avoided everything obscure or preten­ tious in style. This book is the less well known because it had the bad luck to be published about 1940-41 just as theUSA and USSR were entering World War II and its emphasis was then too anti-imperialist and anti-war if not too anti-fascist.

In the Thirties as in any period anywhere, there was a lot of bad writing. As in few periods, there was a great deal of good.

To suggest to young people what the Thirties' novels were not, I present an excerpt from an imaginary and very prole­ tarian novel which I entitle Sweat.

Sweat The icy fingers of the early morning winter wind clutched the slender form of Esther Quigley who had had nothing for breakfast, causing her skin to turn blue and make goose pimples. The fingers of the wind, thought Esther, are like the fingers of a ruthless exploiting boss trying to squeeze more surplus value 16 out of the muscles of we workers. Esther, as she scurried down the street of collapsing tenement houses left unrepaired by un­ scrupulous landlords who were still fast asleep up in fashion­ able Platinum Heights, wished that she had a warmer dress and a coat and some underwear. Ironically, in these great industrial United States, famed throughout the world for glittering streamlined underwear fac­ tories, the former flood of intimate feminine garments had shrunk to a mere trickle, and Esther Quigley had nothing under her thin ragged dress but her simple honest skin and naught within her to warm her except her burning class-consciousness. Even more ironically on this day she was grudgingly trudging off to drudgery in the Hittite Brassiere factory which was a major U.S. link in the sinister cartel and chain of underwear fashioners forged by I. G. Farben in an effort to girdle the world. Esther Quigley's desires were modest. Her daydreams as she worked at her elastic snipping machine envisioned no more than a better life for everyone and, for herself, some woolen underpants, a Hittite Bosom Booster, a warm dress and coat, and the love of Joe Magarac, the forceful muscular passionate Communist Party organizer who had recently come to Peoria and with a few quotations from Lenin on imperialism had filled Esther's maiden (and unconfined) bosom with revolutionary zeal. No, she did not long for minks and champagne; she would be content with a simple Russian sable and a pitcher of vodka. That very evening, however, Esther Quigley was to wear minks and gulp champagne. Ending her long day of being ex­ ploited as an elastic snipper, Esther paused to speak to a group of young workers who were skylarking in front of the factory's opulent offices. "Why don't you boys," smiled Esther Quigley, her eyes sparkling with mischief and her vision of the future, "come to the union meeting tomorrow night?" "Yah, whut fer?" sneered back one of the lads, shivering in his thin ragged coveralls.

17 "You are confused and lack class-consciousness," dimpled Esther tolerantly. At that moment a long low sleek Rolls Royce roadster swept through the factory gates and ground to a stop with a screaming of exploited tires and a shrieking of depressed brakes. At the wheel was none other than pampered, powdered, perfumed Sheila Greenbax, sleekly wearing minks around a form patently jampacked with rich proteins and carbohydrates in glaring contrast to the frail half-starved skinny beauty of Esther Quigley, more appealing by far to a worker who had studied and knew the historical origins of the two types of beauty. Unfortunately at this time, before the main organizing drive of the union and the great strike had taken place, the young workingmen were still badly confused in politics and art and judging girls. "That babe," one of them exclaimed, "sure has class!" Esther Quigley smiled wryly and thought "he does have class- consciousness after all." Sheila Greenbax had driven up to the factory to take "Daddy," as she called him, home to a great chateau, every stone of which had been quarried in ages past by rebellious French peasants and put into place by unorganized and therefore ill-paid masons, pulled down during the Revolution by an inflamed peasantry outraged by centuries of abuses such as le droit de seigneur, put up again in the 19th century at the expense of a French indus­ trialist who played an infamous role in the Dreyfus case, taken down again in the 20th century at the behest of Hengist H. Greenbax and sent to Peoria, Illinois, each stone numbered, and put up in place again by members of Local 1764 of the Amalga­ mated Bricklayers who, thorough craf tworkers with a narrow and reactionary outlook, nevertheless charged Greenbax plenty for their sweaty toil. As Sheila slid out of the car, displaying her pink knees and rolled stockings . . . (not to be continued)

18 Benjamin Appel

My image of the 1930's . . .

To write about the literary 1930's, it is first necessary to dig them out — no, to resurrect them. They have all but vanished like some city of remote antiquity underneath the smear and smudge of such typical invective as: "proletarian literature," "social realism," "social consciousness." The plays, poems, stories, novels of the 1930's —and their creators — have been buried by the thorough and often hysterical spadework of the very men "born" into the literary life of those depression years. It was a time when all America was an Appalachia on the brink of war, when Fascism was not a page in history but a living terror, when Communism was the Utopia to many Ameri­ can writers. The Second World War "solved" the depression, the Cold War "solved" such questions as Patriotism, and with the advent of the No-Think State of the 1950's quite a few literary lights turned their backs on their old social beliefs. To show up in the ever-swelling graveyard detail whose purpose it was to dump dirt — dirt of all kinds — on the Pink or Red (take your choice) 1930's. Let me say here that I am not Stalin's sole surviving admirer in America. I believe, and I have always believed that a man has a right to change his politics, his beliefs, his literary style, etc. To me, this is the meaning of America: free choice without penalties. Even before the Hitler war, many writers had become disenchanted with the Communist Utopia; the cracks in the foundations had become apparent, and, even worse from a hu­ mane view, there were too many secret and unspeakable rooms. Like all Utopias it was man-made and man-faulted. From a purely literary view, its doctrines had led innumerable Ameri-

!9 can writers to use their pens as clubs. Then, why do I use such a phrase as "graveyard detail"? I believe that too many critics of the literary 1930's exchanged their pens for shovels. Neither club nor shovel have a place or should have a place on a writer's desk. So successful was the burial that today's generation of writers and readers are completely ignorant, not only of the decade's good writing, but of its broad commitment to an ideal as valid today as it will be tomorrow: to show man in his man-made world. Man in society. "Ulysses is the direct aesthetic experience of the breakdown of the whole Graeco-Christian world, not only in emotion but also in concept . . . Mann's Magic Mountain is the projected aesthetic experience of both that whole world and the sickness which is breaking it down." I have deliberately quoted, not a Marxist critic but R. P. Blackmur, literary patriarch of a huge tribe of aesthetes and Ph.D.'s, professors of creative writing and writers in residence. But unlike Blackmur, many of them have forgotten that man exists and has always existed in society. Just as they do them­ selves in the society of the university with its tenure system, rivalries, daggers and laurel wreaths. All of us carry the turtle-shell of our society on our backs. Writers who ignore this ever-present reality, no matter how elegant or brilliant their prose, have in effect blinded them­ selves. The turtle-shell is there. It has always been there. The writers of the 1930's, unlike their successors who as a group found both refuge and sustenance in their navels, did try, no matter how clumsily, to trace the umbilical cord that inexorably binds even the most individual of individuals to the social shell: country club and church, slum and senate. True, many of us tended to put the world before man, reducing the irreducible individual to pygmy size. But the vision was there. The writers of the 1930's knew what Joyce and Mann knew, what Melville knew when he created Moby Dick, that colossal construct of "a whole world" sea-borne on the Pequod.

20 Performance, however, as I have indicated was often on the small side. There was the "strike novel" where the union organ­ izer like a latter-day St. George slew the Wall Street dragon in the last chapter. There was what could be called the "prolet hypnosis" that impelled middle-class writers to abandon the world they knew best and, notebooks in hand like so many Zolas, to venture out into the America of steelmills and share­ cropper shacks. True, true enough. But the literary burial squads in their haste, their disenchantment, their fear, their new respectability, heaped the dirt indiscriminately on both good and bad writing. "What good writing?" I can hear the skeptics. I might mention the poetry of a Kenneth Fearing or the early plays of a Clifford Odets. For the critics who praise the American Jewish fiction of a Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth, I would recommend Albert Halper's short stories and Daniel Fuchs' novels. I would suggest that the little magazines of the period, Kosmos, Clay, Midland, Story, Blast, The Magazine, etc., contain all sorts of good writing; poetry, fiction, and even good criticism from the Marxist or Socialist or Anarchist (call out the police!) view­ points. Of course, it's not fashionable to explore the unknown 1930's. Today, everybody in Academia, it seems, has clambered on board such proven vessels as the Pequod. Entire crews of liter­ ary sailors are still polishing up the last oarlock of The Open Boat. I would suggest that great interpreters of the American classics are as rare as great American writers, and it might be worthwhile if a few Ph.D.'s and their professors came ashore to take a look at the 1930's. No Magic Mountains but quite a few good-sized hills. "We must be great and true because the country is great and true and needs a literature to give it voice." This is a younger William Saroyan talking. Like Thomas Wolfe, he was a non- political writer, but both men spoke no differently than the politicals. The country! Man and country; individual and society. It

21 was the prevailing literary credo of the depression time whose writers dreamed of doing "the great American novel" — another Melvillian Pequod with still another crew of Americans. Bound for what port? What fulfillment? What destiny? How different today when many writers shrink at the very idea of the Big Try. "Reality is too incredible," they say. "Mod­ ern times are too chaotic, fantastic ..." etc. Instead of man in society — this society whose alphabet begins with A for A-Bomb, we have man in his private juices and private parts. Great poetry can be created perhaps within these limits but the long prose work cannot ignore the burden of the turtle-shell that weighs so heavily on all our destinies. The hungry workingman of the 1930's had no hesitation in griping about what-the-hell's-wrong. The hungry writer echoed him at the typewriter. He felt free because he had no security to speak of, and out of insecurity created a philosophy: to free lance it on beans and hamburger, and above all to steer clear of the easy money. Some of us were grimly or romantically ideal­ istic; some were married to wives with jobs; some itched to "sell out to Hollywood" but alas, never had the opportunity. We lived in cheap flats, working at cheap-pay jobs when we had to as clerks, laborers, millhands, lumberjacks — remember, this was the depression with its own idealized image of the worker who surely would save America! We picketed, we wrote pamphlets, joined committees, signed petitions protesting all sorts of social injustices. And we wrote, rather proud on the whole to be out­ side the corrupting big money. The writers of the 1930's would change, of course, with the changing years in a changing America. For reasons probably only apparent to the psychiatrist I still haven't consulted, I have continued free lancing except for the war years. Between my first novel Brain Guy in 1934 and my latest novel A Time of Fortune in 1963, I have published fourteen novels. None sold over 5,000 copies and my financial mainstay has been paper­ backs, juveniles, and quite often a working wife. Time silenced some of my contemporaries; cynicism others.

22 To still others, security became all-important. Post-war affluence made that easy. The golden tide flowed over, and the arts tradi­ tionally stuck in the mud of American indifference, bobbed up, jaunty, spruce, gleaming with new paint to join the all-Ameri­ can fleet. Culture became the latest gadget in a gadget-rich country where even the workingman (except in Appalachia) now owned two cars. Millions of people flocked into the museums and concert halls; tens of thousands enrolled in painting and creative writing courses. Writers, oldtimers and recent gradu­ ates, found themselves on board the S.S. Establishment. There was the academic deck, and the non-academic. Advertising (bigger than ever), mammoth television, shrunken Hollywood but still golden, speechwriting for corporation presidents newly concerned with their corporate image, etc. A new America, a new society, rich, powerful, brilliant in its sciences and yet the nagging old question. Where was it bound, this twentieth- century Pequod, this time carrying every last one of us on board, a global crew? Where? The daily newspapers print the daily storm signals: "Red China will have the Bomb" — "corruption in high places" — "the Warren Report" — "a money civilization" — "war on pov­ erty" — "automation" — "the Negro Revolution" . . . And where were the pens? Presto! The "black laughter" boys appeared; the "absurd" writers who on the q.t., perhaps not knowing what they did, had adopted the credo of the 1930's. But instead of a Communist Party or C.I.O. card in their pockets, they carried a jokebook. Dr. Strangelove, atomic custard pie in hand, capering and grin­ ning like an idiot, nevertheless shrieks out the truth. Society is sick and inevitably so are we all. Who can ignore the diagnosis? These new doctors are fashion­ able, received in the best literary circles. Yet they too, like the old-fashioned medics of the 1930's, tend to play up society and to slight the individual. Their slapstick characters are often exactly that: sticks, lacking flesh and blood. (It's a tough thing to pull off as I know from my own experience; I wrote my own

23 "black laughter" novel The Funhouse back in 1959.) Perhaps the success of this newest literary school of "bad and wicked" boys will encourage the more sober talents? When an American Thomas Mann emerges with an American Magic Mountain perhaps the 1930's credo of man in society will be re-accepted. Perhaps, even the 1930's will be re-appraised and seen for what they were: a current in the American literary mainstream that like the Mississippi has always joined the people on the shore to their times and their country.

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24 James T. Farrell

Golden Youth: 1794

Dedicate a Alfred Rosmer

Today, he could be called a lion, A golden youth. In David's portrait, He looks as exquisitely sensitive As a lovely girl. He wrote when young, "Happiness is a new idea"; But he was called "L'Ange du Mort." He wrote when young, That he could ride the crests of his century, And that he could stand above misfortune. He wrote when young To express the hope That danger would encompass his "Companions in Liberty," As he knew that he would be encompassed. He was young When he rode in one of the carts And he heard the noises the tumbrils made, And the shrieks of the mad Thermadorean mob. He was young When he walked up to the guillotine With proud disdain. His name was St. Just. He was one With the Revolution — Its child. i963 2n This page

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[email protected] Edwin Georgrichard Bruell

The "tcere" days always are . . .

Ah, but those Terrible Thirties! Those gray days —when all were born under signs that were even at best hapless! When the hounds of spring nipped at us whose clothes were raga­ muffin best, when our armor was down at the heel, and our soles were missing parts! I was one of those who then embarked, feebly and futilely peering out at the tempest ahead. Forewarned by the 1932 valedictory, I carried off the Pyrrhic prize of an Edward Rector Scholarship and started for a nebulous place yclept De Pauw in the quiet hamlet of Greencastle, Indiana. Although my father had vowed he would go barefoot to get me off to college, his wise paternalism was essentially foolish, a guide toward a campus I never trod. I peddled newspapers instead — a sorry stand-in on a carousel stage in Muncie, Indiana, the comfortable home of Emily Kimbrough who had the wherewithal to inhale the nostalgia, the wealthy home of the Kitselmans who turned out wire and one of whom rose to sponsor the poet C. E. Millspaugh, the opulent home of the Balls who built fruit-jars and a college that stands to this day and which I disdained then like some Wandervogel with yearnings for strange summits. And when my family moved a world away —two hundred miles and seventeen — I shed my Hoosierdom and said a reluc­ tant adieu to George Ade and James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington and Lew Wallace and Theodore Dreiser, to all the distinguished personages I'd met within the tight covers of books. We went down the pike to Illinois. New vistas appeared in the cornland. I knew again that I

32 had to go where there were books to call up the life that had been and could be. I worked in a bar-room and hoarded the pay that was given out in a fisty fingerful of a little brown envelope. And at last I inched over the demon hurdles that were despair and doubt, and found myself of a sudden enrolled at a giant university on the prairie. What matter if I lived in an attic among my fellow rats who burned it out one night when they chewed playfully on an electric wire and the land­ lady in self-defence gave me the largesse of a room below for the same identical charge. My father was doing nobly on twenty-five a week, and he helped me wherever and whenever he could. O my papa, to me you're always wonderful and always will be in eternity. Look down on your son who dipped down deep and wide in the involuted treasure of all the books you gathered together some­ how some way. There were books on astrology and atheism and winning bridge and writing business-letters and the modern saint Eugene Debs and Clarence Darrow's Life for a dollar and Colonel Bob Ingersoll's Speeches and John Altgeld, Is That in the Bible? and Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook and Edgar Guest's Just Folks, the Complete Shakespeare, The Wisdom of Con­ fucius, "Is Life Worth Living?" (a debate), the Good Book, Confessions of Frank Harris, and Shaw's and Ibsen's plays and French cooking and Jack London and Schopenhauer and Beggars of Life by Jim Tully and William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech and Doctor Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of Books, The Popular Educator, The Art and Science of Fortune Telling and Graphology and Havelock Ellis and Nietzche and Maxim Gorki's Creatures That Once Were Men, Papini's Life of Christ and The Story of Philosophy and The Story of Man­ kind, also a fat collection of the slim blue first pocket-books that were the five-cent product of E. Haldemann-Julius of Girard, Kansas. Of magazines there were the Appeal to Reason and Pearson's and The Schemer and the contraband Two World's Monthly that dared to print Joyce's banned Ulysses.

33 I read them all. I swear I did when I was a teen and growing up and partly before. When I met my first professor of rhetoric, and boasted about the science fiction I had written at seventeen and sold to an editor whom I had had to sue for my one cent for each of my 3006 words, the professor's head was not at all turned. And when I interpreted the standard theme topic, "What I Expect to Get out of College," I was so weighted by economic deter­ minism as to suggest that I expected the university to be a kind of high-class trade school to elevate me into national journalism. How he blasted me then with improbably legible red marks that were like blood drippings from a poniard! How could I know though, then, a child of the evil Depression, that a college is a cultural center to teach men how to live? I who had heard the sinister tales of PhD's who operated elevators. Always there was the dread, the gnaw-hard dread at the bowels, of being alone in a strange world I never made or even sanc­ tioned. To this day the haunt is alive. Money was an idolator's god like Baal, and even the bums who rode the boxcars and wouldn't work and the hoboes who would work for a little to get subsistence and then return to the kingdom of hobohood, and the tramps who wouldn't work or hitch a ride but always per­ sisted in tramping across the land — all of them worshipped the Golden Calf. But they never could see him in the jungles and tar-paper lean-tos along the tracks. I found solace in the senna sentimentalities of Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell. I sent things out to the non-paying "little magazines" and made the soul-satisfying acquaintance of the quite literate voice of the proletarian press in Moberly, Mis­ souri, The Anvil, edited by a whole-hearted novelist named Jack Conroy. All for three cents. Or was it two then? No matter. I forget now, but I knew then, believe me. The New Leader rated lower, along with the New Masses. I stayed in college by shining shoes, racking balls in a pool hall, soliciting for newspapers, hopping tables, and working on FDR's NYA. There was a whole host of alphabetical life-savers,

34 the CCC for the boys with the new-made sap who wondered about the Western rainbows, and the WPA for their fathers who knew. I lasted it out in college for four years, slugging out the economic fight. Sometimes I hardly knew where the next bursar's remittance was coming from or where I could scrounge a cheap copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars. But there were compensations. Never was there the vice of academic pressure that seekers after learning are clamped in today. We were too close to the earth. We had even a kind of camaraderie among students and teachers, and when we sat for hours over nursed-down beers, the talk was great with pro­ fundity. Or seemed so then. Ergo, it was. The only fear we had was of economic expulsion. The colleges seemed to want us there, and we were student princes, sans money to be sure. In the fateful June of 1939 I had a degree bestowed upon me, and I ventured again "out into the world." I was lucky. I taught in a country school. To get the job I had gone through a whirli­ gig of homespun interviews with farmers who served on school boards and who had milked their cows as I "applied" in my city-slicker outfit. They had listened laconically. From their high dignity under the stolid cows they had looked up at me, a dolorous supplicant from the state institution. And then of a sudden a new decade was a-borning, and the Thirties were no more. We knew that the dream was never the nightmare it may once have seemed. Those were the days — the days that were. They always are. The "were" days always are, as long as human memory is in the race.

35 Jack Conroy

. . . the contemporary fact . . .

Not long back I was reminiscing with a sociology professor at Northwestern University about the Thirties. We were wondering how we ever managed to survive them, and at length my friend observed with some wistfulness: "We can afford to eat better these days, but the food doesn't taste as good." This is true, and it wasn't just the sauce of youth that flavored our fare. Something in the air was electric. Things were happening. There were the W. P. A. writers' projects and theater, the W. P. A. artists decorating murals and public buildings with realistic interpretations of American history, hunger marches, the bonus army, penny auction sales on the farms. And a new breed of writers to record these events. I was editing The Anvil in Moberly, Missouri, and Ben Hagglund, who later was to cart his cases of battered type from one section of the country to the other ("from pine to palm," as he put it when he moved from Holt, Minnesota, to San Benito, Texas), was printing an issue whenever we could raise enough money to buy paper, ink, and postage enough to launch it. Ben was forced to migrate to any place likely to offer a job to satisfy the more earthly demands of his being. Tough times but stimulating times as well. The Anvil looked for material from the "mines, mills and factories of America," and it found it. Some of the stuff — rough-hewn, but bitter and alive from the furnace of experience — invited the jeers of the more aesthetic urban and academic critics. Other editors began to look with more favor on the motto of The Anvil: "We prefer crude vigor to polished banality." The magazine never pre-

36 sumed to dictate editorial standards for other periodicals. We simply were plowing a comparatively untilled field, one whose freshness and novelty soon invited the attention of others. Letters began to come in from the New York publishers. "We're looking for a good proletarian novel. What about Joseph Kalar, J. S. Balch, John C. Rogers, and Robert Erisman? What are they doing?" College graduates of English Composi­ tion classes soon began to invade the Midwest — listening, look­ ing, and setting down impressions. The fruits of these whirlwind pilgrimages (few could afford a long trip, even by bus) were sometimes odd and lop-sided. One sympathetic observer noted that young husbands in the poverty-stricken hinterlands of Missouri and Arkansas must be fully aware that their wives grew old before their time. They habitually referred to a young wife as "the old lady." All this meant, in actuality, was that a customary form of address was being used — it might be applied to the blooming bride of a millionaire. Many of the efforts to set down the vernacular involved similar and even more ludicrous misinterpretations. The isolated writers soon put into effect equivalents of the Committees of Correspondence. Some who became good friends by mail did not meet for years; some, indeed, never did encoun­ ter one another face to face. But they were bound together by a camaraderie, a fraternity of mutual concern, that no longer exists. For a good many years, discussions of the literary phases of the Great Depression were mainly confined to witch-hunting excursions like Eugene Lyons' The Red Decade (1941), which warned that Stalin had already moved into Hollywood and would be in Washington eftsoons if we didn't curb the "crim- sonbacks" in our midst. Then after World War II came the "mea culpa! mea culpa!" outcries of repentant and guilt-laden retrospectivists like Murray Kempton and James Wechsler, who had been seduced by the Muscovites and wanted to save other political virgins from a like disaster. In his emotional and melodramatic Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monu-

37 ments of the Thirties (1955) Kempton shrives himself for a brief flirtation with the Young Communist League in his dewy and ingenuous youth. Included is this grandiloquent requiem:

The fifties are a graveyard for young writers whose art was molded by the myth of the thirties. The author of one of the most admired pro­ letarian novels of the period is now a magazine critic. Numbers of his contemporaries buried themselves in Hollywood to be disinterred and cast to the winds by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Another once young proletarian novelist is a hopeless soak in Chicago; a former revolutionary poet writes empty novels of derivative passion.

This lugubrious valedictory is characteristic of the romantic approach toward revolutionary writing taken by college kids like Kempton and Wechsler during their brief posturings on the barricades. It is difficult to see why the act of writing one proletarian novel and then quitting should be equated, as it were, with taking Holy Orders only to become an apostate by trying something else. Why should it be either shameful or tragic for "one of the most admired proletarian novelists of the period" later to earn his living as a magazine critic? The ideological tempests raging in New York City coffee pots seemed unreal and remote out in the Midwest, where C. I. O. organizers were getting their heads cracked while organizing factories. Who were the proletarian heroes of the political activists like Kempton? Why, his tallest "monument" turns out to be none other than James T. Farrell! Farrell, who at the close of the first Writers' Congress in New York City in 1935, arose to demand that the assembled delegates sing "The Internationale," won the admiration of Kempton when he told Whittaker Chambers, then a "party line" Torquemada and "enforcer," right to his sassy face: "Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write." Presumably, neither man nor God has to this day, which finds Farrell writing long and incoherent complaints to critics who feel that nobody, either mundane or divine, has ever yet succeeded in telling him how to write. The "confessions" of reformed ephemerids like Kempton usually are written from the top of the head or from the sometimes faulty or biased

38 memories of incorrigible axe-grinders like Farrell. An example of Kempton's research accuracy may be found in two short paragraphs where he manages to make three factual errors con­ cerning the Irish-American poet, Shaemas O'Sheel. Wechsler, in The Age of Suspicion (1953), looks back upon his fleeting dalliance with Communism with something like rueful amusement. "We read," he writes, evidently speaking for other young recruits, "the proletarian novels of Grace Lumpkin, Fielding Burke, Jack Conroy and of countless others who had sprung to their typewriters to herald the final conflict." This flippant vulgarization of my purpose in writing The Disinherited (and I daresay the purpose of the other two men­ tioned) is symptomatic of an attitude that prevailed for a great many years. I, for one, considered myself a witness to the times rather than a novelist. Mine was an effort to obey Whitman's injunction to "vivify the contemporary fact." Beginning, I believe, with Walter B. Rideout's The Radical Novel in the United States (1956) a trend has been growing toward a more equitable assessment of the Thirties. Daniel Aaron even more ably continued the process of rectification in Writers on the Left (1961).

"In their excavations of the radical past," he writes, "the historians have dug up little but fragments and ruins. Yet surely a movement which involved so many intelligent and generous men and women can­ not be barren of significance. . . . The strong impact of Communism's program upon even those writers who opposed it must be reckoned with. So much the vitalizing influence of the Left Wing intellectuals who stirred up controversies, discovered new novelists and playwrights, opened up hitherto neglected areas of American life, and broke down the barriers that had isolated many writers from the great issues of our times. "We who precariously survive in the sixties can regret their inade­ quacies and failures, their romaticism, their capacity for self-deception, their shrillness, their self-righteousness. It is less easy to scorn their efforts, however blundering and ineffective, to change the world."

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[email protected] David Cornel Dejong

Money and rue . . .

I have a notion that my personal reactions to the values and symptoms of the Thirties are off kilter and have little economic or cosmic significance. My peculiar circumstances and aims can be of small concern to others. During the Thirties I was still a foreigner, or immigrant. My attitudes were exhausted by learning the English language and expressing myself in it, by breaking away from a rigidly Calvinistic background which condemned all such expression, while all the time I was on my own and in such a low economic scale that the Thirties, to­ gether with their "Depression," amounted to little more than a social and economic leveling out. I was used to the hardships which were now becoming nearly everyone's portion, hence there was on my part no inverse feeling of nostalgia for some­ thing that had been mislaid or lost. Conversely for me the Thirties amounted to a victorious period, marked by greater freedom of expression. My first four novels were published, and during the decade I appeared freely in both little and not-so-little magazines. At times my income from writing amounted to all of two thousand dollars a year. At other times I kept going more precariously by translating from the Dutch and Flemish. But there were also spells when I was reduced to manual labor, such as gravedigging and road work of the pick-ax variety. I can't recall feeling sorry for my­ self, or feeling that I should be treated with more appreciation. Hence I could never assume the then vaunted posture of hurt. My soul didn't feel afflicted, my sensibilities weren't being mauled, and what was happening to the people around me and the country and its economy seemed to me something which had

50 to be expected and could presumably happen again and again, and I could not speculate about the difference between the important and unimportant poor. I suppose I had been of the poor too long to make a fetish of it. Because the atmosphere was what it was, it seemed occasion­ ally expedient to get into the swim and make appropriate pro­ tests. Certainly I was told to do so, by all and sundry within the literary orbit. I never had the proper formality, however, nor could I assume the necessary non-humor and nostalgia. Dur­ ing the Thirties I moved to New York, soon after the publica­ tion of my second novel. Just about that time Lincoln Kirstein found it expedient to mark me as a true specimen of the prole­ tariat, to give some sort of social significance to my appearing off and on in the Hound & Horn. At the same time I was being instructed, or accosted, by one of the editors of Time, a man fairly Brooks Brothered in the proper social consciousness. This gent who had one novel of overall protest to his credit urged me in all seriousness to switch from writing about Dutch peas­ ants to the delineating of Michigan peasants, which would be much more in fashionable focus. Where I was unaware of my ever having written about Dutch peasants, nor came from Dutch peasant stock, as he assumed, and had never during all my years as a city dweller in Michigan encountered a Michigan peasant, his advice seemed cutely surrealistic, and all his ado about social integrity missed fire so much that I couldn't even feel angry. Still the man's advice was symptomatic of the period. Erling Larsen's evocative essay on James Agee and the literary magazines of the period once more reminded me that during those haunted Thirties I was largely concerned with my work and was academically unaware of the important and unimpor­ tant poor, conceivably because I myself was habitually poor and even supported indigent parents who frowned on my source of income. My needed sense of values prevented me from looking at poverty symbolically. At the end of the decade I had achieved a sort of functional status of independence. Accordingly I was being envied. From this period I particularly recall one eve- 51 ning with James Agee — an evening of long and high talking, hazy attitudinizing and inchoate remorse, all through clouds of drinks and smoke. Agee at the time was preoccupied with or at least was in the throes of his assignment lot Fortune. During the evening the inverse nostalgia was there for the plucking from the thick air. Somewhere along the way I got a pretty clear idea about the definite figures, money figures, Agee and Evans were to receive for their labors for Fortune. The figures amounted to a sum roughly seven times greater than I was earning annually. The great rue of being made to perpetrate what they were perpetrating eluded me. The envy of others present didn't. After I left and had already reached the street, Jim Agee opened a window and shouted down to me: "Dejong, don't you dare sell your soul and guts. You have them for free, keep them so." All things are relative, and it isn't even fair to take this Agee text out of context. But wasn't he actually asking me to hold on to my free soul and guts because if I didn't I might be induc­ ing him and others like him to become more mournful? No, I wasn't romantic enough, and I badly lacked a sense of gainful social consciousness. I was such an integral part of it I couldn't afford to step outside of it and look down upon it with anger and remorse. Wonderful fellow Agee was, but to me the stuff he wrote for Fortune and other things in that vein was self- conscious slop, and I cannot understand why it is being resus­ citated currently. To me the Thirties were a period which had to be lived with and through and I myself couldn't be blamed. Attitudinizing was for those birds who wanted to swallow the worm so that they might be able both to enjoy and deplore the rewards. That was their business and often they got paid and printed well. And brought forth period pieces.

52 August Derleth

. . . never cursed with the illusion . . .

In a very real sense, the decade of the Thirties was that in which I found myself as a writer. The Thirties began for me with graduation from the University of Wisconsin and an al­ most immediate stint as an associate editor with Fawcett Maga­ zines, which were then in Minneapolis, where I lived pretty much as I had lived in Madison — attending the concerts at Northrop Auditorium, belonging (however much at the fringe) to a student-instructor group of people interested in creative work (Meridel Le Sueur, Austin Faricy, Donald and Howard Wandrei, etc.). But this did not last long — scarcely five months — before I resigned and came back to Sac Prairie (i.e., Sauk City/Prairie du Sac) where I represented the fourth generation of my family in that place and had, thus, the continuity of time and place necessary for my creative wellbeing. In Sac Prairie that first summer of 1931, I rented a small, abandoned house on the bank of the Wisconsin in the heart of the village with Mark Schorer (also a native and a friend of long standing, back in town after a year of teaching in Kentucky), and set out to write a sequence of pulp magazine stories in col­ laboration. I had been publishing pulp fiction since I was 15, particularly in the domain of the macabre and ours was an unique arrangement, for I found it necessary to work in the local canning factory by day and wrote by night, while Mark wrote by day and played by night, so that our pattern of collabo­ ration was fixed — each evening I outlined in detail the plot for next day's story; every day Mark wrote the story, and that evening I rewrote it before outlining the next day's plot. But pulp fiction was merely an economic necessity. The de- 53 pression of those years did not strike fully into most small mid- western communities like Sac Prairie until 1932, and even then, the one bank failure in town in 1933 was brought about not so much by the depression as by criminal mismanagement and woeful ineptitude. I was at that time subscribing to most of the little magazines of the day and soon contributing to them — This Quarter, The Midland, Pagany, Contempo, The Frontier, Prairie Schooner, Hound & Horn, Story, The Lion if Unicorn — by 1933 a novelette of mine had made the O'Brien Roll of Honor, and in that same year I began a decad of mystery novels (each written in ten days) and assembled for publication a quar­ tet of serious long stories, which saw the light in book form in 1935 under the title Place of Hawks. From the last year of my university schooling I had been gathering notes for a series of novels, short stories, poems, and miscellaneous prose volumes designed to recount the social history of Sac Prairie from 1830 to 1950; Place of Hawks inaugurated that series, and my first long novel, Still Is the Summer Night, published by Scribner's in 1937, continued it. Despite my addiction to the little magazines, I was too far removed from the scenes of social and economic unrest of the decade for identification, though I read the proletarian maga­ zines, including the New Masses, and contributed to Jack Con- roy's The Anvil. I was diligently pursuing a course of my own, non-aligned, though my identification as a writer was primarily with the regionalists — Zona Gale lived nearby, and my corre­ spondents included Edgar Lee Masters, Henry Williamson, Jesse Stuart, Sherwood Anderson, Algernon Blackwood, M. P. Shiel, Hamlin Garland — occasionaly Sinclair Lewis who, with Masters recommended me for the Guggenheim Fellowship that came my way in 1938, and H. L. Mencken — most of whom were even then no longer closely tied to the mainstream in American writing. I felt and still feel that such of my work as merited serious consideration (probably 10% of the whole) was rather more related to the core tradition in American literature than to the current mainstream, and I have never at any time felt 54 any compulsion to swing into that mainstream. Moreover, once back in Sac Prairie from the editorial stint with Fawcett's and an equally brief period on an elegant little review, The Midwestern, published in Madison, I was deter­ mined to succeed or fail as a free-lance writer, supplementing my meager income by seasonal factory work. By 1935 I had begun to sell regional short stories and verse to Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, Household, The New Republic, The Com­ monweal, Poetry, as well as to most of the little reviews; and by the end of the decade, I had had twenty books published, had inaugurated in Arkham House my own publishing business, sat on the local Board of Education, and had built a house at the edge of town. I had even survived my local reputation for being a dangerous "radical," a reputation acquired as much for sup­ porting Roosevelt as for championing the cause of local under­ dogs. My roots here go deep, obviously, but I have led here in reality almost a Thoreauvian existence — participating locally in the life of the village, but taking the role of an observer of the wider scene, a post for which so essentially provincial a place as Sac Prairie is ideal, since it affords me a far clearer perspective on events than I might have as an active participant. The decade of the Thirties was one of creative growth for me, but rather singularly within the limitations of the regional, since the major subject I had chosen for myself —Sac Prairie —fell within those boundaries. I kept aloof from literary "move­ ments" and belonged to no group while maintaining a strong interest in every creative art and direction, from the most tradi­ tional to the most experimental. There was never much money in those years —not enough, for instance, for the concerts I longed to hear in nearby Madison, but a contributing editorship of Outdoors Magazine brought in many new books to review so that I could spend what I could afford to spend on the little reviews, which seemed to me then the literary pulse of tomor­ row; most of the money I earned through factory work and writing — and this, too, was minimal — was contributed largely

55 to household expenses, for I lived with my parents in that decade, and my father, after being forced by technological prog­ ress to give up blacksmithing and wagon-making, had taken to carpentry and house-painting, and was for some years employed by the WPA. Nevertheless, my windows to the outside were many, varied, and in perspective, not only through print but correspondence — relatively voluminous with Masters — shared experienced with Jesse Stuart and H. P. Lovecraft and Alan Devoe — exchange of ideas and convictions with scores of fellow contributors to the little magazines. I kept more or less free of commitments to literary groups, and I never had any desire to move to New York. Toward the end of the decade I began to visit there — to see Masters, Max­ well Perkins (then my editor at Scribner's) and others —saw plays and operas, but always found the Sac Prairie milieu of more human interest and more comfortable in its comparative lack of haste and tensions. Nor did I think of myself consciously as a regionalist — rather more simply a story-teller; even as long ago as 1940, when I gave a course in American Regional Litera­ ture at the University of Wisconsin, I pointed out that regional­ ism as a movement in American literature was fading before literature of a more national character. Nevertheless, my expli­ cation of life in Sac Prairie was and continues to be inevitably pigeonholed as regionalism. No matter. Since I was never cursed with the illusion of genius, I don't have that to live up to, I lack both a facade and an academic reputation to maintain, and I am perfectly satisfied to classify with such other "regionalists" as Faulkner, Vardis Fisher and Jesse Stuart. The decade of the Thirties did not specifically influence my literary career. In that decade my creative direction became fixed, assured. It was simply the decade of my twenties, and I suspect that had that decade occurred ten years earlier or ten years later, precisely the same development would have taken place — given the similar circumstances of my parents affording me living space and thus time for development while my small earnings brought in the little reviews and the quality magazines 56 from here and abroad, and the lack of any need to consort with other creative young men and women — so many of whom, I found on such acquaintance as I had with them, did far more talking than creating, balanced by the need to know the natives who were, basically, my material, and whose doings and atti­ tudes had been jotted down in my Sac Prairie Journal begun in late 1935. It seems to me, in looking back, that I took a direction before I was out of my teens, became fixed in it in the decade of the Thirties, and have carried on in it without much deviation ever since. Any significance I may have on the American literary scene is bound to be marginal and secondary.

Paul "Doc" Evans

Some local jazz .

This essay is a record of various conversations with Mr. Evans, some that were taped and transcribed, some that were written down out of the interviewer's memory.

During the Twenties, my family lived in West Concord, Minnesota, a small town, population maybe six hundred. We had a big house with a front lawn where we played football and baseball. And we had hunted out all kinds of places for fishing and swimming. It was a good life. We had books at home, and a big library of records, Caruso and Schumann-Heink. None of the operatic or symphonic things were complete, of course, but we did have I remember two movements of Beethoven's Fifth. I didn't have to be driven to piano lessons. I wanted to play 57 every kind of instrument at once. My mother's family was all more or less musical, not artists or anything like that, but they all played something. And my grandfather and my uncle played brass instruments and there were always some brass instruments around. My father had left me a fiddle which I never could learn to play. It was without strings or a tail-piece but I fixed it up and tried to learn. I sent away for an instruction book, but that's one instrument I couldn't make. Not then, anyway. I did teach myself drums from an instruction book, however, and as a small boy I got to play in the city band. It was not until I got to Carleton that my interest in jazz really crystallized. This was partly because of Fritz Lawrence, who had the first collection of jazz records I had ever seen. I re­ member the day he asked me over to his house, and up in his room he had piles and piles of records, no jackets on them, just stacks. He played records by bands I'd never even heard of. Then there were a few people at Carleton who were playing jazz, upperclassmen. And I began to play with them. We played for college dances, and then along toward the end of my Carleton days I sometimes went out and played with bands around the area, and once in a while I'd sub with one of the road bands when they needed a trumpet player. And then my senior year I went up to the University and played on the campus weekends, and between my junior and senior years I lived at the YMCA in Minneapolis, because it was the cheap­ est place I could find, and I played at a place called The Golden Pheasant Cafe. I think I had two nights a week in there, and then an odd job here and there. I didn't expect to do this as a life work, really. It was a way to spend a summer vacation and I thought I was going to make a little more money than I did. I thought I'd probably end up with a few dollars, but I can remember writing a few checks on Dad to tide me over when we didn't make enough at this cafe. But I did make quite a bit of money playing at school. I re­ member my tuition was paid and my clothes were paid for and

58 board and room and everything, so when I'd get money for these jobs we were playing I remember just throwing it in a bureau drawer. There was a pile of money in there. I never knew how much was in there. It's a wonder it didn't disappear. But I had all this money. I started buying myself clothes and things. I thought, well, I'd take a little of the burden off the folks. I had lots of spending money for a while. The only really rugged time was that summer between the junior and senior years. I'd play those week-end jobs sometimes with Loot Leraan, a Saint Olaf student, who wasn't supposed to be playing, of course. He used to leave his horn in Minneapolis and they'd bring it on the job for him and that way it wasn't suspicious. We'd ride the bus up and sometimes, because we weren't sup­ posed to have cars, we'd rent a Model T Ford from a kid that worked at an ice-cream place, The Green Lantern. And some­ times we'd ride the bread trucks back to Northfield Monday morning. The drivers were fine about it, but they had to stop every few miles and it took a long time to get to Northfield. It would be broad daylight when we got there. I used to fall asleep in history classes on Monday. Professor Duniway laughed about it. He knew why I was asleep, I guess. But I didn't do too badly in history, so he wasn't too hard on me. I remember once the whole class got up and walked out and I was still sitting there sleeping and he came over and waked me up but he laughed about it. I didn't know much about the depression during the Thirties, or think about it, until I was teaching high school back in West Concord. I taught English and History and Economics and Business, Business because no one else was available to do it and I was low man on the totem pole. I didn't much care for the high school teaching, mainly because the students didn't seem to care. You had to jam everything down their throats. And of course I had the high school band, and the town band, and I'd play too with a band called The Purple Aces. When they needed me they'd come around and pick me up 59 and we'd play one-night jobs at the Zumbro Ridge Pavilion and the Rainbow Pavilion, places like that. Finally the depression did catch up with me, and my school teaching job folded. I came up to Minneapolis and found a job playing and it was pretty rugged. I can remember going out on jobs strictly on percentage and making fifty cents or some­ thing like that and then I can remember playing jobs where you were guaranteed two dollars. It was pretty rough until I got in with a band that had been a campus band, Art Gold­ berg's band, and had a lot of society work and country club work so that although we didn't work every night we made fairly good money at it. I can remember also working for some clubs for twenty-five dollars a week, and living on it. Of course, money went a long way then. It seems as though we got out of this sort of thing very gradually and things got just a little better all the time, and perhaps I made better connections or some­ thing, and in time the money rolled in pretty well. I had no trouble finding a job. We really didn't feel the depression very much. I spent one summer playing with The Jolly Millers. They were a German band, an oompah band, but I did make them sound sometimes a little like a Dixieland band by writing out little phrases and melodies for them to play and passing them around and, because they could read notes even though they didn't know anything about jazz, sometimes it came out almost good. We lived in a cottage at Madison Lake that summer, and Sundays we'd go over to Point Pleasant, or over to Beaver Dam Lodge, and play jazz just for the fun of it. Fritz Lawrence was around then and Herbie Nerbovig, both of them veterans of the old Carleton bands, and we began to attract Sunday after­ noon crowds, and after the word got around we'd sometimes have the place filled by eight o'clock. Various musicians from around Mankato would come out to sit in and after awhile it was all a pretty big thing. The proprietor liked it, after all it didn't cost him anything, and he was sometimes pleased enough to buy us all steak dinners. That summer, the Jolly Miller sum-

60 mer, lasted just long enough, just long enough for me to make enough money to make a down payment on a house. As soon as I had it, I quit the oompah. Back to Minneapolis and a chance to play more honest jazz. Most of this would be in night-clubs. Fly-by-night night clubs. We never called them speakeasies. They were known as private clubs. And of course when prohibition was repealed things changed quite a bit. We never had it as rough as Mezz Mezzrow says he had it, for instance, around Cicero and Hammond, but I used to hear stories from other musicians about the places they worked. There were gangsters around, I suppose, and I remember one night when I was coming home from work and another car was following me. I don't know why I thought it was following me but I turned off and took a very wild route home. I don't know who they thought I was or why they were following me, but anyway I out-distanced them and parked the car and ran inside and looked out the window. And they went by two or three times in this car. And I remember one musician telling me how somebody had stopped him and pulled a gun on him and was going to shoot him and all of a sudden discovered he wasn't the right man. I can also remember when a man, the proprietor of one of these clubs, was shot out in the parking lot of his place. I wasn't there but I remember about it. And, of course, for a number of those years I had another sideline. I raised cocker spaniels and made part of my income from that. It was a little hard to depend on music entirely. So I raised cockers. It's hard to say when I started, because you sort of sneak into these things. But I raised cockers for six or seven years. And I showed them all over, sometimes showing them myself, sometimes hiring a professional handler. I had eleven champions before I quit. The first was named Super Sam of Carrbern. His picture appeared on the cover of Dog World some time in 1942. But that's getting out of the Thirties. It isn't easy to say what the Thirties were. One thing that 61 made them different, I think, was that we did things then that nobody would do now. At Lindy's, now called Augie's, for in­ stance, we'd have a band and it would depend on business how many players we'd have or how long we'd play. Sometimes along in the evening the boss would send half the band home, or keep maybe only the piano and the sax or something like that. Then those of us who had been sent home would walk down the street to another joint or drive up on the North Side and sit in with the negro musicians. One place I remember never hired more than a piano player, and when we were done work­ ing we'd go and play with him. We never knew who'd show up. And half the time when we were done playing and would come out on the street it would be bright sunlight. For one thing, the laws were different then, or they were enforced differently. But, laws or not, you won't find people doing that sort of thing now.

Ben Hagglund

. . . akin to revelation . . .

Every thirty years a new generation completes its takeover from the old, and has to be brought up to date and learn how to advance from the last vantage point. Of course this is a con­ tinuous process and the thirty-year figure should be qualified by "more or less." It has been noted too that each new generation seems utterly incapable of learning from the experiences of the old and has to find things out for itself the hard way. One way you learn about what people thought, how they felt

62 and acted thirty years ago, is to read (or re-read) books of that period. What started this whole symposium was Erling Larsen's essay on James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which made its reappearance in 1961. A more precise example is Jack Conroy's The Disinherited, published first in 1933 and reissued in 1963 as a paperback. Robert Carlton Brown (one of the old Masses editors) published scads of books in the Thirties; last year I saw three reappearances of his books in paperback form. Anyone who has perused Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961) will be struck with the casual mention of vast quantities of almost forgotten material. If reappearances in paperback form is truly a feature of this thirty-year idea, we should prepare ourselves for a veritable deluge, for the Thirties were characterized by a vast flowering of what is known as proletarian literature. Of course, if this thirty-year recurrence idea were to hold true in everything, right now we should be in the midst of one of the greatest depressions in all history. But the lavish prosperity, the inflation, the ease with which anyone with any talent can get awell-paying job, the almost suffocating abundance of Things which characterizes this age, is almost an exact opposite of how things were in the Thirties. The Thirties were a time of deprivation, one-fourth of the working population out of work, banks going broke, men and women graduating from colleges and universities into a world that could not use their services, farmers raising grain and live­ stock that hardly paid transportation and handling costs. The Marxists all during the Twenties had been warning us about this, and here it was. The generation opening its mind at the beginning of the Thirties and asking questions got no answers except from the Marxists. Small wonder that vast numbers of thoughtful people were climbing on the bandwagon going left­ ward. Eugene Burdick could have been thinking of the proletarian literary movement of 1930-1940 when he wrote, "All crucial institutions develop a literature of apology and, if they last for

63 long, a literature of criticism." There was nothing apologetic about magazines like The Rebel Poet (1931) and The Anvil (1933), both edited by Jack Conroy and published by Ben Hagglund, but these magazines, which started the decade were certainly not critical; while a magazine like Partisan Review, which swallowed The Anvil in a merger, saw its influence growing stronger as the decade ended, because of its strong emphasis on criticism. There may be some truth in the belief that the proletarian literary movement could not stand criticism. The raw, unre­ fined, crude stuff of the Conroy ventures had nothing going for them but enthusiasm. The host of imitators of The Anvil fared no better. And The New Anvil (a Conroy-Hagglund venture putting out seven issues from March 1939 to August 1940) proved nothing except that by 1940 the entire base had been yanked out from under the proletarian literary movement. The movement depended on the deep freeze of the depression for continuing inspiration; when the New Deal began to melt the glacial conditions, the proletarian movement lost its force. This principle, one of the main tenets of Marxism, is known as economic determinism. Proletarian literature, based on the economic type of misery, did not —perhaps could not —shift to other types of misery and despair. With another world war looming, with fascism rampant in the world, with a newborn technology making its appearance, there were plenty of other things to write about besides starving workers. And so the proletarian movement declined. Frederick J. Hoffman, one of the authors of The Little Maga­ zine, says that eighty per cent of successful writers got their first public exposure in little magazines. This figure, which looks like an elaborate guess, could be right; looking back in the files of my own magazines, I see an astonishing number of names that later graced the covers of books and national maga­ zines. Assuming that a "published author" is a successful author, look at these names from my early magazine of verse, The

64 Northern Light (Jan. 1927-Mar. 1928): Scott Graham Williamson, William Allen Ward, Raymond Kresensky, Alter Abelson, Jack Conroy, Jay G. Sigmund, George S. Whittaker, Israel Newman, Walter Evans Kidd, Frances M. Frost. Then there was my Western Poetry (first number Dec. 1929) containing these poets: Clement Wood, Benjamin Musser, Ralph Cheyney, Lucia Trent, Frederick Herbert Adler, William E. Pillin, David Cor­ nel Dejong, Meindert R. Dejong, Louise Burton Laidlaw, Kenneth W. Porter, Howard McKinley Corning, Robert Carl­ ton Brown, H. H. Lewis, Kathleen Sutton, Fania Kruger. The files of The Northern Light and Western Poetry reveal the ever-increasing social awareness coming into the work of American writers. The 1930 numbers reflect the deepening despair and misery of that time, so that when Jack Conroy outlined a plan for a magazine of radical verse to be called The Rebel Poet, I was ready to act as printer and publisher. The first number, January 1931, listed me as "editor and publisher," but this was wrong, because I did not edit it. Conroy had the work of gathering the material. The seventeen numbers of The Rebel Poet which appeared up to October 1932 featured such people as: Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Arthur Truman Merrill, Sey­ mour G. Link, Verne Bright, Miriam Allen deFord, Gale Wil- helm, Joseph Gaer, Boris J. Israel, Joseph Freeman, Johannes R. Becher, James Rorty, Fredericka Blankner, Gabor Andor, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Joe Corrie, Victor Jerome, Fred Miller, H. T. Tsiang. Now Conroy and others planned a magazine of "stories for workers" and I, being by now an experienced proletarian printer, got out the first number of The Anvil in May 1933. This spunky magazine, which had a fighting time of it right down to February 1936 when it merged with Partisan Review, managed to present the early work of people like: Edwin Seaver, Erskine Caldwell, Paul F. Corey, Edwin Rolfe,

65 J. S. Balch, Alfred Morang, Karlton Kelm, Edward Newhouse, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Orrick Johns, Norman Mac- leod, Howard Rushmore, Sanora Babb, Josephine W. Johnson, Benjamin Appel, Arkady Leokum, Langston Hughes, James T. Farrell, A. B. Magil. By 1937 I felt I had gained enough practical experience and amassed enough superior equipment to make another stab at publishing, so I began agitating for a revival of The Rebel Poet. There was some interest, and some poems even accepted; but genuine enthusiasm was lacking, so I returned the poems and the few advance subscriptions. Meanwhile, Conroy had been thinking of reviving The Anvil, which in the meantime had disappeared completely from the masthead of the newly revived Partisan Review. (Months before, the merger was to be known as Anvil and Partisan Review, but something happened, and it appeared as Partisan Review and Anvil. Then it suspended briefly and came out as Partisan Review, with not only a truncated name but a completely re­ built set of aims and beliefs, utterly unlike the original maga­ zine.) Conroy's musings chimed in with my revival spirit; and the upshot was The New Anvil, the first number of which appeared in March 1939. Seven issues in all rolled off my press, the last one coming out in August 1940. Nelson Algren was managing editor, and we had such contributors as: William Carlos Williams, Stuart David Engstrand, Len Zin- berg, Frank Yerby (his very first published story), Michael Blankfort, Norman Rosten, Eve Merriam, Ashley Buck, Jesse Stuart, Gladden Haskell, Roberto Felix Salazar, Millen Brand, Karl Jay Shapiro, William Peterson, Prudencio de Pereda, J. Calder Joseph. It became evident by the summer of 1940 that what we called proletarian writing was at odds with events. The New Anvil was an anachronism. Of course we didn't realize it as clearly as all that at the time; but we knew things were not quite right, and our receipts showed plainly that the magazine could not 66 continue much longer. At a certain point, I got myself a $25-a-week job on a coun­ try weekly newspaper, which solved our immediate financial needs, but which left no spare time to get out The New Anvil. Then the war came, I served in a combat outfit overseas, came back, and tried to pick up where I had left off. But World War II, McCarthyism, Korea, Automation, and everything else had completely obliterated the way back; and anyway who wanted to go back there? Here is another world, with new drives and new ideas. On returning from the wars I plotted a poetry magazine called Caravel, making elaborate plans, even setting some type for it as early as 1946. But it was not until December 1957 that number one of Caravel was mailed. Number thirteen is now in the works. By now I have not only "learned the ropes," I have also solved the problem of financing a little magazine. (It really is no secret: get yourself a well-paying job and print the maga­ zine yourself in your spare time!) Caravel is trying to synthesize the "people-to-people" idea in literature; Caravel poets, we fondly hope, have been sent scurry­ ing to works on anthropology by A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and others. Perhaps the full fruit of the "people-and-places" emphasis of Caravel will not be realized until the next decade. As long as we are indulging in name-dropping, let us wonder if these names of Caravel poets will be significant in the years to come: Ralph S. Pomeroy, Evelyn Tooley Hunt, Emilie Glen, Rose Rosberg, William L. Cerveny, Alden A. Nowlan, Harland Ristau, Bessie Jeffery, Joseph Martinek, Robert N. Zimmerman. I like to think that Hoffman's 80% formula will continue to work in the future; so I, for one, am fondly watching the growth and development of the people whose poems I publish. As I mulled over the problem of writing about the Thirties, the only meaning I could get out of that period was not how I felt, but how the whole country felt. It was that kind of time. 67 The collective spirit had us enthralled briefly; then when things eased up a bit, the old individualistic spirit got us again, and we were right back at each other's throats. In 1933-34 I stayed briefly at Llano Cooperative Colony, in Louisiana. Besides being a genuine socialistic colony, the print- shop there (where I worked) managed to get the printing of a score of little magazines of the period, among them The Anvil. That is where I met Robert Carlton Brown, who wrote a book about his experiences there, Can We Cooperate} I also met Dale Kramer, who was a linotype operater there briefly. (Kramer pub­ lished the little regional magazine, Hinterland, and went on to write several books.) Llano was the "depot" of a constant stream of dreamers, crackpots, intellectuals, and plain hoboes who came, stayed briefly, and went, and I among them. The New Deal finally made Llano superfluous, so it went under late in the Thirties, suffered innumerable lawsuits, and now is among the nearly-forgotten experiments in communal living. What did it feel like to be in these things? Well, the idea of "one for all, all for one" was shot through all these ventures, and any one who had sprung up through the field of country printing as I had was enthralled by the notion of a world where others were the first consideration, and where the / was not even thought of. Of course, as time went on, I learned that most writers and poets are all /, and they make a bad fit into a world where others are thought of first. The "Century of the Common Man" has already been spoiled by the uncommon man. And I suppose I am one of them. Anyhow, there was a vision, and it needed a particular frame of mind to see it, and that frame of mind did not include self- analysis, so that no one who had the experience could truthfully tell just what it was he alone thought. Granville Hicks, writing in 1943, and looking back on the Thirties, called what hap­ pened "mysterious." I suppose what happened was akin to revelation, somewhat religious. You can see that I am still trying to dope it all out.

68 David Ignatow

Unfinished business . . •

In 1937 I edited the literary magazine Analytic. Earlier I had been associated with the short-lived Literary Arts, American Scene and Womankind, all three headed by that amazing eccen­ tric, Lawrence C. Woodman. One reason for the failure of all three was a lack of money, complicated by Woodman's bizarre impracticality. He had insisted on issuing them simultaneously, on a survival income from a WPA teaching job which also had to support his wife, daughter and himself. Woodman was driven by idealistic Herculean ambition which unfortunately went to prove his inability to realize it, but he had hold of a truth about our literary condition which only in a scattered, desultory way was being acknowledged and discussed by others. Despite my misgivings as to the practical outcome of his extravagant scheme, I helped in every way I could to publish his three periodicals and to have them distributed widely. It was several years before the second number of American Scene appeared, the other two coming out each spaced about six months apart, after which there was silence over them all. In the meanwhile I had had in­ valuable contact direct and indirect with writers from all over the country, getting their views of Woodman's ideas and their own reflections on life and current literature in this country. This gave me the opportunity to form my own theories. Vague though they were, they grew out of a difficult literary and per­ sonal position. Woodman, whose magazines are listed and described in the Hoffman-Allen-Ulrich The Little Magazines, was strongly op­ posed to the bland, pragmatic-transcendental pap published regularly then in The Atlantic, Harper's and other magazines.

69 He could praise such magazines as The Anvil and the New Masses for their emphasis on the poverty and neglect being endured by the workers and farmers, but he condemned their prose and poetry as self-defeating because of the absence of individuality, the neglect of characterization and the general slighting of an American tone that could give the writing authenticity. As for the more representative national magazines, while he found in their stories and poems a sense of place, the language and characterizations were employed to gloss over essentially superficial insights. In his magazines Woodman hoped to bridge the gap between the two most important trends in American writing at this time. He wanted from The Anvil and the New Masses angry concern with the economic plight and isolation of the American worker and farmer, and from the more urbane magazines, such as The Atlantic, their sense of style. This project was to be fulfilled by his magazine The American Scene. In The Literary Arts, the emphasis was to be on psychological insight and on highly experimental style. Woodman was an enthusiastic follower of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Needless to say, however, during the Thirties the will to ex­ periment with techniques was not nearly as strong among American writers as was their immediate need to tell their truth with what methods they had at hand. They were being oppressed by their own acutely insecure economic and social position in a depressed society and had little or no disposition to probe for style or subtlety. Certainly a lack of money and the innate impracticality of Woodman were two causes for the eventual silence of his three magazines, but contributing in a decisive way to their early deaths was the limited response from writers and readers. The literary world of the Thirties was sharply divided between the so-called Proletarian School and that complex of polite literature represented by The Atlantic, The Saturday Evening Post, The American Mercury, Harper's, and the many woman-oriented magazines. The vast majority of writers and readers went one or the other way. In Womankind, 70 the third of Woodman's magazines to fail after a second issue, there was an attempt to combine the elements of experimenta­ tion and sociological observation, with only women as contribu­ tors. The response from readers was even less than for The American Scene and The Literary Arts. Woodman, however, in a last flareup of enthusiasm proposed that I edit my own magazine, following my own ideas. What­ ever spare money he had left over from his unsuccessful ven­ tures, together with the meager receipts from sales would go towards subsidizing the first issue of Analytic. Like Woodman, I too had to condemn both literary camps for their mediocre productions, but my explanation and my solution for this failure differed basically from Woodman's. In his view, there were two groups, spiritually and ideologically divided. In my view, they were simply two sides of the same coin. Was not Albert Halper being printed in Harper's and The Menorah Journal, to men­ tion just two respectable publications? Recently, his first novel, Union Square, a book written out of sympathy with the Com­ munists, had been published by Viking. Halper wrote sadly and even gently, if sentimentally, of privation and class struggle. His writing never shouted. There were few exclamation points in his description of victory or defeat in the class-struggle May Day Parades. His stories for national magazines were even more muted, with close, loving attention to individual lives in pri­ vate circumstances. He was well suited to present the Marxist position in a middle class milieu. In fact, his work was indis­ tinguishable from the great majority of stories published in Harper's and such magazines; descriptions of characters and situations hardly differed from those of the more folksy kind of writer favored by these middle-class publications. In all the prose, poetry and short stories published between the two sup­ posedly hostile camps, I could find only a difference of tone. Both sides made man out to be a product of society. But what was society? To the Marxists, shouting at the tops of their lungs, society was explained by their theory of labor value in any given environment. Man was the sum of his worth in the labor mar-

7i ket. A laborer was worth almost nothing, because he could be hired cheaply. An executive, or an owner of a business, or a hired professional was a key figure because of the income he could command, consequently because of the power he enjoyed. The Theory turned on money. Man and money formed an equation, man evaluated according to the amounts of money he possessed or could control. To the liberals, the polite magazine crowd, this thinking was implicit, with, however, a touching regard for the quality of one's response as a person. In other words, it was okay to live by the buck, so long as one knew about it. That somehow kept you free. All this was beside the point for me. I saw that neither side had any conception of or insight into the restlessness that was gripping the country, in strikes and mass migrations. Class differences and class war were not at the heart of it. Neither was it a concern with economics, as put forward in the communist or more moderate view. It was no longer money for its own sake, either. That was in the past, when all those amenities deriving from money had ruled their lives and marked success or failure. It was something that had grown on them, following the initial shock of the failure and near bankruptcy of the country's eco­ nomic life. It certainly was not reflected in the stories they read in popular magazines for "entertainment." It had to be dis­ covered by talking with them directly, living among them, sounding them out, making friends of them in their lonely hours. I had that opportunity in many a sleazy office job during working hours, lunch hours and on the way home in crowded subways. I had the opportunity in the squalid neighborhoods in which I was forced to live and when visiting among relatives living on tree-lined and garden-bordered streets. The response always was the same. People were deeply pessimistic. With money they had hoped to keep the path of life straight and smooth. But when money gives out, what then? With what did one build a path straight and smooth then? It was not only the striving for money that was in question but all that money brought with it, power, prestige, status. If all this

72 could be wiped out in one day, as the crash had just taught, what then did man exist for? There was emptiness, and this was the heart of the problem facing everyone, and neither the Marxists nor the American pragmatic economists, thinkers and humanist writers were prepared or willing to deal with this question. The people were rejecting all the values and panaceas of the market. My contact with numerous writers from all parts of the coun­ try, as I worked with Woodman and when shaping my own magazine, supported me in this observation. Robert Traver from the midwest, Cornel Dejong in New England, Harry Brown in the east, Alfred Morang the writer and traveling musician, Langston Hughes, Kerker Quinn, Weldon Kees, For­ rest Anderson, Millen Brand and many others outside the influence of either literary grouping. I was receiving letters and manuscripts from men and women who were deep in the life of their country as husbands, fathers, wives, working tor a living, raising families, trying to write after hours or doing free lance work or simply looking for work while on relief. The common strain through their letters was a bitterness with exist­ ence as it was, not from an inability to make ends meet but from a questioning of a way of life in which everything de­ pended finally on money for existence, even the very things by which one took delight in life. Of necessity, it even entered into one's way of thinking about oneself, and that was poisonous. It filled everyone with dangerous despair. In my magazine, I tried to publish as much of this material as I could get. I wanted the person to be seen as he really felt and lived in this period, and I wanted to show this person deep in his effort to rescue something of inalienable good, utterly divorced from those standards which a respect for money imposed. It had to be something in which he could root his dignity and self-respect without fear of losing either in the market shuffle. At this time scores of magazines were springing up to bring the cruel situation of want and personal deprivation to the minds and souls of the American people. Many of these mimeo-

73 graphed or hand-set magazines were being subsidized out of the Home Relief pennies of men and women determined to see that their case was put before the world. These crudely printed issues were the training ground for some of the finest writers of today. And now in the Sixties suddenly it is as if the Thirties were coming to life again in all their passion and anger. I can only refer to the New York scene, but I do imagine it corre­ sponds to what is happening all over the country. In New York we now have on the stands a protest magazine called Umbra, edited jointly by negroes and whites, with the one theme of the violation of the negro race. In its second number, it already has brought forward Negro poets important for the freedom with which they speak of the sickness of a nation that can tolerate the wilful degradation of even a single human being. The poetry and short stories are by no means perfect, but the voices are authentic, as in the Thirties, and they will be heard and have a bearing upon the fate of the country. The excitement is there. I foresee a major change in the life and literature of our times.

Calvin C. Hernton

Terrorist

(For the four Negro children murdered in Birmingham while praying to God)

Like his strickened face There were stroke of midnight. Torn by crack of thunder Or dissonance of vowel, The deed, like an agonized tooth

74 Fell from his mouth

And exploded.

In a dark room in a crumbling Heart, the deed conceived its victims: Ninety-one nails in the breast of Christ; The deed made terror, ripped open

Flesh and bone. No one knew, Not even he himself, eight fragile legs Would never walk from that debris. / am the door. Hammer me down

Ninety-one and Four! They were like chrysanthemums, Tender flesh cracked by thunder- Unknown to his grotesque face.

A revolution must draw flood.

In the manacled chambers of our egoes What we do not know about death Comes alive; and though love agonized There, when terror expires our frail hearts

Hate is a better madness.

For the four who died, without tears, Outside of cognition — their end Is ubiquitous, everlasting; Their beginning is eternity.

To die young, before the rodent of exchange Imperils the flesh, when you are innocent And immaculate to the paranoid itch, Is lambs blood,

75 Is bread transubstantiated

To galaxy.

If I were loin from whose pain The ecstasy of these four little girls Leaped, I would wail and weep,

Seek revenge; fly, with shotgun, Through the streets. Yet, I know When all of this raving, tortured love And flagellating hatred Is reckoned up to stars, These four will illuminate The dark more than a billion heavens.

I wish I had died as they. Before thunder in your face is Done, you will too; there shall be No shaking hands later on And forgetting; blood will heave

In your chattered streets, Birmingham!

And God, the tornado Shall rave down on you like an angered Black fist, merciless

And violent! Even unto the blazing sun.

76 Ruth Lechlitner

. . . anti-war and anti-fascism . . .

In 1929 Paul Corey and I were beginning writers, with a first novel and a first collection of poems still to be published. We shared a "social conscience," a social-realist attitude. Our belief in the benefits of socialism American-style stemmed from our middle-western college days of the Twenties. We were like most of the young writers who later became affiliated (1936-37) with the League of American Writers: we didn't become commu­ nists; we weren't even very dedicated fellow-travellers. But we had been for some time definitely aware of the increasing spread of fascism; we'd always been anti-war, and we feared the woeful sociocultural consequences of a very possible World War II. We were born and grew up in Iowa and in Indiana, in farm­ ing and small-town industrial environments. Our parents — from American-born generations of English, Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania "Dutch" stock — were middle-class Methodists and political conservatives. Paul worked all of his way, and I part of my way, through middlewestern state universities. We were among the many young people who, shortly after college, came to New York, where we hoped to find the stimulus of a cultural center. We worked full-time with publishing houses or trade journals; we wrote at night and on week-ends. Paul and I were married in 1928. During the prosperous late Twenties we'd both managed to save a little money. Being country-born, we disliked living in city apartments. So, in 1929, we bought (with the help of a thousand-dollar inheritance) a

77 few stony acres near Cold Spring, almost directly across the Hudson from West Point. We went up to our land on week­ ends and started building — this was the first of Paul's do-it- yourself projects —a very small house, mostly of stone from the old walls fencing our land. Our good neighbors didn't mind: they had no cows to get into our apples, and we had no apples to get into their cows. So when the Depression really struck, and we no longer had steady incomes, we at least owned land and shelter. We were lucky — even though for more than seven lean years we had no electricity or running water, no phone, no heat except from the wood we cut and burned in our pot-belly stove. And some of those winters weren't balmy. But Paul made terraced garden- beds on our hilly slopes to hold what soil we had, scattered between those eternal stones, and we grew our own vegetables and berries. The surplus I canned, pickled and jammed all sum­ mer, to have for winter use. We found a free supply of apples from unfenced trees, abundant swamp blueberries, other kinds of wild fruit, and nuts. We started a few chickens for our own use, gradually expanded their number till we had enough eggs to sell a few dozen weekly. Our eggs went also to the village meat-market to be traded for a few pounds of hamburger or a little bacon (we got awfully tired of eating old hen and rooster) or an occasional precious quarter-pound of butter. Plain bourgeois rugged individualism. Yeah. It wasn't all duck-soup. But we ate. We wore second-hand clothes given us by friends in the city who still had regular employment. Fortu­ nately, back in 1927 I'd begun writing reviews, mostly of poetry, for Irita Van Doren, then editor of the N. Y. Herald Tribune Books section. Irita was not only an outstanding editor, but a generous, warm-hearted person. It was those much-needed and greatly appreciated checks for reviews that largely accounted for our cash income during the Thirties. Occasionally we'd get a short story or poem accepted — but mostly in the "little" maga­ zines that were springing up — among them Jack Conroy's New Anvil, Jack Stoll's A Year Magazine, John Malcolm Brinnin's

78 Signatures; also the Windsor Quarterly, Kosmos, Smoke, West­ minster, Direction; and, in England, such excellent publications as Life and Letters Today. I'm not starry-eyed about those grim Depression years. But we had fun. We couldn't very often afford the 50-mile train trip to the city, but we had a varied assortment of friends among other young writers who came up for long weekends, happy to sample our home-grown chicken and vegetables. They brought along, when they had the wherewithal, liquid supplement — to help stimulate many a late-hour discussion of our writing prob­ lems, and of the times in which we lived. Our dependable old Ford pick-up truck, staunch tribute to ye Capitalist system, pulled us through deep snow-drifts in winter, hauled rocks and lumber for house-building, fertilizer from chicken coop to garden plot —and also transported visi­ tors to and from the Cold Spring station. I remember once when Peter Monro Jack, British-born Columbia University in­ structor and reviewer for the N. Y. Times, came up to spend a weekend with us, beautifully turned out in a spotless white summer suit. Our guests usually sat in the pick-up section of the Ford, on grocery cartons or orange crates. When the Ford took on two wheels one of the sharp uphill curves, Peter fell off his orange crate into some chicken-droppings that had, alas, escaped our scrutiny. But he roared with delight when Paul solemnly assured him that our Ford impartially hauled manure and celebrities. As for the chickens, Paul and I were both chicken when it came to killing them, having raised them (with the help of a setting-hen) from innocent babyhood. So, to facilitate the neces­ sary step from lusty crow to roasting-pan, we named the cocks after political and literary figures with whom we weren't in rapport — Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, etc. When Peter Jack visited us, we had a white cock named J. Donald Adams: his prototype N. Y. Times Book Review editor had been very cool to us, especially after he and I had both reviewed (but not from the same viewpoint) flag-waving poet Paul Engle's American

79 Song. In deference to Peter Monro, we didn't roast J. Donald that weekend. But one Sunday Isidor and Helen Schneider partook of, with great relish, fried Trotsky. I don't quite re­ member whether it was poet Willard Maas and his artist-wife, Marie Menken, or Ben Field, who dined with us appreciatively on a pair of feisty, pin-feathered, half-bastard Rhode Island Reds named Philip R. and William P. As frequent writing-friend weekenders, we especially enjoyed having Jerre Mangione, then working on his first novel about Sicilians in this country; Dick Wright, with his big, shy, hand­ some smile, who sat by the pot-belly stove pencilling the drafts of the stories that later appeared in Uncle Tom's Children. There was witty Dave Dejong, Dutch-descent poet and novelist, with one of our cats devotedly perched on his knee; Hope Newell and Phyllis Crawford, both writers of books for young people; novelists Josephine Herbst and John Herrmann; poets Raymond Holden and Sara Henderson Hay; free-lance writer Henry Christman and Zoe. Writer-neighbors came also, like Willie and Marjory Seabrook from nearby Poughkeepsie, who sometimes brought along Herbert and Claire Gorman. Espe­ cially did we love exchanging visits with Lewis and Sophie Mumford, who lived across the river at Amenia. There were occasional parties in the city, of course. There was a fine one for the contributors to the New American Cara­ van, genially hosted by editors Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mum- ford, and Paul Rosenfeld. I recall too a rather stuffy cocktail party at Muriel Draper's apartment for visiting British poet W. H. Auden. And there were those informal, enjoyable eve­ nings at Willard Maas' apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where the younger poets, such as David Shubert and Elizabeth Bishop, met with William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and other established poets who were so generously helpful to us beginners. Unforgettable was the back-stage party at the Columbia Broadcasting Studio following the premier of Archibald Mac- Leish's verse-play for radio, The Fall of the City. Two young actors who read leading parts in that broadcast were Burgess

80 Meredith and Orson Welles. Orson confided to me that he considered MacLeish "greater than Shakespeare." MacLeish himself —gentle, cordial, self-effacing — chatted with us about his conviction that poetry could be brought to a wide audience through the medium of radio, and urged some of us to try our hand also at verse-plays for radio broadcasting. 2. It was the League of American Writers that gave cohesion to what most of us were deeply concerned with during the Thirties. Through the League there developed a genuine feeling of fellowship among both established and beginning writers as had seldom been known before — and as certainly has not since. For the young writer especially, the League meetings were a source of hope and encouragement: they gave him a feeling not of lonely, isolated struggle, but of having something worthwhile to say, of being fully alive — and growing. Paul and I had to take turns to attend the League meetings, 1936 and 1937. We couldn't afford, either, to go in to all of them. I sat in mostly at the workshop sessions for poets. We poets enjoyed these; we found ourselves able to work agreeably together. Two fine collective efforts came from the League-spon­ sored poets. The first was And Spain Sings (Vanguard, 1937) — translations of 50 poems by the Spanish Loyalists, edited by M. J. Bernadette and Rolfe Humphries. It was a volunteer, shared project — proceeds went entirely to the Loyalist cause. We helped each other with the contemporary Spanish idiom, with the ballad forms, or to achieve a free-verse translation that best approximated the original Spanish texts. Among those who con­ tributed translations were William Carlos Williams, Genevieve Taggard, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shaemas O'Sheel, Jean Starr Untermeyer, John Peale Bishop, Willard Maas, Stanley Kunitz, Katherine Garrison Chapin. The second League-sponsored volume of poetry, edited by Joy Davidman, was War Poems of the United Nations (Dial Press, 1943). The American section included poems by the Benets, Witter Bynner, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg, James Neugass, Edwin Rolfe, Norman Rosten, Mark Van Doren and Carl Sandburg. These were accomplishments. One League project we got nowhere at all with, was the one in which we tried to interest publishers in putting out inexpensive paperback reprints and also new books — novels, short story collections, poetry. We had a plan through which League members in all parts of the coun­ try would cooperate with publishers in area distribution. We had in mind, besides the usual bookstore outlets, setting up dis­ play racks in drug stores, in train and subway and bus stations, in newspaper-magazine shops, in grocery and department stores. But no publisher in New York that our committee approached with the idea was interested. They felt that bookstore proprietors themselves would not care to handle cheap paperbacks — they wouldn't sell to regular book-loving customers. The publishers were also sure that if the general public would buy paper-backs at all in drug or grocery stores they would buy only joke-books, cook-books or flashy detective stories. We were two decades ahead of our time: besides being "pre­ mature" fascist-fearers, we were premature paperbackers.

John Rood

Extract from an autobiography . . .

In the fall of 1933 three friends, Flola Shepard, Mary Law- head (my wife) and I had the financially mad idea to publish Manuscript, a "little" magazine. We all knew that commercial publishers had little interest in literary writing and that the majority of the writers we most admired had first been pub­ lished in these so-called "little" magazines. Because no audience was eager to read their work — a fact which probably applies to anything new and genuinely creative — they had to create an audience, by publishing wherever and whenever they could. During the depression it was almost impossible to find a pub­ lisher who could afford to take risks. Yet, more and more people, out of work, were turning to writing as a possible source of in­ come. Little magazines began to spring up all over the country. For such a venture as the publication of a little magazine, Mary Lawhead and I were in a uniquely favorable position. We had a printing plant in the family. My brother-in-law and I were co-managers of The Lawhead Press. In those trying times, this exalted position meant that we worked in the plant along with the few remaining employees. There wasn't much to manage. I learned to operate a linotype. My brother-in-law learned to run the printing presses. We taught ourselves, on the sly as it were, because unions didn't like the idea of bosses working in their own shop. But we too had to have jobs! Flola Shepard and I, at the time, were writing a play to­ gether. Both of us had had enough experience — in little theatre groups — to produce a fairly competent piece of work, but we had no illusions that financially it would ever be an Abie's Irish Rose. Ours was a serious play, and serious plays have even less chance of being produced than have serious stories or novels of being published. Yet, to our surprise and delight, Eva LeGal- lienne — bless her for being one of the most gallant women the stage has known —was interested. But, alas, too late! Our play came to her attention just as her repertory theatre was gasping its last breath. One evening as we sat talking around the dinner table, one of us mentioned the magazine Story, which at that time was mov­ ing from the island of Mallorca to the United States. Whit Burnett and Martha Foley were doing a brilliant job. Story had caught the attention of everyone interested in writing. Suddenly the three of us were struck with the same idea: why not start our own little magazine? What a wonderful evening it was! We made grandiose plans, as only young people, in their delightful ignorance of the diffi­ culties ahead, are capable of doing. Flola and Mary, equally interested in literature, had the necessary taste, intelligence and training; as a printer I had the technical know-how. Besides, I was writing constantly and had been for many years. Nothing had been published, though editors returned novels and stories evincing interest in them and asking that I let them see the next one. Our first problem, which turned out to be no problem at all, was how to find new writers. That evening as we made plans, we decided that — if we did not get enough stories — we would write them all ourselves! Hilariously we made up pen-names for ourselves. It was September. We planned Volume 1, No. 1, for January publication — 1934. One of us had the idea of sending the New York Times a no­ tice of our intention to publish Manuscript. Shortly thereafter a paragraph appeared in the Sunday book section. Almost the next day we had a letter, and a story, from a man who was to be of invaluable assistance in our search for new writers. War­ ren Bower — now a Dean at New York University — was then a teacher of writing and was editing an anthology of stories by new, promising unknown writers. Our first major "discovery" came through him. Hilde Abel. How excited we were when we read her "Great-Great-Grand­ mother"! It was later to be reprinted in an anthology of "best" stories. I liked it so much that I printed and bound a small edition of the story as a gesture of gratitude to Hilde Abel for being our first important discovery. The history of our struggle to keep Manuscript alive is too long — and too painful to recall — to be related here. Flola soon dropped out as editor, not because she lost interest, but because she had accepted a teaching position in a Kentucky college. Mary Lawhead and I continued. The necessary correspondence

84 was voluminous. I did most of it because I could type faster. Mary Lawhead's more exacting job was to read the dozens of stories that came to us in an ever-increasing flood. I set all the type, made up the pages, wrote the contributors' notes, and supervised the presswork. The two of us together, along with any visiting writers we could snag, bound and mailed the finished magazines. Considering that my regular work at the printery occupied eight hours every day except Sunday, and that Mary Lawhead — who did all proofreading for the plant — was equally busy, it is now almost unbelievable to me that we were physically able to get the magazine out on time. Obviously we had the stamina of draft horses. Just to complicate matters, immediately after we began publi­ cation of Manuscript, I became seriously involved with sculp­ ture. As time went on, I spent more time in my studio than I did at my desk. During those years, 1933 through 1936, I man­ aged to produce enough sculpture to hold my first New York exhibition in the spring of 1937. By that time it was obvious — my career was to be that of a sculptor. In December 1936, after 18 issues, reluctantly we gave up Manuscript. Soon after our acceptance of Hilde Abel's story, her husband, D. A. Davidson, sent us one. By that time, we had found Wen­ dell Wilcox. All three have published distinguished novels since then. One day during those first bright months while Flola Shepard was still with us, she came to the house glowing with excitement. In a batch of stories given her for a first reading was Eudora Welty's "Death of a Salesman." As I remember, she read it aloud and we were all equally enthusiastic. A few years ago Eudora Welty said to me, "If you hadn't taken that story, I would have stopped writing." She meant it, because she had been sending out stories for years and just as regularly as they were sent, re­ jection slips — or, corn to the mule, a note saying "let us see the next one" — were received in return. I often wonder how many unknown Eudora Weltys there are in the United States. If we,

85 as she says, saved her from oblivion, then the three years of hard work with Manuscript were more than worth it. Most people believe, with some complacence — freed as they are of any obligation to lend a hand — that genius can't be kept down, that it will rise like cream. I wonder if this is true; it seems to me, most of the milk these days is either skimmed or homogenized. You have to get back to the source if you want the whole thing, and the source — in writing — is a lonesome, often discouraged individual at a desk. Publishing is a highly competitive business and editors can not spend much time en­ couraging talented, unknown writers. If they did, they would have no time to search for the Harold Bell Wrights — who will make more money for their houses than any number of Willa Cathers or Sherwood Andersons or Eudora Weltys. During that first year, I corresponded for some months with a young man in St. Louis whose stories were almost but not quite acceptable. He was having a rough time and was getting pretty discouraged, but he kept on sending stories to us. Then came one we could accept with enthusiasm, and as I remember, Story accepted another shortly after that. He was on his way. The title of the story was "Twenty Wagon-Loads of Cotton." The author was Thomas Lanier Williams — known to his friends as Tom. Since then, under the name of Tennessee Williams, he has done very well indeed! The story we published was later adapted to the movies and given the title of Baby Doll. Now, thirty years later, I often hear from one of our old grads, so to speak. Some of them are still writing. Many have attained a certain prominence. I think of one, particularly, who over the years has continued as a close friend: Irving Shulman, whose book on Jean Harlow is currently receiving much atten­ tion. It took energy, time, patience and a sense of humor to put out Manuscript. We lost money of course, but — since it was a family business — we owed it to ourselves. Indeed we did! In more ways than one.

86 Robert Traver

Where the sound of mimeographs?

As I look back I tend for some reason to equate the Thirties with the Depression and the Depression with the return of Booze. In those days there was launched upon us some fearsome new whiskies calculated to dissolve the tattered remnants of one's taste buds: ardent young distillates gaily called Crab Orchard, Wolf Creek and Snug Harbor, all you could encom­ pass for a buck fifty a quart. One could get a big brown bottle of beer (looking like the dug of a nursing squaw) for fifteen cents, and one still recalls whole entaverned families crouched around a table under a 25-watt bulb nuzzling away at one of these communal glass udders until closing time, listening on the radio to the hypnotic voice of FDR or to Joe Louis shuffling out to induce sleep in another crazed opponent. O lost, O grieved.. . . Everybody seemed to be working on WPA, and his progeny was in CCC camps busily planting pine trees too close together — which their sons now get time-and-a-half for thinning out. It was a time of Landon buttons and perpetual Golden Gloves regional finals — tickets twenty-five cents — during which our local hero, a flailing muscle-bound iron miner, used monoto­ nously to get knocked on his can in the first round; a time when second-hand Model A's ran around miraculously on rag tires and thimbles of gasoline and last year's license plates. I tend also to equate the Depression with a kind of personal locking and unlocking; the time for abandoning some old whimseys I had nourished about Success; a time for dabbling seriously with the notion — as a current popular song had it — that the fundamental things apply as time goes by. . . . Dimly I

87 recall a puzzled young lawyer squatting over the dime store in a little iron-mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan wondering what had happened to the wondrous and dizzy Twenties, fearful and yet stirred by this sudden new austerity, wanting to tell all about it, wanting badly to write about things the way he thought they were. True, he couldn't spell or punctu­ ate, but still he yearned to capture on paper a little of this exciting new ferment. Amost instinctively he didn't send his things to the Post or Collier's; he sensed it was no use; instead he sent them to the new burgeoning crop of "little" magazines he learned about in the back of Edward J. O'Brien's annual collection of Best Stories: obscure magazines called Hinterland and Clay and Pagany and Literary America; rather better known ones like Contempo, Story and Prairie Schooner— and dozens upon scores of others which he no longer recalls. There was a whim­ sical old guy in New York called Lawrence C. Woodman who painted with one hand and with the other launched a half dozen new "little" magazines from out of a broom closet, Ameri­ can Scene being one of them; and a young poet, Jose Garcia Villa (only recently rediscovered, we are charmed to note, and still miraculously young) who started almost as many, and more­ over took everything our young lawyer wrote. In fact during the Depression there seemed to be a million "little" magazines; fecundity was rampant; they spread like spores; the poorer we got the more little mags were born. The writer's sole pay was the privilege of subscribing, of course; that and the heady prospect of seeing his name in the contributors' column: "R. Traver is a rising young notary in Gaptooth, Mich." He was also prepared to nourish the wistful hope that the magazine might survive to carry his story — of which a few even did. When one fell two sprang up in its place and the sound of mimeographs rang in the land. By and by the young lawyer's office grew so awash with "little" magazines that they far outnumbered his law books. Still he wrote and wrote — still trying to tell about things the way they were — and the little

88 magazines took and took, until finally he achieved the dubious immortality of seeing a story of his in Story wedged of all things between Farrell and Saroyan. Progress was being made, you see; our hero was learning to spell and punctuate a little; the benign O'Brien even sprayed him with a few stars. Time passed, and then it happened; that old spoilsport FDR ruined everything; almost single-handedly he went out and fetched back Prosperity. Whereupon all the little magazines promptly faded and died — "folded" was the trade name — they could stand almost anything but that. The brayers of platitudes and caveat emptor boys crept gradually out of hiding; banks began to unbolt their doors again; the Post and Collier's were back in the saddle — and the scribbling young lawyer had sud­ denly lost his outlet and his audience. Trying to make people listen he was forced to write a book; it impregnated an unwary publisher on the twenty-third try, but still no one really listened, for the little magazines — where people had seemed to speak his language — were gone with the wind. Eight books and thirty years later the aging ex-lawyer some­ times wonders what young writers do these days to get listened to, to learn their trade. Not excitedly or indignantly, just won­ ders is all. Do they still dare write the way it really is? If so, where can they send their stuff? The little magazines exist now only in unpublished doctorates; most campus magazines are devoted largely to contemplating their navels and memorializ­ ing the dead — they do everything to fiction but print it; com­ mercial magazines that carry even an occasional story can be counted on the fingers of one hand; and, worse yet, the writers they court can be counted it seems on one finger. How do young writers get to make it these days? Who out there is listening to them? Maybe, dark thought, they don't ever make it. Maybe nobody listens to them. Maybe people are fed up on facing things the way they really are. Could it be that what we need is a brand new five-alarm Depression?

89 Peter Brand

Bobby Shaftoe

Even in Mack's Sweet Shoppe you could hear the cold spring wind blowing from the north down the main street through the square and it whistled around the front of Mack's place there and swung his hanging sign so it squeaked coldly harshly and banged now and then against the wall and inside you could see the swinging shadow of it cutting across the light against the frosted glass over the door and the big windows at the sides. Bobby sat drinking beer and listening to the wind and the sign and watching the shadow of it swinging. He sat at the counter staring at the wall with the signs what kind of beer was good and what cigars and then the sign outside would squeak and bang and he would look up and out at the shadow and hear the wind and look through the windows at the trench mortar painted all khaki as a war memorial on a slab of concrete in the middle of the grass in the middle of the square with the cars parked all around it shining in the hard light from the street lamps. "It gets dark pretty early even in April," Mack said, coming in and switching on the radio. He stood with his hand on the dial waiting for the set to warm up. "Yes," Bobby said. "You drinking beer," Mack said. "Ain't you going home to supper?" "Sure." Mack shrugged his shoulders and turned the dial and the band played Orchids in the Moonlight. "Got a calendar?" Bobby asked. "Lots of them."

90 They were tacked up on the wall in back cutting the kitchen off from the big room where the counter was and the booths. Bobby walked back and looked at them. They all said almost a full moon tonight. Bobby went back to his beer and sat down with his hands around the bottle. "Might blow up a rain this wind," he said. Mack didn't know. You never could tell the weather but it might. Bobby swung his arm along the counter sweeping the rum­ pled evening papers together and then piled them together and turned them over looking at them. The front pages were all full of the strike in Portage and some of them had boxed editorials on the front pages making fun of the governor and they all had in their headlines that the National Guard units throughout the state were being held in readiness. Bobby was sitting tap­ ping his fingers on the headlines when Spud came in. They all said hello. Mack spiked a beer for Spud. "Well, Shaftoe," Spud said grinning. "I always wonder why they call you Shaftoe," Mack said. "It was in a song or something at school. Bobby Shaftoe," Spud laughed and took a big drink of beer. "Well, it was." "Sure it was." "Give me another," Bobby said. "What you going to do home smelling of it?" Mack asked. "The hell with that." Bobby and Spud knocked the necks of their bottles together and drank. "I bet we go," Spud said. "I hope it doesn't rain." "We'll ride in busses if we go. Connors said so. I just saw him." "I bet he was all dressed up with a sword and everything," Bobby said. "Do you want to go?" "Well." "I don't know," Bobby said. "What's your old man say?" 9i "He says we ought to go with machine guns." Bobby listened to Orchids in the Moonlight and an an­ nouncer broke in on the music apologizing for the interruption but he had a last minute news flash about the strike. The striking truck drivers of Portage had balked at the latest effort at con­ ciliation and the National Guard would move into Portage dur­ ing the night and the next day. For further details he said see your local newspapers. "These here is too early," Mack said. "They only say they might go." "We better go home. Maybe they called up," Spud said. "You're just new in ain't you?" Mack asked Bobby. "Couple weeks. Since my birthday. Only I hung around up there before. They wanted a radio man." "Well, good luck," Mack said. "Here. Have a couple on me." He reached down into his cooler and get two beers. They came dripping from the icewater with their labels coming off and steaming a little after Mack wiped them dry. "There ain't nothing too good for them as protects our lives and properties. I always say cops don't get half enough pay." "We aren't cops," Bobby said. "No, I suppose not exactly." "Nobody knows just exactly what at all." Bobby finished his beer in a hurry and stood up. Spud was only half through with his. "I better go," Bobby said. "Supper waiting," he said. "Thanks for the beer." "Okay," Mack said. "See you later," he said. Spud nodded. Bobby went out. The wind was from the north still singing through the square swinging the big light in the middle of the square over the trench mortar so great shadows went up and down the building fronts around the square and it was a cold April wind wet-smelling and hard against his face. He stopped in front of the bank. There were lights inside. He knocked. Old

92 Willy Smithers pulled the shades on the door aside and then let him in. "So you're going to war," Willy said. "Is my father here?" Bobby looked down the aisle between the tan painted wall and the wall of glass and mahogany with the adding machines and check writers behind it to the open door of the little office at the back where his father sat with yellow light falling on his grey hair as he bent over the desk. "He's almost through I think." Mr. Jones looked up. "I'll be right with you," he said, rolling down the top of his desk and disappearing around the corner of the door to get his coat. Bobby watched Willy sweep the tiled floor with one wet cigar butt scurrying before his broom along the white tiles and stick­ ing in a corner where Willy had to dig with the handle of the broom to get it loose. "Have a good time," Willy said as Bobby went out with his father. Together they crossed the square and turned up the main street and off that up Fifth Street toward the house. Their steps clicked together under the wide-spreading new-leaved trees and the wind was far away above the houses and the trees heard only at crossings whispering around them blowing old news­ papers against their feet. "So you're really going," his father said. "I guess so." "Your mother will be very pleased." "Won't you?" "I really don't want to say," he said. "But you were in the war. Enlisted even didn't you?" "I was young and foolish and in love too." "Older than I am now." "Yes, but we had no business messing in a European war. Don't know if we should ever go to war." "But this now," Bobby said, "this strike." 93 "You couldn't back out now if you wanted to could you?" "No I guess not." The light from the porch shone out to the walk and they went up the steps to the door. Bobby looked through rose-patterned curtains into the hall and opened the door. They went in. It was warm inside with the furnace humming in the basement and the radio going and a smell of baking pork and apples. They hung up their coats and went to the kitchen. Bobby's mother was there looking into the oven. "I didn't hear you," she said. Her face was damp from the oven heat. "And I've got a big goingaway dinner for Bobby. Lieutenant Connors called and said you were to get all ready and take your stuff to the armory and then go to the movies till he called. He said they were all going to the movies. I feel just like I did when you went to the war," she said. "Yes," his father said. "You had a great time then." She put her hands on Bobby's shoulders and looked at him and then put her arms around him kissing him. "Bobby," she said, "you've been drinking." "Just near-beer," he said. "They were buying it downtown. You know for the boys that are going." "Bobby Shaftoe," she said. "Gone to sea. Silver buckles on his knee. Pretty. Remember starting off to school mornings? You're going more than to school now." "I better start getting my stuff," Bobby said. "I'll help you." "Never mind," he said and went up to his room. The walls were covered with cards from radio hams and in one corner was a small table with a microphone standing against a tall black control panel all white dials and shiny. Bobby threw a switch and sat down and threw the switch back and stood up. He sat on the bed and looked at the books on the table. His mother had left a new women's club magazine with a paper of hers printed about America and What We Have Done in the Philip­ pines. Bobby walked around the room. There was a picture of his father in uniform not as fat as now with a small dark mous-

94 tache and a Sam Brown belt and a bamboo cane very light and switchy-looking. He went to the closet and got out his uniform and began to change. He began wrapping his puttees carefully and slowly leaning over sitting on the edge of the bed and lean­ ing he saw on the shelf under the table a book on the causes of the world war. He picked it up, flicking through it as the puttee unwrapped from around his leg. Passages were under­ lined about imperialism and economic expansion. It is obvious that these interests desire an expanding market and will go to any lengths to keep it expanding and the demand increasing. Near the back he found a blank deposit slip his father had used to mark his place. He tossed the book behind him on the bed and leaned over again slowly rewrapping his puttee. When he was dressed he looked at himself in the mirror and then sat down at his microphone by the window. There were still stars and against them the wind-swayed branches of tall trees and now he could hear one branch rubbing against the eaves some­ where at the back of the house. He sat looking out at the trees till his mother called and then he got his things together and went down. "I guess it won't rain tonight," he said. They sat down to eat. "That's enough," he said when his father began to pile sliced pork on his plate. "Excited, darling?" his mother asked. "Now don't go railroading him like you did me," his father said. "I thought it was to let him think for himself. We want a son that thinks for himself." "Of course, darling," she said. "All right," he said, slapping a slice of pork on his own plate and scooping a spoonful of mashed potatoes that fell wet on his plate. "I was thinking," Bobby said, "about this strike. About." "All right," she said. "Only I want you to understand that we ought to kind of guide him. What are parents for?" His mother and father looked at him holding forks of pota- 95 toes mashed and pork gravy-smeared in the air suspended. "Well," his mother said. "They're for guiding children," his father said. "I was guided once too myself." "John Jones I did not. You wanted to. And this is just as im­ portant. Those terrible strikers. No milk for babies. No medi­ cine for hospitals. No meat for." "The hospitals are getting what they need," his father said. "John, I can't stand for you beginning now to go against everything you once stood for." "We always said Bobby should think for himself," his father said, reaching for a slice of bread. He had a look reaching as of reaching for a check he knew would be bad. "And you thinking for yourself all over town so people laugh at you and stop banking with you and stop asking us places." "No danger," he said. "But what's behind it?" Bobby said. "Behind the strike and what's happening. The papers." "The papers are all bought," his father said. "Now John, you know Professor Enbright at the university writes." Bobby swallowed his coffee and went out into the hall to put on his coat. "Bobby," his mother said. "I've got to go." "Aren't you going to say good-bye?" "Sure." He went back and kissed his mother on the forehead. "Bobby Shaftoe off to sea again," she said smiling. He shook hands with his father. His father said nothing. He took his pack from where it leaned against the coatrack in the hall and hoisted it over one shoulder so it hung down to one side by both straps. "Let me walk part way with you," his mother said coming to him in the hall. "I'd rather go alone," Bobby said. As he shifted on his feet 96 he felt the pack pull his one shoulder down and swing heavy against his thigh. "Let him go," his father said from his chair. "John with all your free-thinking you're respons." "If I ever had a free thought," his father said. His mother sighed and turned back toward the dining room and Bobby went out into the street into the wind still blowing cold with April wet. He walked down to the street before the main street and went along it along the top of the little hill it ran on and looked out over the roofs of the stores where red and yellow light came up from the street and lighted the smoke blowing across the building tops until he was even with the armory and then he went down to the main street and in. Nobody was at the armory but there was a pile of packs and coats in a corner of the room there beside the hallway going in where the bookcases were and the blackboards and the radio. There was a map-making problem on one of the boards some­ body had sliced through once with an eraser and somebody had left an American Legion magazine open on the floor. Bobby dropped his things on the pile and then picked them up again and leaned the pack against the bookcase and rolled his coat and laid it on top. He picked up the magazine and looked at a picture of a general saying something through a white mous­ tache about the bonus. He put the magazine on the table and turned on the radio. When it was warmed up he switched over to the twenty-metre band and listened to some of his friends and smiled when one of them made a joke and then switched the radio off and went out again to walk. He walked down the main street toward Mack's place and met Spud outside McGonigal's funeral parlors. Spud was leaning against a lampost talking to old doc Bramlee. Spud was smoking a cigarette fast inhaling deeply quickly puffing his cheeks out exhaling. "I guess we supposed to take everything," he said. "Rifles. Bayonets."

97 "How long you going to stay?" "Hello Bobby." "Hello." "Hello," old doc said. "We stay till it's all straightened out I guess," Spud said flicking ashes off his cigarette. He kept flicking after the ashes were gone and the spark of the cigarette hung by a thread of tobacco and when he put it to his mouth the spark fell off and Spud swore and threw the butt away. "That might be kind of long," Spud said. "See you later," Bobby said. "Sure." "If I get a dose," Spud said, "you fix me up when I get back," and he laughed and the old doc laughed and said something about you young punk you I remember you being born. The wind came harder now whipping up the street from the square and it was roaring in Bobby's ears as he walked. Ahead of him down the street to the square he saw nobody and he turned around to see nobody behind him but Spud and old doc under the streetlamp with short black fat shadows at their feet. Bobby came into the square and began to cross the grass plot in the middle where the trench mortar stood when he saw old lady Pearson his old high school teacher coming up across the bridge to go past Mack's toward the bank and he stopped on the grass plot leaning against the mortar watching her go by and when she was gone he went into Mack's under the swinging creaking sign. There was nobody behind the counter and nobody drinking and Bobby stood a moment listening to voices coming from the back kitchen. "Sure they're human beings like me and you and they got kids and families but Jesus Chrise when they stop milk from getting to babies and stuff like that." "Sure," Mack said. Connors was talking again. "And when they tie up business and commerce and the arteries of trade," he said. "Sure," Mack said.

98 Bobby walked toward the kitchen. He stood in the door looking at Connors sitting on the edge of a table with one leg swinging in a polished brown boot with a chained spur shining silver on the foot twinkling silver in the light. Connors was drinking a beer and his yellow gloves were dark brown where the bottle had wet them and his broad-brimmed hat was pushed back on his forehead. A blue enamel shield on his hat said To The Last Man. His trench coat was belted very tight and his face was red. "Mack," Bobby said, "Let's have a beer and make it heavy." "Sure," Mack said. They were standing by the counter in front when Connors came to the kitchen door. "Jones," he yelled, "what the hell you doing here? Orders was to go to the movies." "Yes sir," Bobby said, "I was just going to drink a." "No drinking." "Yes sir." Bobby started for the door. "Wait." Bobby turned around. "There's nobody at the armory. Better go up there and keep an eye on the stuff." "Yes sir," Bobby said. The wind was still blowing outside and Mack's sign was squeaking so he could hear it halfway up the street and when he stopped on the armory stairs he looked up and saw only a few stars and banks of white clouds flying low tearing apart in the cold wind. Bobby found Spud inside. "It's going to rain," Bobby said. "That's okay," Spud said. "We going to go in buses."

99 Wayne Carver

. in the night ahead .

I suppose I should regret that I slumbered peacefully all through the Thirties while, apparently, everyone else was doing something to bring in the New Order. I was later to meet people my own age who told of their passing out YCL leaflets at Madison Square Garden, of making collections for the Span­ ish Republicans, of discovering to their horror that the father of one of their playmates was a Counter-Revolutionist — and so on. As late as last spring right here in Northfield a Solid Ideologue whose field of operation is still the downtrodden (the students) and the Fascists (the Administration) fastened me and my drink to the wall with a four-martini stare and said "How can someone like you who has been through the Thirties be so uncommitted." Or words to that effect. I hope I said, "Just lucky, I guess." But I probably didn't. It was very late. But for better or worse my sole political act in the Thirties was losing an election for Junior High student body president, unless it was a political act to help my father and brother dump the year's crop of onions in the Weber River, after waiting all winter for the market to rise — or, more likely, waiting for a market to develop. If that was a political act, I was political every spring. But I doubt that it was political. It certainly was not done in anger, and my idea of a political act is somehow tied up with anger — organized anger. My father's faith in FDR was so sanguine that he could have dumped house and barn and all the livestock as well as the crop in the river while assur­ ing us that times were better than they had been. They prob-

100 ably were. Some of the Uncles and Aunts and Cousins who had moved out to the farm where they could at least have a garden began to move back to the city where the jobs were. But all that meant to me was that I (Lefty Grove) lost my catcher cousin (Mickey Cochrane) for my imaginary mound duels in the front yard under the locust trees. We had refused to break up the battery when Connie Mack sent Grove to Boston and Cochrane to Detroit. It took a railroad job in Ogden to do that. I turned slugger and began to break all Cobb's records by hit­ ting small rocks across the potato patch with a broom handle. So that was my political development in the Thirties, and I'm not certain it has moved along much since. I can never even remember whether, come the Revolution, I am the kind that is shot just after the Fascist swine and before the Liberal sentimentalists or the kind that is kept around as a reminder to others of the ravages of political sloth. But I see by my notes that I am supposed to review a book.1 2. It is a good book in many ways — though it is an ideologue's book — but it can hardly be expected to stand up to its book jacket press where it is compared to the works of Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Camus, Malraux, and Balzac. Such talk is pretentious and silly; but if we are going to play that game, I should think that it is close — in its naturalistic symbols and imagery and its diagnosis of pre-WW II Europe — to Thomas Mann rather than to Malraux and Pasternak and almost iden­ tical in its ultimate theme of the revolutionary quality of love to the Silone of Bread and Wine and The Seed Beneath the Snow. Incognito, in fact, might be seen as Dumitriu's attempt to do in one big novel what Silone did in three, beginning with Fontamara and continuing in the two Spina novels mentioned above: chart the movement in a single man from the confusion of political quietism through communist orthodoxy to the mak­ ing of a saint and the intimations of the coming society of saints. Dumitriu's story is essentially about Sebastian, who, like

1 Incognito by Petru Dumitriu, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964) 471 pages, $5.95. lOl Silone's Pietro Spina, has had from his childhood an impulse toward Sainthood and Purity. This impulse leads him to leave his microsmic home (you'll have to take my word for it, but it is and I can prove it) with its odor of "masturbation and incest." Successively he becomes a Rumanian soldier fighting with the Germans against Russia, an Anna Pauker Rumanian fighting with the Russians against Germany and other Rumanians, a member of the Securisti in the puppet Government after the war, a prisoner of that Government, a discoverer — in the excrement-crusted black hole of his prison — of the power of loving the world rather than hating and fearing it; and, ulti­ mately, Saint Sebastian, martyred, like his namesake, because he declared his faith, made his testimony, started the counter­ revolution of love. Unlike his namesake, he throws himself under a train, his work done, so that in Rumania innocent people will not needlessly suffer for his transgressions of the police-state law. This ambitious and partly successful novel is, then, in the direct line of descent from Tolstoy's essay "What is to Be Done?" (1886) to Lenin's Iskra essays of 1902 (collected as "What is to be Done?") through Silone's peasants who ask the identical question in the mid-Thirties. In the 1950's Dumitriu's Sebastian asks it. But where Tolstoy invokes the parables of Christ and Christian love, Lenin the organizational thrust of disciplined Revolutionaries, and Silone first one (Lenin, in Fontamara) then the other (in the Spina novels), Dimitriu in­ vokes the power of the God to whom the Greeks dedicated that extra temple: The God Unknown . . . whom he addresses thus: "Blessed be God, my love, my happiness, my grief, love of the universe, grief of the universe, happiness of the universe, love, grief, happiness, God, may you be blessed, my God, my God, God " There speaks last week's political ideologue turned on his head, calling this time for the absolute Love that passes all understanding instead of for the absolute power to crush all political opposition.

102 Sebastian's call is not programmatic — yet. And that is its appeal. But it is for an absolute, an ultimate appeal — an ide­ ology as impatient of lapses as any other orthodoxy; and that is where I draw back a little. Not in horror, but a little scared. I do not draw back from the novel when it is an action, and it is a superb action much of the time. When he does not give in to his inclination to comment on and preach over all things both great and small, Dimitriu is very good. And if Sebastian becomes something of a prig and a harranguer near the end as he enters his third phase, I can regret this but at the same time understand how hard it must be to make an incipient saint keep dramatic interest. Especially since Sebastian is not one of those perky picaresque Saints who want to sin their way to God. No, my withdrawal of sympathy is not because Sebastian's hymn to joy spoils a good novel. It doesn't. My withdrawal, such as it is, is based on my dislike for the ideological rigidity of Sebastian late as of Sebastian middle. Only the ideology has changed. Here if anywhere (and I should try to get it in again) is where my dilettante past rears up to haunt and perhaps to ruin me. But I probably do not like saints or understand them any more than I like commissars. The one intimidates me with his boots and power, the other with a Love that I cannot return. And unless I misunderstand Sebastian, the novel telling his story comes close to ending with just an­ other facile, fashionable, and modishly hysterical hymn to love, love, love — that perfectly good and necessary word that has come to sound as harsh as Gesellschaft in the mouths of its glib manipulators. We secrete these days an oily love that is as dank as rank sweat. I'll take Ma Joad's "The Fambly. The Fambly." She felt "The Fambly" deep in her Okie bones, and she was talking about love, too. We are used to hearing that the City of God is impossible and the City of Man not yet built. And we are summoned to finish the work. If this is true — and it is, isn't it? — I wonder if we shouldn't stop our lamentations and perhaps our labors and recognize a blessing when we have one. It may be that we are

103 better off in the confusing darkness than we would be out there in the glare of all those different lights that we are so freely offered. In darkness we can feel the awful real pain of what it is like to be in mid-passage, with all the ports scarcely intimated in the night ahead. Sebastian's new harbor of love, like his old harbor of political power, will have its bottom covered by rust­ ing hulls of ships that did not make it all the way. There is, as Melville's Ishmael knew, something to be said about even the safety of the open sea.

A Letter

March 19 [1964] Dear Erling Larsen, Thank you for sending me the current Carleton Miscellany. Please don't depend on me, however, to contribute to a sympo­ sium on the Thirties. The truth is that that time is so remote I lost interest in it long ago. In fact, I did very little writing in that decade. I didn't write a readable book until the Forties, and feel a great deal closer to the period that followed World War II, rather than the years before. Walk on the Wide Side wasn't a book of the Thirties. It had that date for a background because I began it as a revision of a book I wrote in the Thirties. But it became something entirely new, I think. The great fallacy of the era of Proletarian literature was that, with the single exception of Richard Wright, it was conducted by intellectuals. Whatever I may have contributed was accidental since I was neither a proletarian nor an intellectual. All the right-thinking people I know are drug addicts. Cordially, Nelson Algren 104 Robert Tracy

Indignation the seed of art . . .

The Deputy1 is the most controversial drama to be acted in a generation. It is also the most misunderstood, perhaps because Rolf Hochhuth is above all a morally committed playwright who has chosen to probe his countrymen's greatest crime, the Nazi murder of six million Jews. Hochhuth approaches the problem of the atrocities through a specific question of fact: in the face of the moral evil of the Nazis, why did the Pope, the Vicar of Christ, never denounce their slaughter of European Jewry? To dramatize his question he creates two heroes who do both denounce and protest: Father Riccardo Fontana, a young papal diplomat, who tries to make the Pope condemn the atrocities, and Kurt Gerstein, a Protes­ tant, who has joined the S.S. as a "spy for God" to expose and delay the sinister "final solution." The two men try to deputize for all those silent Christian priests, ministers, and people who ignored Hitler's crimes. Fontana is quite literally a deputy — face to face with the angry Pope, who has refused to speak out, he pins the yellow star of a Jew to his cassock and sets out for Auschwitz to "represent the Pope . . . there, where he should stand." The play ends in Auschwitz with Fontana's death, Ger- stein's arrest, and a final reminder that the Pope never did pro­ test, and that the death camps continued to function until the end of the war. The playwright's treatment of Pius XII has outraged public opinion wherever The Deputy has been performed. Yet in all of the strident controversy I have not seen any real criticism of

1Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter; Schauspiel. Rowholt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg. The Representative, translated with a preface by Robert David MacDonald. Methuen and Co., Lon­ don. The Deputy, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, with a preface by Dr. Albert Schweitzer^ Grove Press, New York. 105 the play as a play, any real examination of Hochhuth's precise charges against Pius XII, nor any examination at all of the play's central issues, which go far beyond the question of the Pope's responsibility. Propaganda is perhaps not literature, but neither is it responsibile criticism to assume before reading a play that it is propaganda. It is necessary to approach The Deputy as one would any other play if its real strengths and weaknesses and its real content are to become apparent. The title chosen for the American version does not really convey all the meanings implicit in the German title, and it is in this set of meanings that Hochhuth's intentions are clarified. Der Ste liver treter is correctly translated as "the deputy," but the word also conveys overtones of "the vicar" (in German the Pope's title, Vicar of Christ, is Stellvertreter Christi), "the sub­ stitute," "the representative" (thus it can refer to a Nuncio, or papal ambassador), "the stand in," and "the proxy." With no real violation of meaning it can be made to suggest "the scape­ goat." Throughout the play Hochhuth employs all of these meanings with great skill. His title refers directly to the Vicar of Christ himself, to Fontana's self-assumed role as the Pope's substitute, and to Gerstein's work as Christ's representative among the victims, but the device of representation and substi­ tution turns up on almost every page. The opening lines are spoken by the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, the Pope's representative in the German capital, and the penultimate lines are given to Baron von Weizacker, Hitler's Ambassador or representative at the Vatican. Most of the characters are representative types, standing for sizeable professional and social groups. Thus Baron Rutta represents the German industrialists who flourished un­ der Hitler; Count Fontana represents those diplomats who try to resolve human problems into questions of policy; Professor Hirt represents the German scientists and intellectuals who condoned Hitler's crimes; Eichmann represents the colorless bureaucrats who efficiently organized the deportations. They are all deputies, and Hochhuth stresses their lack of individual personalities by advising the director that many of these parts ""may be played by the same actor — since, in an age of general

106 conscription it is not necessarily a question of merit or blame, or even a question of character, whether a man put on this or that uniform or is on the side of hangman or victim." Thus an indifferent priest in the Berlin Nuncio's residence can easily turn into the S.S. Sergeant Witzel, and he in turn into a Jewish Kapo at Auschwitz. Dr. Fritsche, an Auschwitz official, is earn­ est, hard-working, a bit pedantic, and a bit cold; the same actor can easily play Dr. Luccani, a Roman Jew with many of the same traits. Victim and killer are interchangeable; both are ordinary men without very much interest in questions of good and evil. Only the play's two heroes, Gerstein and Fontana, and its real villain, a character known as "The Doctor," are uncom­ mon, and these are the only parts that cannot be doubled. I emphasize the recurrence of this thematic idea of represen­ tation and substitution in The Deputy because it is almost the only organizing device in a work so often blurred and confused that, despite the great relevance of its theme, it fails both as drama and as propaganda. Hochhuth has simply not made up his mind about what he wants to say or how he wants to say it. He has a subject, of course — the undeniable fact that at no time during the War did Pope Pius XII condemn the Nazi persecution of the Jews. And he has an argument, that papal condemnation would have stopped the persecution and that Pius is thus doubly guilty — directly guilty of the lives of millions of Jews, since a word from him would have saved them, and guilty of deliber­ ately refusing to exercise his moral authority as Vicar of Christ. The play fails. Hochhuth has not made out a convincing case. Let us take his two main charges in order. Would a condem­ nation from Pius XII really have stopped the Nazi atrocities? Hochhuth reminds us that protests from Christian X of Den­ mark and from various Catholic bishops and nuncios stopped or at least hindered the persecution in certain parts of Europe. Although King Christian was a Nazi prisoner and the bishops had merely local power, their protests were heeded. This is true, but such protests were usually heeded at a local level by German soldiers or administrators who were anxious that their areas remain peaceful, and who did not have Hitler's fanatical

107 single-mindedness about the Jews. It is unlikely that a direct confrontation between Hitler and the Pope would have been as fruitful. To the Nazi dictator the extermination of the Jews was one of the main objectives of the War. He might well have refused to abandon it for merely diplomatic considerations, for he was the most dangerous of political types, a man of principle. He recognized no shades of grey, but only black and white. To argue that the Pope's condemnation would have stopped the slaughter is to argue that Hitler was thinking clearly and rationally as late as 1944, and that he was then capable of mak­ ing choices between more prudent and less prudent policies. The point is open to discussion, but a definite answer is prob­ ably not possible. Hochhuth, however, treats the Pope's power as a political fact. Pius may have been uncharitable or too diffi­ dent, but we can never be sure that he had this power and failed to use it. The play thus rests on an interesting hypothesis which can probably never be proved. It is only fair to add that the present Pope and other Catho­ lics who defend Pius XII also rest their case on an unproved hypothesis. Pope Paul argues that there would have been terri­ ble reprisals had his predecessor spoken out, but this too is un­ likely. The same defense is explored in the course of the play, and pretty well demolished by Hochhuth's spokesmen. They remind their listeners that Hitler governed a large Catholic population, that there were millions of Catholics in his army, and that he was eager to get Catholic Spain into the War as his ally. To persecute the Church under such conditions would have been practically impossible, although the Fuhrer's con­ versations and Goebbels' diary make it clear that such a perse­ cution would have taken place after a German victory. That fear of reprisals stayed the Pope from protesting is an unlikely hypothesis, and one that does him the disservice of accusing him of cowardice. When we turn to more speculative arguments, we find Hoch­ huth offering a number of explanations for Pius's silence. He suggests that Pius hoped to stand well with both Axis powers and Allies so he could negotiate a peace settlement, that he did 108 not wish to denounce Hitler while the German leader was leading Europe's battle against Communism, and that he feared that such a denunciation would somehow jeopardize the Vati­ can investments. These explanations cannot be taken very seri­ ously. The first and second of them may contain a germ of truth, but the third destroys the play by turning Pius from a believable failure into a monster of selfishness and depravity, a war profiteer of the lowest sort. At times, this indeed seems to be Hochhuth's intention, and at such times the Pope becomes a mere caricature out of the anti-clerical press. He begins his confrontation with Fontana by complaining about financial losses, and goes on to discuss ways in which the Jesuit-owned mercury mines can supply material to both sides, even though Jews are being arrested beneath his very windows. Almost his first words, "von brennender Sorge" (with burning concern) re­ mind a German audience of Pius XI's famous encyclical, which began with those words and went on to denounce the Nazis. Pius XII's "burning concern" is "for our factories, power sta­ tions, railway stations, dams." By such an emphasis Hochhuth ruins the character and the scene he is trying to create. Pius XII can be either a powerful but inactive moral force or he can be a villain, but he cannot be both. It is meaningful for Fontana to argue with a Pope who is an over-cautious diplomat, or with a Pope who is a mystic too aloof from ordinary human suffer­ ing, but a debate with a Pope who can think only as a stock­ holder is morally and dramatically empty. Such a debate merely expresses the author's vindictiveness without justifying it. To create these many ingenious and contradictory hypotheses is not to explain the Pope's silence, and to create an impossible figure of the Pope is to destroy any hope of an explanation. Yet the question remains: why did the historic Pope not speak out? I think that some of the facts presented in the play do point to an answer, though it is one that Hochhuth himself does not really explore. In his elaborate appendix he includes docu­ ments which describe the Pope's coldness towards most of his close associates, his unwillingness to have much to do with peo­ ple, and his obsessive habit of washing his hands after every

109 human contact. The playwright uses these facts to justify the controversial scene in which Pius, after refusing to interfere in the persecutions, washes his hands like Pilate. But perhaps these traits lead to a plausible explanation for the Pope's silence. They imply that, although he was highly intelligent, Pius XII was deficient in emotion and in imagination. He seems to have been incapable of understanding events in an emotional way, of feeling what was happening to ordinary people. He could not be touched. This is a failure of personality rather than a moral failure, but it created a moral vacuum, and the voice that should have spoken remained silent. I am, of course, now making an hypothesis of my own about this enigmatic personality, but I think it is as plausible as some that are advanced in the play. Pius XII seems to have been a dangerous combination of the diplomat and the mystic. Able to see all around a question, and thus to pereceive good reasons for not acting, he was also able to remove his interest from the material world entirely by reminding himself that any practical human act is of little importance in eternal terms. Or (I am thinking in mystical terms again) he may have tried to assume in some way the guilt of all those who persecuted or who toler­ ated persecution. "Priests," as a character in Joyce remarks, "are queer people," and Popes presumably govern their lives by other than practical considerations. Hochhuth entitles Act IV, in which Fontana confronts Pius XII and asks him to protest, 77 Gran Rifiuto, the great refusal. Dante first used this phrase in condemnation of Pope Celestine V, a mystic who abdicated rather than play an active political role. But Hochhuth should have remembered that the weak and useless Celestine V was later canonized. The basic argument be­ tween Fontana and Pope Pius rests on two quite different views of the Church, that which assigns it an ethical and social role in the world and that which recognizes only eternal concerns. The argument is as old as Christianity, and a single playwright can­ not hope to solve it —but he could have presented it more clearly. His treatment of this central question is historically and dramatically weak. no Another serious confusion weakens the play. Though the central issue is the persecution of the Jews, Hochhuth equally emphasizes the Pope's indifference to the sufferings of Catholic priests and nuns murdered by the Nazis. He may be doing this to strengthen his indictment of the Pope, to argue that the Pope shirks his duty to his own flock as well as his duty to humanity at large. The facts are historically correct, but as Hochhuth uses them in the play they confuse our impression of the character he has created. The facts are not made psychologi­ cally or dramatically intelligible. Yet in other parts of the play too this theme of indifference is clearly to Hochhuth a relevant one. He seems to be insisting that the lack of human sympathy explains how the Nazi atroc­ ities could have happened. His storm troopers and policemen do not hate their victims — they are merely indifferent to them. The beautiful Helga, a typist at Auschwitz, is quite uninterested in the deaths around her. And here again the doubling of actors reinforces the theme. Indifference and neutrality, not virtue or villainy, are the norm. "How far can the Neutral Man be held guilty?" Hochhuth asks on the last page of his book.

Further — what can one expect of the Neutral Man when General Con­ scription and such statutes lead him into situations which are easier dealt with by saints than men? A refusal to obey orders? How can any­ one demand such a thing from someone who has not, since his con­ firmation, even felt the need to reflect on the problem of Good and Evil? However, the moment the individual is no longer to be held re­ sponsible for anything, either because he has nothing more to decide about, or because he does not grasp the fact that he has an obligation to decide, then an alibi has been created for all guilt: the play is over.

Pius XII is thus a representative in another sense — the repre­ sentative of twentieth century man's indifference, of Neutral Man's inability to feel and protest. Hochhuth has made of him what in fact the Popes have always claimed to be, an interme­ diary between God and man. He is the representative of Christ on earth, but he also represents man before God — and in his indifference, Pius represents supremely well the indifference of many civilized men to Hitler's deeds. "It isn't just Pius XII that is tried in this play," Herman Shumlin told a reporter. "It's all

111 men, all of us who didn't speak." Peter Brook made the same point graphic by clothing all his actors in uniform blue cotton suits, over which a priest's cassock, a cardinal's robe, or a Nazi armband could be donned as needed. Neutral Man's indiffer­ ence to suffering is uniform and universal, varying only slightly with slight variations of costume. But this theme brings us back again to Hochhuth's failure. He doubles parts to suggest that the Pope's indifference is gen­ erally shared, and also to suggest that the silent Pope is as guilty as the storm trooper who did his job without protest. This is a double line of argument, for Hochhuth's German citizen who could not protest safely is excused by the inaction of the Pope who could have protested but did not. There seems to be a serious moral confusion here. Hochhuth has not really clarified the moral direction of his play, the character of Pius XII, or the exact nature of his in­ dictment of the Pope, and these serious flaws invalidate much of his work as history, as morality, and as drama. But there is yet another flaw, which has been little noted in discussions of The Deputy and which invalidates it even more seriously. In the course of the play Hochhuth introduces two good men to speak for humanity and compassion — Fontana and Gerstein. Their opponent seems to be Pius himself; his diplomacy and timidity seem to be set against their charity. But they have an­ other and far more important opponent, who is given his great­ est scenes in the fifth act. This opponent is The Doctor, the elegant devil who embodies the negation that is Auschwitz, and his role is an attempt to carry the play far beyond the ethical implications of Pius's silence. For The Doctor is no ordinary man. He is Ivan Karamazov's Devil, the spirit of denial and of rebellion against God, and his presence introduces a theologi­ cal element into The Deputy — an element which is as impor­ tant as the play's moral concerns, but is, unfortunately, no more decisively handled by the author. Here again is that tragic habit of wasting material, of raising profound questions without ex­ ploring them, that is Hochhuth's greatest crime as a dramatist. The Doctor, in a dialogue with Fontana in front of the ovens

112 at Auschwitz, explains his mission: he is an ex-priest, and he is carrying out an experiment to discover whether or not God exists. "I took an oath that I would provoke that Old Man so measurelessly . . . that he would have to give an answer. Even if it was only the negative answer ... that He does not exist. . .. He hasn't even aimed a thunderbolt at me." The Doctor thinks that God will still have some strength if Fontana's faith can survive in Auschwitz. This central issue is quite different from the question of papal guilt; the question is not how could the Pope have tolerated the murder of the Jews but how could God have tolerated it? The Doctor has come to Ivan Karamazov's conclusions: either there is no God, or He is unspeakably cruel. Auschwitz seems to convert Fontana to the same doctrine, for after he has worked at the ovens he admits that "with each human body that I burn, I burn away a particle of faith. I am burning God.... If I knew that — He was looking on — I would have ... to hate Him ... I would be frightened of salvation through Him — a wild beast that devours its young." Yet even here the playwright fails to make himself clear. Fontana seems to recover his faith again, but exactly how and when this hap­ pens is never explained. The play ends both with despair and with a reminder that the concentration camps were eventually destroyed. A whole library of criticism has already been written about The Deputy, but very few comments go beyond an argument about the Pope's guilt to discuss this further question of the vindication of God's ways to man. Few have realized that God Himself rather than His Vicar is on trial here — and because Hochhuth has lost control over his themes, the play is an artis­ tic failure and a philosophic puzzle, neither theodicy nor theodicide. Yet the stirring of even muddy waters is sometimes worth doing. We can only hope that Hochhuth's later work, and that of the playwrights who will inevitably follow him, will attempt to clarify the moral problems he has raised, and that this burning indignation can be controlled and shaped into art.

113 Robley Wilson, Jr.

Notes Toward Yet Another Theory

1. Inferno

Saturday afternoon. The television is on — Grown men are golfing. Dust, high humidity, Heat, general oppression on a warm wind That breathes eternally from the southwest (The hawthorne I planted leans and leans) — I am in the middle of summer. I overhear Hammering, I go to the window (action!); It is my neighbor, pounding his g.d. fence. I hate his fence — it is gross and ugly, Unfinished, half-way stained like redwood, And when the wind gusts it gets propped With a pair of weathered two-by-fours Whose base is my back lawn. My neighbor Never asks me for the use of my back lawn — He appropriates it. Once his fence fell in And blew all over hell's half-acre. I think I live for such possibilities. Enough fence. I hate it, but I've plenty of passion left For its other side. I hate my neighbor's dog; It stinks, and the stink spills over on me; It barks, but only when I am sick for sleep; It rambles endlessly among its own stools And gapes red-eyed through its chicken-wire. Once in every year the dog fulfills itself — It goes duck-hunting, it retrieves torn birds. I guess it is happy; when I'm not hating it

114 I feel an anger that must be close to pity. To hell with pity. My neighbor has a boat, Sitting on a trailer between our two yards, Collecting rainwater and patronizing weeds Which flourish in its shade. I sit here Looking out the window, watching the winds Broadcast my lawn with fescue and dandelions; I watch my sons playing around the boat And savor the pleasure of suing my neighbor If one of them should fall in and drown. I ought to hate my neighbor, but to what end? He is a cop, a state trooper, a guardian — I see him into his driveway every evening, Steering a blue sedan with yellow shields Glorious on its front doors and a red light On its right front fender, and my neighbor Awesome in his tans and gold-button jacket With a silver badge on his breast, a silver Badge on his cap. Once I smiled and said That I was sorry to gripe, but couldn't he Do something about his dog? How mealy-mouthed I am. I am never sorry to gripe. In fact, I am so blitheringly delighted to be griping That the sweat chills my sides, and my heart Races, and my stomach turns sweetly sick. My neighbor is sorry, too; he didn't know His dog barked. We part; he goes away to eat, To change his clothes. Either he will put on An old swimsuit and begin to abuse his fence So I can scowl at his flabby back, his baldness And (when he turns around) his ample paunch — Or he will emerge in National Guard fatigues With master-sergeant's stripes and ride off To drill. He is uniform-happy and childish, But children know cows moo, and all dogs bark. I ought to hate him. When my two boys play

ii5 With his girls, in his yard, I ought to hate His language, his sublime enforcer's arrogance, His rank stupidity. When I hear he has used The word "nigger" I ought to hate him aloud — Not for the word, but for the scorn I know He says it with, and my children's hearing it. Damn it. Nothing of my neighbor is bearable. (Nothing of any neighbors is truly bearable.) The gravel pile he bought a year ago to even His driveway slowly diminishes. I pick rocks Out of my grass — at first I returned them, But now I scatter them in my own driveway. The house he started to paint ten months ago Is half-covered — like his propped-up fence. Cinder blocks and bricks and scraps of lumber Acquired for projects obscure to both of us Overflow from his property to mine; my boys Get bruised on them, and my rhubarb smothers. The light in his garage stays on all night And floods my bedroom. ... I make this catalog For every day I don't work, so I may think ill Of my neighbor. Too bad I am not Christian Enough to love this damned unloveable person, But not yet fallen far enough for hate.

2. Purgatorio Is it all me? Perhaps it is a man I invent — The kind of failure I am forever accused of In my own thoughts. I am scarcely grown old, But I think I am and I curse the forecast Of my death repeated in the things around me. Ah, that's the neurosis; my wife tells me The one sin she despises my neighbor for Is that he is kind to our children. He is — More kind than me, more patient than my wife, 116 More gentle than the winds bearing gingerly The frail, sterile spores of the dandelion Over the green lawns of the world. He is — And I am made guilty by his unwise affection. What do I know of love? My wife conceived Our firstborn, and I blamed her for misreading The desk calendar; I also condemned my reason For surrendering to cocktails. When my wife Delivered, I was at home watching television. Nothing can come of nothing. I tolerated The arrival of my children; I swore to learn How to love them — and the oath wants mending. For love I propose virtue, the doing of good In terms tailored to my own expediencies, And I require silence and swift obedience. To hell with love. I say to hell with love, But follow after to find it. I seek it in The tears of my sons when I have struck them; I catch brief sight of it behind my remorse, But then it is gone and I have forgotten it. I seek it in my wife; as dutiful and aimless As my neighbor at his fence I go to her flesh, Where once again my glimpse of love is quick But vanished like my boys' tears. It is rare. Often when my wife is passionate, I am tired, And she is tired when I am passionate. We are The spirits of our real selves — untouchable, Faceless and sexless, wordless and shadowless Among the unrumpled covers of our shared bed In the gray light from the garage window; We kiss self-consciously and hug our dreams. When I wake up I know I have slept badly: My hair is snarled — combing it is a nuisance. When I shave it is more than vanity that takes My time; it is the awful lie I tell myself About age and the joyless conceit of dying. 117 No day begins worse than this, no day better. My wife and I have agreed we will not speak Before noon, but it is an agreement I break Eternally. She says I am picking a quarrel; I say, as usual, I am seeking a sign of love. Alas, I seek love in others. Once, long ago, I tried adultery but was not worthy of it — Though at first it gave me religion, made me Better than I am. The girl was years younger, Easier than I am; her body was strange to me, Like the idols seen in an unfamiliar church, And because I was obliged to hide the truth — That I was perishing — I preened for her. I started to care about bathing, and I shaved Gladly, pretending a normal sort of ego; I dressed to make her pleased to be my lover; I spent more money than I had — when it ran out I squandered what she gave me. For a year We met under the neon blessing of motel signs On contrived weekends and holidays after dark. We were excessively carnal; in the bad end She caught on to me; she saw I wanted love, And finding she had little enough for herself She sent me home. I cursed. I had achieved Banality and I began to read about myself In a hundred trashy novels. Even the memory Has been cleared away, and now I only see her In every woman who is much younger than I am. Then I confessed, was penitent and contrite; Then I was forgiven (and forgiven, punished). Because my neighbor is good to my children As well as his own; because he gives away life In acts unthinkable to me, and does not care; Because — though he is all things I disparage — He is stupid and happy, I see love in him. Dear God, isn't that enough of suffering? 118 Did saints know worse? I think the universe Will crack; the strings that steer the stars Will be exposed, and tangle, and fall in fire. To hell with love, for if I should once find it I could not so succeed in my unworthiness.

3. Paradiso I have a vision: It is a day of rest — it is, Perhaps, Sunday, and at twelve noon all of us Arrive home from the shake-shingled church Where we have shared God's florid infinities. In the driveway beside our bungalow we stop, Unbuckle our belts. The station wagon doors Spring open like wings on a white dragonfly And we four pile out. Behind the back door A poodle whines. We mount the washed steps. My wife wears pink the hue of an Alpine dawn, And a pert white straw, and long white gloves Whose cleanliness stuns the eye and shames The tremulous fountain of our hydrangea bush. We are all laughing; our laughter makes music On the lyre of the gold willow tree bowing Over my fence. One of my sons, the youngest, Sits astride my neck; he is a light burden, And his heels thump delight against my ribs — In the mirror of the kitchen door I am amazed By the noon sun brilliant as flax in his hair. My older boy, skinny and gawky as a hawthorne, Dances beside me, begging for the key, proud That he may unlock the door. I bend my knees To duck under the door frame; the dog barks, Slides backward, and his claws clack and skid On the waxed linoleum. How happy we all are. Roast-smells eddy in the house; on the stove The timer is ticking off nothing more ominous

119 Than the minutes until dinner. Next door, My neighbor in his brown sedan comes home From his own worship; his doors too fly open, Like June-bug wings. All of us wave; my son Demands to be set down and with his brother Runs outside. I smile. My wife rings pans Whose copper bottoms turn the sun to pennies Pried from the purses of giants in a fable. Oh, life, we're rich — all of us grandly rich. Or it is not Sunday, but (say) Memorial Day; It is a late spring, and I have just mowed My lawn for the first time. Having hosed The power-mower housing, I get out the flag I picked up yesterday at the mail-order desk. Thinking proud thoughts, I screw the bracket To the post of my front porch, clip the flag On its varnished pole and raise it in place. The wind nuzzles the bunting, the stars swim, Five-armed, the stripes roll like plowed sea. It is a heady moment. The air drinks up grass And reels skyward; on the breeze, bass drums Bumble from the paved apron of the firehouse Where the parade is forming. When we four Drive into town to watch, we take the poodle. We lean on the car, the dog barks at the band, The drums are huge blossoms in my stomach, And the boys squeal. We follow the marchers; At the cemetery we wait for the rifles to slap Volleys of salute in the direction of Heaven, And our muscles twitch; then I explain blanks. All afternoon the flag ripples and splashes. All day long there is no mustness to move me. That evening we eat outside and entertain My neighbors. The steaks slaver red juices On gray pillows of charcoal; yellow tongues Leap and fall back into the ashes. I labor

120 In my smock over the grill, dispensing salt And pepper, butter and monosodium glutamate. My wife has made deep leafy salads, and tea Sweating in opaque tumblers. We praise her; I kiss her cheek and pat her on the bottom So my neighbor can chuckle at my impropriety. After supper we propose badminton; we win. At sunset we reverently fold away the flag. I think when my holiday is over, the children Are asleep, the dog is put down in the cellar, And all the chores are done by ten o'clock — I think, putting on my pajamas, of the worst That can happen. Driving to work tomorrow I am in an accident — some crazy old man with A heart attack, crossing to the wrong lane, Hitting me head-on. I shudder. Yet I wear My seat belt; I stay in the zone of safety On impact. I keep living, flourish, prosper. A day comes when I see everything paid for; My wife and I can die together in sweet sleep, And my least immortality is in my children.

121 Some Recent Books

*The FBI Nobody Knows, by Fred J. Cook. The Macmillan Com­ pany, $5.95. Perhaps nobody knows the FBI or this FBI, but the author and his informants and the authors of his sources are con­ vinced they know a good deal about the FBI. Although some of the book seems to be hastily written (a statement of probability on Page 163 becomes a positive assertion on page 172, for instance), it makes quite clear Mr. Cook's belief that the FBI verges on being more interested in thought-control than in the apprehending of malefactors and that "The fears of the Sixtieth Congress — fears that we might create a federal secret police force like the French ministry of police under Fouche — seem to have been justified." The publishers call this a controversial book. If the author's conclusions are correct, it is a terrifying book. * Simeon, by Donald Finkel, Atheneum, $1.95. In paper binding. A clothbound edition is also available. This is Mr. Finkel's first book of poems. The title poem, perhaps the most ambitious in the vol­ ume, was first printed in Poetry Northwest and won the annual Helen Bullis prize, awarded through that magazine. Another, "Visit from a Black Angel," first appeared in the Miscellany for Fall, 1962. *A Stormy Night with The Turn of the Screw, by Muriel West. Frye and Smith, Ltd., Phoenix, $4.50. This is the text of a manu­ script "which came into" Miss West's "hands by a lucky chance — included in a box of miscellaneous old books bought at auction." The manuscript itself tells in first-person narrative form the adven­ tures of a critic trying to understand and interpret "The Turn of the Screw." He concludes his rather inconclusive account with the description of an unknown person or ghost who intrudes upon him and by force tries to save him from himself. Miss West includes in her version of this story (in brackets) the comments of an also anonymous (anyway, known only by the initials H.K.Y.) annotator who points out some of the difficulties in the original anonymous story. In his Foreword, H.K.Y. makes a solid point also. "Imagine," he writes, "beginning a critical review with the first-person-singular, and with such a phrase: 'I was alone'!" Perhaps it is only a curious coincidence that H.K.Y. says he discovered the manuscript in the

122 secret compartment, etc., etc., in the attic, etc., etc., on "W n Square," but that coincidence leads one to wish that Miss West had edited the whole text a bit more carefully and made at least some effort to establish the authenticity or spuriousness of the original critique. She does cast some doubt upon, or expresses some doubt in, H.K.Y.'s theory that the text dates from a period "subsequent to 1905 and prior to 1908," but she makes no attempt to establish a date and even misses, or ignores, so easily evident a clue as the original anonymous author's use of the phrase "just for kicks." As every schoolboy knows, that expression is not even listed in Par­ tridge's Dictionary of Slang and was not used in popular speech before 1949 or written before 1956 (cf Wentworth and Flexner, who cite Longstreet The Real Jazz Old and New). It is clearly Miss West's responsibility (she does not disclaim continued possession of the manuscript) to write A Long Hot Summer with a Stormy Night with The Turn of the Screw. * The Suspect in Poetry, by James Dickey. The Sixties Press, Madi­ son, Minnesota. Cloth $2.00, paper $1.00. Mr. Dickey here collects a number of his reviews, written as long ago as 1955 and as recently as the early sixties, binds them together with a few transitional essays intended to build the whole into a discussion of what is suspect or who is the suspect in poetry. The main trouble he sees is that "we don't really experience poetry any more, but only judge it." Perhaps because it may be difficult to experience poetry, in print anyway, Mr. Dickey proceeds to give a number of judgments. He judges against "the wrapping up of a small ordinary parcel with habitual skill and dispatch." He dislikes "the average Winters-trained poet, primly preaching a set of academic homilies." On the other hand he says that "Confession is not enough." This is in judging Ginsberg to be a bad poet, and because Mr. Dickey has rejected purely technical and academic standards, he proves his judgment correct by saying, "It takes more than this to make poetry. It just does." Mr. Dickey sees some possible trouble arising from this kind of standard. He understands that "what may be suspect to me may well be genuine to you, and consequently we enter into a thorough critical chaos." Understand, however, he writes: "This is, I suspect [Quite a few suspect's right here!] where we should be, anyway." As antidote, a closing remark: "At times the hardest of the review­ er's tasks is to keep himself from saying to his little stable of poets

123 . . . 'Yes! Yes! Go on and do what you're doing: write. You're all wonderful! ... I take your hands! I bless you all!' " Mr. Dickey has successfully resisted this temptation in this lively and angry attempt to grapple with a very heavy and important problem. *A New Directions Reader, Edited by Hayden Carruth and J. Laughlin. A New Directions Paperbook. New York, $1.95. A selec­ tion from the works of fifty-eight writers — from Appollinaire and Barnes through Patchen and Paz to Williams and Williams. For people who collect books and literary periodicals, the anthology may serve little purpose. For the same people much interest will lie in the appended "A List of the Books Published by New Direc­ tions, 1936-1963." The list includes data on writers, titles, book designers, jacket designers, artists, printers. By careful reading and referring to the list of abreviations, one can learn much from an entry like: "New Directions in Prose and Poetry Number Eleven. Ed. by JL. 512 and 8 pp. of photos. $4.50. J: AL. D: DK. P: BRMP. 12/15/1949. . . . Remaining sheets bound as NDP 72. $1.55. 1957." *To the Maker of Globes, and other poems, by Robert Lewis Weeks. South and West, Inc., Fort Smith, Arkansas. Of the poems in this, Mr. Weeks' first book, two were first printed in the Miscellany. In an introduction, Karl Shapiro writes "that Weeks has refused the blandishments of the Tradition and . . . seeks his own authentic statements among the shards of modern culture" and that "the poems approximate 'naturals,' experiences found to hand, honestly fashioned with tools of [the poet's] own making." *The Journal of Jules Renard, edited and translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. George Braziller, New York. $6.00. Jean-Paul Sartre is quoted on the jacket of this book: "Directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature." Perhaps the blurb is badly translated, as the text of the book seems not to be, or is, directly or indirectly, an existentialist evasion. At any rate, it is a fine journal for readers who like journals. It pre­ sents, as Miss Bogan says in her introduction, "the erotic elements in the son-mother relationship with extraordinary frankness — a frankness he shares with Stendhal before him, and with Proust who is to come. . . ." It is quotable. It is whimsical: "A butterfly got on the train at Clamecy and traveled with me." It speaks of the literary life. "The Theatre. To think that God, who sees everything, must see that." And "When a sparrow has said 'peep!', it thinks it

124 has said everything there is to say." And, on the last page, "I could begin all over again and do it better, but no one would notice the difference." Renard's friendship with Sarah Bernhardt begins with a meeting at which her "two enormous dogs. . . . roll on the floor .. . and pretty soon our clothes are covered with little white hairs," extends through "At a sign of Sarah Bernhardt I would follow her to the ends of the earth, with my wife" to "I am beginning to find this great actress insufferable, like everybody else." *The Common Pursuit, by F. R. Leavis. New York University Press. $5.00. A collection of critical essays, many of them having first ap­ peared in Scrutiny, one at least dating to 1934. Mr. Leavis concerns himself with Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Bunyan, James, Eliot, and others, and employs a complexity and density of syntax that becomes, after long exposure to it, almost endearing. The sheets were printed in Great Britain, and bear a few typographical errors. *And In Him, Too; In Us, by Konstantinos Lardas. Generation, Ann Arbor. $3.00. This is the first of a New Poet Series, of which four volumes have been announced, published under the authority of the Board in Control of Student Publications, the University of Michigan, and under a kind of manifesto that says in part: "We are against the anachronism of young poets being middle-aged. We are for young poets being young." Gerunds, anyone? Anyhow, Mr. Lardas is the son of parents who imigrated to Ohio from the Aegean island of Ikaria, is much involved with and in the Greek myths and language. Some of his poetry reads as if out of Hopkins by Dylan Thomas. Austin Warren in an Introduction says: "I know of no such deeply intuitive, verbally enamoured, seawardly rhyth­ mical poetry being written in English today." * Us He Devours, by James B. Hall. New Directions — San Francisco Review. $4.50. Miscellany readers will remember "The Freezer Bandit." It is one of the fourteen stories that make up this new collection. Some of the thirteen come up to the "Bandit," and some don't. Most of the stories are examples of the process of making the metaphor actual. The result in some is obliquity, in some ob­ scurity, in all interest. * Conversations With Nelson Algren, by H. E. F. Donohue. Hill and Wang. $6.50. These conversations began to appear in the Miscel­ lany, and came to a close in The Atlantic Monthly. The middle section, now for the first time published, casts some light on Holly-

125 wood and literary agents. Mr. Donohue is remembered by Miscellany readers also as the author of "The Man Who Knew What Ethiopia Should Do About Her Water Table." *Figures of the Human, by David Ignatow. Wesleyan University Press. Cloth $4.00. Paper $1.85. A new collection of poems, a pair of which appeared not long ago in the Miscellany, some of them new and some of them rescued from earlier collections now difficult to find. *New and Selected Poems, by Thomas McGrath. Alan Swallow. $4.00. Reprinting many poems long since difficult to obtain and containing new ones like "You Can Start the Poetry Now, Or: News From Crazy Horse" as it appeared in the Miscellany, this volume will be welcomed by all who like the tough McGrath mind as it tries to explain or explain away the soft McGrath heart. *To the number of existing series of pamphlets or books dealing with writers of various kinds and in various categories may now be added two more. The "Columbia Essays on Modern Writers" are edited by William York Tindall, published by the Columbia Uni­ versity Press, and sell for sixty-five cents each. The six essays pub­ lished to date are on Albert Camus, William Golding, Hermann Broch, Samuel Beckett, Constantine Cafavy and Lawrence Durrell. The "Masters of World Literature Series" is edited by Louis Kronenberger, published by Macmillan, and sells for $3.95 each. These are hard-cover books of about two hundred pages. They are critical biographies aimed at "the literary layman." Published to date are books on George Eliot, John Milton, Jonathan Swift and Honore de Balzac. *Confucius to Cummings, edited by Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann. New Directions. $6.75. An anthology of poetry somewhat in the manner of Pound's earlier ABC of Reading but with more poems and fewer statements of principle.

126 Notes on Contributors

Most of the contributors to this issue have written about themselves and their careers and attitudes in a manner that might make these notes superfluous. Nevertheless, we do have some data that are not parts of the works printed supra. . . . Some of NELSON ALGREN's early conversations with H. E. F. Donohue appeared in the Fall 1963 issue of this magazine. . . . DOROTHY ALLEN is secretary to VIPPLADECACO. . . . RUSSELL AMES lives in Mexico and is the author of Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia (Princeton) and The Story of American Folksong (Grosset). . . . BENJAMIN APPEL'S recent Publishers Weekly account of his refusal to sign a loyalty oath, and thereby losing the sale of something like a hundred thousand copies of one of his books that had been accepted, conditionally, for use in the Texas school system, has attracted wide attention and was the cause of a recent anti-oath statement from the Authors League of America. . . . B. A. BOTKIN's interest in folklore remains strong. He is to read a paper on "The Folklore of Urban Subcultures and Mass Society" as part of a symposium he planned for the meeting of the American Folklore Society in New York in late December of this year. . . . SAX BRADFORD is in the State Department and was last heard from in Washing­ ton, D.C. . . . PETER BRAND has written for Miscellany before and has been gracious enough to let us have for this issue a story written during the Thirties and rejected then by both The Atlantic Monthly and the New Masses. Brand regrets to this day that he didn't submit the story to The Anvil. . . . EDWIN GEORGRICHARD BRUELL is chairman of the English Department in Bremen High School, Midlothain, Illinois. . . . WAYNE CARVER is spending this year working both for the English Department and the Andersen Foundation in American Studies at Carleton. . . . JACK CONROY is an editor in a Chicago publishing house. . . . MALCOLM COWLEY's essay on The New Republic is part of a projected book on the Thirties. . . . DAVID CORNEL DeJONG's newest volume of poems is called Still Traveling on Sunday. . . . AUGUST DERLETH is Director of Arkham House: Publishers of Sauk City, Wisconsin. . . . PAUL "DOC" EVANS is well known as a Dixieland jazzman, less widely known in his more recent role as Director of the Bloomington (Minnesota) Civic Orchestra. . . . After we read a Saturday Review interview with JAMES T. FARRELL we thought we had a "first" in his poem, but he writes that he actually said he could not get a book of poems published and that the poem we have in this issue is only one of many he has had published. . . . ROSE GRAUBART's work has been exhibited at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and The Jewish Museum of Art. . . . BEN HAGGLUND is still a printer, and editor and publisher, now in East Palo Alto, California. . . . CALVIN C. HERNTON's poem was sent to us by David Ignatow who in a recent review of New Negro Poets: U. S. A., edited by Langston Hughes, pointed to Hernton's work, published therein, as that of "one of the three or four new Negro poets with something to say." . . . DAVID IGNATOW's own recent volume of poems, Figures of the Human, is published by Wesleyan. . . . RUTH LECHLITNER's first book of poems, Tomorrow's Phoenix, was published in 1937. . . . JOHN ROOD, best known as a sculptor, has published one novel, This, My Brother. It appeared in 1936 under the auspices of the Midwest Federation of Arts and Professions and had an introduc­ tion by Meridel Le Sueur. Mr. Rood writes that the book was composed on the linotype "so that it was ready to print when I had finished writing it." . . . ROBERT TRACY, now at work on a book concerning Trollope's later novels, is the editor of the Vintage edition of The Aran Islands and other writings of J. M. Synge. . . . ROBERT TRAVER is a trout-fisherman whose most widely known novel is Anatomy of a Murder. . . . ROBLEY WILSON, JR. teaches English and creative writing at the State College of Iowa in Cedar Falls. His "Notes of a Blind Nudist" appeared in this magazine a couple of years ago. In a letter recently he wrote that he was thirty-four years old. According to one reckoning, this means he was born in 1930.

127 The Eternal Present, Vol. II: THE BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE By S. GIEDION. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1957, at the National Gallery of Art. "Enhances our understanding of all architecture, ourselves and our world.?'—WOLF VON ECK- ARDT, Seven Arts News. "Astounding erudition, spar­ EUGENE kling insights, beautiful il­ lustrations.—L/brary Jour- ONEGIN nal. 345 illustrations, 18 in ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN'S color. $12.50 novel in verse, translated Previously published: THE ETER­ from the Russian, with com­ NAL PRESENT Vol. I: THE BEGIN­ mentary, by VLADIMIR NA­ NINGS OF ART. $12.50 BOKOV. "Only a quadrilin- gual artist-scholar of Mr. PLATO 2: Nabokov's genius could have THE DIALOGUES, accomplished this wizard­ FIRST PERIOD ry"— HARRISON E. SALISBURY} By PAUL FRIEDLANDER. Translated by HANS MEYER- N. Y. Times. "A magnificent HOFF. The second of three achievement and unsur­ volumes representing the dis­ tinguished German scholar's passed as a translation and commentaries on Plato, which annotation of Pushkin's have profoundly influenced modern Platonic studies. poem."—ERNEST J. SIMMONS, $5.00 N. Y. Times Book Review. Previously published: Appendices, index. In four PLATO: AN INTRODUCTION. $5.00- -volumes, boxed: $18.50

Bollingen Series is published by Bollingen Foundation. Distributed by Pantheon Books, 22 East 51st St., New York, N. Y. 10022. For detailed catalogue, write to Bollingen Series, 140 East 62nd Street, New York, N. Y. 10021 A part of the cost of producing this special issue on the 1930's has been met by a grant from the William C. Whitney Founda­ tion. For this, The Carleton Miscellany is deeply grateful. 'Hill'