1953-Vol4-No2

QUARTO SPRING 1953

VOLUME IV • 25 cents • Number 2

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

American History as the only one-volume work that contains all the facts, all the topics, all the great personalities of America's political, military, economic and cultural history — through Dec, 1952

EDITED BY

Richard B. Morris Chief Consultant Editor:

HENRY I >TEELE COMMAGEF

FOR THE GENERAL READER .. .

FOR THE STUDENT...

FOR THE TEACHER . . .

FOR THE BUSINESSMAN, THE PROFESSIONAL M A N , THE PUBLIC OFFICIAL.. .

A standard reference guide to more than 300,000 facts or events, with a Mast* Index to make cross-reference easy.

Price $6.00 FOR SALE AT THE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE JOURNALISM BUILDING

2960 BROADWAY

NEW YORK 27, NEW YORK

QUARTO VOLUME IV, NUMBER 2

A Literary Magazine PUBLISHED AT THE SCHOOL OF GENERAL STUDIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NARRATIVE The Story of A Lady The Rock Dreamboats The Defiler

20 33 46 51

D. Preston Boone Vurrell Yentzen Norman Bonter Isobel Kneeland

SATIRE The Table Talk of Gaylord Babbitt 23

Peter Viereck

LITERARY ARTICLE On Contemporary Spanish American Poetry 25

Eugenio Florit

POETRY No Say It Not All My Singing In The Forest I Walk Waiting Into the Darkness Chrysanthemums Of The Fall

19 24 32 32 45

Vivian Newman Judith Bishop Vivian Newman M. M. Daly Chris Bjerknes

50

Chris Bjerknes

Contributors 60 Editor's Commentary 62

EDITOR:

Vincent Fondacaro

FICTION EDITOR:

Robert Cluett, TV

POETRY EDITOR:

Vivian Newman

PRODUCTION:

Margaret Loos

BUSINESS MANAGER: FACULTY ADVISER:

James Mechler

Helen Hull

is published semi-annually during the winter and spring sessions by the students of the School of General Studies, Columbia University. Copyright 1953 by QUARTO. Office of Publication and Editorial Office, 801 Business Building, Columbia University, New York 27, N. Y. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. No material in this magazine may be reprinted without permission of the Publishers.

QUARTO

Single copies: $.25. Subscriptions: Domestic, $1.00 for four issues. Foreign, $.50 extra for postage. In case of change of address, please notify us and your local post office immediately.

Set in Linotype Caledonia, ten point, leaded two points, on fiftyfive pound book paper, antique, laid.

Printed in the United States of America by The Columbia University Press.

THE TABLE TALK OF GAYLORD BABBITT An Exclusive Interview in Cafe Chic1

By Peter Viereck To purify the diction of my tribe-M allarmt Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking?

Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!

Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling! let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands!

Let there be no unfashionable wisdom! let such be scorn'd and derided off from the earth!

Let there be wealthy and immense cities—but still through any of them, not a single poet, savior, knower, lover!

Let the infidels of These States laugh all faith away!

-Walt Whitman

INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO TABLE TALK Young Gaylord Babbitt (that brilliantly intellectual son of Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt) gets around a lot—what with all those art galleries and soirees that are dominated by his flashing repartee—young Babbitt gets around; and if you start thinking, you realize that hardly a day goes by in lower Manhattan or Harvard Square without your running into him. His name, his face may seem to change. But you can always spot him by the phrases he uses; by his enlightened, emancipated attitude toward everything—in life or art or politics; and even more, by his awareness of how enlightened he is and by the complacency that such awareness gives him.

It is the same complacency poor, reactionary old Babbitt Senior used to feel when he strolled through Zenith, Ohio, long ago in that other epoch before 1929,—before the world changed on him and laughed at his ideas.

In contrast, even now almost nobody laughs—dares to laugh—at the ideas of Babbitt Junior. After all, who can dare to laugh at Progress?

As his Bos well, I have been recording G.B.'s Table Talk for a long time now. This recording is a time-capsule of the dominant ideas of an epoch, 1929-50. The '29 crash killed off Senior's epoch. Certain world events of 1. Written in 1947 (for a novel about the intellectuals of the 1940s).

Revised up-to-date for 1952, as a time-capsule to preserve a particular epoch of literary intellectuals now drawing to a close.

the 1950s are at last bringing Junior's epoch to an end. Yet Gaylord himself will never end; he will simply readjust himself to the epoch ahead, and his process of readjustment will be fascinating to watch.

But why not let Gaylord speak entirely for himself in my interview with him (which follows)?

I. ONLY YESTEBDAT I had lunch with my Hero Gaylord in what he called "one of my little French restaurants." Being in a hurry, I blunderingly suggested having hamburgers at Childs. How quickly he put me in my place, snapping: "How provincial of you! Speed, speed, what does it get you?

Stomach ulcers, that's what being commercial-minded gets you.

We second-generation Babbitts always take off two hours for lunch on account of it's more civilise. Oh poor, P. V., will you never learn to be a Man of the World? Why, the way you talk, folks might think you're some middlewesterner—I mean, some fellow who has never eaten the legs of a single frog!"

"Your wit is in fine fettle today, G. B.," I chortled appreciatively, writing down his epigram in my notebook. As we settled down in Cafe Chic instead of Childs, I asked him in openmouthed admiration, "How do you insure so infallibly that your ideas on all subjects are always the most liberal possible, so that you're always protected, never giving anybody an opening to kid you as an old-fogey or an awful, narrow-minded businessman?"

Pouring himself an elegant demitasse of Sparkling Burgundy, his favorite beverage, he answered me frankly: "That's easy as pie. For example, take politics. Whenever I have to choose between two political ideas, I always choose whatever idea is the more Advanced. If they're equally Advanced so that I can't choose, then I read what my Nation and my New Statesman say about it. And as for the field of art and sex—you know, art, sex, that kind of thing—why, sometimes my thoughts are so Advanced that I tremble at my own daring.

There's nothing more wonderful than being emancipated from medieval superstitions and fearlessly defying conventions. Why, there's no more fearless defier than I; I defy conventions right and left."

"As your Eckermann, I always feel I'm boring you, asking

you for crumbs of your wisdom. It's so difficult sitting here, eating with a genius, instead of reading him at a distance centuries later. Oh G. B., what must I be like to become worthy of lunching with you? What kind of people do you tolerate?

What pet hates have you that I can tactfully avoid?"

"Unforunately for you, I only tolerate folks who are suave.

'Suave?'—oh, by that I mean anybody who can, on short notice, name an adequate little French restaurant in the East Fifties.

And you know what's my latest hate? Not the lowbrows: that's all les neiges de yesteryear. It's those middlebrows. They're even worse than lowbrows. For example, a highbrow like me and a lowbrow like you can get along together fine. We can talk for hours enthusing over the comic strips: each from our quite different viewpoints, y'understand; my viewpoint analytical, as benefits a social observer of life's mores, and your viewpoint toward the comics more spontaneous and naive. Yes, I can get along with you lowbrows, you refreshing primitives, but I'll never get along with those over-avid middlebrows. They're so pretentious; always trying to live beyond their intellectual means."

"A misunderstood dreamer like you," I replied with gentle understanding, "must have trouble finding any merely human company tolerable? Can it be that only Paris is your spiritual home? Is that why you brought me, with your exquisite taste, to this restaurant where they print the menus in the language of Robespierre and Proust?"

At the mention of that sacred city, which he had never visited in person but knew better than any visitor, Gaylord Babbitt clasped his artistic hands and was lost to this sordid American world. In his trance, he keened to himself: "Gee, it must be wonderful to be out there on the Left Bank and sit there in some cafe, talking about brand-new Movements like Dada-ism and Follies Bergeres and everything. And maybe at the table right smack next to me, nonchalantly sipping absinthe, there'd be Sartre and Mistinguette and Louis Aragon and Alice B. Toklas, all four on a double-date together. Maybe it's the eternal bohemian in me, but I'm an incurable Artist of Life."

"Golly Gaylord, how come you always manage to pick jusl the Right Names in the world of lit-crit? I'm scared to open my mouth about criticism or even to mention the name of a single poet, lest it turn out to be a Wrong Name, so that every-

body here at Cafe Chic would then laugh behind my back and think I'm slipping."

"The solution is to pick the right lit-crit culture-hero and ride his juggernaut like a roller-coaster, no matter how sharply it twists and skids at the curves. I find it indispensable to have the Eliot literary school telling me when to dislike Milton and when I'm allowed to like Milton again. In precisely the same way, I found it indispensable to have a political line telling me in June, 1941, when it was an imperialist war and when it stopped being one."

This puzzled me, and I objected: "But the literary dictatorship you follow is by a medieval religious author, while your political line—slips! I mean tendence—is 100% modern and progressive. Isn't that inconsistent?"

"Yes, there is that admitted inconsistency between my literary and political tendences, but a minor one. The major consistency between them is: both bait poor old daddy Babbitt; both are or used to be advance-guard; both get me elected into the intellectual elite. Only instead of daddy's Kiwanis-belongingness, my literary and political lines make me belong with all those dazzling, outrageously witty giants of Bloomsbury, Greenwich Village and Piazza di Spagna."

"How do you giants recognize each other among all us pygmies of the intellect?" I asked.

"By the intonation of one single word: by the expression with which we say 'we'. Best example is to talk like The Master himself. I've spent hours memorizing every sentence in which Eliot uses the word 'we'. Then I repeat just those sentences every time I meet a London or New York celebrity who's trying to sniff out if I belong to the literary ins or the literary outs; it always works. O, the sweet prestige and banquet invitations of being known as a neglected and lonely scorner of The Herd."

"Tell me a couple of those sentences, pronouncing 'we' in the right voice," I pleaded. "The maybe even I can learn how to talk about poetry."

"Well, I memorized that very short sentence in The Sacred Wood where he says: 'Agreed that we do not greatly enjoy Swinburne.' You gotta say that sentence in such a casual yet authoritative tone that a whole praetorian guard of English departments and Little Magazines will exclaim in chorus: O, the bliss of

being part of that We, O, the leper-agony of being excluded from it!"

"With all your scintillating Writers' Conferences," I marveled, "I guess you ethereal mandarins of Pure Art can follow the daily fluctuations of esthetic careers the same way your dad follows his stock-market fluctuations."

"Yup, and with the same rush to sell short a loser and to buy on margin every day's winner."

"Teach me another example of a We-sentence, Gaylord, so I can some day prove worthy of asociating with you winners."

"A different kind of We—this time pronounced with a tone of squeamish impatience—comes earlier in The Sacred Wood, where Eliot writes: *We still hear that George Meredith is a master of prose, or even a profound philosopher.' Whenever I repeat that sentence at a Yale or Princeton literary forum, all of us belongers feel like members of Skull and Bones, snubbing some underbred cad. Picture the cad sidling up and sweatingly trying to ingratiate himself by saying too eagerly: 'George Meredith is a master of prose. George Meredith is even a profound philosopher.'"

II. As always, our conversation soon progressed from literature to politics. "Would you like to hear my political credo in a nut-shell?" he asked dramatically. "I can boil it down to a sentence."

"I can hardly wait," I gibbered with excitement, while opening my notebook to a fresh page. "This is Dear Diary's lucky day."

"I'm an Independent Fighting Liberal, who thinks for himself.

Every morning without fail, I repeat that sentence aloud to myself. There I stand, in front of my mirror, adjusting my lips to a sophisticated sneer, and reciting the same sentence: "I'm an Independent Fighting Liberal, who thinks for himself."

Tactfully I inquired: "How do you show your independence from that somewhat overly impetuous brand of liberals known as communists?"

Gaylord Babbitt withered me with his noble eyes and explained in a tired, patient voice: "I'm a non-communist, definitely a non-communist—ah, but not an anfr'-communist."

"Touche!" I conceded, in panic at having dared to match wits with the great man. "Toucht" and I'm sportsman enough to admit it. One bon mot from you clears up my political confusion like a flash of lightning at midnight. Alas, since the Big Interests crushed PM and The New York Star and since the end of cooperation between liberals and our brave Russian allies, you've become so silent about politics. This leaves us, your followers and readers, like ships without rudders. Speak out again, bold and loud, and resolve our doubts* For example, why as a noncommunist do you invariably sign your name to every procommunist petition and 'peace' manifesto that comes your way?"

G. B. glanced daintily into his litle pocket periscope to see if the F.B.I. was hiding in the booth behind us. Finding the coast clear, he unveiled the Dostoyevsky-like conflict in his soul.

He summed it up in the following heart-rending confession, a true cri de coeur: "What I say now, I've never told before to man or beast, not even my own mother. But as the Boswell of my spiritual Odyssey, you're entitled to the naked truth. I admit that as a non-communist I shouldn't do it, shouldn't sign my name to all those petitions and manifestoes; and God knows how I've struggled against it—afterwards—in the guilty loneliness of my boudoir. Each time I swear that this is the last time I'll submit to their political advances. But it's no use. The same malign ecstasy overpowers my self-control each time I get in the mail a new communist petition whose wording sounds at all progressive. My hand begins to itch, and the more I reread certain favorite phrases—like Common Man and Exploitation and Dynamic and New and Vital—the more I feel intoxicated and just can't bother reading carefully what it's all about. It's like craving a drug; I just gotta sign."

He paused, trembling and perspiring; took a deep breath; continued more calmly: "And then later, after I've signed, it's such a marvelous feeling to see my name in print everywhere, until I end up, if I'm lucky, with a Profile of me in the New Yorker. Not so easy to get into print nowadays. And people are coming to recognize my name, to know it's a name they can always, as they say, 'count on' for progressive causes. Just think of all the people 8

reading the petitions I sign and saying to themselves—maybe even somebody Real Big like Rockwell Kent—saying: "'This Gaylord Babbitt must be a dashing personality; we always see his name in the thick of it wherever there's a Good Cause/" Being a non-communist and therefore against anti-communists, he totally ignores my questions whenever I ask his superior advice on things that trouble me in Soviet foreign policy. Instead, he abruptly changes the subject and asks in that tone of sarcasm he handles so brilliantly: "Aha, so you've reached the point where you approve of our State Department playing footsie with Franco Spain?"

"Footsie" is his favorite political metaphor. Here is an example of how the great man used it, while pouring his special private mixture of catsup and Worcestershire sauce over his Strasbourg snails. I had just asked him how he knew with such absolute certainty that the Chinese communists were just agrarian reformers with Titoist tendencies. Totally ignoring my question as usual, he asked in turn: "While your precious Chiang fascists were raping prostrate China, what do you think our cookiepushers in striped pants were doing? Don't tell me you don't know that our State Department was playing footsie with the openly conservative Dalai Lama of Tibet."

I asked why he assumed I was defending fascists when I was merely asking him to explain communist policy to me. But I soon repented my naive bourgeois objectivity when he replied: "Yes, but the ultimate logic of merely asking such questions about Russia leads you right up the Franco path. Your questions may not be open Red-baiting, but they're potential Red-baiting. Subjectively, you're actively participating at this very moment in the rape of prostrate Spain."

When I asked him to define 'potential' Red-baiting, he gave me his most masterful answer; the more I think of it, the more I see how true it is: "Even if a fellow does not so much as mention Russia, the instant he introduces ethics and that kind of stuff—instead of economics—as a standard for judging some exciting new Social Experiment, the instant, I say, that he sneaks in ethics, that instant he becomes a potential Red-baiter and war-monger. Because one thing leads to another—that's logic—and once you begin 9

with a medieval moralizing attitude, you'll end up by asking about Soviet forced-labor camps. Not that I approve of them, not for a single second; anybody who says I approve of them is lying. Those kinds of medieval-minded liars, what they lack is ethics."

The word "medieval-minded" is his favorite epithet. In that painful final break with his family, when Babbitt Senior wanted to cover the torn wallpaper with "Whistler's Mother" while Babbitt Junior insisted on a Picasso, the soul-searing cry of Babbitt Junior as he left Zenith forever was: "Why, you're nothing but a boosting, Rotarian, medieval-minded philistine!"

III. "You asked about my pet hates just now," resumed Gaylord, as the waiter clear the dishes. "Name-calling is another of my hates. The irresponsibility of it! Whom will they smear next?"

"Before you know it," I shuddered deliciously, "they'll even call moderate Jeffersonians like Mao a Communist!"

"If that ever happens," panted freedom's sturdy old war-horse, "then nobody is safe in America any more. It's all interconnected; you cannot thus slander away the civil liberties of Mao or Stalin without ending by implication the liberties of every American man, woman, and child. Not that I hold the slightest brief for Stalin or Mao; oh, how I hate them! But their freedom from being Red-baited is your freedom and my freedom and the freedom of your poor, innocent grandchildren: you and you and you and you. Can't you picture our unborn grandchildren being dragged by our Gestapo in front of the Inquisition? I mean, the way they dragged Shirley Temple that time—she was still a baby then, why practically an embryo—in front of the Committee on Un-American Activities."

"But even worse than the witch hunts," I shivered, "are the spy hunts. They call Fuchs a spy, Greenglass a spy, Ethel Rosenberg a spy, Judy Coplon a spy, our Canadian neighbor Sam Carr a spy; in short, anybody who opposes war or believes in academic freedom."

"Those narsty name-callers even call an almost-nearly Mayflower American like Prince Charming Alger Hiss a spy. When they pulled that red herring on us, it showed no American is 10

safe from persecution any more. Next thing you know, some exRed, turned informer, will even call me almost a fellow-traveler or something, doing so for strictly psychopathic reasons, of course. Oh la, those ex-Reds! If there has to be any baiting, then what we liberals love is to bait not Reds but ex-Reds. Anyway, according to the dictionary, witches don't exist. By definition, all witch-hunts hunt the non-existent. That means Fuchs, Coplon, Greenglass, and Hiss never existed. What does not exist, cannot be guilty, so why all the national hysteria?"

"Q.E.D." I intoned piously. "But why stop there? Our kind of civil liberties must assume that no Communists at all exist, no Red Army exists, no Red atom bomb exists. Never deign to mention such mirages in your editorials or conversation. Mention only the real danger: the Pentagon dictatorship right at home."

"You're learning from me fast," beamed my mentor. "Whatever spoils our argument, doesn't exist. That's the beauty of an immortal book, called Witch Hunt, by Carey McWilliams of The Nation. It proves its case against the witch-hunters by never once even mentioning the names Hiss, Fuchs, or Stalin. Look up those three names in the index, and you won't even find them there.

Being witches, they don't exist, and whoever mentions or even thinks of names like Stalin is liysterical.' Books and magazines like that are written on the tacit assumption that Joe McCarthy is President of the U.S.A., without a single voice opposing him except on the far left. We Gaylord Babbitts encourage and need the McCarthys. Their actions prove the correctness of our indictment of anti-communism. Without them we'd be lost. What ammunition would we have left if, God forbid, McCarthy were beaten for re-election? Our only solution is to save him."

"What a dandy solution," I chuckled, "for saving the psychological need of liberals to be forever aghast at some right-wing menace inside America. But since you use the label 'fascist' against practically everybody, I wonder why you protested furiously against applying it to an American poet who during the war preached Nazi pogroms and mutiny to American troops over Mussolini's radio?"

"Two reasons. First: that particular poetry-cult in my career as a beauty-lover means the same kind of advancement that buttering up the Four Hundred means in my wife's social career.

11

Second: that particular literary genius actually supported the Italian political party that openly called itself fascist. And my policy is never to use that word "fascist" for actual fascist parties.

I use it only for those skulking conservatives who refuse to admit they're fascists; that is, for anybody whose politics I don't like.

Take members of the Republican party, for example. Call any ordinary Republican a fascist, and you'll never hear me protest that you're using language loosely. But as soon as you call a fascist a fascist, I get my fighting dander up; that's smearing, that's guilt by association, just like calling a communist a communist."

"Your answer satisfies me completely," I recited reverently.

"And since you are supplying me with the right thunderbolts to strike down our detractors, tell me what to answer when friends heckle me about the Soviet peasants or about Hiss and Chambers. How rebut such wild charges?"

"Well, even if poor Alger is just a teeny-weeny bit guilty of treason (and how can he be?—somebody so successful, handsome, fashionable), yet our duty is to keep silent as clams about Hiss. Concentrate exclusively on inventing Freudian explanations for Whittaker Chambers. There's no surer way to become a social leper in Respectable Circles than to say a good word for a pariah like Chambers. Self-interest is the first law of modern emancipated man. When a fellow gives up a good magazine job and his good name merely to serve a rotten capitalist fraud like the United States of America and merely because some itsybitsy treason is going on, his motive must be pathological. Because obviously there are no motives outside Freud or Marx.

Honor? Patriotism? Freedom? It's all a gyp!"

"But what about those peasants? The hecklers and spoil-sports say that ten million were deliberately starved to death."

"According to my own, more objective research, the great Five Year Plan only killed five million. That proves you can only believe one half of what the kept press says against Russia. Seeing it's not ten million but a mere handful of five million, you can ask the hecklers: why should a wilful handful stand in the way of the blueprints of progress? Anyway, it's chauvinism to worry about mere physical assassination abroad when something far worse, namely character assassination, is raging in America.

Starvation is not actually so bad, especially for insensitive ox-like 12

creatures like peasants; after the first three weeks the stomach shrinks from pain, and then the agony gets gradually less. The real pain is character assassination. Five million stomach-pangs are nothing compared with the anxiety a single sensitive intellectual feels under an ordeal-by-slander."

"You mean there's two kinds of pain, G.B.?"

"Naturally. Most peasants are reactionaries anyway, believing in stuff like God and family and individualism. If they cling with vicious kulak stubbornness to such notions, there's nothing left but rolling over them with the imperial impersonal steamroller of social engineering. Those hicks can't feel pain the way a New York intellectual can, who's been made super-wincing by reading Kahlil Gibran and visiting 57th Street art galleries, something no peasant would ever do. Marx conceded that peasants are an inferior kind of people because they just won't revolt when you tell them to. Regard those five million not as humans but as plow animals. Why gee whiz, a peasant or some thickskinned, bigoted conservative can no more feel real pain than do the earthworms I like to squash with my heels at my country club every time I'm annoyed by losing a point at golf."

At this point an ugly-looking cripple at the next table, some kind of Russian or Baltic refugee who had long been lowering the bon ton of our bistro, limped out rapidly with his hand over his mouth, as if he were throwing up. This taught him a good lesson against eavesdropping, I'll bet!

IV. For future historians of the 1930's and '40s, I must define further what Gaylord Babbitt meant during those years by being "non-Communist." It meant that he boycotted all Party-members personally, but hobnobbed socially as much as possible with rich, fashionable, fellow-traveler sympathizers, was "thrilled to meet" the Dean of Canterbury, paid lavishly for tickets to hear and applaud every visiting Fadeyev. Yet when some poor Alabama Negro is in trouble, being framed up by local police and accused quite erroneously of being a "Red" by Kuklux demagogues, then G.B. will not contribute a penny of what he gives to banquets for Soviet-American Friendship. In one such case he sternly ordered the Negro not to write him letters appealing for a bail fund "lest it get me into hot water."

13

"I'm an Independent Liberal," G.B. explained to me logically and convincingly about this. "No sir, it's no man's Party Line for Gaylord Babbitt—especially when it might prejudice the FBI against me and prevent me from getting an important job as morale-builder in Washington in case of World War III. During World War II, I kept up soldier morale by writing—for their Know Your Allies Information-Series—my morale-building pamphlet, 'I SALUTE YOU, ANA PAUKER!' And listen to my human-interest subtitle: 'An Epic of Jeffersonian Agrarian Reform under the Pin-Up Girl of the Carpathians.' Well, why can't I do the same kind of inspiration of the young in the next world war? And the next and the next. I can already recite how I'd begin my inspiration leaflet for Our Boys in Siberia: "Dear G.I.s Sitting here in Washington this winter and suffering silently (like a loyal soldier of the pen) from these overheated radiators, I ask myself: of what does the name of this capital city remind me? Washington? Washington? It sounds so familiar.

"Suddenly I know! It reminds me of that great Independent Liberal who was our first president and derived his name from the name of this city. George Washington! Our martyr president! What a privilege to be able today to share George Washington's sacred ordeal, by camping out there in Siberia. You, and you alone, can know what the Father of Our Country felt like during that First Hard Winter that tried men's souls in the snows of Valley Forge."

As you can see from this, G.B.'s attitude toward Stalinism is undergoing a rapid and still inconsistent flux. This is in prudent accord with what Hegel calls the Weltgeist, meaning the local Spirit of the Moment. That is why the 1950s and Korea are the end of an epoch. Babbitt's sympathies with labor are stronger than ever, so long as it is a question of attending a testimonial dinner in tuxedos for a popular labor leader at $50 a plate. But his sympathy with labor leaders now suddenly ceases when they get into any danger. This had always been true of democratic, anti-Stalinist leaders, whom he accused of "Trotskyite sapping of our unity with the Soviet Union." But in 1950, the turningpoint year, he turned for the first time against the eleven Stalinists who had been convicted under Judge Medina in 1949: 14

"Just because I sign all those petitions for Soviet friendship that I never even read before signing, they ask me to 'stand by* them in their Tiour of trial.' It was different standing by them in the easy pre-Korea '30s, in the days of Loyalist Spain. Why shucks, all the smart boys I admire were doing it then. You should've seen all the debutantes who came to my charity ball for sending a platinum corset to La Passionaria.

"But now," he sounded plaintiff and hurt and bewildered, "everything's suddenly different. No more liberal solidarity. And boy, am I getting cold feet! Gotta think of my own skin occasionally; can't be crusading for oppressed humanity all the time.

Don't tell anybody yet, but I can switch from the toiling-humanity bandwagon of the '30s to the McCormick-McCarthy Jeep of the '50s just as quickly as I switched from intervention to isolationism the day of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Mind you, I'm not saying I'll do that necessarily; we Babbitts first wait and see, to make triply sure which way Progress is really marching in the 1950s. Meanwhile, as my forthcoming liberal novel will show you, I'm marking time: like a dying swan barking up the wrong tree in a final ave atque vale to destiny before the changing of the guard."

"Sometimes, Gaylord, you're just too idealistic to live," I marveled, with eyes not utterly untouched by the tell-tale moisture of a strange man in presence of the sublime. "That's what the ancients called 'selfless love'; the way you force yourself to change your line in order to serve the Progress of mankind. Every change in your politics is like a new act in some cosmic Greek tragedy."

"Of course," resumed G.B., "I'm always 100% on the side of revolutionists; that's the liberal thing to be; but I draw the line at—well, at subversiveness. No Babbitt—and here for once dad and I agree—no Babbitt ever wastes sympathy on anybody who resists the police. That goes for America if times should change, just as for the good old Gay-Pay-whatcha-call-it in Russia."

"But then what rocklike principle can you give us through the crisis?"

"Liberty!" boomed Babbitt reassuringly. "The main thing is to be always in the front ranks of martyrs of liberty. How you define liberty is of secondary importance; that depends on what part of the country you live in. If I lived down South, I would 15

have signed my name to the Dixiecrat Party petitions and would define liberty as State Rights. Similarly in New York I signed petitions in 1948 to put the Wallace Party on the ballot. My point is: real integrity in politics-(and I'm a glutton for integrity)—depends on having an Open Mind and adjusting it 100£ to your neighbors. That's what I call sympathizing with the aspirations of the toiling masses amongst whom you dwell."

"Which mass-aspiration is it best for a live-wire writer to tie up with in this eastern part of the country?" I asked.

'If you've really got your ear to the ground in New York, then you'll agree with me that anti-bigotry is still the big thing. Moreover, that's the one slogan of our former Popular Front days that is still negotiable currency. This leads up to the subject of my movie scenario—I mean, novel, being published next Monday, Now don't confuse me with the old-fashioned, soft kind of liberal who also fights bigotry. He does it merely for some sissy purpose like compassion and understanding and reform. My novel wastes no time on that old stuff. My aim is not compassion or reform but to turn a quick dollar by commercializing, as a hard-headed salesmanship techique, the soft-headed reforming or compassionate impulses of the public. I got the idea for cashing in on this when I read the ads of a big commercial publisher playing up, as a book-selling technique, something called 'Brotherhood Week.' Playing skilfully on the liberal conscience of modern readers, the ad told them to celebrate Brotherhood Week not by acting for humane reforms but by spending money for lurid pulp-novels on racial minorities, alcoholics, excitingly tortured lunatics, and whatever new kind of misery we creative artists can commercialize next."

"The highest idealism is a practical idealism," I nodded sympathetically, "which knows its dollars and cents. The lofty, quixotic head of you is ever soaring to the clouds, hitching its wagon to following the gleam, but those big earthy feet of you remain hard-headed on the solid ground. Like all geniuses, your mens sana remains the Weltschmerz in your sano corpore."

"My novel will be my way of getting into the anti-bigotry busness on the ground floor and cleaning up in four ways. Yes, four ways; that's because of my original plot. Promise not to give the plot away before the day of publication; it'll make novelists like Charles Jackson burst with envy. Mere one-way tolerance is 16

small-time stuff, like using an electric shaver with only one head.

My book has race tolerance, sex tolerance, it's got everything.

But wait, don't go away, just sit still and listen."

"I'm all ears," I protested, goggle-eyed with suspense. "Tell me the title. Tell me the plot. I won't tell a soul."

"The title of my novel is: MUST SUCH THINGS BE? That's indignation, get it? There's money in any kind of tolerance; but four-way anti-bigotry protection—like a four-headed Remington dry shaver—will really hit the jackpot. Now, who are the four most important underdogs in current movies and fiction? You know the answer: it's Negroes, homosexuals, alcoholics, and the People of Israel. I hit upon the formula when I heard somebody remark that, since people buy books about Lincoln, doctors, and dogs, a sure best-seller must be called Lincoln's Doctors Dog. Let's shift this formula to Lincoln's Doctor's Underdog. Give the public a four-way underdog for the price of one, and the book writes itself. The inner voice of my Muse tells me I've produced the Great American Novel that we all dream of in secret.

"My fearlessly frank psychological novel has a hero who suffers from feeling somehow alienated from society because he is a very, very sensitive homosexual Negro of Hebrew religion, afflicted with alcoholism caused by his name not being included in the New York Social Register. His nervous breakdown, caused by the Social Register trauma, will give Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer a chance for a thrilling insane-asylum sequence, where the brutal White Protestant heterosexual guards torture my hero by telling him he doesn't *belong\" "Think only what the movie and television rights will be," I panted. "A more stupendous picture than Pinky, Gentleman's Agreement, Snake Pit, and Lost Week End put together. How proud I am to be allowed to talk with you, almost like an equal."

"Patience, while I get back to the main story. The hero's lawyer, who is also a psychoanalyst and a crusader against Victorian Puritanism, will be played by Paul Muni. Brandishing aloft the guilty volume of the Social Register, Paul Muni swears to 'fight this thing through every court in the land till the American people undo this wrong.' Meanwhile, his idealistic client becomes a national hero by writing a humanitarian muck-raking pamphlet on the U. S. Navy, demanding that the oppressed sailors be allowed more nights of shore-leave in New York. In order 17

to reward his achieving this forward-looking reform for the toilers of the sea, the Social Register tycoons repent and put his name at the very head of their book. Like the name Abou Ben Adhem heading the list. This happy denouement at once cures his alcoholism and his sense of not belonging. There's psychology for you!

"The scenario—I mean, the novel—ends with the hero (now appointed Scout Master in the most socially elite section of New York) holding what he calls a 'Tolerance Jamboree/ In 'Ballad for Americans' fashion, the hero sings an appeal for religious, racial, and sexual tolerance. His audience consists of cheering Eagle Scouts, who in wholesome young voices chorus, "Lynch them, string 'em up!' each time he assails "those sinister groups who look as if they might secretly be harboring intolerant thoughts.' On the boy scout refrain of 'Lynch them,' the curtain falls—I mean, the novel ends."

"Your every word purges me of pity and terror," I spluttered, moved to the quick. "You mince no words in your unmasking of social shams. I reel aghast at your passionate indictment of what man has made of man. Yet you inspire me with your battlecry on behalf of the downtrodden."

"Battlecry—there's the right phrase for Your Truly," bantered Babbitt in that charming, whimsical way of his. "Not for nothing did they call me 'Battling Babbitt' at college when I founded the Social Conscience Powwow Parlor in in an old, abandoned N.A.M. hall after it got foreclosed on in 1929. I'm a strongchinned crusader for the Welfare State, who believes in pushing around all people who believe in pushing people around."

"What will Babbitt Senior think of your novel, G.B.?"

"It's this kind of urge for higher things that my dad was never able to understand in me. Read this letter that just arrived from the old boy, accompanying the monthly check on which I'm unfortunately still entirely dependent. Nothing confidential; go ahead and read it. It proves my point that he doesn't see the difference between him and me. Doesn't see that I'm the Creative Type, just an intellectual Don Quixote forever following the Gleam."

While my friend chatted in slow precise French with the headwaiter, saying, "Moi, je suis un gourmet, pas un gourmand; tres 18

au courant avec le pate de foie gras," I skimmed the closing lines of the letter from Babbitt Senior: "Though I stayed behind in Zenith and you left for Manhattan, though I still drink my Bourbon in *Ye Chummy Steak House' while you sip absinthe in 'Cafe Chic,' we're not so different as you like to think. Son, you're just a chip off the ole block."

Reprinted from: The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals: Babbitt Jr. Vs. The Rediscovery of Values. The Beacon Press, Boston, 1953.

NO SAY IT NOT Vivian Newman

No say it not The whisper of the linnet Echoes the distant trees The strange wind of night.

Time the minstrel Unsings the sepulchre, And death, its fool.

Not here In the echoing embrace Of earth's warm streams.

Here the lamb Sleeps. I know sun Warm about his feet.

The grass, wild pasture, On its green shadowed hill, Encasing earth's sweet pearl Reweaves the sphere, No say it not.

19

THE STORY OF A LADY

By D. Preston Boone

]Vf RS. NORMAN HARTWICK, Beatrice Hartwick was her name. And at the moment she felt very silly, for fear that the neighbors would see her and find her a ridiculous sight, walking around alone in her front yard carrying a lot of fishing rods and wearing waders.

She didn't really mind about the Maynards seeing her, because they were very good friends of hers. And the Birnbaums she just didn't give a damn about. They were kikes, anyway, and none of the decent people in Wilton hardly ever spoke to them, ever since Harry Birnbaum had had the gall to eat at Sally Ufford's Inn with a NEGRO. It was a good thing for the community that Sally Ufford had had enough sense to put a screen around the two of them so the decent, self-respecting people in the place could eat without getting sick on the spot. But, my God, if the Barclays saw her! They had just moved to Wilton and there was no telling what they would think if they saw their neighbor, whom they scarcely knew, walking around in the driveway in THAT getup. So, as Mrs. Hartwick was packing the car and running back and forth between the car and the house, she tried to keep as close to the house as possible, so the Barclays wouldn't see her.

After getting it all packed, she got into the car and started to pull out of the driveway. But Mrs. Hartwick found it most difficult to drive with the waders on. It annoyed her. She pulled the waders off inside the car. She didn't do it outside for fear of making a spectacle of herself to passers-by. She wished that Norman was still alive, for he would have packed the car and driven and she could have put her waders on before leaving.

But she forgot that Norman wasn't there and that she would have to do the driving, so she put them on anyway, then had to take them off again. The whole business was a great inconvenience.

While she was driving to the stream, she wished that Norman 20

was with her. It had always been so much fun when they had gone on fishing trips together, even when it was only for a day.

But still, it was probably a good thing that he had gone instead of her. No telling what the poor boy would have done without her. He needed her so, and he didn't even know it. Norman was wonderful. A perfect gentleman all the way through. He was a little annoying, perhaps, sometimes when he was tight, but he was above all a gentleman. She remembered when that sonofabitch Howard Moncrief had tried to get fresh with her one night at the Wilton Club. Norman had handled it so well. Any other man would have hit him, but Norman just took him by the sleeve and told him in plain and simple terms that this was a club for DECENT people and that DECENT people just didn't play around with other men's wives. And to this day, Howard Moncrief had never made another pass at her.

If Norman were still alive, he would be fishing with her, and taking her to parties, and going to bed with her. She used to wake up in the middle of the night groping for him in the bed.

He used to compare her technique with that of other women, sometimes, and that annoyed her. But that wasn't Norman's fault. The Army had done that to him. If it hadn't been for the Army, Norman would never have LOOKED at another woman.

But no telling what a fellow will do, especially a boy like Norman, when he thinks that each leave will be his last. But he only did that when he was a little tight, and MOST men will act a LITTLE strange when they're tight.

She managed to drive Norman from her thoughts long enough to decide that the gray, overcast sky meant that the trout would be rising today. She watched for the turn-off to the stream. Ah, Maisie Kennedy's house, the last one before the turn-off. Maisie always was a howl. A perfect howl. Telling that joke the other day at the Garden Club about the French woman who held her liquor by the ears. The joke would have been just AWFUL, coming from anyone else, but Maisie had a way with jokes and because she was a REAL lady she could get away with PRACtically anything.

Mrs. Hartwick laughed and turned the car into the dirt road.

She parked the car as near to the stream as she could get it.

She put on her waders outside of the car and got out the tackle.

She stuffed the books of flies into the pockets of her leather 21

jacket and picked up the rod and landing net. She knew that she looked just ridiculous waddling across the field carrying all that stuff and in that ridiculous getup. But no one would recognize her, she was sure of that. With some difficulty, Mrs. Hartwick prepared the rod, reel, and fly. She wished that Norman had been there to help her, he never got all balled up with the line, the way she was doing.

She didn't have much luck. It was so hard to set the fly on the water just right. After an hour of unsuccessful casting, she wondered why she had come out at all that day. But it was a good day for fishing and there was nothing else to do. She looked around at the woods and stream and felt very lonely. She wondered just how Norman had stood it, being out there in the woods all alone, before he taught her how to fish. The poor boy must have gone absolutely crazy with loneliness. IMAGINE having no one to talk to. She looked around the woods. It was all so spooky. Two squirrels scrambled through the underbrush and made her start. Then she felt a sudden tug on her line and heard the reel sing. Without thinking, she yelled, "Strike!" expecting someone to be there.

But she didn't think about it, she just went on playing the fish. The fish didn't break water, and that annoyed her. After all, that's half the fun. It's just no fun at all when you don't know what you're going to pull up. But this one was really a fighter, he was bound to be over a pound. She had most of her line in.

The fish darted by her. She turned to her right and said, "Well land the damn thing, will you?"

But then Mrs. Hartwick remembered that she was alone, felt awfully silly, talking to herself when there wasn't anyone there.

She took the landing net from her belt and landed the fish. Oh, Norman would have been so proud. It was a good pound and a half. She had landed it all by herself, too!

Mrs. Hartwick suddenly felt very tired and wanted to be back in the car. She couldn't stand up in the stream all day, the way she used to. The fish suddenly flipped in the net, but she swung the net, hitting the fish on a nearby rock, killing it. That's the way Norman had always done it. She felt very, very proud.

She waded out of the stream with the rod in one hand and the net in the other, and waddled back across the field to her car.

She put the net in the front seat and started to take the rod 22

apart, but oh, how silly, she had forgotten to take the fly out of the fish's mouth and reel in the line. She did not want to touch the slimy fish, so she simply cut the line and took the rod apart. That was much easier, anyway. Having packed everything, Mrs. Hartwick took off her waders, got into the car and drove back.

When she got out of the dirt road, she looked down at the fish. It was very slimy and unattractive. She just didn't know how she could eat it. It was a problem, now that she had gone to all that trouble to catch it. Up the road, she suddenly spied the Cartwright house. Then it occurred to her, she would give the fish to Jane Cartwright. She and Norman had always given the Cartwrights something they had caught when they returned from a trip, for they were very good friends. Norman used to play poker with Henry Cartwright when they were first married, but she decided that it was too expensive a habit for a married man and put an end to it. After all, he sometimes lost as much as ten dollars in one evening! What do men see in poker, anyway? And what would poor Norman have done without a soothing and settling influence?

She pulled into the driveway and up in front of the great, sprawling Cartwright mansion. She was very glad that there were no houses near. She looked a wreck and God knows what a stranger would think. She took a hankie from her pocket and wrapped it around the fish's tail and picked it out of the net. She mounted the stairs and rang the bell. Footsteps. Jane would be so pleased! A butler answered the door. My GOD. He had hair exactly like Norman's. No, it couldn't be. But it was. That little wave up near the front. Se said something which she didn't hear, she just went on admiring his wonderful hair. Finally, practically shouting, he said "What do you want?"

"Oh . . . Oh. You startled me. . . . Is Mrs. Cartwright in?"

"I'm terribly sorry, but the service entrance is at the rear."

"WHAT?" "I SAID that the service entrance is at the rear."

Why the nerve of that AWFUL man. BEATRICE Hartwick go to the service entrance. How just plain god damned inSULting! She sputtered a minute, trying to do something. SERVICE entrance.

23

Mrs. Hartwick drew her hand back and hit the butler across the face with the fish and said, "You sonofabitch, don't you know a lady when you see one?"

Not knowing what to do, she dropped the fish and scuttled back to the car. She drove off, scattering the bluestone of the driveway behind her.

ALL MY SINGING Judith Bishop

There is so much That gleams and leaps, Shadows and sinks Between the comings Of moon and sun.

The trees stand Glowing of some Great joy, Full to the tips of music, Viscous and flowing As the quick sprung blood Of love's bed.

You are these trees, The day warmed stones, The muted sea flow Of all soaked reeds And bird clusters, Sliding in this sway Of quiet water.

You are all my singing Within the world And sky.

24

1

ON CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY

By Eugenio Florit

W H E N JOSE MARTI (1853-1895), the Cuban patriot, wrote from his New York exile in 1893 that "in America there is flowering a new generation which demands gravity in its prose and character in its verse and wants work and reality in its policies and its literature," and later when he referred to "this literary generation that began with studied imitation, and now has attained a laconic and concise elegance and sincere artistic expression, brief but clear-cut, of personal sentiment and frank criollo "opinion," he was making a very accurate evaluation of the literary situation of Spanish America at his time. The fact is that those final years of the nineteen century mark the development in the Spanish speaking world of a phenomenon so important that it has been considered the beginning of our literary coming-of-age: Modernism. In order to understand our contemporary letters —and, incidentally, not only ours of Spanish America but also those of Spain as well — Modernism is the point of departure.

During the three centuries of the Colonial period Spanish America was nourished principally by the literary life and the esthetic schools that flourished in Spain —a process much like that which took place in the northern colonies with respect to England. Then with the beginning of the nineteenth century and the struggles for Independence other elements came. Not only Spanish but also English and French Romanticism exerted a strong influence over us. Travel and communication with the rest of Europe put our men of letters in contact with other ideas that were combined with those emanating from the Peninsula.

It is important to remember that Romanticism in Spain had its own sources as well as English inspiration; the latter having begun about the middle of the eighteenth century with the reading and translation of the works of Edward Young, Thomas Gray,

25

etc. Even so, the two Hispanic worlds, the European and the American, followed parallel courses during the nineteenth century, although, naturally, they were divergent in their political ideas and aspirations. Spain, after the intense flowering of its Romantic literature, centered around the years 1832 to 1850, and after the special and unique cases of the great post-Romantic poets Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (1836-1870) and Rosalia Castro (1837-1885), had descended considerable in the literary scale.

It could only offer a few names of poets, well-known and popular to be sure, but of limited artistic quality. The Spanish genius of the second half of the nineteenth century manifested itself in a particular way in prose — in the novel, in the short story, in the essay —in whose genres there was a genuine renaissance.

In those years of indecision our men of letters began to feel the need to express themselves in a different manner — different, but yet in conformity with the tone in which the other nations of the Western civilized world were expressing themselves.

Again travel, the readings, and the restlessness accomplished the miracle. There began to be felt the influence of French Parnassianism and Symbolism, which enriched the traditional Hispanic essences without stifling them in any way. This is a movement that has been given the name Modernism, a point of view or literary school that occupies a spread of years approximately between 1888 —the date of the publication of the first important book of Ruben Dario, Azul — and the first decade of the present century. Although it begins a few years before, this period corresponds to that of the influence of Symbolism in English poetry as exemplified in Arthur Symons and Yeats and later extended to all contemporary poetry. In the United States this influence of European Symbolism does not appear until after 1910 and, as H. R. Hays observed, "even then in highly modified form through such poets as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore."

These initiatives of renovation came to us in the prose of Marti especially, and, following him, in the prose and poetry of all the forerunners of Modernism: the Mexican Gutierrez Najera (1859-1895), the other Cuban Julian del Casal (1863-1893), in whom Parnassian and Symbolistic themes and forms are combined and integrated; the Colombian Jose Asuncion Silva (18651896), whose most evident foreign inspiration is Poe; and, above 26

all, the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario (1867-1916), the most universal of them all and the poet who had the genius for expressing Modernism in the most accomplished, profound and artistic fashion. It was Dario who brought the new sensibility to Spain with his books and his presence. Spain had been trying in its own way to effect renovation through some poets who were desirous of a change and were experimenting with new forms and tones, for example, Salvador Rueda (1857-1924). Spain received the new literary school with open arms and, modifying it in its turn, gave birth to a poetic world that in the first thirty years of this century can be considered one of the most fecund and brilliant in the literary history of that country.

The seed of Modernism was rapidly sown through all the Spanish speaking nations of America (and to be sure in Brazil as well), there we find a shining group of poets, such as Leopoldo Lugones (Argentina, 1874-1938), Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia, 1872-1933), Guillermo Valencia (Colombia, 18721943), Amado Nervo (Mexico, 1870-1919) and many moreall writers of the highest caliber. But we must not imagine that these poets or others that are not mentioned here formed a school in the limited sense of the word 窶馬ot at all. Each of them in accord with his genius and personality expressed Modernism in his own way, imparting to his poetry certain original elements.

Furthermore, as in the instances of Jose Maria Eguren (Peru, 1875-1942) and Julio Herrera y Reissig, (Uruguay, 1875-1910), they were establishing the foundations of a newer estheticism which was to assert itself toward the end of the first World War. Even Enrique Gonzalez Martinez (1871-1952), the most important of the contemporary Mexican poets, is quite symbolistic in all his work, although because of his attitude against the formal ornamentation in the style of Dario, as expressed in the famous Tuercele el cuello al cisne, he has often been considered a Post-Modernist. At this point might be mentioned John Peale Bishop's very good translation of the above quoted sonnet that begins: Then twist the neck of this elusive swan . . .

Within Post-Modernism, that is between 1905 and 1915, it is necessary to consider the most notable of the Spanish American women poets: Delmira Agustini (Uruguay, 1886-1914), who has so many points of contact with Edna St.Vincent Millay; Alfonsina Storni (Argentina, 1892-1938), Juana de Ibarbourou (Uru27

guay, 1895) and Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889). All of these, even the ones who have outlived their moment as have the last two, breathe the air of that period; but at the same time have great originality in expressing the amorous and even the sexual in a free and sincere manner within an elegant and precise form.

Gabriela Mistral is of course the most americana of them all.

She has managed to free herself from the solely intimate world to concern herself with the entire continent. In her poetry (Nobel Prize, 1946) is present nature, man, the American phenomenom with all its power and all its vigor.

Similar to what happened in the rest of the occidental world during the end of the war 1914-1918, Spanish America received the influence of the European literary schools —many of them of French origin — which tried to create a new sort of literature by cleaning it from sentimentality, formality, and logical frigidity. Those schools which were known in France as Dadaism, in Italy as Futurism and in the United States and England as Imagism, in Spain and Spanish America take difiFerent names, and are called Ultraism and Creationism respectively. Both schools produced a revolution in poetry and in creative art at large. Manifestos were written; numerous periodicals and little reviews appeared; scandalizing speeches were pronounced. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean Hispanic poets put themselves in accord with their foreign colleagues and like them, rejuvenated poetry and prepared it for the more recent and youthful experiments. This was a question of using above all the image, of breaking with the traditional order as to form, of expressing the velocity and inquietude of the times. In order to do this the poets introduced as poetic topics the airplane, the railroad, the electric sign, the automobile — in short, anything that has mobility, agility and speed. This group is well illustrated by the now famous names of Vicente Huidobro (Chile, 1893-1948), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899) and Cesar Vallejo (Peru, 1894-1938). Each, again, was independent of the other and had diverse political and social points of view, but the three were united, along with many others, by the ideal of renovation and contemporariness which was the motto of their generation.

Since 1918 Spanish American poetry has followed many lines of development which, although they often appear mixed and poets classed by the nucleus of their work as belonging frankly 28

to one of them may have nevertheless characteristics of some of the others, may be summed up as follows: In the first place, are the poets with a more universal voice; those who withdraw most insistently from from lo nativo and write in a tone and about themes within the general orbit of the epoch. One should not forget that, as noted by Dudley Fitts, "Dario's influence, whether positive or negative, is apparent in the work of the majority of reputable poets writing today." And to Dario's influence must be added that of the other important poets of the western world such as Juan Ramon Jimenez (Spain, 1881) for example, or T. S. Eliot (United States, 1888), influences present in many of our contemporaries. These Spanish Americans are the poets who because of their culture and sensitivity are more kindred to the Europeans, who have followed most closely the latter's movements and most obviously express the anguish and the problems of contemporary man without abandoning, of course, their particular American way of seeing the world. Some of them like Xavier Villaurrutia (Mexico, 1903-1950) or Emilio Ballagas (Cuba, 1910) are immersed in an interior world with all the complications that a heightened sensitivity creates in their works. Others are more like Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904), in whom this "general" mood is blended with a strong sense of the political and the social, and a tremendous eye for nature. Neruda's last book, Canto general (Mexico, 1950), is one of the most ambitious poetic endeavors ever made in Spanish America with respect to extent and content.

There are other poets in whom the regional produces more influence and amongst them we find several different directions depending on the region to which the poet belongs. It may be, for example, the small-town tone which one finds sometimes in Jacinto Fombona Pachano (Venezuela, 1901-1951); the city tone of Jorge Luis Borges (at first a participant of Spanish Ultraism); the ever new imagery of Jorge Carrera Andrade (Ecuador, 1903); or the more "native" of the poets in those countries where there is a preponderance of the Indian element. This last statement occasions the mention of a movement quite generalized in our America: indigenismo. It is a literary current that transcends school and fashions, foreign influences, or even the "spirit of the times" (aire del tiempo, as Guillermo de Torre put it), and turns for inspiration to its own popular themes, elevating them to the 29

category of a work of art. The particular method for accomplishing this and the success of the effort depend, naturally, on the personality and the poetic awareness of the writer. The results are not always completely satisfactory, but the current must be indicated as one of those in the present panorama of our poetry.

In many of those poets, nevertheless, can be marked certain foreign influences in the matter of form, in particular that of Spain's Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), whose Romancero gitano (1928) has had an enormous repercussion in allthe Hispanic world, especially on certain poets classed as popularistas.

Another current that must be described, akin to the one we have just been discussing since it also expresses the popular, is that poetry known as poesia negra, poesia afroantillana, poesia mulata, etc. This is found in those countries — especially the Antilles — where there is an important percentage of negro blood, and where lo negro as local color, folklore, a social problem or simply a picturesque motif is to be noted daily and in all aspects of national life. Lo negro, in art, began to become fashionable with the studies of Frobenius on Africa, the negre period of Picasso's art and the interest that all this caused in Europe. Thus there began in the Antilles —in Puerto Rico and Cuba mainly — an interest that at first was only what we might term picturesque: the negro, the mulatto —man or woman —as an amusing type, sometimes picaresque, full of the rhythms of his captivating music. For example, the Puerto Rican Luis Pales Matos (1898) gave us a magnificent poem Danza negra which shows how much can be done poetically and rhythmically with Afro-Antillean folklore. It should be remembered, nevertheless, that Pales Matos is white and that as such he was seeing lo negro more as a spectacle or show than as a problem. But it was to be Cuba's good fortune to have among her young poets one, a mulatto, Nicolas Guillen (1904), able to unite a first class genius and an awareness of his race, not in a frivolous or insubstantial manner but rather a profound and serious one. Beginning with a series of little pictures, delicious and seemingly light, called Motivos de son (Habana, 1930), he has increasingly developed in his metier and has become, like Langston Hughes in the United States, the poetic voice of his race. Nicolas Guillen is, aside from all "color," an authentic great poet of universal, very fine, and elegant tone. Interest in the negro has produced a very 30

valuable poetry not only in the Antilles but also in other parts of Spanish America where there is African blood. It is enough to cite the single instance of the Colombian Jorge Artel, a very accomplished example of this kind of poetry.

On the basis of the foregoing it can be seen how poetry in Spanish America has been produced in accord with the circumstances of time and space, without turning its back on the general literary movements of the western world, and yet preserving at the same time a character and an accent of its own. It has been exposed, in a similar way as the poetry of the United States, to the influences from Europe, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Parnassian, Symbolist. Spanish American poetry has managed to combine the last two with the Classical and Medieval Spanish heritage to create a far-reaching movement with definitive consequences for all Hispanic poetry: Modernism.

In the present, that is to say, since the first World War, it has recognized, tried and accomplished the most daring experiments within the so-called Vanguardism, Surrealism, and other related "-isms." But — lest we forget — all this has been done in the process on conditioning its poetic expression to the characteristics of its nature and its men, and maintaining at every moment, from the first examples in the sixteenth century to the present, its very peculiar own accent, worthy of being read and studied by scholars and students belonging to other cultures.

31

ssss

IN THE FOREST I WALK Vivian Newman

I am what I am.

I know neither path I'm going Caring less for matter More for sound.

In the forest I walk Among lifting trees that seek Questioning not beyond.

Only the words I choose, In the forest I walk A cold shadow in my steps Caring not what stones I stumble on But what are thrown.

WAITING M. M. Daly To scoop sea-water in a silver shell And clamor careless on the rocks.

To listen with the heart for sounds, Wind-sprung in night.

To call and hear no echo.

Where dark dies, but a timid sun Trailing thin mist across the sky.

To seek, sick-eyed, in the storm For out Where Time is keeper of the light.

32

THE ROCK

By Vurrell Yentzen

rocks on the beach, some sharp enough to make clean cuts. The bones of the trees the waves had cast were littered here. Paul sighed, watching a tiny crab which sulked in a pool of tears the weeping sea had left. And his lips moved as he reheased again what he must tell his wife Alzade.

He looked at her with pity, lying there on the blanket beside him, swollen and grotesque from the child that was heavy within her. . . . I spoke to Bruce this morning and we looked at the X-rays he took yesterday while you were in Pt. Arthur . . . what can I say? . . . the child that is dreaming within you has floated out of normal delivery position because it is malformed . . . it's a hydrocephalic, Baby . . . it will not live . . .

She grunted softly as she mopped at the sweat that glazed her flesh. The brownness of her skin was without erotic appeal, he mused as nakedness in itself has no appeal . . . a brown, solid coolness, Alzade was and even as Veeda had been . . .

It was ironic to think how serene and contented he had felt now that he had finished interning and settled down to practicing in Pt. Arthur, Texas. There was much in Pt. Arthur which reminded him of Louisiana; French was heard more frequently than English on the streets. And hearing was like feeling pleasure without pain . . .

Somewhere the shouts of children playing came, but he did not turn his head to listen. . . . how would you tell her that . . . how could he say bluntly . . . Alzade, this child kicking within you, dreaming warm and contented, is not going to live . . .this pitiful, little animal, your son and my son, awaits birth to find death . . .

He sighed again, feeling all this tenderness for women involved in fertility . . . always he felt hurt somehow when a woman came in, annoyed, irritated, even sometime cursing that she was pregTHERE WERE

33

n a n t . . . he wondered sometimes if it were possible for the child feeding within the dark womb to perceive that he was unwanted . . . but then, of course . . . that was impossible.

He could see her press her hand suddenly against her stomach as if she would quiet the child that had moved within her. Paul put out his hand to feel the solidness and the enormousness that her pregnancy gave her. With pity, he touched her, ready then to tell her.

She turned her head sharply. "For Christ's sake! Stop pawing at me. God! It's hot." it had been hot, too, in the Philippines when Lester and he had landed on Samar the fifth day of the Battle for Leyte Gulf to pick out a spot for the epidemiology team. The PT base was on the side of a steep hill. Water from frequent showers during the last days had drained to the new road, bogging it, until no jeep would pass. But that was unimportant; there was no stretch more than three hundred feet where a jeep could travel. And they walked around the base area, the mud sucking at their feet.

A sailor said Monta was the Chief Master of Arms and made tent platform assignments. Bogging through the mud, they found Monta's tent on the hillside. Paul called and, presently, a brute appeared at the edge of the platform over their heads, completely naked except for muddy boots. To Paul, he was obscene, man was naked enough when caught unexpectedly, but a view from below was shocking in its strangeness.

It embarrassed Lester and he reddened, but he blushed easily; He was still young emotionally.

"Take the three tents on the far side," Monta said, pointing to the left after Paul had explained what they needed.

When they left him, Lester said, "That was revolting."

"Perhaps we caught him unaware, say sleeping or changing clothes," Paul said, ready to excuse him.

"With rubber boots? Nonsense."

Yet the explanation was simple. Later, when Paul knew Monta better, he reminded him of the incident. And Monta grinned, saying he had with him only the clothes he wore. He had slipped in the mud, so he had washed his clothes and was waiting for them to dry.

But washing hadn't been a problem for Paul after the first few days. Veeda came to the tent begging for washing. Out of pity 34

?•'

•

II

for her poverty—she was barefooted and was wearing a dress made of a coarsely woven fabric dyed a dull brown—he had hunted up some dirty clothes to give her. He had felt this immense dignity within her even then. She was not asking for favors; she was asking for work.

There was a clean, animal look about her which animated her plainness until, at times, he thought her beautiful. But then he guessed he never saw her distinctly. Even now, he couldn't remember her clearly, as if she were some intangible vision. He remembered more those kindnesses and the smile that showed her white teeth. And more than anything else—the solidity within her.

There were both solid women—Veeda and Alzade. Sometimes he had thought he would tell Alzade about Veeda, but she would never understand. She would exclaim, "How revolting! Really, Paul, can't you keep those things to yourself."

He looked again to the rock.

Seeing his glance, Alzade said, "Paul, get the portable out of the car." She sighed heavily from her discomfort. "I suppose I should go in, but it's so warm and comfortable here."

When he brought the portable radio to her, she found some music. He stretched out on the blanket again and listened casually, studying the rock on the beach.

How was he going to tell her?

He dreaded telling her ,knowing her unhappiness would be his unhappiness. It was as if he found in all these pregnancies a chain, linking one generation to another . . . a mystery and a hope which he clung to, almost desperately, finding in them some faith which explained the reason for man's existence . . . and sometime he felt that unless he could rid himself of the emotional attachment he felt for each of these pregnancies, he should give up his profession. But he gave up all of this now to find . . . what? What frightened him? Because he could not believe in a life after death, he must find here a mode of living which would give him satisfaction . . .

Like he thought once he had found with Veeda.

Cobayen . . . and it seemed the memories he remembered most were fragments, like white bones from the trees out of the sea . . . the white lilies in the field he crossed . . . he could recall how sweet the fragrance, almost overpowering when he walked 35

through them . . . and after that, the rough old rice fields with the caraboo wallows, where sometimes an old pig of a cow wallowed with her calf, muddily caked . . . their hides rough and cracked . . .

Over the small streams where the pathway was an old rotten log and sometimes, he didn't make it and stepped off into the stagnant water, knee deep, and on through the village and the smoke of fires where meals cooked or clothes boiled.

And always the coconut fronds overhead . . .

Everything just a little sad . . . like a quiet interlude in music, and on through to Veeda's shack to stretch out on the splitbamboo floor while she fried a tough little cockerel in coconut butter and cooked unpolished rice.

And later, eating with his fingers, relishing food because he was hungry, and going down to the stream in the bushes to urinate because there wasn't an outhouse—these people didn't know or care about sanitation, except what he taught Veeda and insisted that she tell her neighbors.

There was always the laughter in the dusk of the houses. Her teeth was white and strong and when she carried the child, it was carried high. He loved to see her walk, because the dignity now was heightened.

She was a trader, that woman!

From the clothes and the money he gave her she was building security for herself and her coming child. When he would lie on the bamboo floor, listening to her voice when the women would gather in the first dark, she talking and laughing in Visayen which sounded so musical, like French, almost the nostalgia became too much.

He would be there in his trunks, barefooted, while they, aware and yet not aware of him, gossiped like the women at home. And sometimes when he would be filled with the sickness for home, he would tell of the States and Veeda would interpret for him, proud of her thin knowledge of English.

Somehow the stories were always unbelievable, like the time he tried to explain snow and they were not aware of coldness, dullness perhaps. How could he give the impression of a coldness they never felt? Yet they had tried to understand. They listened intently to him when he spoke and to Veeda when she explained. But then it didn't matter. It was a tale of a wonderful 36

land where everybody was rich. And he would tell Veeda it was not that; it was not that at all.

He would ask, what is a house but a place to keep the rain from your head! And what is food, but something to feed our bodies? And bathrooms, which she couldn't visualize, in fact, said were unimportant; no one in the village had one.

How could she want what she didn't know?

She had been more interested in the small stove he had made for her from the five gallon tin so she could build her little fire in it for cooking. The women had come and admired. He had been forced to find many flour tins so that they, too could have these little stoves.

And more, too, he did.

He brought medicine, especially atabrine and aspirin. Veeda always said she wanted medicine. And he would lecture to her, telling her what she must explain to her people. But he wondered sometimes if she hadn't sold the medicine instead of giving it.

When he knew the child was coming, he told Veeda he would deliver it. She must send for him at the first sign of labor; he didn't want this child delivered by a native midwife.

Planning, then, that he would deliver her although he was only a pharmacist's mate at the time, he made up the surgical packs and sterilized them in the autoclave in the lab. Methodically he stole the instruments he would need. Lester, seeing him, said, "My God, what do you plan to do? Move a hospital to that shack?"

After packing the surgical packs in a small box, he walked to Veeda's shack and said to her, "I've tied this box securely.

You must not open. When you will give birth, you will send for me and I will be here and need this."

And she put the box away carefully in the bottom of the sea chest that held some of his clothes.

But for all his planning Veeda delivered the child without him.

Lester, who had been out on a larval survey, came to him, saying, "Veeda has her baby. You lucky dog! It's very white."

He had gone to see her immediately. She kept the baby in a hammock in one corner. Heavy netting and blankets darkened the corner to keep away the flies. Until his navel was healed, she explained.

"Damn it, Veeda," he said. "Why didn't you send for me?"

37

"It is old Filipino custom a woman gives birth in her way," she said meekly. "I will bring you the son."

Almost dismayingly came the vision of childbirth in the Philippines . . . the woman in labor crouching from the increasing pains of the rhymthic contractions, the midwife kneeling behind her, massaging and pressing the bulging stomach, until the child is dropped into a layer of wood ashes which experience has taught have some antiseptic value. The eyes and throat of the child are cleared of mucus, but the white ashes, clinging hke powder, sterilizing man's entry into primitive society, remains protectively for the first week . . .

This, he wanted to avoid with Veeda; he had wanted to bring some of the refinements that man had developed in childbirth.

Veeda brought the child to him, wrapped securely in cloth.

"I must see what you've done with him." Laying the baby on the floor, he unwrapped him.

"See, we have tied with the rattan," she said, pointing to his navel.

"There isn't much to be done now," he said, reluctantly. "Get me the package I brought you."

And when he opened it, he painted the navel with merthiolate.

"Now look," he said. "This is a belly band." She repeated his words after him. "You must keep him tied Hke this for a few days." She watched carefully. And more he told her, knowing that it was somehow futile. Then, she wrapped up the child and returned it to the hammock in the corner. "You shouldn't be stirring around so much either," he said. "You must rest."

She looked surprised. "I do not feel sick," she said with dignity.

He didn't live in big chunks of experience in the Philippines . . . it was like music in a low key, tearing at his heart and his compassion . . . when he would help these people he was taken by the futility of the help; it was a temporary respite . . . when he was gone, they would return to their worms and their fevers and their diarrheas and their infant mortality and their superstitions.

"We must give him a name," Veeda said. He named several possible names, but she shook her head. Finally he said, "Let's call him Norman."

She was taken with the sound of the name although she had never heard it before. "Where comes this name?" she asked.

38

"It's in the family. It's my father's name."

It pleased her. "We name him Norman. Write on a paper so I can take the priest to baptize. Soon I go to Tenoquin and pray to the gods."

He smiled at her indulgently, watching little Norman nurse at her ample breasts. "I'm going to send you to the States," he said.

It alarmed her. "I do not want to go to America."

"But you will be happy there. I will teach you the many customs."

"In America they will not like me. I do not want to go where they do not like the black people."

He was disturbed. "Veeda! Where have you heard this?"

"The black Americans they come to the village and force some girls and they say, I n America, Filipinos, too, are black.' I do not want to go where I am black. I do not like this."

"Veeda!" He was angry now. "Has anyone tried to harm you."

"No." Then she laughed. "I take the knife and say, 'Go way.

I do not like. I will cut.' And they laugh and do not touch. Maybe because they see I am big with child."

"You must go to the States," he insisted. "I wish I could go back with you now. But I have orders for China duty. But my family will take care of you until I return. You will like it in Louisiana."

She was silent for several minutes. "I do not like this. I will stay. I have made much already with the clothes and the goods and the money you give me. I make trade. See? We have boat already from Catabologen to Tacloben. Soon we have two boats.

You must come to Catabologen. I have there one house and many coconut trees."

"But, Veeda. In the States I can do so much more. Here there is so little for my training. Besides I must learn to become a doctor. You must come to the States with me and we will have there, too, a big house. And we will make of this son a big man."

He looked at the child and she, seeing his glance, hugged Norman protectively.

She would not listen.

And when he returned, she was gone.

Where? No one could or would tell him. She had left, the natives said vaguely.

39

Lester Teller helped Paul wrangle two weeks leave and delay in orders from the base commander. Paul managed to get to Catabologen on a native craft, but he could not find Veeda there.

Hopefully, he waited for her, waiting as long as he could, thinking even of deserting. But he returned to the base, to China and later to the States, promising always he would return to the Philippines and find Veeda.

But two years passed before he was out of the service, two years of writing to the Consulate and working through the Red Cross without a trace. Veeda and his son disappeared into the people of the world.

He excused himself, finally, thinking she would get along. The solidity she had in her was the mark of the matriarch . . . the rock on the beach with blind eyes . . . the resigned eyes, begging for compassion and sometime catching a glance somewhere over the heads of people and seeing there at once understanding, an awareness of a common feeling . . . and what if through Alzade he was cut off from generations to come . . . what would he live for now? The melancholy of a lonely life, contemplating man as an animal which still crawls within the shadow of the human to come. If in the church he had found what he wanted those many years ago in the dim days of his remembered youth, willingly he would have given himself . . . but he could not become a priest without faith . . . poverty . . . humility . . . chastity . . . there had been a time when he thought he had a vocation for the church . . . it happened in New Orleans. He reflected later it must have been moral incrimination, still, at the time he felt good and noble. He had talked to the Jesuit priest at Loyola and the Jesuit was certain Paul had a vocation. In him, Paul found a gentleness and serenity which was quietening.

He had gone to see the Monsignor and talked, pouring out all he felt, trying to explain, to say what he felt, as if he could put into words a kind of belongingness.

But the Monsignor, "You're too old. We usually start training in grammar school. However, we will take you as a brother and feed and clothe you."

It was not food and clothing he was seeking. "I don't want to 40

become a brother. I want to become a priest," he said doggedly.

The Monsignor had looked at him critically; Paul had felt like a lost blood cell. "Another Order may take you," the Master said. "Others don't have such strict requirements as the Jesuits.

However, we will be glad ot have you if you want to become a brother. I will let you speak with Brother Alfonso before you leave. He will answer any questions you have."

Brother Alfonso came and Paul was repulsed by the sight of him. There was avarice in his face and something in his manner, some softness, what, he wasn't sure—a kind of worldliness. Anyway, he was repulsed and there weren't many questions he could think to ask, he was that disappointed. The way he felt, he was sure he was destined to become a priest.

He was led into a closed classroom, heavily paneled, with the appearance of age. A mustiness filled his nostrils . . . an odor of old wood rotting submerged in stagnant water . . . decay . . .

The brother talked cheerfully and persuasively, but Paul was unmoved. Finally, Paul said, "I must go."

The brother said he should return anytime and talk with him.

He would be glad to answer any questions.

But even that hadn't hurt the feeling of humility he had within him and he would spend long hours in the Cathedral in Vieux Carre, praying, but largely he was contented to sit quietly in a pew, feeling contented . . . there was a feeling of awareness, more of continuity, as if in the Sanctuary was the beginning and the end . . . here, perhaps, was what he was seeking . . . eternal life. For a lifetime he would have been contended to reflect on the goodness within man . . . and that he was man himself, not so perfect, but capable of good . . . of god.

The days passed, marking passage by the sleep he needed and the food he wanted. He was serene and secure because he had found God. And if he who walked in His name on the face of the earth had taken him by the hand and led him away, he would have lived his life adoring the Mystery.

But the passing days made his return home more and more urgent and finally he left the Cathedral and returned to the land where he was born. Then the rawness of a practical life began to encroach into his tranquillity. When he would go to Mass each morning, he did not find the contentment that he had known in the Cathedral and he tried to deny this to himself, he would re41

fuse to think, as he refused then to think of impure thoughts by saying a Hail Mary or an Our Father . . . but the waters ate away at the sands beneath the tower of his contentment and the day came when it was gone. It was as simple as that.

It had been like a spell or a sickness.

And almost frightened, he had returned to the Cathedral in New Orleans and each day he would sit in the pew and try to recapture his faith, but it was gone . . . and thinking about it, he decided that his rationalism had eaten away at the mystery; where he thought he had found God, he had found the organized Church.

And he thought, churches should be the biggest in the world.

They should tower to the sky. They should dwarf man into minuteness and insignificance, so that when the Church asked, "Man, who is your Master?" he would look to the tallest spire and say, "You, O Lord."

And though he was sad that the contentment was gone—it was as if God had died, like a dear friend, like his mother . . . still, through his unhappiness seeped the consolation that never again would he be concerned with dying and going to hell. It gave him a soaring relief, as if he had been released from death . . . and there was no longer a veil before his face as there was between Alzade and him.

Somehow he must reach through and explain.

The children on the beach were playing nearby, now and three, chasing a ball, almost ran over them, kicking sand on the blankets.

"Look at these kids," Paul said to Alzade. "They don't know how unhappy they will become."

She was looking at him intently as she did when she was thinking about him. "Paul, what is the matter with you? You've been so quiet."

A tiny girl had found the crab in the pool of water and was now methodically pulling off its claws.

"Childhood is the happy time," he said watching the child.

"Then, we're content with so little."

"I don't like you when you're like this. It's too depressing.

What are you trying to be, Jesus Christ?"

He laughed, as if it were a joke. "Tell me, Alzade, are we happy because we know so much or because we know so little?"

42

She was silent then, as she was when he asked something he knew she didn't want to think about.

"Paul, I was thinking," she said finally. "We should open the Carter addition now. We could run up a group of twenty houses there. I hate to wait any longer."

He frowned slightly; he had never approved of this real estate business she was developing. "I thought you were going to wait until you were straightened out again." He looked again at the bigness of her and he wondered in the child dreaming within her . . . well, knew.

"I know. But I'm afraid we'll miss out if we wait any longer."

He looked at her then, sitting round and heavy, her arms on her knees, giving an impression of permanency.

"You love money, don't you Alzade?"

"It's not that," she said candidly. "It's the wonderful power of it and the respect it brings to you." And almost respectfully, she touched her stomach, like making the sign of the cross, "And for your family." Then, sighing, almost grunting, she lay back on the blanket.

He was filled with pity for her; he wished he did not have to tell her what he knew.

"Alzade," he said quietly, "Sometimes these pregnancies don't always work out."

"Are you thinking of Frances and Bill? Well, I'm not worried."

There was contentment in her voice. She touched her stomach firmly. "My child is going to be sound and healthy."

He felt then, as if he were going to stab her. "Alzade. Not every baby is a good one. They don't always turn out the way we plan." There was an awkwardness in his voice and a pity he had tried to prevent coming through.

She turned her head sharply. For a moment, she studied his face. "Paul. What are you trying to tell me?"

He reached for her hand and squeezed it firmly. "I'm sorry, Baby. Bruce called me about the X-ray plates. The child is defective, a hydrocephalic. That's the reason the child had turned from normal delivery position. That's why Bruce spoke of a breech delivery."

He could see the child moving within her. With panic she pressed at her stomach as if now pain, too, was there. "I don't 43

believe it. It's not true." But already there was a mistiness in her eyes.

He pressed her hand again.

"Don't," she said, jerking her hand out of his. She rolled over on her side clumsily, but carefully, away from him. For a few moments sobs shuddered through her.

He wondered if the child within her wept with self-pity . . . it is unconsolable . . . finding in itself neither a sexlessness nor a consolation which will still the tears that seep forth from his blind eyes . . . it's face is formless with the amorphous enlargement of the embryo .. . within the dark warmth, it's sightless eyes gaze upon a w a l l . . . it knows nothing; it can but feel. . . recoiling with terror at the cold blast of disapproval . . . soon . . . he will be dead . . . gasping for the last load of air carried by some tiny red blood cell like a tiny crab, soon to lay dreaming in a bluish-red pool . . . an instance of stillness in a lake of nothingness . . . soon . . . there will be weeping . . . even before the last clod falls with thudding silence upon ears that hear no more, the last instance of now will become then . . . blood on white paper . . . regret that the red fragrance of the white lily sleeps in the seed of tomorrow . . .

"Alzade?"

"Yes." She did not turn towards him.

"It's just one of those unfortunate mishaps, Baby. We can go on to a good baby later."

"I don't want to talk about it." There was bitterness in her voice. . . . I cannot tell you Alzade, which is the beginning or the end . . . neither where today was yesterday, or when the night comes with the brightness of a silent word, sweeping aside the veils of dreams . . . of a red bird . . . in a cool brown rock.

When Paul looked at the rock again, he saw into it and through it. Doubting his eyes, he touched it, trying to find in it's coolness and texture, an assurance of solidarity, but it was as glass.

He listened again to the low, sweet music . . . the low, sweet music of humanity, one of the pets had written.

44

Looking through the rock, he could see upon the beach, seeing there the bones of the trees that the waters had cast.

He turned to Alzade, puzzled, and said, "Look to the rock and tell me what you see."

"It's a plain, ordinary rock," she said. "Is that enough?"

"Tell me what you see." There was a persistent tone in his voice, as if he wanted her, too, to see what he could see.

"It's just a rock. A goddamn, bitchy rock. I cut my foot there last week."

"I tell you that if you can see, you will look not to the rock, but in the rock and through the rock to the beach beyond."

She stood up wearily, cutting short the explanation he would have given her. "It's too hot for anagrams. It's just a goddamn rock. I'm returning to Pt. Arthur tonight, Paul. In the morning I'm letting out the contracts for the houses."

Taking her blanket she walked beyond the rock to lie on the beach among the bones of the trees. Pressing her heaviness into the cool, damp sand, she began to weep.

INTO THE DARKNESS Chris Bjerknes

Nothing beyond pain farther than the filtered cloud curls up its hand digs in the memory down and convulses silently, like a light falling deeper than the rain, into the darkness.

45

DREAMBOATS

By Norman Bonter

THERE, ON the high rocky peninsula formed by the Kialing and Yangtze Rivers, sprawled the great gray-walled city, Chungking.

Her people, warmed by the early morning sun, stirred like flies coming out of hibernation. It was a fine spring morning in 1935.

The fishermen brought their catch in to market and the salt junks plied the river, their twenty oarsmen, ten on a side, chanting to the stroke like the men of the ancient galleys. There was the smell of cook-pots, offal, fish, and human manure. The smell of China.

Below the high escarpment of the city, the restless Yangtze, lifeline of the Great Valley, swept along on its fifteen hundred mile journey to Shanghai and the East China Sea. And, ready for her trip downriver, the steamer "Chi Lai" strained at her bow and stern lines made fast to the pontoon. Black smoke poured out of her funnel and the wind whipped it aft where it almost obscured the ship's American flag. The passengers milled about on deck.

Captain Crenshaw, master of the "Chi Lai," looked at his watch. "Damnation," he said, "we've got to get under way."

"What's holding us up?" I said.

"I'm waiting for a man from Chengtu." Nervously the Captain paced up and down.

Chengtu! Three hundred miles to the northwest, and hemmed in by the high mountains. The seat of West China University, a place for scholars and mystics.

On the pontoon I saw a tall thin young man striding toward the "Chi Lai." He was followed by a Chinese boy earring a khaki duffel bag and a bedding roll. He entered the starboard cargo port and clambered up the 'midships ladder leading to the main deck.

Captain Crenshaw introduced us. "Rowe, I'd like you to know Draper." We shook hands. You have seen Draper wherever men douse their whiskey with soda and affect loose-fitting odd jackets,

46

gray flannel trousers, tab collars and brown buckskin Oxfords.

The Captain looked again at his watch and said, "Time to get under way." He nodded, smiled, and made for the bridge.

On deck the bo's'n's whistle shrilled and the lines were let go.

The "Chi Lai" backed out into the stream and headed downriver.

Draper waved to the Chinese boy who stood disconsolate on the pontoon. The boy waved back and watched us until we were out of sight around the bend where stands the great Golden Buddha, guardian of the river boatmen.

"Good boy that," Draper said. "Hate to leave him."

He did not appear to be a particularly sympathetic type, and I was surprised. He looked tired after his trip overland.

"What about a touch of the whip," I said.

He grabbed my arm. "Jolly good idea."

We went aft to the ship's mess and sat down in the neat, oakpaneled saloon. Draper gazed appreciatively about him and said, "I say, this is good. Nice to be back in civilization." He fumbled in his pockets and brought out a pack of Players cigarettes and a thin, leather bound book. It was The Meditations of Lao-Tse. I looked at him more closely. The eyes of a mystic, long yellow hair, the thin, strong face and body of the ascetic.

But those eyes! Deep, blue, and piercing. The eyes of a man who has a dream and who, perhaps, is soon to realize that dream.

"I say," he said, looking at his hands, "I think I'd better wash off some of this muck." He put Lao-Tse back into the side pocket of his packet. There was something furtive about the gesture, or so I thought. He got up and left the saloon. Gone for the moment were the tension and mystery he carried with him. I wondered what his dream was. China does strange things to some foreigners. Perhaps because China has always been a land of strong contrast — beauty and ugliness, fragrance and stink, feast and famine. Side by side they dwell, hike peacocks and buzzards in the same nest.

Draper returned and sat down. A smiling Ningpo boy, immaculate in white jacket and black bombazine trousers, came alongside. "Yes, master?"

"Whiskey soda," Draper said.

I nodded. "Two apiece, Ah Kwe." I said, "I hear you just got in from Chengtu."

"Yes. Bit of a go. Didn't know whether I'd make it."

47

"Chengtu! I'd give anything to get into the interior and take a look around."

"Oh, I don't know old boy, one place is as good as another."

Ah Kwe brought our drinks. Draper offered me the pack of Players, and as we lit our cigarettes, he saw me studying him.

"I'm with B.A.T.," he said.

"British American Tobacco?"

He sensed my astonishment. "Yes. Crashing bore, isn't it?"

"I have a hunch it isn't, in your case."

He smiled and smoothed that long hair, the color of a ripe banana. "Right you are. I've been about a bit. Going home on leave. I've been out here five years." He raised his glass and said, "Cheerio, here's to England."

"To England," I said.

With a shy smile, he took a long pull at his Scotch and splash.

He put down the glass and said, "One of the real pleasures of life, you know."

Smiling, I said, "England ought to look good to you."

"Rather." He pulled one of his long legs from under the table and gazed for some time at his foot. It was encased in a brown Oxford tie, somewhat the worse for wear. I began to wonder if he were a bit "touched."

The "Chi Lai" slipped through the Brass Gong Gorge and passed by the walled city of Chang-sho. Seeing them through the port, Draper said, "You were asking about the interior. Not much to tell, but if you're interested —" I was interested. Perhaps the man would come out with his secret, his dream. I wondered if it had anything to do with Lao-Tse. I ordered another round of drinks and he began to talk. He talked well and with animation.

"Ever been on the back of a camel?"

"No," I said, "that's something I've missed."

"Well," he said, laughing, "it's very good for the liver, you know, but bad for the heart."

It was the first time I'd heard him laugh, and it was good to hear.

"I get it," I said, "probably very good for those blokes in India and Malaya —all that gin and curry?"

"Right you are, old boy, right you are!" He laughed again.

"Well, I rode a camel into Mongolia with a caravan. Good show."

48

He told of the glorious winter sunsets in Manchuria, their colors intensified by myriads of flying snow particles. He told of the Lolo country in Yunnan, where few foreigners have been and where none are welcome.

"How would you like to wake up, old boy, and see a tiger sitting on your front porch in the morning? Or dig into a melon for breakfast, a melon the size of a basketball? That's what you've got in Yunnan."

He took a sip of his drink. "You've got a river in the States, the Colorado. They say it's the most savage river in the world, for rapids. We've got one out here, just like it. Gorges thousands of feet deep, and the water gets a bit ferocious." And he told of shooting the rapids of the wild Kin-sha-ho, the River of Golden Sand, in a native coracle.

Draper and I had lunch together. The day wore on, but we remained seated in the mess-room, he talking, I listening. The other passengers spent their time on deck admiring the scenery.

At sunset, the "Chi Lai" slipped expertly into her anchorage opposite the River Office at Wanhsien. Inland, the great purple mountains of Wushan arched their shaggy-coated backs against the darkening sky.

I watched the slow merging of the mountains and the sky.

And I saw Draper staring once again at the worn shoe. I wondered what was so fascinating about it.

Suddenly he said, "You know what I'm going to do when I get back home?"

I shook my head, unwilling to hazard a guess. What were a man's dreams of his home? What were the dreams of the lonely hours of his exile?

"When I get home," Draper was saying — "Yes?" I said.

"I'm going to a place I know — Lobb's in Bond Street."

"Yes?" He tamped out his cigarette. His fingers were quick and nervous. In that lean face the blue eyes, deep and intense, glowed as though from an inner fire. He leaned forward.

"You see, old boy," he said, "I've always wanted a pair of handmade shoes. And by God, this time I'm going to get them!"

I raised my glass. "Cheerio, here's to England," I said.

"To England," Draper said.

49

CHRYSANTHEMUMS OF THE FALL Chris Bjerknes

time is a cricket that ticks its music out of the moon tomorrows cool breath has scattered the people our world never appears our questioning dreams without the cool breath of breathing lips, the glass worlds bubble in a bloodless mist light of moon in a vapor of magnolias like an angels sleep the thin sounds of time the cricket stirs the grace of water, the dull cipher of speech the frail hero with his white water lilies for eyes, the rhetoric of the snowy butterflies of the fall and frost, faith in the silver vowels the rosary of sky, sweet rain broken from its darkness, a tear from faith the winds jaw drips as it gnaws on the scattered stones along the shore sweet water from the heavens pensive mouth, and laughter from the cricket.

50

THE DEFILER

By Isobel Kneeland

divorce, she found a brand-new apartment in a good neighborhood, and set about forgetting that she had ever been married. Her mind, which had been diverted by courtship but outraged by every demand of marriage, obliterated the seven years eagerly. Occasionally she might look down at the faultless grey surface of her living-room rug, and remember with distaste the scuff-marks of masculine shoes on other rugs; and sometimes she would note with cool triumph how orderly the magazines were in their polished rack, instead of strewn about like newspapers in a park; but at few moments other than these did her dissolved marriage intrude on her thoughts.

She took a job in a lawyer's office, but only on a part-time basis. When friends suggested that she devote some of her time to service clubs, she declined. Getting settled in a new home, she would explain, smiling, was a mammoth job.

She talked with interior decorators, discussed the merits of "morning colors" and "afternoon colors," and weighed their suggestions. But no one helped her to choose her furnishings.

She felt that she would not care to live in rooms that reflected someone else's taste. Selecting her furniture with care, she kept away from antiques. Years, maybe centuries of other people's touch . . .

When her dwelling was outfitted, she invited small groups to come in. People were unfailingly impressed by her apartment.

"It's a little showplace!" they'd exclaim. "Like those model rooms in department stores." The living-room was modern and suave, in dark calm greens accented with shades of coral. The whimsical little kitchen had spice cabinets on the walls, and curtains in an original design of printed recipes.

The bedroom was a dream. A confection. It left women breathless. "Adorable!" some cried. Others called it exquisite.

AFTER THE

51

One young girl murmured, "It's like a doll's room. I'd be afraid to sleep in it. That spread—it looks like gossamer!"

"It's only silk organdy," Minna laughed, immensely pleased.

When they had gasped and admired and sighed themselves out, she would say, "I have nothing actually costly. It's the thought you put into a home that gives it character, don't you think so? I took the bedroom colors from that Dufy print of lilies. Do you notice how the colors are echoed? The white, and the jade, and the touches of muted rose?"

"Very pretty," an elderly uncle said. "Truly pristine. Now tell me, where do you live?" She was not amused.

Some of her friends were jealous. She could not help knowing it. She was surprised at the behavior of Julia Ray, a forthright woman who did Social Service work. Minna invited Julia over one evening, and they sat in the living-room listening to records. Minna perched on a coral chair, sewing a ruffle on an apron, and Julia sat on the sofa, leaning wearily back. "Lord, I'm beat," Julia said. "I called on two of the most pathetic families today. I never can get used to seeing good little honest people getting nothing but bad breaks."

"Poor things," Minna murmured, admiring the ruffle.

"You make a very attractive picture, sitting there," Julia said.

"You really do. You fit right in with the surroundings. Yellow dress and grey shoes, coral chair and grey rug and yellow sofa. My soul, do you know, that's really artistic!"

"Thank you, dear," Minna purred, her sharp little face looking quite pretty as she flushed.

"I'm so beat I could die," Julia said. She pushed off her pumps and stretched out with a sigh. "My, this sofa's comfortable!" She rubbed one instep lightly with her other foot, looking as much at home as if she lived there. Yes, exactly as if she owned the place.

Minna's teeth clenched, but she didn't say a thing. She merely sat up very straight in her chair, feet planted side by side on the floor, and sewed briskly. She became aware that Julia was watching here.

"Minna," Julia said, "is anything bothering you?"

"Bothering me? Why?" "I don't know. You have a grim look."

"Now, what could be bothering me?" Minna said crisply.

52

Her glance moved to Julia's stockinged feet, resting on the sofa, then returned to the apron she was trimming. Julia looked at her feet for a moment before she sat up and put on her shoes.

In the bedroom, when she was leaving, Julia went over to the window and moved aside the filmy curtains to peer out. "I think it's stopped raining," she said.

Minna went and stood beside her, looking out. "Yes," she said, "it has."

As Julia turned away, Minna straightened the curtains into perfect folds. It took her some time, and Julia turned around before she had arranged them quite to her satisfaction. Julia looked at Minna inquiringly, and Minna said, "They're so sheer that you can see out of the window without moving them aside."

Julia said, "Can you, now!" She looked around at the various things on the dressing table, and waved her hand toward a crystal ash-tray. "Is that an ash-tray?" she asked.

"Yes." "For ashes, and matches, and things?"

"Of course."

Julia stubbed out her cigarette deliberately in the exact center.

After she had gone, Minna thought, Julia's really getting irritable. I'm afraid she's a little envious.

A number of friends, Minna found, were beginning to annoy her. They took the most incredible liberties. She was amazed at Mary Hughes. Mary phoned one afternoon and said, "Minna, would you do me a tremendous favor?"

"What favor?" Minna asked.

"Well, my sister Dot's in town, on her way to the coast," May said, "and she has a three hour stopover, and her little girl's with her. And my Bobby's got measles, poor kid, so I can't ask them here. Dot's expecting another baby." She paused, then said in a rush, "Minna, could you possibly let them come out to your place, just for a couple of hours? They've had two days and a night on the train."

Minna said nothing for a moment. She did not want a child in her apartment. "Why in the world is your sister taking the trip?" she asked finally.

"Her husband's been transferred." Embarrassment made Mary's voice husky. "You're not far from the station, and I thought they could take a taxi up. If it wouldn't put you out, 5S

I mean. You may have other plans."

How could Minna pretend to have other plans? Mary was one of her oldest friends. She was obligated. Dot and the child had come.

To be implicitly fair, they hadn't touched a thing. Dot sat quietly and wouldn't take anything but an aspirin and a sip of water. The little girl sat on the floor beside her mother's chair and looked at magazines. Minna mentioned cookies, but the mother said, looking dubiously about the room, "Oh no, really, we'll wait till we're on the train. She's a bit scattery with crumbs." No, Minna had no complaint about them; but it was the idea of Mary Hughes suggesting that she open her home to strangers!

She had more time to herself now than she used to, but that suited her very well. Her three rooms required constant care. The floors and mirrors were polished to gleam as brightly as her manicured nails. The draperies hung in folds as even as the impeccable waves of her short, dark hair. The lamps, the pictures, the amusing little ceramics were as appropriate as the jewlery Minna wore. They contributed to one another's charm, the apartment and she. She was, as it were, the central ornament, and the apartment was the tasteful setting. Sometimes, when she sat at her dressing table in a flowing rose-colored negliglee, she would look in the mirror at her reflection and the reflection of the beautiful room in the background, with lamplight gleaming on the shimmering bed-spread; and she couldn't help but smile with pleasure at the picture they made.

It was June, but the weather was fractious; dull for several days, then briefly sunny, then dull again. Many brides were married under cloudy skies. Minna did not care for June. The month of weddings, she thought with a twisted smile, as she sat in her kitchen cutting up peaches for a salad. For an instant, the image of a man's white shirt flung over the back of a bedroom chair burned offensively bright in her mind. She remembered a photograph of a football team propped defiantly on a bureau . . . the frilly shade of a bedside lamp tilted to shed light for reading . . . rumpled pajamas thrown hastily on top of a laundry hamper.

Even though it was all over, she felt sick with resentment.

The month of weddings. She was glad the sun wouldn't shine.

54

She was just setting her pretty salad on the gate-leg table when the telephone rang. A tiresome time to call anyone, just at seven. When she heard Beth Taylor's voice, Minna sighed.

Beth could talk endlessly even when she had nothing to say.

But this time she did have news, of import to herself, if not to Minna. Her rent was to be raised, way beyond what she could afford, and she had to find another apartment.

"When I think," Beth raged, "of how little an extra ten dollars a month means to that miser, and what it means to mel If Frank were alive, he'd handle him. But they know how to prey on widows, those grasping money-grubbing fiends . . ."

Minna voiced sympathy, but her mind was on her salad, growing limp on the table.

Beth phoned again, two evenings later. "All the places I can afford are nothing but rat-holes," she deplored. "Minna, what am I going to do?"

Minna murmured consolingly. Something would turn up, she said.

"If you hear of anything, will you call me?" Beth pleaded.

"Would there be anything in your building? Could you ask around?"

"I'm sure there isn't," Minna said, "but if I hear of anything, 111 call you."

"Well," Beth said disconsolately, "I'll let you know how I get on."

"Do," Minna said. As soon as she had replaced the receiver, suspicion clutched her. Was it, could it be possible that Beth was hoping she'd ask her to . . . Her mind balked, then faced the thought. To move in with her? Surely, no! Beth had really given her no cause to think that. But the mere consideration of it made her hands turn moist.

She went out next morning and bought a slipper chair, a sweet, impractical one upholstered in white taffeta and adorned with rose-colored fringe. She put it beneath the painting of the lilies in the bedroom. Acquiring the chair put her in so sunny a humor that she decided she had done Beth Taylor an injustice.

Beth was not a person who would intrude.

But when the telephone rang soon after seven, she did not answer it.

She was sitting in the living-room, listening to a program of 55

18th Century music. The day had been sultry, with a heavy, clinging heat that lingered relentless even though an apathetic rain was falling. Through the tinkling notes of the music, light and fountain-cool, the telephone squalled. Minna jumped. She started to get up, then sat back. It would, of course, be Beth.

What a nuisance she had become! The telephone repeated its call five times, and subsided.

I really couldn't endure Beth's lament tonight, Minna thought.

She began to wander about the room, straightening ornaments absently. Oh, the air was oppressive! Even with the windows open, she felt stifled. She went into the kitchen and opened the window there, hoping for a cross-draft of breeze. Glancing out, over the potted geraniums on the sill, she noticed that a child's cloth doll was sprawled on the landing. The baby girl upstairs was always dropping things. It looked somehow macabre, spread-eagled on the wet landing with its button eyes staring, and rain drizzling down on it. Such a furtive, clammy rain.

The 18th Century music was ended, and a murder play breathed hotly in its place. Minna turned off the radio. Her head was beginning to ache. She went into her bedroom and undressed in the dusk rather than close the blind against the feeble stir of air. The touch of her rustling white nightgown was cool, but the bedroom was really too warm for comfort.

Later, she would go to bed, but at present the living-room was more endurable. She went in and stretched out on the sofa.

No breeze came through the hall. Outside on the street a noisy melee struck up, of dogs in a fight, fiercely snarling. It was horrible to hear, a voracious, scuffling sound, as if one beast were killing the other. She pressed her fingertips against her temples. Violence . . . she couldn't bear violence. Animals could be so tame and good, but she never trusted them. Suddenly the telephone rang, startling her. Beth again, she thought angrily. Well, I'm not at home tonight, Beth. Sorry. There's nobody home.

The telephone persisted through seven peals, before the caller was convinced that there would be no answer. Minna smiled venegefully, picturing Beth's frustration. Let her pour out her tale of woe to somebody else. She lay for a time watching the watery beams of car lights sliding across the walls, before she fell asleep.

56

She woke in prickling fear.

For a moment, confused, she did not know what was wrong.

She stayed motionless, eyes darting about the dark room. Nothing there to be afraid of. A dream? Sometimes she did have frightening dreams. It must have been that. Just some silly . . . then she heard again the thing that had wakened her. A brief, scraping sound. From where she lay she could not see around the curve of the hall. But she knew, with hideous certainty, that someone had pushed aside the flower-pots at the kitchen window. Her taut throat would not scream.

There was a soft bump on the kitchen floor, and a pause, then moving, and a pause, and moving again. Oh God, oh please, oh please . . . Footsteps, muffled and terribly cautious, started along the hall.

She lay rigid. Oh please God, God, please please please.

Heart clamoring, breath swishing in her throat. Don't let them hurt me . . . The footsteps stopped, and began again, but not coming down the hall any more. In the bedroom. Not coming here. Get to the door. Get outside. Run. But the door . . . oh, God, the door was beyond the bedroom. They would hear, and catch her before she could . . . please, oh dear God . . .

Her face, her neck, her hands were wet, the nightgown clung to her drenched body. Shaking, she raised herself on an elbow.

Not a sound. But dim light moved in the bedroom and flickered on the wall outside.

Got to get out before . . . She crept off the sofa, swayed, faltered across the rug, moved down the hall like a shadow, soundless on the carpet.

At the bedroom door she stopped, too terrified to pass.

The marauder bent over her bureau, his shadow arched black and monstrous in the flash-light beam. Something clinked under his hurrying hands. She stood with fingers clamped over her mouth, her whole body beating with the frantic burst of her heart. He was so close, so close. Now . . . while his back is . . . the front door, quick . . . But she stayed.

The man peered at something he had found and put it in the pocket of his dark jacket. He pulled open a drawer and fumbled through it. Handkerchiefs, tossed out, landed on the floor with faint pats. A scarf fluttered slowly down.

He opened the drawer below, and plunged his hand into the 57

soft garments of lace and silk, seeking clumsily among them.

Without sound, she leapt.

She caught him half turned, and the force of her body sent him sprawling back over the white chair, and she and the man and the chair crashed down together, and she was upon him, clawing his eyes and face, tearing the cap from his head, ripping his face with ferocious fingers. He rolled onto his side and threw her from him, and scrabbled across the bed, and lunged for the door. But she twisted to her feet, cat-quick, and snatched his flashlight from the floor and reached the bedroom door before him. He caught her wrist and wrenched the flashlight away before her savage blow could land. With his open hand, he struck her on the side of the head, and she reeled gack, gasping.

He ran into the hall, yanked open a door, found it was a cupboard, ran to another door. She leapt at him again and sank her teeth in his arm, biting at the musty sleeve. He had the door open, the right door. Light from the corridor flooded in on them. He threw a wild glance over his shoulder. She saw a narrow young face, scared, blood-streaked under an eye. Her arm shot out, fingers hooked.

"Get off, you damn fool!" he hissed. "You crazy damn fool!"

He hurled her from him and raced for the stairs. She stumbled back, mouth stiffly open. The door moved slowly, gathered speed, shut with a bang. The sound echoed again and again.

Sagging against the wall, she stared at the door. Her black hair hung in snaky tangles over her eyes. From a shoulder of her nightgown, torn lace dangled. Slowly, she slid onto her knees and pitched forward. She lay for a little while, not bothering to turn her stinging cheek away from the carpet. An ocean noise moaned in her head when she raised it. She tried to see into the bedroom, but it was too dark. She dragged herself to her feet and felt for the lamp inside the door. Rosy light flowed over the room. She stood in the doorway, nausea curling and uncurling inside.

The fragile spread half-stripped from the bed, soiled with mud from his feet. The white chair on its side, short wooden legs jutting from its prim skirt. The jade rug kicked into a mound. Perfume bottles and powder jumbled on the bureau, handkerchiefs strewn where he had tossed them. The bureau drawer crookedly open, spilling out its drift of silk.

58

On the floor, under the painting of lilies . . . black, foul, filthy, his cap.

Swiftly, she went forward. For a moment she could not touch it, then she grasped the wet thing, limp and muddy like a dead bat in her hand; and she ran to the window and flung it out with all the strength she had, and watched it hurtle down to land with a splat in the murky pool of the lane.

Grey-faced, she turned and looked about. The room appeared different; even beyond the disorder, it was altered. Suddenly the change grew clear, and she was gripped by a new kind of shock.

For the room did not seem to mind. It looked, to her, triumphant. It wore an air of rakish defiance, like a pampered pet who has found, and liked, the alley. She put her hands over her face. "I can't stay here," she whispered. "It isn't nice any more."

She walked through the shambles and into the living-room.

A damp breeze threaded in from the kitchen, making her shiver as she huddled in a chair. Slow tears strayed down her face.

The taste of his sleeve, sour and dusty, was in her mouth. She rubbed her hand across her lips. Then she realized that it was the hand that had touched the cap, and she shuddered and began to sob. "Not nice . . . any more . . ."

Invaded soiled . . . Soiled.

She would stay where she was until morning, and then—perhaps Julia would take her in for a day or two. Her friends . . . her friends could have the things from the apartment, if they wanted them. And she would look for a place, some sort of place to live.

A hotel, a furnished room . . . she did not care.

59

CONTRIBUTORS

JUDITH BISHOP is a music student and lives in New York.

She is at present at the Columbia School of General Studies learning the craft of a poet. All My Singing is Miss Bishop's first published poem.

NORMAN BONTER is a retired Marine officer. He is working for his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Columbia, where he took fiction writing courses under Professor Vernon Loggins and Miss Dorothy McCleary. Dreamboats is based on an incident which occurred during his service in China. His work has been published in The Leatherneck, The Infantry Journal, Naval Institute Proceedings, and other Service magazines. Mr. Bonter is a former editor of QUARTO. D. PRESTON BOONE is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, although he received the major part of his education in the North, at Lawrenceville School and Williams College. He is now living in New York, and works for a law firm. Mr. Boone, at present, is attending the Columbia School of General Studies and is working for his Bachelor of Science degree. He has previously been published in Comment.

CHRIS BJERKNES has appeared in various publications both here in the United States (The John Hopkins Review, Golden Goose, Inferno, Intro, Idiom, Experiment) and abroad in England in the London Poetry Quarterly, Ninepence, Stand, The Poet. He appears for the first time in QUARTO. MARGARET M. DALY attended College of New Rochelle and Fordham University. She is presently studying poetry in Dr. Leonie Adams' Workshop for Poets. She has been published in the Sign and the Spirit.

EUGENIO FLORIT is a Spanish American poet. He was born in Madrid, Spain, and his early years were spent in Madrid and Barcelona, and in 1918 his family moved to Cuba where the 60

poet studied law. After he became a Cuban citizen in 1922 he entered the service of the State Department. From 1940 to 1945 Mr. Florit was employed in the Cuban Consulate in New York City and since 1945 he has been teaching in the Spanish Department of Barnard College and Columbia University. Mr. Florit has published the following: 32 Poemas Breves, Havana, 1927, Trdpico, Havana, 1930, Doble acento, Havana, 1937, Reino, Havana, 1938, Cuatro poemas, Havana, 1940 and Poema mio, Mexico, 1946 (Collected Poems).

ISOBEL KNEELAND is a native of Montreal and a graduate of McGill University. At present copywriter in an advertising agency. Her poetry has appeared in Forge, The Montrealer, Montreal Gazette.

VIVIAN NEWMAN, our present Poetry Editor, published her first poem when she was eight. She attended Breadloaf in Vermont and was an invited guest to the Poetry Convention of Harvard in 1950. Dr. Henry Welles of the Columbia Graduate School has been her critic and adviser for the past several years.

Miss Newman is now in Dr. L6onie Adams' Workshop for Poets.

PETER VIERECK won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948 for his collection of poems, Terror and Decorum. His first work was a volume of political essays, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (1948). Other works are: Conservatism Revisited (1949), The First Morning: New Poems (Scribner's, 1952) and the recent Shame ir Glory Of The Intellectuals, Babbitt Jr. Versus The Rediscovery of Values (Beacon Press, Boston, 1953), At present, Mr. Viereck is an associate professor at Mount Holyoke College.

VURRELL YENTZEN is a student in the School of General Studies, Columbia University. He is a Texan by birth and has been at many trades, ranging from advertising to assembly-line work in an aviation plant. The Rock was written by Mr. Yentzen while studying under Professor William Owens in the summer of 1951. It is his first published story.

61

EDITOR'S COMMENTARY

COLUMBIA'S SCHOOL of General Studies now offers the degrees of Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Fine Arts in the fields of Editing and Publishing and Graphic Arts respectively. Both programs are excellent and we recommend them to students interested in those fields.

The Harper Prize Novel Contest for 1954 will open on June 1, 1953 and close June 1, 1954. This Contest is designed to give recognition to a work of outstanding merit in the field of fiction.

For further information concerning the Harper Prize Novel Contest all letters should be addressed to: Harper Prize Novel Contest, Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N. Y. In this Contest there are no restrictions as to setting or theme and the contestant may submit more than one manuscript if he chooses.

Recent Publications: Books by Columbia University Faculty Members.

Eric Bentley In Search Of Theatre, Knopf, $6.00 Shepard B. Clough The American Way, The Economic Basis Of Our Civilization, Crowell, $4.00 Wilbert M. Frohock Andre Malraux, and The Tragic Imagination, Stanford University Press, $4.00 Eli Ginzberg The Uneducated, Columbia University Press, $4.50 Gilbert Highet People, Places and Books, Oxford University Press, $3.50 Helen Hull Landfall, Coward-McCann, $3.50 Allan Nevins Study In Power, John D. Rockefeller, Scribners, (Two Volumes), $10.00 Mario Pei Swords Of Anjou, The John Day Company, $3.50 George G. Simpson Life Of The Past, Yale University Press, $4.00 Paul Tillich The Courage To Be, Yale University Press, $3.00 Mark Van Doren Spring Birth and Other Poems, Henry Holt, $3.00 62

Recent Reprints Published By The New American Library Of World Literature, Inc. Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down, Gore Vidal, Dangerous Voyage (Williwaw), A. E. Van Vogt, Destination: Universe!, Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought, J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Louis Auchincloss, Sybil, Harry Grey, The Hoods, William Faulkner, The Unvanquished, Leonard Bishop, Down All Your Streets, Nancy Mitford, The Blessing, Winston Brebner, Dream of Eden (The Second Circle), Desmond Stewart, Leopard in the Grass, Robert Moore Fisher, How to Know and Predict The Weather, Maritta Wolff, Back of Town.

Robert Cluett, IV and Margaret Loos have joined the staff of QUARTO: Mr. Cluett, as Fiction Editor and Miss Loos in charge of Production.

Each time we mail QUARTO to our subscribers, several copies are returned by the post office because of the subscriber's change of address. Since second and third class mail are not forwarded, please notify us promptly in case you move. We want to keep our end of the contract.

VJF

63

T

HE fantastic, heroic, heartbreakingly true story of the 1839 mutiny on the slave schooner Amistad —a desperate venture that produced an international explosion and involved, at one time or another, each of the following: CINQUE, son of an African headman Her Majesty QUEEN VICTORIA President MARTIN VAN BUREN Ex-President JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Chief Justice ROGER B. TANEY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER Prof. JOSIAH WILLARD GIBBS, of Yale CHEVALIER DE ARGAIZ, Minister of Spain Two Spanish slave traders Two retired American sea captains Other Africans, including four children Illustrated.

$4.00

SLAVE MUTINY

By WILLIAM A. OWENS Available at The Columbia University Book Store

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

SUMMER SESSION July 6 to August 14, 1953 Registration, July 2 and 3

COURSES IN WRITING SHORT STORY NON-FICTION TELEVISION AND RADIO

WRITER'S CONFERENCE

July 20 to August 6 Speakers will include well-known novelists, short story writers, poets, playwrights, authors of non-fiction books and articles, representatives from radio and television studios, and publishers and editors.

All courses are subject to the conditions and regulations stated in the Summer Session Bulletin of Information which may be obtained on written request to the Office of University Admissions, Columbia University, New York 27, N. Y.