THE CARLETON O my America! (Gettysburg, Detroit, Alexandria) —Allen Tate, Erling Larsen and John Wain Michel Butor — Kimon Lolos and poems by Stafford, Sward Hoffman, Bates, Black Finkel, Turco, Strand Kroll, Lucas, Tagliabue Anderson, Dejong Petersen, Coxe Summer 1963 $1 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY Volume IV, Number 3 Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota Published by Carleton College Editor: Reed Whittemore Associate Editors: Wayne Carver and Erling Larsen Managing Editor: Ruth MacKenzie Editor, Department of American: Wayne Booth Ifl 11 THE CARLETON Vol. IV, No. 3 Summer 1963 Miscellany CONTENTS The Superior Country by Erling Larsen 3 The Battle of Gettysburg: Why It Was Fought by Allen Tate 32 Wildtrack, a poem in progress, by John Wain 45 Poems by Robert Sward, Jack Anderson, Charles Black, John Tagliabue, Mark Strand, Donald Finkel, Scott Bates, Louis O. Coxe, Lewis Turco 69 Mule No. 095, a story by Kimon Lolos 81 Poems by William Stafford, Daniel Hoffman, Donald Petersen, Ernest Kroll, John Lucas, David Cornell Dejong 91 A Sampling of the Writings of Michel Butor, edited by Donald Schier Peregrination 100 Growing Pains in Science Fiction 113 Excerpt from Passage de Milan. 121 The Carleton Miscellany is published in Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. 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. Manuscripts should be submitted to The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfleld, Minnesota, as should subscriptions. Manuscripts are submitted at the author's 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, 1963, by Carleton College Second-class postage paid at Northfleld, Minnesota Notes on Contributors . JACK ANDERSON has published poems recently in the Antioch, San Francisco and Massachusetts Reviews. Formerly assistant drama critic of the Oakland, Calif. Tribune, he is "currently on the performer's side of the footlights, acting in the San Francisco premiere of Strindberg's The Dream Play." . ROBERT SWARD, an editor of Epoch, has a new book of poems, Kissing the Dancer, coming out this year. MARK STRAND writes as follows: "I was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I'm 28 years old. I teach in the Poetry Work­ shop of the State U. of Iowa with Donald Justice. Poems of mine have appeared and will appear in The New Yorker, Atlantic, The Nation, The Yale Review, etc. I'm married and my wife's name is Antonia." . DONALD PETERSEN has taught at the State University of Iowa and now teaches in the State University of New York. Formerly on the staff of The Western Review, he has published verse in little magazines since 1950. LEWIS TURCO of Fenn College has had poems in recent issues of Poetry, Antioch Review and Genesis West. His chapbook, The Sketches of Lewis Turco, was published in 1962. The poems by JOHN TAGLIABUE printed here are part of a larger group on Shake­ spearean subjects written, he says, while re-reading the Falstaff plays. WILLIAM STAFFORD who teaches at Lewis and Clark College won the National Book Award this year for his poems, Travelling Through the Dark. KIMON LOLOS' second book has just been published by Harper & Row. JOHN LUCAS, formerly of the English Dept. at Carleton, now lives in Rome and lectures throughout Italy on literature, music and art. ERLING LARSEN, one of The Miscellany's editors, has been on leave this year from Carleton. DANIEL HOFFMAN teaches at Swarthmore, SCOTT BATES at the University of the South, DONALD FINKEL at Washington University, LOUIS O. COXE at Bowdoin, and DONALD SCHIER at Carleton. CHARLES BLACK of New Haven, ERNEST KROLL of Wash­ ington, and DAVID CORNEL DE JONG of Providence are all old contributors to The Miscellany, as is ALLEN TATE, who participated in the symposium on foundations in our Spring issue. JOHN WAIN's poetry is not as well known in this country as his prose, but a small selection of it may be found in the anthology, New Poets of Eng­ land and America. Mr. Wain reports that other sections of the long poem, "Wildtrack," of which the first part is printed here, are now in the works. ... A biographical note on MICHEL BUTOR appears on page 100. Erling Larsen The Superior Country REMEMBERING SIGRID who also liked it and who lived in it for twenty-two years less four days I When I first came out into this country I had trouble deciding what it looked like, what it was. I was young and this was all new to me, but, more important, I was going to be a writer and was sure I would not see the country in any satisfactory way until I could describe it. I had paid close attention to Hemingway's account of the bull fight in which he tells first of his reactions and then of going back to the hotel to think about the fight in an effort to decide what had caused his reactions. The need to solve this entire pressing problem, the self-conscious attempt to see a new country, together with the attempt to understand and apply what was for me a new way of seeing it, made my future and still nebulous liter­ ary career look very complicated indeed. But I began the writing. My short stories would go out to the little magazines and come back and go out again and finally some of them began to stick and stay away until they returned mimeo­ graphed or printed on very rough paper sometimes in magazines without covers and sometimes in rich magazines with Edward Wes­ ton photographs for frontispieces. I admired these photographs, and those of Walker Evans and Paul Strand which were beginning at that time to be pretty widely reproduced, almost as much as I did "The End of Something." I liked the sharply-focused and precise 3 The Carleton Miscellany attention to detail, the finely-draw grain of the old wooden fence posts and the patterns of shadow in peeling paint, and I saw in these pictures evidence of eyes that operated as I thought Hemingway's did. But I could still see that the Weston solution to the literary problem or the seeing problem was much simpler than the Heming­ way one even though in Hemingway's work was much of the Wes­ ton sharpness; it was, I thought, much easier to decide where to stand your camera than to decide what had moved you to stand it there. I suppose as a result of my struggles with this argument, and perhaps even as a result of my confusion, I had a story in a maga­ zine called, yes, The Dubuque Dial, all orange-covered and green- printed, and I proudly sent a copy off to an old friend of the fam­ ily, a big-city corporation lawyer who, I thought not characteristi­ cally, had a consuming interest in literature and had converted the attic of his enormous old house into a library stuffed with first edi­ tions of books I thought were very new and very important and with complete files of transition and This Quarter. He wrote back that he had enjoyed my "pastiche of Stein and Hemingway" and made certain suggestions which, lest they cause a return of my de­ flation and depression, I shall not reproduce here. I should point out, however, that among other pejorative words he used I perhaps longest remembered "surface." I thought about that word a long time even though in one part of the letter he had tried to make it easier for me by writing "finished surface." That word sent me into a re-examining of my own work and a re-reading of Hemingway's during which, perhaps in an uncon­ scious attempt to recapture some part of my lost self-assurance, I spent a couple of days feeling a little superior to Hemingway be­ cause I thought I had discovered him in a rhetorical impasse. The way I remember it, now that I am back in the hotel to make up my mind, is this. Somewhere I found him writing about Africa or Wy­ oming and describing the hills as looking like Spain. And I asked myself, with this feeling of superiority, What good can a writer accomplish by describing one country his reader has not seen in terms of another he has not seen either? Also I asked myself, What good will it be when in another place he writes about the Wyoming- looking hills of still another country? A man writing that way, I thought, can go in some pretty vicious circles. And he can lead his reader down some pretty vicious blind alleys and allow him to emerge while still, or consequently, uncertain about where he has been or what has happened to him. The writer will have described Erling Larsen Africa in Spanish terms and Spain in Wyoming terms and Wyoming finally in African terms and he will have made his circle, all right, but the whole business will not have added up to a true Aristotelean metaphor. For both terms of each of the equations will be unknowns and none will add to the knowledge which Aristotle says a meta­ phor is supposed to give a reader. The writer may of course have made the surface, even the finished surface, but he will have left his reader as ignorant as he found him. I am unable now, remembering all this, to find the phrase on which I had built my rhetorical argument.