SPAN: February 1973

Spm

Febrnaey 1973

· .. We stand on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world. The central question before us is: How shall we use that peace? Let us resolve that this era we are about to enter will not be what other post-war periods have so often been: a time of retreat and isolation that leads to stagnation at home and invites new danger abroad. Let us resolve that this will be what it can become: a time of great responsibilities greatly borne, in which we renew the spirit and the promise of America as we enter our third century as a nation. This past year saw far-reaching results from our new policies for peace. By continuing to revitalize our traditional friendships, and by our missions to Peking and to Moscow, we were able to establish the base for a new and more durable pattern of relationships among the nations of the world. Because of America's bold initiatives, 1972 will be long remembered as the year of the greatest progress since the end of World War II towards a lasting peace in the world.

Together with the rest of the world, let us resolve to move forward from the beginnings we have made. Let us continue to bring down the wal.lsof hostility which have divided the world for too long, and to build in their place bridges of understanding-so that despite profound differences between systems of government, the people of the world can be friends. Let us build a structure of peace in the world in .which the weak are as safe as the strong-in which each respects the right of the other to live by a different system-in which those who would influence others will do so by the strength of their ideas and not by the force of their arms. Let us accept that high responsibility not as a burden, but gladly-gladly because the chance to build such a peace is the noblest endeavour in which a nation can engage; gladly also because only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home.

l' 6

Inauguration Day, U.S.A. How the President Sees His Second Term

by Daniel P. Moynihan

9 10

A SPECIAL SECTION: SOME NEW VIEWS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE Modern American Ethnic Literature

by Jacob Sloan

15

America's Black Novelists

by Me! Watkins

18

The Night I Decided to Write Like Thurber

by V.D. Trivadi

23 Poetry Is the Breath of Life An Interview with Poet William Stafford

Ghazals of Ghalib

26

Oates

by Alfred Kazin

28 Hemingway

by Chaman Nahal

32 . 'New Views' of Tom Sa,wyerand Huck Finn

35

Updike

by Richard Locke

39 . An Updike Sampler

STEPHEN

ESPIE, Editor; DANIEL

P. OLE~SIW;

Publisher.

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, M. M. Saha.

Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Kuldip Singh Jus, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Gopi Gajwani.

Production Manager: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Limited, Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I. Photographs: Inside front cover-Engraving

by J. Rogers from J.McNevin, Geogra phic Society; White House Historical Association. 1 bottom-Lincoln National Life Foundat·ion. IS-Dominique Berretty, Rapho Guillumette; Dial Press; David Attie. 16-Jo Lynn, courtesy McGrawHill Book Company; Gail Brown, courtesy Doubleday and Company; Gotfryd, courtesy Newsweek; Keeler Photography, courtesy Little, Brown and Company; Bert Andrews, Holt Rhinehart and Winston. 17-Christa Fleischmann, courtesy Doubleday and Company; Willard Moore, courtesy Trident Press; Jack Nisberg, courtesy Newsweek; Fran Ortiz, courtesy Dial Press. 33 left-Lee E. Battaglia. 45 to Inside back cover-NASA.

© National

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, rupees five; single copy, fifty paise. No new subscriptions can be accepted at this time. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to the Circulation Manager, USIS, New Delhi. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

Wraparound cover: Titled "Writers and Writing U.S.A. " Ivan Chermayeff's design sets the mood for this issue's special section on American literature. Chermayeff (left), 40, is one of America's most daring and innovative artists. Creator of some of New York's most famous advertising signs, he also helped design the U.S. pavilions at the Montreal and Osaka fairs.

Comparable in pomp and pageantry to India's RepubJic Day celebrations-also held in January-the U.S. Presidential inauguration is an occasion for both solemn traditions and colounul ceremonies, many of which can be traced back to the earliest days of the American Republic. On the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington last mOQ.th,Richard Nixon was sworn in as President for his second four-year term of office.

After the Inaugural Address he led an impressive parade-featuring gaily decorated floats, musical bands and military unitS-dOWD Pennsylvania Avenue, which was lined with hundreds of thousands of spectators.

&~~ -4; /f'f./

In letter at left, recently discovered, . Abraham Lincoln invites his predecessor in office, President Buchanan., to his Inauguration Ball.

On 0PPJ)sitepage, top, George Washington stands in a lavishly decorated barge as he travels from New Jersey to New York for his first inaugural. At bottom, celebrators besiege the White House after Andrew Jackson's inauguration in 1829.

GEORGE WASHINGTO

THOMAS JEFFERSON

No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men, more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.

I know, indeed, that some honest men have feared that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and rro on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.

-GEORGE

WASHINGTON,

1789

-THOMAS

With malice toward none, with charity for all, witli firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shan have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans, to do aU which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

-ABRAHAM

LINCOLN,

1865

JEFFERSON,

1801

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. or need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, .and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world .... My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

-JOHN

F. KENNIDY,

1961

The political changes accomplished this day do not imply turbulence, upheaval or disorder.

Rather this change expresses a purpose of strengthening our dedication and devotion to the precepts of our founding documents, a conscious renewal of faith in our country and in the watchfulness of a divine Providence.

This article originally appeared in the September 1, 1972 iss~e of 'Life' magazine, where it was advertised on the cover (above). It was written by Dr. Moynihan before the 1972 .

Presidential election and, of course, before he was appointed Ambassador to India. A member of the Nixon cabinet for two years, an analyst and admirer of Nixon's pragmatic philosophy, Dr. Moynihan has impeccable credentials for discussing the President's second term.

How will Richard Nixon shape his second term? A defining characteristic ofthe Administration so far has been the President's steadfastness of purpose. This may not be an admirable quality; in fact much of the criticism directed at him has really been directed at this trait, described less neutrally. But a well-conceived order of priorities has guided his Administration through four years, and will probably continue to do so through the next four.

His first priority (his second and third and fourth) is world' peace. Few people have learned to see themselves with an immediate operational responsibility for the future of mankind, but an American President must. It is this perspective in which Richard Nixon has held and holds the war in Vietnam. He sees it as having been long, frustrating and difficult. Despite our strength, it has cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. It distorted our economy, distorted our relations with other countries, and, in the President's view, has had a massive effect on the American spirit. Nevertheless, to Nixon the war was only an aspect of a far more dangerous condition. Every aware person, he believes, hopes that the Vietnam war will soon be over. The urgency now lies in ensuring that there will'be no more Vietnams and, far more important, no nuclear holocaust.

The President feels that his place in history will turn upon his success in this. The central achievement of his first term he believes to have been the two great initiatives,first with the People's Republic of China, then the Soviet Union. With them, he asserts, we have changed the world. By inference, he suggests that if Vietnam had come to an end without such movement, nothing surely would have been gained by it. Here, perhaps, the President's views are not widely known or widely shared. He will say that we have changed the world-and that we changed it at the last possible moment we could. The postwar world was breaking up fast: China, Europe and Japan rising in influence rapidly, the influence of the United States bound to recede. Meanwhile, the growing possibility of world destruction-if not the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R. in the immediate future, then the U.S.S.R. and China 15years hence.

There may be nothing closer to Nixon's present sense of the Presidency than the fact that what happened in respect to the first of his priorities was exactly wpat he planned and hoped would happen. By opening a dialogue with the People's Republic of China and negotiating a historic arms limitation agreement with

the Soviet Union, in his judgment, the chances for a nuclear holocaust were reduced.

But though better than even odds of surviving are preferable to uneven ones, they are still not good enough, and this is the logic that will command his second term. He hopes to expand the initiatives with China and the Soviet Union. His plans are specific with respect to the Soviets. Following the already accomplished PhaseI in arms control, Phase II must be the development of a mutually beneficial limit on all offensive nuclear weapons, Phase III their reduction. Even with a nuclear arms agreement, nuclear arms are still being built, and too many are in existence for the safety of the human race.

There are other world issues. He feels that when he came to the Presidency he was not aware of how pressing was the need for a new international economic structure that would adapt to the existence-of the Common Market and Japan as major industrial and trading complexes, nor yet of the similar role he sees for China a quarter-century hence. A world order that will avoidl military collision must also, he assumes, be one that will avoid disastrous economic warfare, and that can attend to the rightful demands of underdeveloped countries.

Nor will peace in Vietnam mean peace everywhere. Maintaining the integrity of Israel and stability in the Middle East, for example, will.in his opinion take very skilful diplomacy.

For the United States to playa proper role in world affairs, we must in the President's view not only be strong militarily but strong in spirit, strong in self-respect. We must be able to govern ourselves if we are to help govern the world. Here the Presiden becomes animated. How could we live with a $30,000 million cut in the defence budget? Here he is with six carriers in the Atlantic and only two on station. The United States does not maintain its strength in order to push other people around. It does so in order to playa role which only the United States can play. We have accepted arms parity with the Soviet Union. China will achieve parity in 25 years. If we drop out no one will succeed to our role. We must maintain the strength of our military establishment, and of our economy, and we must show that we can govern ourselves. .

This in a way is a curious thing for an American President to have to say. Writing from Europe, Walter Laqueur reports in Commentary, "The image of America as far as the outside world

is concerned is more and more that of a nation unwilling to exercise power, a nation beset by a mood of pervasive defeatism, and ridden with internal dissent." This is what worries the President, indeed obsesses him, and has done from his first day in office. It is in these terms that he cannot accept the proposition that it is time to turn the whole of our attention inward. He knows, or in any event feels, that the people are tired of world adventures.

But to him it begs the question to pose as alternativ~s a vigorous role in world affairs, or a vibrant concentration on domestic matters. To his thinking, you have to do both, or you have neither.

In truth his initiatives at home have not had anything like the success of his efforts abroad. He lists them: welfare reform, revenue-sharing, government reorganization, a new health programme, and says he is disappointed. This is the predicament of Presidents. They can do things in foreign affairs and ask to be judged by their performance. In domestic matters they most often can only propose to do things, and thereafter the record becomes fuzzy. It is three years since, in a series of messages to Congress preceded by a nation-wide television address, he set forth both his family assistance plan, a proposal to place a floor under the income of every family with children in the land, and to share federal revenue with state and local governments. But, he notes, in three years the Congress did not reject pis proposals. It simply did not act on them. Finally, a partial, compromise measure was passed at the end of the 1972 session but Congress adjourned without acting on the President's government reorganization and health programme proposals. Such delays and failures suggest to him that we face a crisis in our ability to govern, that the ma-

chinery of government is obsolete. It is after all 18th-century machinery. Effohs to change it never succeed dramatically, but he feels the main thing is not to be satisfied with conditions as they are. He considers his record respectable in domestic matterscertainly the level of domestic peace is notably higher than it was four years ago-but that it is only a beginning.

Old issues continue-the problem of poverty. and the fiscal crisis of the cities-but new issues arise. No one development disturbs him more than the rise of what some have called "quota democracy," the imposition of proportionate representatkm of socially defined groups in a variety of private and public institutions. He becomes personal and specific on this issue, pointing as an instance to the number of Jews among his closest advisers: Henry A. Kissinger, assistant for national security affairs; Arthur F. Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and former counsellor; Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Edward E. David, Jr., science adviser; Leonard Garment, his special consultant on the widest range of social and cultural issues; William L. Safire, a trusted speech-writer. It: he had made appointments by quota, he asserts, he would have had to fire them all, all except Kissinger whom he would insist on Daniel P. Moynihan, one of America's most distinguished intellectuals, is a professor of education and urban politics at Harvard. He is also Director of the Joint Center of Urban Studies established by Harvard and M.LT. During 1969-71, he served as President Nixon's counsellor for domestic affairs. Here, Dr. Moynihan (below, right) confers with the President shortly before he resigned from his cabinet to return to Harvard.

keeping, but might have to settle for using on a quarter-time basis. Why does he have them? Not, he emphasizes, because of their religion, but because of their qualities.

With equal vehemence he insists that prejudice continues into our time against blacks, women, Mexican-Americans, ItalianAmericans: a long and disturbing list. It is his view that persons from sucb groups should be given an edge in the selection process; that government and other institutions should look harder for excellence in such groups. But he insists that the idea of quotas will penalize our most able persons and undermine our most essential standards. He allows that such issues involve questions of morale and of style and of purpose; questions about which a President's influence is uncertain.

The President shares the view of commentators who hold that the 1972 election was crucial, historic. In his view it was the first election since America assumed its present role in world affairs in which that role was genuinely under challenge. There were also basic differences about the general features of the American economic system. In the past the electorate has been asked to choose between different men; this time, he maintains, the choice was between different principles, between men who disagreed on goals.

He did not, evidently, foresee any distinct Republican majority emerging from this confrontation. The Gallup Poll showed that about one-quarter of the electorate regarded itself as Republican.

There was no way, in his view, that this could be made a majority.

If anything, the trend is away from party identification. Already almost a third of the voters consider themselves independent.

He did not see the campaign in terms of advancing Republican principles. The Republican Party has its own differences-he speaks with resignation on the beating he has been getting from the Birchers and others on the far right. But he does feel that a new coalition is possible, built ar~>undthe perception of a grand mosaic of concerns which he feels a majority of Americans share with regard to the future of the nation and the world. In part, as he sees it, our trouble has been that American Presidents in the 20th century have not had a strong enough sense of the interconnection of things. Theodore Roosevelt, in his judgment, was about the last Chief Executive to measure up to this standard. Wilson tried, but it wasn't his dish of tea. His first term was excellent, but then he was dragged into foreign affairs. It was not his decision, and he could not in the end control events. In much the same way, the second Roosevelt was dragged into war; Truman, he feels, saw some of it: -much of it. Eisenhower had a world view, but no political experience. Kennedy-always there is a pause when he mentions Kennedy-did not have enough time.

But the record, he seems to say, is too random. We are now at a time when whoever is President must have such a world view, think in terms of the mosaic, think in terms of the next quartercentury, of the next four centuries. What is needed is to enunciate a coherent philosophy of what it is we hope for and how we propose to realize our hopes.

He sees the old F.D.R. coalition coming apart. It was brought together, he feels, as much from fear as from hope. The times were terrible _enough to inspire both. But the constituent parts made no enduring sense: northern liberals, southern conservatives and the like. He would hope for a new coalition not built on

fears, but built on common hopes. He sees as its unifying principle not total agreement, or even substantial agreement, about the particulars of programme and policy, but rather recognition of the need for civility in working out ways to approach the great goals of the society. To his thinking, the question of how we are to conduct a rational debate about the issues that divide us has become at least as important as the issues themselves.

He does not conceive that a person who has been a Democrat all his life will cease to be one by virtue of sharing this judgment.

As he sees it, the "Stevensonian" concept of civility and rational discourse is accessible equally to persons north, west, south, east, black, white, yellow, young, old. It is a perception of a centre, which distinguishes itself alike from those who sit on their fanny and do nothing and those whose essential object is to destroy what has been done.

Of the considerable range of views which he ,hopes to unite on principles of action, his own are distinct and almost certainly in the minority. He sees himself and his policies closest to those of the 19th-century liberal. And yet not quite. What the British used to call Tory Democracy is an idea for which he shares a certain respect, but Tory Democracy without Tory imperialism. Internationalism without imperialism is a distinction he feels to be as vital today as when it first got muddled by the Little Englanders.

In a phrase, he believes in the old values, including the value of change, but change that works. He is well enough aware that there are new values, and sees no reason there can be no dialogue between the two. He has journeyed to Peking; one assumes he can make'it to Woodstock. But nothing will come of it without civility, without some quest for clarity as to what unites and what divides. He wonders if the intellectuals of the nation will not now return to this work, which' is by rights theirs. They have not really been about it, in his view, since John F. Kennedy was killed.

Kennedy had meant so much to them that when he went, they went. Back, that is, to opposition and to ever more'savage criticism that only concealed but could not ease their own hurt. He has no very great expectations, not certainly for those who have assumed roles in which hostility to almost any administration is practically institutionalized. He notes of the Ivy League presidents that he never hears from them save to protest the war, and then only when they are having trouble with their students. He accepts such behaviour as role playing, and sees it as no enormous loss.

The President is no Ivy Leaguer. But he is, in his own way, as much an intellectual as any President in modern times. I heard him say just that-"I, too, am an intellectual"-to a dinner at the Hotel Pierre which he gave for the several hundreds of men and women, mostly from universities, who had gathered to work for him on task forces just after the 1968 election. He noted then that probably only a handful of those in the room had voted for him.

Even so, they had responded to his. request for help, and he responded in turn. Civility is no small thing. It is to a nation.what character is to a man. Neither he for his part, nor the academics' for theirs, could point to a past of flawlessly modulated and perfectly controlled behaviour. But too many men and women live out their lives trying to reshape their past. A quality of the Presidency is that it focuses on the future. He has changed the world, he feels. He knows it has changed him.

END

SomeNew Viewsof American Literature

This issue of SPAN is devoted to a 36-page Special Section on Ameri<;:anLiterature-new views of new writers, fresh views of old writers.

The strength and richness of America derives in large part from its ethnic diversity. So, too, its literature. In the opening article "Modern American Ethnic Literature" (page 10), U.S.LS. Resident Specialist Jacob Sloan, who is well-known throughout India as an itinerant lecturer on American letters, discusses those American writers who are not of white Anglo-Saxon extraction, including the only true Qative Americans, the Red Indians. Sloan also develops the controversial thesis that playwright Eugene O'Neill is basically an "ethnic" writer whose inspiration came from his Irish immigrant roots.

Of all the ethnic schools of American literature today, perhaps the most varied and vital is Negro writing. In "America's Black Novelists" (page 15), Negro writer-editor Mel Watkins introduces a host of young and promising black authors. He argues that first the Anglo-Saxons dominated American literature, then the Jews. "Now," he says, "it's our turn."

For a change of pace-and a proof that literary criticism can be fun to read-one of India's most distinguished humorists, V.D. Trivadi, tells what happened "The Night I Decided to Write Like Thurber" (page 18). One of Trivadi's conclusions: Until James Thurber came along, it was believed that the humorist's chief function was to make the world a less frightening place to live in; Thurber took the opposite view.

Lest we neglect poets, SPAN interviews William Stafford (page 23), who gave lectures and poetry readings in India late last year. Stafford offers some new ideas about his craft-and about the difficulties of translating poetry. How well he himself has surmounted those difficulties may be seen from his translations (page 24) of the Ghazals of Ghalib.

For an intimate view of "a new and disturbing" writer in American fiction, Alfred Kazin reports on his visit with Joyce Carol Oates (page 26). He suggests that one reason fO,rher growing appeal is that her characters, like most 20th-century people, are caught up in the "avalanche of time." They "live through terrifying events but cannot understand them." They live lives where "too much" is happening.

Sometimes not enough is happening in Ernest Hemingway's novels, but the inactivity is an artistic device. This is the controversial thesis of Dr. Cham an Nahal, one of India's most distinguished scholars of American literature, in his article on page 28. Hemingway is "the first Western novelist," in Nahal's opinion, "to use inactivity-physical or mental-as part of the structure of the novel." Seeing the typical Hemingway hero as a passive person, Nahal defies the long established "party line" of literary criticism that Hemingway heroes are men of action. His article is also a human interest travelogue on what it was like to live and do research on Hemingway at Princeton University. In a sidebar on page 31, Dr. Nahal applies his new theory to Hemingway's posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream.

People challenged us to come up with a "new view" of Mark Twain, and we met the challenge with pictures. Twain grew up in the little Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. His boyhood life there was eventually transformed by his art into Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What do young boys do today in Hannibal, Missouri? The picture essay on page 32 shows they do much the same things Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did. Life on the Mississippi hasn't changed all that much.

Finally, New York Times critic Richard Locke takes issue (page 35) with those who think that John Updike, though a craftsman of the elegant phrase, is not a great and serious writer.

Locke feels there are only two American writers working in a professional way to help us come to an "understanding of our human and cultural predicament as we slide into the 'seventies."

Norman Mailer is one. John Updike is the other. The "Updike Sampler" beginning on page 39 contains a selection of his humorous poems as well as two short stories so different in character from each other that they demonstrate Updike's virtuosity as a writer of fiction.

, /'

Moden! American

1

literatore

'Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America.

Then I discovered that the immigrants ~ American history.'

These much quoted words were written by the American historian Oscar Handlin in the introduction to his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Uprooted.

If Professor Handlin is right and the immigrants to American shores from abroad were American history, it may with equal truth be said that the writings of those immigrants and their descendants are American literature.

By the term "American ethnic writing," we mean writing by authors who are members of one of the many groups from different lands, races, historic origins that compose the American population-and whose writing shows the influence of that ethnic or group membership and that ethnic experience.

Theoretically, since all Americans but Red Indians are immigrants or descendants of im-

migrants, and the immigrants tended to come in waves, one might define all American writers, ipso facto, as ethnic writers. But the practice is to limit the term to those writers for whom being a member of a certain ethnic group is a very important fact as evidenced in their writing.

There is a narrower definition which says that American ethnic writing deals only with

the group the writer belongs to, and with his own experience only insofar as it relates to the group's experience. But we prefer the first definition, as being broader, and closer to the reality of both writing and experience.

Let us illustrate with an Indian analogy.

Khushwant Singh, currently the editor of the Illustrated Weekly, has written a number of books where it is quite clear that he writes as a member of the Sikh community, of that community's experiences and of the experiences of Sikhs as Sikhs.

He has also written other books where the fact that he himself is a Sikh and deeply involved in his community does not seem to be so important, since in these books he is not writing about the experiences of Sikhs or the Sikh community as such. He is writing about general Indian experiences-for example, in his memoirs about the Indian Foreign Service in London and New York.

Now, strictly speaking, one might maintain that Khushwant Singh's books about Sikh experiences are community, or ethnic writing, while his writing about his experiences in the Indian Foreign Service is not.

But, broadly speaking, if one judges that being a Sikh is a salient consideration in all of Khushwant Singh's writing, one is willing to include all of his books under the rubric of ethnic writing. That is the criterion we are applying to American ethnic writing.

To continue the Indian analogy: You are all familiar with the various groups, the various communities in Indian society: those based on caste lines, those on regional-linguistic lines, those on religious lines. American ethnic -groups are based on considerations of national origin, on race, on religion, and on history.

The American colonies were settled in the 17thand 18th centuries chiefly by immigrants from English-speaking countries: Great Britain and Northern Ireland. They found the North American continent sparsely inhabited

by Red Indians-that is, by groups descended from tribes of Asiatics, Mongolians who had crossedover to North America via the Bering Straits many centuries before. The European immigrants themselves soon began to import Negro slaves from Africa-the first slaves were brought over in 1619. The 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century saw a tremendous influx of immigrants to the United States: first from Northern and West-

ern Europe, then from Central and Eastern Swedish). These writers all come- from the two-thirds of Americans who are not of White Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East.

As a result of this large-scale settlement of Anglo-Saxon Protestant origin-known familthe United States by immigrants from differ- iarly in the United States by the acronymic abbreviation: WASP. Although the WASPs ent parts of Europe and the Mediterranean area, the country is now inhabited by people strictly speaking may also be considered an of many many ethnic groups, of different American ethnic group, we shall not be disraces, nations, cultures, and histories. So that, cussing their writing-simply because it is so sociologists now estimate, the descendants of well-known. Their writing is considered the the original Anglo-Saxon element now make mainstream of American literature. We are up only one-third of the American popula- thinking of such writers as Emerson and tion; the parents of two-thirds of the American Whitman and Melville and Twain and Hawpeople came from countries where English thorne and Hemingway and Faulkner and Frost and Stevens, and so forth. The writers was not the mother tongue.

This social situation is reflected in Amer- and the writing we shall consider in this ican literature. Men and women of Irish, article are in the'streams that empty into that Negro, and Jewish descen~ make up a signif- mainstream. icant proportion of American writers. But there is no direct one-to-one relationship beho are these writers? What are their tween the size of an ethnic group, and the names? Some of these names are very number and importance of its literary people. familiar, others less so, still others quite During the past century, and particularly dur- unfamiliar outside of the United States, and ing the last 25 years, the last generation, Jews - outside of their own ethnic groups. We will have been contributing a far higher propor- move from the familiar to the unfamiliar: the tion of good writers to American literature names will grow stranger and stranger. Yet than their 4 per cent of the total population each of these writers is an important repremight indicate. sentative of his ethnic group: On the other hand, until very recently We begin with names of writers of Irish there were few good Negro writers-though background (10 per cent of Americans are of Negroes constitute II per cent of the U.S. Irish descent). Starting with Eugene O'Neill, population. But the last generation, since the a world name, we proceed to other Irish end of the Second World War, the number of names: James T. Farrell, Edwin O'Connor, Negro writers has been shooting up. Their John O'Hara and Frank O'Hara. advent coincides with the social revolution Negro names: James Baldwin, Richard that was marked by the United States Su- Wright, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, James preme Court decision of 1954 declaring it Weldon Johnson. illegal to segregate Negro students in special Jewish names: Saul Bellow, Bernard schools-they were not receiving an educa- Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Karl Shapiro. tion equal to that of other American students.

Armenian names: William Saroyan. I note Now, more of them are; as we know, a good an increasing interest in Saroyan's writings education is generally a prerequisite for liter- in India. ary achievement.

Norwegian: Ole Rolvaag. Swedish: May Swenson. hat are these ethnic groups? They are Chinese: Lin Yu Tang. Japanese: Shisei not limited to writers of Irish, Negro Tsuneishi. Filipino: Jose Garcia Villa. and Jewish background. Thus, a recent an- Korean: Richard Kim. Italian: Pietro di Donato, Gregory Corso. thology of American ethniC writing divides its contents into six large chapters: Negro AmerPuerto Rican: Luis Munoz Marin, Piri ican Writers; Oriental American Writers (of Thomas.

Chinese, Japanese, Philippine origin); HisMexican: Rudy Gallardo. Spanish: Pmpanic American Writers (Spanish, Mexican, dencio de Pereda. Basque: Robert Laxalt.

Russian (more specifically, Ukrainian): Puerto Rican); Jewish American Writers; Red Indian Writers; and European American and Marya Zaturenska. Greek: Harry Mark Near-Eastern American Writers (Italian, Irish, Pettakis. Polish: Richard Bankowsky.

Polish, Greek, Basque, Russian, Armenian, And last, but far from least, writers from an

W

W

'The descendants of the Anglo-Saxon element now make up only ,one-third of the American population; the thing about the universality of this writer whom we dare to hold as at least in part an ethnic writer. I myself agree with those critics who claim that those late posthumous plays of O'Neill were his best ones. For in these plays he did two things: First he raised his language above the mediocrity that is the bane of the American stage. And second, in two plays he dealt in depth with the innermost experience of his ethnic group, the Irish immigrants to the United States. The two .plays I am referring to are Long Day's Journey Into Night, written between 1939 and 1941, but not produced until 1956; and A Touch o.fthe Poet, written between 1935 and 1942, produced 16 years later in 1958.

Whatever his merits as a purely literary man, as a dramatist O'Neill is remarkable for his force, the intensity of his passion, and the breadth of his concerns. In the vigour and the variety of his art, he is matched only by two American writers who, with him, composed the triad of our world figures: the novelist Mark Twain and the poet Walt Whitman. o answer these questions, we shaU not Do we mean a: paradox then when we attempt here to deal with aU of the writers and aU of the groups we have cited. We will maintain that in this world figure we shall focus on one writer, the best known of them find the basic themes of American ethnic all, with whose writing we are all familiar, writing? Perhaps we should ask ourselves how with the ethnic aspects of his writing, and much of Eugene O'Neill's strength goes back with its relation to American literature as a to his roots, his ties, in the ethnic group from . which he sprang-the Irish immigrants to the whole.

That writer, of course, is Eugene O'Neill.

United States? How much was he like Antaeus? You remember the Greek myth about Of the. many writers we have named, the giant Antaeus of fabulous strength who Eugene O'Neill is undeniably the most emchallenged all passersby to a wrestle to death. inent. His work is, for the most part, not particularly notable as literature. It is not The hero Hercules came along during the course of his 10 adventures. He accepted the refined or distinguished in its use of lanchallenge, and easily lifting the giant aloft, guage. O'Neill was not Shakespeare.

But threw him down to the earth. To Hercules's who, except Shakespeare, was? amazement, the giant rebounded stronger I am reminded of a story about the old than ever. This happened several times. Then master of Ger, the guru, who is reported to have said to his disciples on his deathbed: Hercules realized that the giant Antaeus drew his great strength from renewed contact with "Children, I am not worried that his mother, Mother Earth. So Hercules made when I die the Angel on High at the gate one last desperate effort, grabbed Antaeus of heaven wiU ask me: Master of Ger, and held him kicking and squirming over his why were you not Moses? Why were head at arm's length, until all kicking and you not Jesus Christ? Why were you squirming stopped: Antaeus went limp. How not the prophet Mohammed? Why were far was Eugene O'Neill indebted to his conyou not the ineffable Buddha? Why tacts with his "earth," the Irish ethnic group, were you not the great Confucius? for his vitality?

"I am worried that he may ask me: Now it is obviously impossible to measure Why were you not the Master of Ger?" the vitality of an artist exactly on a graph, to Eugene O'Neill did realize himself. He did become Eugene O'Neill. trace the roots of his art to their last tentacle in the soil of his people. There is always an O'Neill was certainly not a prophet without honour in his own country during his incalculable residue, call it personality, call it genius, call it the X factor, the X quality, lifetime; he was successful and highly esteemed. But perhaps the strongest enthusiasts of that distinguishes every individual. We do not wish to imply that Eugene O'Neill, or this American writer of Irish descent, those who can be credited with having brought his any of the other writers we have mentioned, was only, nothing more than, an ethnic varilater, stiU unproduced plays to public attenant of the genus writer. We are not trying to tion, were the Swedes. Which tells us someethnic group that is just now beginning to reassert its identity, the American Red Indians: Peter La Farge, who has earned a national reputation as a folk singer and composer of folk songs, many on American Indian themes; N. Scott Momaday, associate professor of English at the University of California in Santa Barbara; and Emerson Blackhorse Mitchell, author of an autobiography written while he was living on a reservation.

AU these writers have written significant books in American English.

Granted all these facts-the history of immigration to the United States, the definitions and names of ethnic groups and of ethnic writers-one comes to the nub of the question: How has American ethnic writing influenced American literature as a whole? To be more specific: What are the themes of ethnic writing? The style? The tone? And, most important, how good is it? What has been its impact on American literature?

T

isolate his genius, to narrow it down into a purely ethnic matter, to hint that he wrote what he did and as he did simply because that was to be expected of someone with his background.

But any. writer's background-as well as his foreground-the personal world he lives in, cannot help but affect his writing. Writers are human beings like everyone else, not writing machines or writing spirits.

Arthur and Barbara Gelb, in their journalistic biography of Eugene O'Neill, have supplied us with all the detailed information one could possibly want to know about his life and career, his family, his education, his friends and his feuds, his travels and sojournings, his marriages and divorces, his bouts of drinking and periods of abstinence, his successful plays and his unsuccessful ones, his painful sicknesses and the relief of his death.

His father, James O'Neill, was an Irish immigrant who became a famous romantic stage actor. So the theatre, as the saying goes, was in Eugene O'Neill's blood. But his father was at the same time grandiose and petty.

He had tremendous acting potential which he never fulfilled because he suffered fr'om a sense of acute insecurity. O'Neill's mother became a drug addict, but was eventually cured. His brother, however, could not overcome his alcoholism and literally drank himself to death. Eugene O'Neill himself rebelled against his home (rather, fled his home and its tragic breakdown) by running off to seathe locale of his early plays. These plays were groundbreaking in the depths of their realism for the American theatre in the years before World War I, lifting that theatre out of the re.alism of surfaces that was its affliction. He went through a long, disastrous period as a down-and-outer, from which he emerged only when he had touched the very bottom-homeless and starving and friendless.

In a sense, O'Neill's background and history were not particularly exceptional. He exaggerated a great deal in his plays. There. are many fathers with great potentials that¡ do not get fulfilled, many mothers and wives who grow sick with anxiety and are cured when the anxiety-provoking situation changes; O'Neill's mother recovered her health, was weaned of her reliance on drugs after her husband died. And there are many sons who are so overwhelmed by conflict with their fathers that they try to escape into one dissipation or other~whether it be alcohol or a life of fantasy-as do so many characters in O'Neill's plays.

But what distinguished Eugene O'Neill was that he took the experiences of his life and placed them in a larger context. He made high

parents of two-thirds of the American people came from ... tragedy out of what was often merely pathos, warm comedy out of what was only ordinary homespun humour-as in Ah, Wilderness.

The conflicts within a typical American ethnic family he transposed from a minor key to a major one. He took ordinary human interest situations, found their counterparts in the classic Greek myths-and then brought them back to the soil of America, immeasurably elevated. In that way the royal Greek kings, queens, noble heroes and desperate adventurers and ruthless murderers and seducers and dangerous witches-Oedipus and Electra and Clytemnestra and Theseus and Medeaappear on the American landscape dressed in the uniforms of Civil War soldiers and New England farmers and Yankee clipper captains.

So O'Neill's Irish American family tree sends its roots through the forests of time and place, to become entangled with the Far Eastern route of that mercenary traveller, the Italian Marco Polo, and with the mystic path of Lazarus, the Palestinian Jew risen from the dead by the word of the Messiah-yes, even with the flight of the contemporary runaway Negro returned to an African island, Emperor Brutus Jones himself.

Eugene O'Neill's popular play Emperor Jones (it was made into both a movie and opera) leads us straight to the ethnic theme.

Professor M. Manuel of the University of Kerala has very aptly pointed out that the theme of this play is a very complicated one.

He has written: "Only at one level, and that the more obvious level, is the theme of the play of the regression of a Negro from a state of civilization to primitive savagery. The real subject of the play is the tumbling down, not particularly of a Negro, but of man and especially of western man, from a state of unstable, cultural equilibrium [our emphasis] to earlier stages of savagery.... " Professor Manuel goes on to conclude: "The identity of himself [emphasis ours] which Jones recognizes is not with the race to which he belongs, but to the white race whose culture has been superimposed on his own cultural inheritance. It is because of this that he is closer to Smith [the degenerate white man in the play] than to the Negroes of the island. Therefore, Jones's fall down the staircase of culture and history is not to be taken as the fall of a Negro but of contemporary man and of Western man in particular."

Now this is a statement by a South Indian scholar about the universal implications of an Irish-American playwright's description of the ethnic dilemma of an American Negro

wltere English was not the mother tongue.~

in Africa. Yet its analysis cuts very close to the bone of American ethnic writing.

The two key ideas in Professor Manuel's analysis of the theme of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones are "identity of self" and "cultural equilibrium." The first has become almost a commonplace in American writing and literary criticism. How often do we hear and talk about the problem of identity-and its companion, alienation, the loss of identity-and their corollary, suffering-as a consequence of the state of alienation and lack of identity!

But "cultural equilibrium" is a horse of a different colour indeed, not at all the same hobby horse. For the usual tendency is to talk about identity-alienation-suffering as though it were either a kind of personal psychological syndrome or, contrariwise, an abstract, impersonal metaphysical entity. It is not generally regarded as intimately associated with a cultural, a social situation-in American terms, very often a definitely ethnic group situation.

Professor Manuel has perceptively made this association for us. He has pointed out that the Emperor Jones, as a member of the Negro ethnic group, has lost his cultural equilibrium; the culture of white society, superimposed on his native black culture, has sent him falling. That cultural loss of balance has led to his confusion over his own identity, and that is why we see him regress to an earlier cultural period, to savagery.

But, you may object: O'Neill in Emperor Jones was writing about a Negro, not someone from his own ethnic group, the American Irish. Besides, the Negro is representing both the very special predicament of his race and that of Western or American society as a whole. Why do we assume that is a predicament of all ethnic groups?

The answer to this reasonable objection is twofold. First, in the context of American society, it is very common for one ethnic group to be represented as standing for another, or for all ethnic groups. This has been most evident in the movies, where for decades all gangsters were represented as Italian in origin, though it was common knowledge that other ethnic groups-German, Irish, Jewish, Negro, Polish, and so forth-contributed their share of criminals. Luckily, the Italian Americans were also depicted as artistic types.

An example of this common substitution of one ethnic group for another, or for all ethnic groups in American culture comes to mind. The film Golden Boy, from the play of that name, tells of a gifted young violinist of conspicuously Italian descent who elects to become a prize-fighter in pursuit of the bitch goddess money-with the inevitable demoral-

lZlng consequences. The author, Clifford Odets, was himself Jewish, had indeed previously written several plays with a Jewish ethnic background, notably Awake and Sing, and the family, as portrayed on both stage and screen could equally well have been Jewish.

I have myself noted in a paper on Bernard Malamud's novel The Assistant that the conjunction of Italian and Jewish characters in that novel is a perfectly accurate reflection of the actual social situation of these ethnic groups. They are very close in many ways.

s

o what Eugene O'Neill did in Emperor a Negro for any other ethnic American group-is quite customary.

In fact, there have been other plays and novels where members of other ethnic groups go back to their ancestors' homelands and feel as alienated as the Emperor Jones does in his African island-and they too revert to a kind of cultural primitivism!

But why substitute another ethnic character for one's own? Perhaps it is the way the author tries to get some necessary distance from his material, to be able to write more objectively. After all, it wasn't until the end of his life that O'Neill could write directly about Irish Americans. Thus, John Steinbeck, who wrote a good deal about ethnic groups, actually moved further and further away from his own German ethnic group; he began with the poor white Okie farmers of the American Southwest and then went on to write about coloured Mexican and Latin American Indian fishermen-and the themes were not too different.

For the second part of the answer to the question-why talk about Negroes when you mean Irish Americ ans or German Americans?

-we can cite another familiar strategy in ethnic writing: displacement, or loading. In recent American writing the cultural disequilibrium and identity-alienation-suffering syndromes have been displaced or loaded on to two groups who are perhaps best equipped from the point of view of history and experience to bear it-the Jews and the Negroes. Both have a history of persecution and of foreignness in the countries where they have lived.

Both have been outstanding in their suffering.

Both have caught the attention of the world.

But these two processes, substitution and. displacement, are possible only because the other ethnic groups face the same problems, and dilemmas, come to the same solutions.

So that authors like O'Neill are responding both as creative artists, and as members of their own ethnic groups. This is even clearer in the writing of the Negro and Jewish authors whom we have mentioned. They all unJones-substituting

Most writers 'unequivocally associate their own experiences ... equivocally associate their own experiences, the themes of their own life, with that of their ethnic group.

All American ethnic groups have shared certain experiences. Typically, they lived, as much by preference as under compulsion, in ghettos, separate living areas, either slums or verging on slums. They have begun generally as poor labourers-working in factories, on road crews, as miners. And most of them have suffered from conflict with their children. For the parents remember the Old Country, and are tied to its values. The children, born into the New Country, find themselves torn between the two worlds and their values. This is the background of history and experience that ethnic groups in America have shared.

It is the source of the alienation-identitysuffering themes in so much of the best of American literature.

What about the style, the tone, the quality of American ethnic writing? This is something that can only be judged through illustration. We offer for your consideration characteristic selections from some of the best of American ethnic writers.

First, a speech from James Baldwin's The Amen Comer. Baldwin is noted for his eloquence, a rhetoric that derives from the rhythms of the Bible and the Negro spiritual.

Here, the preacher Margaret is speaking to her son, David, who is turning wild. Ruefully, compassionately she warns him of the suffering fate of his generation:

with that of their ethnic group.'

Next, from the American Jewish writer Saul Bellow, the famous first paragraph of his picaresque novel, The Adventures of Augie March.

The hero introduces himself in a free-swinging yet contemplative bit of thinking aloud, a style of dialectic characteristic of American urban life. At the same time it is firmly in the Jewish tradition-the play of the mind on an intricate subject, the most intricate of all: oneself, identity.

From 'The Adventures of Augie March,' by Saul Bellow I am an American, Chicago bornChicago, that sombre city-and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

The Chinese-born author Lin Yutang has had a tremendous impact on American audiences with his pellucid, graceful, highly civilized writing. Here, in a poem, "Green, Green" from his book Chinatown Family, he used a classic Chinese form, to hint, ever so glancingly, at the human being's essential nonalienation from sheltering nature, represented here by the Sterculia, the Chinese parasol tree.

From 'The Amen Corner,' by James Baldwin Margaret: I remember boys like you down home, David, many years agofine young men, proud as horses, and I seen what happened to them. I seen them go down, David, until they was among the lowest of the low. There's boys like you down there today, breaking rock and building roads, they ain't never going to hold up their heads up on this earth no more. There's boys like you all over this city, filling up the gin mills and standing on the corners, running down alleys, tearing themselves to pieces with knives and whiskey and dope and sin. You think I done lived this long and I don't know what's happening? Fine young men and they're lostthey don't know what's happened to their life. Fine young men and some of them dead and some them dead while they living ....

Green, Green, The Sterculia leaves.

Blue, blue, The sky behind them.

Light, light, The early autumn breeze.

Gone, gone, My heart's sorrow burden.

Chirp, chirp, The birds' love chatter.

Gay, gay, Their autumnal dress.

Now, the feathered lover flies away, Because his bride disdains his attentions When a new one perches by her side.

But I still look on, While I am thinking of the one gone away.

And finally, the voice of the American Indian, always in the background of all

American ethnic writing, the beginning of all American literature. In the three songs with which we conclude this article we hear the aboriginal, universal, apocalyptic, clearest and deepest note in American literature: that of the American Indian.

The Whole World Is Coming The whole world is coming.

A nation is coming, a nation is coming.

The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.

The father says so, the father says so.

Over the whole earth they are coming.

The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming.

The Crow has brought the message to the tribe.

The father says so, the father says so.

The Raven Says Our father above, I have seen.

The raven says, "There is going to be another judgment day."

May I Walk On the trail marked with pollen may 1 walk, With grasshoppers about my feet may 1 walk, With dew about my feet may I walk, With beauty may I walk, With beauty before me may I walk, With beauty behind me may I walk, With beauty above me may I walk, With beauty under me may I walk, With beauty all around me may I walk, In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk, In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk, It is finished in beauty.

About the Author: Literary critic, editor, translator and poet, Jacob Sloan is currently Resident Specialist in American Literature for the' U.S. Tnformation Service in India, lecturing extensively in all parts of the country. Sloan's articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Commentary and other leading American periodicals. His books include a collection of poetry titled Generation of Journey, as well as translations of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Nobel Prize-winner 1. Y. Agnol1.

L

AmerieWs

ove ists Tough, gutsy, surrealistic, earthy-these are words used to describe America's black novelists-both old and young. Speaking with great intensity and using various stylistic techniques, they have produced some of the most imaginative fiction in the United States today.

Pioneers of black fiction are: top, Richard Wright; and Ralph Ellison, above.

At left, James Baldwin.

As in theatre and poetry, so too in literature, the black revolution in America has created an exciting new ferment. More black novelists than ever before are exploring their experience in fiction and addressing their work to a rapidly growing readership of blacks and whites.

Their emergence speaks with many voices as they search for their own forms of expression in examining the central problems of American society, but they speak with a remarkable vitality and intensity.

The new black writing hardly emerged from a void. The first known novel written by a black American, William Wells Brown, was published in London in 1853. However, it and other novels of the period were more historic milestones than significant literary works. It was not until 1899, with the publication of Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio, that any black novel consistently maintained a theme of independent ethnic consciousness. In this novel, the hero, refusing to accept inferior status, leads an unsuccessful revolt and later joins a group that plans to take over Texas and begin a black nation.

This new sense of black consciousness foreshadowed the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. It was during this decade that black writers turned to their own life style for their creative inspiration.

Such writers as Jean Toomer, whose Cane (1923) ranks at the top of the list along with Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Banana Bottom, and Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter and numerous others, were little known to whites but widely read by blacks. Together with later and much better known writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, they laid the groundwork for the new young writers of today.

Wright's Native Son is still probably the best known black American novel but many contemporary black writers consider his autobiographical Black Boy a greater achievement. Ellison's Invisible Man -voted by a panel of leading American writers as the best novel written by any American in the last 20 years-brings together black folklore, jazz rhythms, surrealism and a rich symbolic structure.

Beyond that, it shocked white Americans with a fact that blacks had always known-that within the mainstream of American society the black was essentially ignored and "invisible." Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain is probably his best novel but he may be better known for his hard-hitting essays on the American racial problem.

Black fiction ranges from traditional realistic novels to more elaborately constructed fiction that employs the symbolic and surrealistic techniques that characterize the modern, mainstream American fictional idiom. The most impressive and unique characteristic of contemporary black fiction is the variety of techniques that novelists are employing in their exploration of the Afro-American experience.

Some black novelists aren't interested in a white audience at all; their concern is with contributing to the black movement for complete equality. "For me," says John Oliver Killens, one of the leading black writers in the United States, "the task of the black writers in America is to deniggeriz~ the world, to rid the world of niggers." Sam Anderson carries the case even further: "We need a revolution .... The black writer ... must necessarily aid in the struggle."

Not all black novelists agree. John A. Williams, whose brilliant The Man Who Cried I Am is a literary odyssey of the generation of black writers ofthe 1930s, argues that insofar as art should "enlighten," the black writer should address himself to white readers. "Most black people know what black writers are saying-our messages, in the main, are for 'Mr. Charlie' [the white man]. However we need the support of black readers." Others like youthful James McPherson, who has published a vivid collection of short stories, Hue and Cry, seethemselves primarily as artists striving for self-expression. "I don't want to desert the black experience," he says. "It's richer than any other in this country. But I don't think one should spend all his time writingpropaganda. I deal with people-black and white-just people."

And the debate goes on. When Thomas Mann defined literature as the union of suffering with the instinct for form, he was thinking of the individual artist, not of a whole people's historic suffering. For the newer black writers, who are far more "black" in every interest, theme and gesture than James Baldwin has ever been, "black" is the sign of the people as well as of the artist, "black" is the name of the activist present and "black" is all the politics a black man needs. By contrast, to Richard Wright "black" was simply the stamp of his personal experience, not a "holy cause."

Among the new writers who are dealing with experimental fiction is Ernest J. Gaines who since 1964 has published three novels and a collection of short stories. His latest work, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is'told in the voice of an ex-slave who has lived through the Civil War to see the "Second Emancipation" of the 1960s. It is his strongest work and, beyond being a moving evocation of an individual black woman's life, traces the course of American race relations through a period of 100 years. Louise Meriwether's first novel Daddy Was a Number Runner is another. It is a brilliant portrayal of ghetto life seen through the eyes of a young girl growing up in Harlem.

Again in Nathan C. Heard's powerful first novel, Howard Street, we see a world devoid of middle-class illusions-the vice centre of Newark's black ghetto, where drug addicts, prostitutes and muggers survive by their wits according to their own special amorality: "A man can't fool with the Golden Rule in a crowd that don't play fair."

But the black novelists' most creative and influential impact upon literature is being made by those writers who have taken the AfroAmerican experience-realistically bizarre, self-contradictory and in some ways pathological-and subjected it to novelistic techniques that heighten its grotesque or comic features or, by employing the ironic perception with which many black Americans view themselves, have fictionally cast an oblique but more revealing image of black life.

One of the most significant of these new works is William Melvin Kelley's Dunfords Travels Everywheres. This novel simultaneously treats the lives of a Harlem "hipster" and an "Ivy League Negro" who, symbolically, mayor may not be the same person. Structurally rich and expressively resonant, it provides a vision of American life through some formidable passages in which Kelley's version of "Black Black novelists: Top left, George Cain; top right, William Kelley; centre, Nathan Heard; above, John Williams and Toni Morrison.

English" successfully synthesizes the novel's symbolism and underlying theme of the quest for black identity.

Few black novelists, however, have more successfully broken sharply with the traditional devices than Ishmael Reed, who writes highly visual, surrealistic fantasies set in the far-out lands of his imagination. "Movie books," he calls them. His first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, uses an explosive combination of English prose, exaggerated black dialect, "hip" jargon, advertising slogans and long, howling, upper-case screams to describe the wanderings of a young innocent through a mad 1984-style country.

Among other new, exciting writers are Charles Wright and Cecil Brown. Wright is the author of two novels, The Messenger (1963) and The Wig (1966). The latter work, a comic-tragic depiction of a black man who tentatively finds love, sex and acceptance by straightening his hair, is a minor tour-de-force that satirizes the absurd efforts blacks have made to gain admittance into a society that rejects them.

Cecil Brown's The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, published in 1969, is a picaresque novel that follows the hilarious exploits of a black artist as he seeks self-discovery and identity in Copenhagen. He soon finds that even in his life as a black stud he is being used by the white world and that, in the end, everything is absurd.

But social satire is only one of the themes that preoccupy contemporary black novelists. Carlene Hatcher Polite's brilliantly executed The Flagellants portrays the gradual disintegration of a relationship between a black couple. One of the most striking effects of this novel is the tension created by Miss Polite's rich, lyrical style as it is used to record her protagonists' persistent psychological laceration of one another. Robert Deane Pharr's first novel, The Book of Numbers, also deals with the ambivalent love-hate, dependent-independent relations among his characters. Another novelist who should be mentioned prominently is Toni Morrison. Her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), was highly praised by critics; its sophisticated and finely wrought style makes one anticipate her next novel.

Perhaps the most important novel to be published by a black American author last year was George Cain's Blueschild Baby. Semi-autobiographical in conception, it is the story of a gifted urban youth's entrapment in the world of drug addiction and his painful fight to extricate himself. Beyond Cain's graphic recreation of the horrors of the addict's life, however, this novel makes a poignant statement about the exploitation that awaited its protagonist had he chosen the middle-class alternative his parents suggested. It is George Cain's deft handling of this material, his ability to interweave scenes involving dope peddlers, pimps and prostitutes into a fictional structure that encompasses American society as a whole, that sets this book apart.

Cain's novel is an excellent example of the extended scope that characterizes much contemporary black fiction. Focusing on experiences that are decidedly Afro-American in nature, he has broadened his fictional statement by successfully relating his personal experiences to the social and political context in which they exist and by which they were produced. This tendency perhaps characterizes today's black fiction more than any other. Still, summary generalizations about literature are usually ill-disposed-even the selection of novelists discussed here might be criticized for there are numerous writers who are not mentioned (among them LeRoi Jones, Barry Beckham, Sarah Wright, Sam Greenlee) but who have contributed to the development of the contemporary black novel.

"One time the Anglos dominated the literature of this country," says Ishmael Reed. "Then the Jews took over. Now it's our turn. I thi nk black literature will be the most interesting of the 1970s." END About the Author: Mel Watkins, an editor of the New York Times Book Review magazine and the literary magazine Black Review, is himself a black writer of increasing pron1inence. His works include short stories and a forth .. ~

coming children's book titled Racism in the Suburbs. Mel Watkins is also the co-author of To Be A Black Woman: Portraits in Fact and Fiction.

At top, Ishmael Reed; cenTre, John Oliver Killen.~ and Carlene Hatcher Polite; above, Ernest J. Gaines.

The night Ideeided

An intimate and envious look at James Thurber, one of the greatest American humorists, by a fellow practitioner from India. The portrait matches wit with wit, and nonsense with nonsense.

Writing is no easy task. The Master.

Himself had admonished his disciples thus: "Some inkling of the general idea should be apparent in the first 500 words." Well, one morning I awakened to the fact that Thurber, to write like Thurber, would reread Thurber. Weighed down by the responsibility of it all, I rushed to a library ... or was it a kennel? The only book unborrowed was about Grover's rovers, Grover being the middle name of our hero though he himself, in a fit of pique upon someone calling him James M. Thurber, invented a new title for himself and that was Murfreesboro. Which, no doubt, everybody found such a perplexity, not unlike the label Jamie Michree which he had tagged on to an immature outpouring.

Murfreesboro's mongrels were no mortal creatures. He had drawn them and tossed them aside, and the fact that they could be sold both astonished and frightened him. He picked them up and began to devote time and attention to the draughtsmanship. Until, that is, his comrade and funster friend E.B. White stopped him in good time. "If you ever become good, Thurber," scolded White, "you'd be mediocre." It worked like magic. There was a return to sanity and rapidity and Thurber's dogs multiplied faster than you could add them up. Conceit became a thing of the past. The Thurber aficionado is truly grateful, though Thurber would be the first to put that down as a Sweeping Statement or a Comfortable Conclusion.

to write like For all that he cared, you might as well have said, "There are no mridangams in Madagascar. " Thurber writes of his childhood reluctantly and only in fragments. But the Thurber childhood was different from, for instance, Salvador Dali's. It wasn't abnormal enough. "It never occurred to me to bite a bat in my aunts' presence or to throw stones at them. There was one escape, though: my secret world of idiom."

He describes it as a fantastic cosmos where people who were tied up at the office sat glued and gagged and roped and riveted; a telltale who was "all ears" was a biological monstrosity, a freak; the man who left town under a cloud could yet boast of having a permanent roof over his head; and good old Mrs. Huston, who was so cut up had actually been pulled apart and pickled in vinegar for posterity.

Mrs. Huston could have had no escape. "Now, Mrs. Huston, will we get on the table like a good girl, or will we have to be put there?" said muffled voices behind surgical masks, and there was Thurber watching.

Some lyrical subject-if not for song and legend, at least for a play. And a play it recently was, at Thurber's alma mater, the Ohio State University, of which he writes that it lies in a region of literacy and slurred enunciation, literary tradition and careless diction, vivid vocabulary and flat pronunciation. In November 1971 Jabberwock was launched, featuring the early Thurber and, by a happy coincidence, his only daughter Rosemary playing her own grandmother. "My father vowed that he would write a play for me," said Rosie before the opening, "but he never got around to it." She should have known her father better; he was getting around and into so many things, all by himself and all the time. Plunging, neck-deep and headlong, into literary criticism. Discussing The Cocktail Party at a cocktail party, Thurber, not content with hovering on the lunatic fringe, blithely adds sagacious remarks all his own. He sees it as "plainly a revaluation of the theory of Cato the Elder that

Thurber

two primary identities can sustain an unidentifiable third." They should have let it go at that but the astonishing reply comes from a listener with a glass in his hand.

"Naturally," says the man, "everybody knows that." Everybody except, presumably, James Grover Thurber!

Sober or not, Thurber was most competent to dwell on Eliot. They had so much in common. If one went for impractical dogs which bore a striking resemblance to dazed male humans, the other had his practical cats including Gus, or Augustus, the cat at the theatre-door.

If at solemn meetings of the Faber & Faber Board Eliot could set alight a cracker right under the Pontiff's throne, Thurber would invent the most divine cocktail tray to which half a dozen glasses are cunningly but firmly secured by tiny nuts and bolts. "This gives the drinker (who cannot get his glass off the tray) the feeling that he has lost his mind or strength and is likely to sober him up." But Thurber's idea of sobriety would, I suspect, conform to our idea of someone going thurberserk. We have seen his levelheaded types before. The gifted lady, for instance, whose frequent use of the triple

I

negative "not unmeaningless" confused everybody, as did her habit of starting sentences in the middle. It could have been worse: she could so easily have started her sentences, as many Thurber women do, in the middle of the night.

Or that other friend who would say: "Tomorrow night, our little talk shall deal with the appalling decline in our time of something or other, I haven't decided what."

Than which there is nothing more scarifying. "The unfounded fear," Thurber knows, "is worse than the founded."

Thurber's clowning was innocent, cherubic. It was congenital-and insurmountable. His mother Marne of whom he writes fondly and fervently was a famous hand at adding the hocus to pocus. She is recorded as having come down the stairs, with the sole aim of turning her father's hair prematurely grey, complaining bitterly to assembled guests that she had been confined upstairs on account of her hapless love for Mr. Briscoe the postman.

A Capricorn with the moon in Sagittarius, Marne Thurber had a memory for dates. This may have rubbed off on the noted critic of the Thurber saga, Richard

'Thurber was relentless in his pursuit of earthdwellers. He followed them through thick and thil

C. Tobias, who begins his work in spectache has worked for thirty-five years.

This is not to mean that Thurber was ular fashion: "The book was conceived at 10:00 in the morning on the 26th of overjoyed with the way his stories were September 1961." Nor was Thurber himfilmed. He may not have walked out on self immune. He wrote best and drew best Walter Mitty, as is often alleged, but it in his prime, a period roughly extending is not improbable that he had Mitty in from the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic mind when he referred to "a movie based to the day coffee was rationed. If you don't rather unsecurely on a piece I wrote some know these dates you have only yourself years ago." Out in the foyer he askedto blame, for being a Leo or a Taurus or drolly, as he confesses: "Did anybody whatever else Thurber and his ancestor catch the name of that picture?" Loud were not. For our benefit Tobias ought to enough, mind you, to be heard by the New have added that the 26th of September York cognoscenti present. If you are not 1961 was a Thursday. He didn't. Perhaps already blinded by the brilliance of it, it wasn't. here's more to come. Asked about a movie, If Thurber was well served by his family the same or another, and told that "it -his grandfather, for instance, was forever stinks" Thurber was quick to reply that he trying to cover up embarrassing situations didn't think it was that good. Over the by offering people watermelons-he was years this slash supreme, this stab sublime may have taken a lot of repair. Today it equally lucky in his peers. Two of the foremost comedians of our time stood by would be something like: "If a picture worse him until they almost tilted. One was than stinks, metrofaction may be said Danny Kaye, superbly intelligent and into have set in." And who will blame him? imitably idiotic. (Asked what he thought There were shorter films too, like The of the Himalayas, hadn't he replied with Lady and the Unicorn, with which Thurber was reportedly happy. But they are all the now famous mot: that he liked him, hated her.) The other was Peter Sellers, a tales with a moral, even if the moral was rather like the last line of a limerick, and near-sighted accident-prone avatar. Danny nobody but nobody could have interfered Kaye was that grand Thurber creation that all of us are, Walter Mitty by name. with that.

He was as triumphant as ever in his odd Thurber was relentless in his pursuit of excursions of clowning, playing a meek â&#x20AC;˘ earthdwellers. He followed them through commuter and the six varied heroes of thick and thin, in nook and corner. It was his day-dreams. Together Thurber and almost as if someone had asked him what, Kaye made Mitty a household name and as an impartial outsider, he thought of the human race. He presented The Male even a staid old maid like the British Lancet was driven into detailing what it Animal in the fearsome glare of Broadway. called the Walter Mitty Syndrome, thus In a lovely piece entitled "Get Thee to a placing Thurber squarely in the lap of Monastery," so modest that it is almost medical men the world over. unbelievable, Thurber has a Dr. Bach tell him this: "Now you and your collaboraAnd we have Peter Sellers of course. tor" selected an aggressively masculine One says of course because there is an air title for your comedy but actually filled of inevitability about both Thurber and Sellers. They just have to get together; and the play with obtrusively male characters and only a hint offemales, rather sketchily you don't quibble about who is Mohammed and which the mountain. If your life and ineptly drawn." He adds, a little too uncomfortably for Thurber, that the play was well ordered the last thing you would want, and the first thing you would find, will be remembered, if at all, as a 1940 vehicle for Gene Tierney. Today the play is reare these jokers together. But it was ahilarious combination, and a most successful collected with pleasure for its aggressively masculine title and for Thurber-and-comone; except for the episode of the Sabine pany whilst Miss Tierney will long reign as women, the world saw its first and only the murderess in glare-glasses in Leave Her Battle of the Sexes, a movie in which an to Heaven which is as far from Thurber as elderly chief accountant plans to murder an American female efficiency expert deteryou may wish to go.

In a less lethal role, Thurber achieved mined to modernize the textile firm where

everlasting fame. This was in the Thurber Carnival where he covered himself with glory by the mere act of walking into the cast with a nonchalance so typical of the man. During the play's last two months Thurber enacted a role he loved most of all, and next only to his mother-himself.

His audiences went hysterical. And why wouldn't they? Year by year he was growing blinder, in spite of a series of cataract operations, and one may picture him lurching and lumbering on the stage, and tottering and staggering, groping his way in the exuberance of light as other men might, in total darkness. He added a new dimension to his personality and at his death in 1961, of pneumonia, a New Yorker colleague was to say of him: "Most writers and artists can be compared with their contemporaries.

Thurber inhabits a world of his own."

It wasn't the first time that Thurber was playing himself. He was forever the lost infant, the child eternal. He was well adjusted, he was at home. Why, even his Fables and other stories for children are pure poetry. They may have the cloak of prose but they are, as Tobias of the 26th

¡ .. as if someone had asked him what, as an impartial outsider, he thought of the human race.'

of September 1961 points out, blank verse.

It is interesting to add that another humorist also wrote blank verse-Charles Dickens of the United Kingdom, citizen and chronicler, and precursor. The difference between these two was the same thick line that divides British beer from American beer. The British variety is hops; the American, hops, skips and jumps! It is the kind of difference that invites the superior skills of psychoanalysis-"My analyst is crazy to meet you, darling,"-but Thurber remains outwardly calm. Nothing left its deep psychic mark on him.

We would gladly settle for anyone of Thurber's 10 accomplishments, the 10 he took in his stride. He was unmoved. He had read that the crust of the earth was shrinking alarmingly, and that the universe was growing steadily colder, but he did not believe that any of those was in half as bad a shape as he was, yet he was steadfast to a degree achieved only by the sages. And he knows what it can do to a man. It's not every American who would wish to buy an American flag as a Christmas present for his wife. He is cool, he is composed. He is confident of himself as he strides into a shop for it, and cocksure of himself as he gives it to his wife. When, however, his wife reacts predictably-or doesn't-he wryly supposes that he should have married Barbara Fritchie. His mistake, really; he needed no flags, 110 slogans, no badges, no statements. But Homer nods. And, let us face it, we are ready to forgive: after all, to thurberr is humour.

It has been observed that Thurber's creations are a breed apart. They attract a lot of attention to themselves, but they themselves take no interest in the reader.

They recognize one another, however. His women cannot exist except with his men.

His men envy his dogs which seem to be able to make a point without barking or biting, no holds barred yet no fangs bared.

They are often spoken of as devilishly indescribable and then properly described in one hundred different ways. Yet they are there doing nothing, achieving a certain negation of action that qualifies them for instant nirvana. In creating them Thurber has a shot at salvation himself. And why not? The world of people and pets is governed by one golden rule: you are damned if you do, and damned if you

don't. Interdependence, not independence, is what might, just might, pull you through.

"The seasick," notes Thurber, "turn to the unseasick for succour, sanctuary and salvation that are impossible to give." That is why the Thurber female interdepends.

She shouts, or makes some nasty observation, or asks some plain wifely question like, "What shall I do with your remains, George?" She speaks the truth, and only the truth: "She got tuberculosis from her teeth and it went all through her symptom."

When particularly sad and forlorn, and feeling wretched, she speaks softly, with her heart in her eyes: "I yielded, yes, but I never led your husband on, Mrs. Fisher."

Dustman Doolittle would have known exactly what the matter is with Thurber women. It's their middle-class morality; they are done in. As for the men, why, that's equally simple, they are done for.

They are "frustrated, fugitive beings always vaguely striving to get out of something-a room, a situation, a state of mind ; at other times, they are merely perplexed and too humble, or weak, to move." They have, however, their smaller joys. They can actually get too daring for words and glare, or say, "I can tell you right now that it won't work," as they superintend their women at the ping-pong table. It could be any female anywhere, doing anything. If this isn't gumption, what is? Chesterton would have approved. He was the one who defined caricature as "making a pig even more like a pig than God made him." And

e.e. cummings would gladly have passed on his crown to Thurber, the one that says: "an author of pictures, a draughtsman of words."

By and large, Thurber drawings have, in

the superb shorthand of Dorothy Parker, the outer semblance of unbaked cookies.

They had been thought "fifth-rate" until Harold Ross of The New Yorker, boss and buyer, announced that they were better, they were third-rate. They have been compared to the scrawls of four-year-olds, even as four-year-olds had been thought to have written much of cummings's verses. And Thurber himself was often asked if he drew by moonlight, or under water. In spite of everything, his cartoons were apt to be stolen, and Thurber smirked that "theft, more than imitation, is the highest form of flattery, carrying with it the risk of fine and imprisonment." They have also been treated with extreme suspicion. The Christmas cards he drew were held up at an international border. Understandable, thought a colleague: "Two-hundred of any drawing of yours must give the authorities pause." It is true that sometimes you don't know where the doodle ends and the drawing begins, as with his writing you can't tell where the dawdling gives place to the dissertation.

Indifferent to adulation, he toyed with himself as he did with his characters. A Thurber woman admitting to a temptation to take her own life would, I think, best represent him, though, given the choice, he would have liked to have identified himself with that fine specimen of British nobility, properly ensconsed in a chauffeur-driven Rolls and instructing as follows: "Drive over the cliff, Thompson, I am committing suicide."

There is one distinction which Thurber achieved which no one else quite has. He was a humorist's humorist, as Corot was a painter's painter and Kean, an actor's actor. His success with fellow-practitioners of his art was astounding. Here were guys wise up to everyone of his little tricks ... yet they fell for them as readily as his readers. There were exceptions, but they were few and far between. A notable example is his French girl who learnt all her English from Shakespeare and once asked him, "How goes the night?", to which Thurber proudly replied, "The moon is down. I have not heard the clock." To adapt Shakespeare for pure fun-is a tricky business, and Thurber did not have that kind of luck with the Bard, but he had better than most with practically everything else.

Until Thurber, the humorist's function was to make the world a less frightening place to live in.

Consider a husband talking to his wife: "With you I have known peace, Lida .... " How will you end it, if you wished it to be funny? You'll find any number of conclusions possible. You could add: " ... but there's this little matter of your dress bill," or, " ... but that's no reason to bash up the car," or, " ... but isn't it time we stopped this Pill foolishness?", or, however outrageous it may seem, "oughtn't we to get Junior out on parole?" or even, God forgive us all, "it's your mother I'm objecting to." It was given to Thurber, however, to cap it with a remark all his own. He said: "With you I've known peace, Lida, and now you tell me you're going crazy!"

Until Thurber came on the scene, the humorist's chief function was believed to be to make the world a less frightening place in which to live. He, a senescent student of the domestic scene, chose to take the opposite view. He was constantly reshaping the home and the world, making both more alarming. Not without pain, however. "Humour can be a headache," he wrote a would-be authoress, "Why don't you become a bacteriologist, or a Red Cross nurse, or a Wave, like all the other girls?" If he found it a struggle, we can find no evidence of it. He was a humorous man writing for a living, as Oliver Hardy was a humorous man who happened to be fat and not a fat man trying to be humorous. Only Thurber could have had one man admonish another in such merciless terms: "You keep your wife's name out of this, Ashby!"

Thurber wails that there is a conviction, particularly amongst women, that "writing late at night lends a special magic to prose, like writing in a rose arbour or on a houseboat." Because he was so guileless, he

wrote tales neither of buccaneers nor of buried treasure. Stephen Leacock almost found the latter and, dying in the attempt, buried himself, a procedure he heartily commends to all who would write similar sea stories. Thurber wrote about his family, as Saroyan wrote, nostalgically, a trifle irrelevantly. Of his uncle, Aram was to remark that "he was scornful of the world that year" and that he was getting his Yoga books out of the library but pretended that he was getting them from God. Both Saroyan and Thurber relied on the manner of telling a story, as strongly recommended

by Mark Twain. When it came to the matter, upon which the comic story depended, Thurber left Saroyan miles behind. He paid attention to both matter and manner, the way India's Mario will only have 40-inch bosoms for his women.

When it came to writing plays, Thurber had the conviction that either the curtain goes up on a lot of bilge, or it goes up not at all-the latter a problem which Eliot confessed he faced in every play he wrote.

As Thurber developed his craft, however, he found he could get the curtain going up beautifully by the mere act of poising his pen over paper. By then he had begun to share some of the more charming qualities of Emerson who "asked not for the great, the remote, the romantic ... but he did explore and sit at the feet of the familiar and the lowly." He was, too, an inheritor to the tradition of Whitman whose "most ardent feelings were those which he could share with a crowd; his sense of identity with other humans seemed to stir him more deeply than any other experience." He observed more keenly, and with more delight, the simpler and kindlier arts of the AI-

mighty. He had learned to write that "pigeons alighting anywhere are neither sad pigeons nor gay pigeons, they are simply pigeons." Which, when you get to think of it, is karma in a nutshell. And what he said of pigeons could be said about presidents and their paraphernalia, paupers and their predicaments. Thurber was no Plato, nor did he need to be; his humour is not "humour bent to the tragic pursuit of a moral philosophy." Had he lived longer than his 66 years, he may have given us his Dialogues. Or did he, and were they plundered by time or a dim memory, much the same way as Plato's 'comedies' have been irrevocably lost?

Years ago I met in Poona a celebrated mathematician. For three hours one evening he constructed the "Four Quartets" as a geometrical solution to a geometrical problem. It was fascinating, particularly as it was above my head. I wish I had asked him to so build a Thurber piece. I like to think that Thurber, too, is pure geometry.

Isn't geometry the sort of thing that retains an identifiable character throughout a series of possible transformations? James Thurber was all people, yet retained his character; he was himself. That was why, when a customs man asked him what kind of an artist he was, he replied that he would not answer for fear of incriminating himself.

Thurber, plain and simple, gliding from one anecdote to another? About Dr. Rankin and Mrs. Albright this time. Dr. Rankin has been taught to believe in the existence of microscopic and invisible agencies of disease in air and water. Mrs. Albright is scornful, sceptical. How then, rebuts the man of medicine, do you account for an epidemic? That, returns Mrs. Albright, is just the contagion. Dr. Rankin frowns thoughtfully and suggests that it is possible -just possible-that both may be right. It is not on record that either of them laughed.

A pity if they didn't. Laughter would have done them good. Laughter-this unique sensation of feeling good all over and showing it, principally, in one spot. The definition is not mine but Josh Billings's.

I do not know. All I know is what happened to me the night I decided to write ~ like Thurber. Wicked, wicked Thurber. I have known peace with you, Murfreesboro, and now you tell me you're going crazy.

END

Poetry is the breatliof life One of America's finest living poets, William Stafford has published several volumes of verse including West of Your City, Travelling Through the Dark, The Rescued Year and Allegiances. Stafford, who recently visited India, has also published Ghazals of Ghalib, translated from Urdu. A resident professor of English at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, he is at present teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle. In speaking of his work, Stafford has expressed the hope that "sometimes for every reader a poem would arrive: it would go out for him and find his life." Here, he discusses what he means-and whatpoetry may mean in the modern world.

SPAN: Mr. Stafford, you seem to prefer to call yourself a ÂŤwriter" rather than specifically a poet. Why? STAFFORD: I don't want to be a salesman for poems. I think

poems may be oversold in the United States, everywhere. Poems sometimes disquiet me. But poetry-this element that is present in the language all the time-is like something precious that is going to surface between people as they talk, or as they read and write. Poems are just local, special, and sometimes awkward and unsuccessful exercises in ingenuity. But poetry is the breath of life for human beings.

SPAN: How do you go about writing? Do you write down notes?

Do you keep business hours?

STAFFORD: r keep fairly regular habits. r usually get up early

in the morning and write for an hour or so before the rest of the family is stirring. But r don't have any rigid hours. And I don't blame myself if some morning r find myself doing some

other kind of work. It's like writing notes to yourself. Poetry is notes to yourself.

It's a strange kind of process. It's making any little move-it's letting anything that occurs to you be the occasion for stirring the next thing that occurs to you, and the next thing. It's not like having a programme, or enunciating a position, or representing anything; it's simply being yourself, and following out what happens.

Writing, the way r do it, is more like a discovery of whatever is implicit in the moment for one's self. And many people do this.

In fact, r guess all creative writing is like this at some stage. r prolong that stage. r don't even know whether I'm going to write poetry or prose, it's just jotting down at first. But then there is a cumulative, incremental kind of thing that happens, and pretty soon you have something.

SPAN: What makes it a poem?

STAFFORD: Current poetry is a free and ready acceptance of the bonuses that naturally come along in the language, rather than a planned, metered, regular presentation of a pattern some one else has invented. It's a discovery of implicit patterns in the language-as it occurs to you.

SPAN: Is poetry becoming a thing of the past? Do poets feel left behind by the tempo of the modern age?

STAFFORD: In the United States poets are thriving more than ever before, r think. For many of the people, in the colleges and universities, literature is very popular today. r think there is something about creative life that harmonizes with the impulses of more people today than ever before. There is a sense-I suppose we all share this-that some of our technological ways have betrayed us. And we are looking for something else: for what we really are. And this process r have been trying to describe is like relocating yourself-finding the centre of your own life..

It's a good time for this kind of work.

SPAN: Is poetry communicable at a distance, or is it culture-bound?

STAFFORD: One of the excitements today in poetry, as r hear

it talked about by people r meet, is the scramble to join hands around the world, and somehow reach out into other literatures and other patterns of life.

And the effort then is to get at it through the best literatures of

other cultures. And, we've all known, this is a difficulty, because the better the writing, the more it is fitted right into the whole breath and background and accent of a people. So translation becomes a crucial endeavour. It's not just a matter of dictionary definitions of words. It's a whole entry in the world view of another writer. I know something about this, having gone through the intricate process of trying to translate from Urdu in a book with translations by five or six American poets, including myself.

It is called the Ghazals of Ghalib. Aijaz Ahmad did a first-rate literal translation into English, and he also supplied us with several pages of notes and background implied by crucial turns in the poetry. I found myself enticed into trying to take this stance just to see how it would be, and a whole rich succession of American poems resulted. I am deliberately saying not translations exactly, though that's what they were intended to be.

SPAN: Can poetry ever be translated?

STAFFORD: I remember Robert Frost saying: "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." That was his definition. But I have an inkling that is not true. Poetry is the only thing that can be translated somehow. It's the common human element that shows up in our recognition of certain prevalent relations and situations that human beings find themselves in.

SPAN: But doesn't the symbolic content

0/ language separate too?Take the language of religions,for example.

liS,

STAFFORD: It occurs to me to say that, even in things like this, though I realize we are divided by religions, and so on, yet we are divided by the prose part of religion. But we converge on the poetry part of religion. Maybe this is a superstition or faith of my own. But there, all the time, waiting to be called to life by mutual recognition, is a harmony, so that it is possible for some one to listen to a person from another culture and think how irreligious, how callous he is, because the terms used are somehow a violation of the other person's terms. But my own fai th is that under all that, if we don't get lost in the prose, there is a miraculous convergence possible.

What is your personal interest lrhen you travel abroad?

What are you looking for?

SPAN:

STAFFORD: When I was Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. sometimes we would get inquiries.

Are the poets of America, for example, much influenced by the poetry of Asia? And sometimes the implication of these questions would be that writers, in any country, are self-centred. But the writers that I know in the United States are far from being insulated in the sense of feeling they've got it here, in America. They think it's somewhere else. And I share this feeling. To go abroad, I think, is to find yourself potentially in a situation of being flooded by a whole world of things outside your ken. So I feel, in a way, I go abroad to witness about the life of writing in the United States. But, in another way, I go as one of the lucky American writers who has a chance to be flooded by the riches from elsewhere. That's what I'm looking for.

END The poems at right are reprinted from Ghazals of Ghalib. edited

by Aijaz Ahmad, published in 1971

by Columbia University Press.

These Stafford-Ahmad translations first appeared in The Hudson Review, Vol. XU, No.4, Winter 1969-70.

Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press.

Only

Love has brought to us the world:

I Beauty finds itself and we are found.

I All

time, all places, call-here, not here: no mirror finds the truth but in itself To know-what do we know? To lVorshipemptiness takes us into its craving.

Any trace, glimpse, whatever flickersthat)s all we have, known or not known.

Held by the word) targeted here in openness, Earth receives the sky bent forever in greeting.

Even at prayer, we bow in our own image; if God didn't hold His door open, we'd nel'er enter.

He has no image: outside, everywhere) so distinctly Himself that even a mirror could not reflect Him. Held behind lips, lament burdens the heart; tlte drop held to itself fails the river and is sucked into dust.

If you live aloof in the world's whole story, the plot of your life drones on) a mere romance.

Either one enters the drift, part and whole as one, or life's a mere game: Be, or be lost.

Even

I merely

God)s Paradise as chanted by fanatics decorates the path for us connoisseurs of ecstasy.

Reflected among spangles, you flare into a room like a sunburst evaporating a globe of dew.

Oh, buried in wltat I say are shapes.for explosion: I farm a deep revolt, sparks like little seeds.

Thousands of strangled urges lurk in my silence; I am a votive lamp no one ever lighted.

Ghalib! Images of death piled up everywhere, that's what the world fastens around us.

No more campaigns. I have lost them all.

A doused light, I can't stand all the convivial fraud.

I can)t find the truth. The world reflects crooked) or the crystal ball distorts. The seer turns blind.

The brilliant and the real-I still know it's there, but you never attain it by jiggling the senses.

So, it's dead in my breast, the zeal) the principleits only reward was the gleam while it vanished.

To you, my younger self: I still.face the cruel game. but this heart that beat hopeful can)t take it any more.

Dew on a flower-tears, or something: hidden spots mark the heart of a cruel woman.

The dove is a clutch of ashes, nightingale a clench of colour: a cry in a scarred, burnt heart, to that, is nothing.

Fire doesn't do it; lust for fire does it.

The heart hurts for the spirit'sfading.

To cry like Love's prisoner is forced by Love's prison: hand under a stone, pinned there, faitI1!ul.

Sun that bathes our world! Hold us all here!

This time's great shadow estranges us all.

It wasn't my luck to achieve heavenly bliss.

No matter how long I lived, I'd never have made it.

TRANSLATED BY AlJAZ AHMAD AND WILLIAM STAFFORD

Live on the great promise? Well, you can believe it; I'd have died of joy had The Great One proved The Word!

This stone would have pulsed blood all over ifman's common suffering had really struck fire.

You sensual novices, you are caught on a shuffleboard; you stagger and pour away your lil'es.

But who could ever find the True Mate, the Right One? Could we sniff out soul-food, surely we'd do it.

Look at me, if your eyes can bring you a lesson; listen to me, if your ears can take advice.

These high, religious longings, Ghalib! These vapourings!

You'd seem religious ~fyou didn't drink so much.

The bar-maid looks ravishing-she blots faith and reason; the singer, she steals away your senses.

All around us, at night, we used to yearn for those random bundles of flmvers, all around usLiquid walk of the bar-maid, the zither's twang: heaven for the eye, heaven (or the em" .

But in the cold morning, abandoned by revellersno heal'el1, none of that old ardour.

A candle, ravaged for the carousing, has guttered out; it too is silent, without any flame.

Here in the splendid court the great verses flow: may such treasure tumble open for us always.

Night has arrived; again the stars tumble forth, a stream rich as wealth from a temple.

Ignorant as I am,foreign to the Beauty's mystery, yet I could rejoice that thefair{ace begins to commune with me.

You should have waited for me a little longer.

Gone on alone, alone you should stay a little longer.

Leaving, you said we shall meet on Doomsday, as (! there could be another, any longer.

You were the full moon in the night for us.

Why couldn't we have stayed the same a little longer?

Yes, you hated me, and with Nayyar were unhappy, but you didn't even watch your children playa little longer.

They are foolish who wonder why I am still living: I am doomed to live, wanting death, a little longer.

Of my thousand cravings, each one a career, many I've done, but never enough.

You've heard of Adam driven weeping from Edenworse, leaving your place I felt you~!orsaken.

Drink,for a spell, tarnished my name.

Even a king once found some truth in the cup.

Why in this night do Ifind grief? Why the storm of remembered affliction?

Will the stars always avert their gaze? Choose others?

Just when you think someone may feelfor your plight, it turns out he's worse off-even calloused, maybe.

Exiled, how can I rejoice, forced here from home, and even my letters torn open?

For God's sake, preacher, don't snoop the wrong temple.

You might stumble on something better neglected.

In the world of Joyce Carol Oates, people 'live through terrifying times, but cannot understand them.'

Caught up in the convulsion of society, her characters are like disembodied souls who not only touch us but also frighten us. This is what makes her, at the age of 34, anew, powerful and disturbing voice in American fiction, says critic Alfred Kazin.

It's Sunday noon on Riverside Drive in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Detroit looms up just across the Detroit River-a concentrated industrial silhouette of piers, storage tanks, factory fronts, dead just now in the frosty winter stillness. It's certainly quiet, genteelquiet in the exquisite little house, on the river, of Professor and Mrs. Raymond Smith, Americans who both teach at the University of Windsor. There's peacefully enveloping snow on the ground all around us, and there's a Mozart symphony on the hi-fi just behind the sofa where Mrs. Smith-Joyce Carol Oates-is enduring the interview.

Obviously the Mozart is a help to a very private person who gamely responds to every question put to her, but who volunteers nothing-not even a smile. She sits beside me on the sofa, taking me in with those extraordinary dark eyes that have been described as "burning in a dove's face." In her photographs ("I take terrible pictures, don't I?" she says in her schoolgirl voice) those eyes seem almost too large to be natural. But when you finally see her, you realize that she just freezes up before a camera. Her eyes seem friendly enough, are as inquisitive as the rest of her. and just as timid.

She has not been easy to get hold of; no one I know has even met her! And now that I am finally sitting with her in her pretty, proper little house, but listening to her with some difficulty through the Mozart, I realize to my dismay that we are soon going to exhaust all biographical items relating to Joyce Carol Oates, and that I will have no excuse not to return to New York this very afternoon.

The problem is not only that she is shy, doesn't drink or smoke, has no small talk, no jokes, no anecdotes, no gossip, no malice, no verbal embroidery of the slightest kind, and is as solemn as a graduate student taking an oral examination, but also that we are freeassociating questions and answers so fast that I am rapidly making my way through whatever she will talk about. While this confirms the sense I get from her fiction of an extraordinary and even tumultuous amount of purely mental existence locked up behind that schoolgirl face, I didn't expect this much of a rush. I had rather looked forward to a leisurely look-around at Windsor and at the university where she is associate professor of English.

But Joyce Carol Oates is shy, very reserved; she also says things like, "I'm not very interesting," "I'm not much," "I'm really not very ambitious." Herselfis a big issue with her.

She is the most fortunate of writers: she has CopyrightŠ 1971by the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company.

Abridged from the August 1971 issue of Harper's Magazine by permission of the author.

the instinctive self-confidence of a writer who has been writing stories since she was a child, but no ego, no sense that Joyce Carol Oates is important. In fact, Joyce Carol Oates is important. In fact, Joyce Carol Oates is not exactly here. When I asked her about her daily routine, what she would do this Sunday, she said with some wonder at my question: "Why, write a story. I have several in my head just now." "And when will you finish it?" "Why, tomorrow morning."

At 34 she looks and sounds like an altogether demure, old-fashioned, altogether proper student intellectual from another generation who is dying to get back to her books.

Though she is obviously startled by all the attention she has been getting lately, and is absurdly respectful to the middle-aged critic trying to draw her out, the extraordinary amount of mental life in her fascinates me.

All sorts of filaments are hanging in the air, suggestions for innumerable stories, people, relationships. She obviously can't wait to get back to her desk.

Joyce Carol Oates is a square, a lovely schoolmarm, but her life is in her head; her life is all the stories she carries in her head.

And when I say "carry," I do not mean that she is plotting a story there, thinking it out, "working it over," as writers say, against the day when they finally get down to the heartcrushing business of writing it, as writers do, with many cigarettes, many cups of coffee, many prayers, shrieks of despair, imprecations, and curses against fate.

This is not the case with Joyce Carol Oates. She writes the way Mozart wrote down the score already written out in his head. Her last novel, written in 1969 and titled them, was her fourth published novel in the past eight years, during which she also published five collections of short stories; had two plays produced off-Broadway; finished a fifth novel, a book of poems (Anonymous Sins), a book on tragedy, and many short essays and reviews.

She even has two completed novels in manuscript that she will "probably" not publish, for they may get in the way of the new novels she is planning to write.

Obviously Joyce Carol Oates leads an altogether austere, hard-working existence straight out of the hard-pressed 'thirties in which she was born-a period that haunts her as the great example of the unrelieved social crisis which is her image of America, and which recurs in her novels A Garden of Earthly Delights and them. She comes from that colourless, often frozen and inhospitable lonely country in western New York, where her father is a tool-and-die designer. It was only with a New York State Regents' Scholar-

ship and a scholarship from Syracuse University that she was able to go to college. Her frugality, simplicity, and even academic solemnity are what you would expect of a scholarship girl whose father is a blue-collar worker.

More than most women writers, Joyce Carol Oates is entirely open to social turmoil, to social havoc and turbulence, to the frighteningly undirected force of any American powerhouse like Detroit. After teaching at the University of Detroit from 1962 to 1967, she remarked that Detroit is a city "so transparent, you can hear it ticking." The sheer rich chaos of American life presses upon her; her fiction, Robert M. Adams has noticed, takes the form of "retrospective nightmare."

So a writer born in 1938 regularly "returns" to the 1930s in her work. A Garden of Earthly Delights begins with the birth on the highway of a migrant worker's child after the truck transporting the workers has been in a collision. I would guess that Joyce Carol Oates's constant sense of Americans in collision, not to overlook characters who are obsessed without being able to talk freely, perhaps rubs the wrong way critics who like events to "build towards a climax, or accumulate tension and meaning." Oates is unlike many women writers in her feeling for the pressure, mass, density of violent American experience not known to the professional middle class. Praising a little-known social novel by Harriette Arnow, The Dol/maker, Oates said: "It seems to me that the greatest works of literature deal with the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it. ... Society is caught in a convulsion, whether of growth or of death, and ordinary people are destroyed. They do not, however, understand that they are 'destroyed'."

This view of "literature" as silent tragedy is a most illuminating description of what interests Oates in fiction and of what she is trying to do in her novels. Her own characters seem to move through a world wholly physical in its detail, yet they touch us and frighten us like disembodied souls calling us from another world; "they live through terrifying events but cannot understand them." This is what makes Oates a new element in American fiction, involuntarily disturbing. She does not understand why she is disturbing.

She is "radical" not programmatically but in her sweetly brutal sense of what American experience is really like. She knows that while "history" is all we save from death, people caught up in the convulsion of society cannot see the meaning to their lives that history will impose.

Life as we live it, trying to save ourselves as that she is utterly hypnotized, positively drugwe go, is really images of other people; hence ged, by other people's experiences. the many collisions in Oates's work, the The social violence so marked in her work couplings that are like collisions, the crash of is like the sheer density of her detail-this people against metal and of metal with meta!. and this and this is what is happening to Oates is peculiarly and even painfully open people. She is attached to life by well-founded to all this, selfless in her imagination, so posapprehensions that nothing lasts, nothing is sessed by other people that in an author's safe, nothing is all around us. "The greatest note to them she says of the student who be- realities," she has said, "are physical and came the "Maureen Wendall" of the novel, economic; all the subtleties of life come "her various problems and complexities overafterward .... " whelmed me .... My initial feeling about her life Yet admiring her sense of reality, so unwas, 'This must be fiction, this can't be real!' presuming, honest, and truly exceptional, I My more permanent feeling was, 'This is the have to add that the problem of dealing with only kind of fiction that is rea!.' " This capacOates is that many of the things she has writity for becoming one's characters (Keats ten are not artistically ambitious enough. called it "negative capability") makes Oates They seem written to relieve her mind of the a sometimes impenetrably voluminous histopeople who haunt it, not to create something rian of lives, lives, lives; you feel that you are that will live. Oates's many stories resemble turning thousands of pages, that her world is a card index of situation; they are not the as harshly overpopulated as the subway, that deeply plotted stories that we return to as you cannot distinguish the individual sounds perfect little dramas; her novels, though they within this clamour of existence. involve the reader because of the author's inHer work contrasts strongly with much tense connection with her material, tend, as contemporary American fiction, which is not incident, to fade out of our minds. Too much only peculiarly personal and moodily selfhappens. Indeed, hers are altogether strange assertive. books, haunting rather than "successful," beOates's titles-"With Shuddering Fall," cause the mind behind them is primarily con"By the North Gate," "Upon the Sweeping cerned with a kind of Darwinian struggle for Flood," "A Garden of Earthly Delights," existence between minds, with the truth of "The Wheel of Love" -often taken from . the universal human struggle. We miss the English Renaissance poems, are almost comperfectly suggestive shapes that modern art ically inappropriate to what she writes about. and fiction have taught us to venerate.

She once told an interviewer that she is always Oates is perhaps a Cassandra bewitched by writing about love. "The emotion of love, her private oracle. But it is not disaster that probably that's the essence of what I'm writis most on her mind; it is, rather, the recogniing about, and it takes many different forms, tion of each person as the centre of the commany different social levels .... I think I write ing disturbance.

And this disturbance, as about love in an unconscious way. I look back Pascal said of divinity, has its centre everyupon the novels I've written, and I say, yes, where and its circumference nowhere. this was my subject. But at the time I'm writThat is exactly what Oates's work expresses ing I'm not really conscious of that. I'm writ- just now: a sense that life is taking some of ing about a certain person who does this and us by the throat. "Too much" is happening. that and comes to a certain end."

There is a constant sense of drift that contrasts What she means by love, you notice, is an violently with the era of "high art" and the attraction of person to person so violent that once-fond belief in immortality through art. it expresses itself as obsession and takes on Oates is someone plainly caught up in this the quality of fatality; the emotions of her "avalanche of time."

END characters are stark physical truths, like the strength or weakness of one's body. But she herself is the most intensely unyielding lover About the Author: Alfred Kazin, a former literary editor in her books, as witness the force with which of The New Republic and a contributing editor of she follows so many people through every Fortune, has taught at the University of Minnesota, trace of their feeling, thinking, moving.

New York University. the University of California, â&#x20AC;˘ Every writer knows himself to be a little Amherst College and City College. He is now professor crazy, but her feeling of her own absurdity is of English at State University of New York. Kazin has won two Guggenheim fellowships and is a member of the probably intensified by the dreamlike ease National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American with which her works are produced. It must Academy of Arts and Sciences. An infiuelltialliterary indeed trouble her that this looks like glibcritic, he colltributes regularly to leading American ness, when in point of fact her dogged feeling periodicals and has written many books. including that she writes out of love is based on the fact On Native Grounds alld Starting Out in the Thirties:

. '-

.

\

<

~

One of the few subjects on which literary critics agree is the Hemingway hero. He is, they say, a man of action, engaged in such dangerous pursuits as soldiering, bull-fighting or big-game hunting in the green hills of Africa. Now along comes Dr. Chaman Nahal who sees the Hemingway hero as a passive individual, "a serious, sensitive andquiescent human."

This theory is summarized in the article on these pages which also describes Dr. Nahal's experiences of academic life in America.

Arriving at New York's Kennedy Airport on an August afternoon in 1967, we felt a little nervous about customs and immigration.

We had heard they were very strict. My daughters looked at me and said that I should have shaved again.

We smoothed out our clothes and tried to smile as we approached the man behind the desk. As things have a way of happening, I ripped my chest X-ray in half as I took it out of my folder. This brought a stammer to my speech. But everything was "okay," as the Americans say, and we were Ill. I had come to the United States with my wife and two daughters to write a book on Ernest Hemingway, using the resources of the Firestone Library at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey. Our immediate problem in Princeton was not Hemingway, but living accommodation.

The university had not arranged anything for us yet. In a way this helped. For in our wild hunt for a place to live, I rightaway added several new words to my English vocabulary. There was the "Y" in New York (short for YM.C.A.) where we could stay for the time being. Or I could look through the "phone book" (not "directory") and dial a few "realtors." Or why not "house-sit" for someone? Or maybe I could "commute" from nearby towns like New Brunswick or Lawrenceville?

The problem was solved for us by Professor Carlos Baker of Princeton University's English Department.

Baker's son was getting married, and Baker and his wife were going away for three weeks to attend the wedding. Why shouldn't we stay in their home for these three weeks? said Baker. And so the Nahals moved into a two-bedroom, centrally heated, centrally air-conditioned, spacious "ranch house" in one of the quiet, sleepy streets of Princeton.

Princeton is one of the few exclusively university towns still left in the world. At one time many others had that distinction -particularly Oxford and Cambridge in England. But those places have been invaded by industry and have lost their academic character. Princeton still is nothing else but a university town. There is only one main thoroughfare, called assau Street. Facing its entire length are the uni-

versity buildings, in all types of architecture-Gothic, Greek, continental, colonial and modern. Not a single industry exists in Princeton. The social life of the town, the intellectual activity, the art and the theatre world, the sports and the recreation-all revolve around the university. No signboard points towards where the university is. The whole town is the university.

In three weeks' time I was given a university apartment to live in and a "carrel" (another new word for me!) in the library to work in. The apartment was a "duplex," which means a two-floor apartment in which a private stairway leads from the first floor to the second. It was situated on Carnegie Lake, about a mile from the English Department and the library.

Long ago, when I went to England to do my doctoral work in 1959, I had decided what kind of literary research I was interested in. For me, research did not mean hair-splitting with other scholars, or looking for parallels between an author's life and his work, or sitting on the fence and praising an author for everything that he had written, or decorating your criticism with so many footnotes per square inch to show what a good bibliophile you were. Research for me was establishing a new relationship with the author of your choice-a highly subjective and personal relationship. And it was to be a relationship with the artist and not with the man, a relationship with his written word.

Consequently, during the two years that I was at Nottingham writing on D.H. Lawrence, I did not attempt to meet anyone who knew Lawrence "personally." (One of his sisters, Mrs. King, was still alive; and a brother of Jessie Chambers, the prototype of Miriam in Sons and Lovers, was a don at the university.) I did visit Eastwood and the Lawrence countryside.

I did go down into a coal mine to see what it feels like being at the coalface. I djd meet people who had unpublished material by or on Lawrence, and I examined their material. But I made not the slightest effort to collect gossipy titbits on Lawrence.

I followed the same principle at Princeton. Mrs. Mary Hemingway was living in New York, only 80 kilometres away. And yet I neither wrote to her nor asked Carlos

I

.------------------------------------------------Baker or anyone else to arrange for me to see her. Fortunately, Carlos Baker, who is the most knowledgeable man alive on Hemingway, had never personally met Hemingway himself. Hemingway the man was only of incidental interest to me. What mattered was the writer behind that bearlike face.

In India I had read all the works of Hemingway and had decided on the things that really interested me. First, I felt that contrary to the generally-held opinion, the Hemingway hero was rather a passive individual. Over the years, the "playboy" image of Hemingway has grown; important scholars like Leon Edel have accused him of deliberately evading the serious issues of life. But beyond the surface swashbuckling, I felt the Hemingway hero was a serious, sensitive and quiescent human, functioning more through meaningful passivity than through action. Secondly, I felt that Hemingway often brought the movement in a story to a halt, and used that pause to promote subtle metaphysical developments in his characters and the story.

In Princeton I began by studying where, how and why Hemingway used moments of passivi ty as essen tia I components of any given actions. Awareness of passivity as a norm of behaviour is a relatively new concept in Western thought.

Western literature revolves around the myth of action-of human endeavour-which is usually equated with perpetual movement.

But in Hemingway passivity constitutes an integral pillar of his aesthetic framework.

He seemed to be the first Western novelist to use inactivity-physical or mental-as part of the structure of a novel. By "inactivity" I don't mean that all activity comes to an end, but rather that there is a pause in the action controlled by human will.

And for those brief moments when the human will is in abeyance, the individual is driven by forces bigger than himself. I came to the conclusion that physical action is what Hemingway is in some ways least interested in. There is, on the contrary, a creative passivity-a positive force, not a negative force-which is the complete antithesis of action. In this passivity the Hemingway hero finds a greater fulfilment than in heroic action. He also finds in it a

bridge that connects him with the Unknown, with the mysterious rhythm of the cosmos.

These lines of pursuit occupied most of my first year at Princeton, which was financed by a Fulbright fellowship. My time was devoted exclusively to research, though now and then students came for help in my area of specialization. I would walk through the university grounds to my carrel and work there from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

I ate a light lunch, then rested in the lounge of the library. From 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. I worked again, after which I went swimming or "jogging" at the university "gym," returning home for dinner. At 9 I was back at Firestone Library, where I continued till 11 in the night. Later I sat up in the flat, going over the day's work.

On an average I logged nine hours of work a day during that first year. I mention this not boastfully-one could do as much hard labour here in India-but to stress the excellent research facilities I had.

These made the hard labour truly productive. Almost everything that I needed was available to me right near my carrel. Princeton's library is not the largest American university library; the largest is at Harvard.

But Princeton has over three million books and it certainly has everything ever written on Hemingway.

But my greatest source of information was Carlos Baker. In those days Carlos was busy writing his biography of Hemingway (published in 1969 as Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story). The executors of the Hemingway Estate-Charles Scribner, Jr., and Mrs. Hemingway-had shipped Carlos all of Hemingway's papers: his letters, his unpublished manuscripts, the deleted portions of his published works, etc. It was indeed providential that I arrived in Princeton at the time I did, for Carlos Baker unhesitatingly placed at my disposal all the material that he had with him. During the first year I re-read the Hemingway texts and also went through everything on him by other critics to see if someone had covered the ground I planned to cover.

The library carrels were small. There was just room enough in them for a table and a chair and a shelf on the wall facing you. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva,

was then living in Princeton and we had come to know her fairly well. She was working on her second book, entitled Just One Year. She visited Firestone Library quite frequently. She would come to my little carrel and stand at the door with a deprecative smile on her face. Shaking her head, she would s.ay: "How can you even breathe in there?"

Actually, I never thought of my carrel as a "small" place, because you could smoke in there and eat food or quietly drink a beer. (Although the last two were forbidden in theory, they were indeed a part of carrel life.) Like the rest of the library, the carrels are air-conditioned, and you could lock them up (with a "code" lock, like a bank safe) and leave your things inside. And you could decorate the interior to suit your fancy. I had a street map of Delhi and several pictures of Ramakrishna, Nehru, Patel, Gandhiji on the wall, and a picture of an Ajanta Fresco, and of the Buddha, a sketch by Husain, and my favourite quotation from Nehru: "We are little men serving a great cause, but because the cause is great something of that greatness falls upon us also."

Somehow, the smallness and silence of my carrel seemed peculiarly conducive to studying the dialectics of passivity and activity. It seemed that Hemingway's view of action included both activity and inactivity. So he had to present inactivity as part of the story. How did he do it? Mainly by creating, from time to time, a "moment of pause," a kind of caesura in the narrative, when the movement of the story stops.

It is a moment of vacuum, when nothing is physically happening. He "uses" this moment artistically to further the moral design of his story.

The caesura marks a total break with the conscious action. Every single novel of his can be seen as composed of two units. The first unit concerns itself with the normal, conventional narrative-the movement of action from one event to the other. The second unit is the unit of arrest when the movement is brought to a full stop.

My work so fascinated me that I seldom thought of such things as my surroundings or financial condition. But during our first year in Princeton, we were relatively poor.

'In Hemingway passivity constitutes an integral pillar of his aesthetic framework.

He (is] the first Western novelist to use inactivity as part of the structure of a novel.'

The result was that I was perpetually in debt, raising one loan after the other from the First National Bank of Princeton. I have not formally acknowledged my gratitude to my bankers in my book, but I'm certain it could never have been finished without their help.

At the end of my first year, I took a job as Associate Professor of English at Long Island University. But the problem was that my research work was at Princeton, my girls were studying in Princeton schools, and we liked Princeton so much that we did not wish to leave it. I discussed my problem with both the schools. Characteristically, both came forward to help. Long Island gave me a two-day-a-week schedule, so that I could devote the rest of my time to research. Princeton made me a visiting faculty member of the university so that I could retain my university flat and my carrel.

It was an absolutely killing routine, but for the next two years, from September 1968 to June 1970 (when we returned to India), I lived in Princeton and taught on Long Island. The school where I went to teach-C.W.Post College of Long Island University-was 150 kilometres away from Princeton.

We hear a lot about American engineering skill. They have landed men on the moon, and their Pioneer 10 is heading for the outer solar system.¡>But I think the greatest American engineering feat is their highway system. The entire country, from north to south, fr.om east to west, is linked by fast "turnpikes" (also called parkways, expressways; national highways) where you don't meet a traffic light -or an inter'section for hundreds of miles.

They are divided highways, the speed limit on which varies from 80 kilometres to 120 kilometres per hour.

On Mondays and Wednesdays I prepared my lessons for what I had to teach.

This left me with two and a half days, the afternoons of Fridays, and Saturdays and Sundays, to work on the book. Manifestly this was very little time. It was then that I developed the habit of thinking some of my ideas out while I was driving to and from Long Island.

I spent roughly four hours on the road each day I made the trip. Different people have different reactions to highway driving, from boredom to ecstasy. My experience was that I felt the freest individual when I was on the road. The lanes moved fast and no one, repeat no one, could get at me; I was protected from all directions by the other fast moving automobiles. On the return journeys at night, I saw only the headlights and tail-lights of other vehicles, never the vehicles themselves. This added to my sense of isolation. Those lights were only the illuminations on the way.

Otherwise I was the only one on those roads. The stars above shone with tremendous brilliance. I sat back in my seat and opened different chambers of my brain.

And while I negotiated smooth curves, went up and down sloping shoulders, entered or got out of bridges, my mind thought of Hemingway. Many of the intricacies of my thesis, which I couldn't unravel in the narrow confines of my carrel, were sorted out on those roads in the peace of the night.

I still remember the trouble For Whom the Bell Tolls gave me. It wouldn't fit my theory of the passive hero. But while going over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge one morning, it came to me that commitment to an ideology was not quite the same as commitment to physical action.

Robert Jordan is active only for the sake of his ideology; he acts with much reluctance and even with inner abhorrence for things he is obliged to do.

It was also on the turnpike where I developed the metaphor of the human heart. What happens when the forward movement of the narrative is arrested resembles the action of the heart. The heart is functioning all the time, but between the two beats it stops for a while before resuming the next beat. It does not cease to function when it rests between the two beats; it is very much alive. Its muscles relax and its chambers fill themselves with blood. Then follows the quick push, the forward flow, and again the passivity. The diastolic activity of the heart is as essential a part of its total life as the systolic activity.

In Hemingway, similarly, there is sys-

tolic action and diastolic action. In the latter, when the movement of the forward action comes to a standstill, the individual returns to a deep mystery within himself through passivity and makes himself ready for the next systolic move. These are not moments of analysis or moments of introspection. These are moments when the individual is in touch with the rhythm of total life, the dark mystery that surrounds man all the time and of which he can only occasionally become aware.

Hemingway belongs to the great tradition of American fiction, where the novelists have tried to come to terms with the dark Unknown of life. He belongs to the tradition of Hawthorne and Poe and Melville, where darkness has been the major theme. In style, Hemingway has acknowledged his indebtedness to Mark Twain. But in cosmology he is closer to the Hawthorne-Poe-Melville tradition. As with them, his moral awareness springs from his awareness of the "larger life" of the universe, compared with which the life of the individual is a puny thing. But in this larger life, the individual has his place of glory. Hemingway makes us aware of that, time and again. His characters are conscious of their smallness, compared with the larger life. Hence the moments of nadas or pessimism and scenes of restlessness and nights without sleep. But his characters are also aware of their glory, when they have passively subjected themselves to the larger life of the universe. Says Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls: "And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life."

END

About the Author: Dr. Chaman Nahal, an associate professor of English at the University of Delhi, has also been a member of the faculties of Long Island University and Princeton University in the United States. He is the author of a book on D.H. Lawrence and has published several articles and short stories in American and Indian magazines. His latest book, which he discusses on these pages, is The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction. It was published in the U.S. by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and in India by Vikas Publications.

Anew view()r 'Islands in the Stream~

In thefollowing review, Dr. Chaman Nahal comments on Hemingway's last novel, Islands in the Stream, published posthumously in 1970. In an introduction to the American edition of the book, the author's widow, Mary Hemingway, notes that she and publisher Charles Scribner, Jr., worked over the manuscript and made" some cuts" in the novel.

Much of the strength of Islands in the Stream derives from the dignity of its protagonist, a painter named Thomas Hudson.

He is a characteristic Hemingway heroextremely sensitive, extremely lonely, extremely passive. There is a rich life of activity all around him-to which he is acutely alive-but he himself is for the most part inactive.

Hudson has immured himself in a lonely house on the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, as though to ensure that nothing will penetrate his defences against the hurts of this world. The story proceeds through a series of diastolic pauses, which Hemingway uses to reveal the complexity of living, the futility of escape.

Islands in the Stream is composed of three parts-"Bimini," "Cuba," and "At Sea." In my view the three parts do not "cohere" too successfully. The first section deals with the summer visit to Bimini of Hudson's three sons by his two dissolved marriages-boys called Tom, David and Andrew. This part is slow moving, gathering momentum only towards °theend, when the boys leave their father to return to their respective mothers. Shortly afterwards Hudson learns that the two younger boys, David and Andrew, have been killed in a car accident with their mother.

The blow comes abruptly, and it is from this point that the true Hemingway touch is evident. For the art of Hemingway has all along concerned itself not so much with plot as with the impact of a certain situation. It may be the flowering of a sudden love, disillusionment in love, or the discovery of a strange secret about someone else-perhaps one's beloved, as in the story The Sea Change. Or it may be a sudden realization about one's own self. But the event stuns the protagonist into a new type of awareness, and Hemingway's ingenuity lies in making us conscious of the extent of that awareness. Thus Hudson finds that even in his isolation he is subjected to a new kind of pressure, the sorrow

at the loss of his children. And the novel takes shape around the emotion of grief.

Part Two of the novel, entitled "Cuba," is the strongest of the three sections. It is characterized by severe verbal economy, and the emotions as well as the rendering are altogether fresh and original. "Cuba" consists of only one long chapter; but it is replete with details of good eating and drinking, intelligent repartee, and exquisite miniatures of business tycoons, pimps and faded prostitutes. Hemingway's description of the prostitute Honest Lil ("honest" because she has a moral code by which she lives and which she never violates) is among the finest of its kind, ranking in artistic perfection with his portrait of Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls. There is a touching encounter between Hudson and Tom's mother in this section, when he has to inform her of the boy's death (as a pilot in the Second World War).

The opening pages of "Cuba," where the cats are described, are superb. The cats here serve the same purpose as the big marlin in The Old Man and the Sea: they represent for us the larger life of the universe. Like the marlin that Santiago hooks, each of these cats is unique, each has a distinct personality. Thomas Hudson sleeps with them, shares his meals with them, goes out for walks with them. So ingenious is the presentation that we soon forget that they are animals, and we accept them as human. Hudson tells the cats that there is no answer to the riddle of existence. And in their purring, they seem to concur.

Hemingway must have found a great deal of pleasure in writing the last part of Islands in the Stream. For it effectivelyprojects the symbol that he increasingly adopted in his later writing to indicate his feeling of the plurality of life: the symbol of the sea. In his attempt to encompass the totality of creation, human and non-human, he began with the huge, vital image of the earth. ("One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.") Gradually, however, he gravitated towards the symbol of the sea, an even more potent expression of the continuous mutation and rhythm of life.

On the whole, I would rate Islands in the Stream as a commendable Hemingway novel. There is the author's usual compression in the narrative. And the book leaves a lingering effect of faith in the endurance and dignity of man.

END

'NEW VIEWS' OF

TomSa er &Huek FInn PHOTOGRAPHS BY VERNON MERRITI Courtesy 'LIFE'

or young boys, life on the Mississippi is pretty much the same today as it was a century ago when Mark Twain drew from his boyhood experiences in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, to write his famous novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Living proof of this is a present-day counterpart of Twain's young heroes-Patrick Powell, aged 13, whose father is a newspaper reporter in Hannibal. Like Tom and Huck before him, Pat roams the streets (above) of Hannibal, romps in its creeks, walks barefoot in its woods, swings on ropes (left), rides horses and climbs the high cliffs to throw rocks into the river (right). Pat's mother says she sometimes feels the family might do better elsewhere. Pat doesn't agree. "I'd feel too cooped up in a big city," he says.

"I've lived all my life on the Mississippi. I can't imagine living anywhere else." Mark Twain might agree with Mrs. Powell; he left Hannibal to seek his fortune elsewhere. But no one doubts that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would agree with Pat.

F

III

at talks excitedly of his adventures in Mark Twain's boyhood town: "The other day I smoked. It was my brother's idea. I inhaled because he said go on and do it Pat, but I don't like to smoke .... Me and my friends ride bicycles through the weeds, but it is a hard ride. We have a lot of jam-ups, because someone always keeps hitting into your cycle to make it fall over. ... Oh, that poor bug. I found him under a railway tie. He lived a long time, but I fed him a worm and the next day he died. I guess the worm had DDT in him ....

I love marbles. We play marbles every day in Huckleberry Park up the road from my house.

Whoever knocks the most out of the ring wins."

Pat sums it up: "Yeah, I love everything about Hannibal."

END

P

--

I e I

The author takes exception to critics who feel that John Updike, although a master craftsman, is too 'precious' to be a serious novelist. He argues that Updike, partly because of his astonishing volume and versatility, is one of the truly great living American writers.

n1939 Thomas Mann sent his brother a fan letter. Heinrich's new novel, he wrote, "is great in love, in art, boldness, freedom, wisdom, kindness, exceedingly rich in intelligence, wit, imagination and feeling-a great and beautiful thing, synthesis and resume of your life and your personality." Though fulsome and obviously written in the first flush of enthusiasm for Heinrich's now all but forgotten book, these are the hyperboles that come to mind . after reading John Updike's latest novel, Rabbit Redux. "It must be said," Mann continues, "that such growth-such transformation of the static to the dynamic, such perseverance, and such a harvesting -is peculiarly European. Here in America the writers are short-lived; they write one good book, follow it with two poor ones, and then are finished."

There's truth as well as well-earned snobbery in this observation. American writers do tend to flash and then fizzle.

The casualties in our postwar fiction are legion: Writers as different as J.D. Salinger and Joseph Heller immediately spring to mind. John Updike knows this well: In an essay on Nabokov he argued that this Russian emigre was the only writer practising in America "whose books, considered as a whole, give the happy impression of an oeuvre) of a continuous task carried forward variously, of a solid personality, of a plentitude of gifts explored knowingly.

His works are an edifice whose every corner rewards inspection. Each book ... yields delight and presents to the aesthetic sense the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant thing."

But, keeping this high professional standard in mind, are there any contemporary American writers who are steadily producing distinguished work, not one or two but say a minimum of four full-length books?

Who are the novelists who have tried to keep a grip on the American experience as we've wobbled along in the past decade or two, the writers to whom we turn to find out something of where we are and what we're feeling, the writers who give the secular news report? I'd suggest that Courtesy of The New York Times Book Review Š 1971 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

there are five: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth-and John Updike himself.

In a surprising return to the hero of his most unequivocally successful novel, Rabbit) Run) John Updike plunges Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, 10 years older, into the late 1960s where he tries to cope with sex, fatherhood, marriage, drugs, Vietnam, blacks, the moon shot. And Rabbit Redux is the best book of the lot.

Of course to praise Updike on these terms, to place him in the company of the other four, is either an outrage or a truism, depending on who's listening. He began as the darling of The New Yorker magazine in the mid-1950s and by the age of 30, in 1962, had published two novels, two collections of short stories, a children's book and a book of light verse. He seemed to have made it as nearly everybody's favourite best young American writer, from Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review) to Mary McCarthy in Paris, to Stanley Edgar Hyman in The New Leader.

Yet even then there were qualms. Melvin Maddocks sounded a first graceful note in what became a symphony of critical opprobrium in a few years: "Infinite care is bestowed on infinitely small passions.

When the time comes to touch the essential, the writer's grip slips, almost from embarrassment, into rhetoric, and feelings become aesthetic sensations."

W

hen Updike's third novel The Centaur appeared in 1963, the editor of Commentary magazine, NormanPodhoretz, laced into him: Updike, he wrote, is callow, sentimental, cruel, adolescent and fashionably audacious in his treatment of sex,given to self-conscious efforts at verbal brilliance and fake profundity to cover up his lack of substance-"a writer who has very little to say and whose authentic emotional range is so narrow and thin that it may without too much exaggeration be characterized as limited to a timid nostalgia for the confusions of youth."

It was Alfred Kazin who sealed the coffin: "Among American novelists," he wrote, "John Updike is the college intellectual with genius ....

I mean someone who can brilliantly describe the adult world

As a short story writer, 'Updike gives the impression of a man warming without conveying its depths and risks, someone wholly literary, dazzlingly bright, the quickest of quick children, someone ready to understand everything and to describe anything, for nothing that can be put in words is alien to him. But when he describes situations that in life do bring terror to the human heart, his facility reminds one of many other college intellectuals brought up on Criticism, Psychoanalysis, the Death of God. Words become all, and what the words show most is the will to be as effective as one is gifted."

Nevertheless, when Updike brought out a collection of stories in 1970 about the imaginary Jewish writer Henry Bech, the critics loved it. Though many had reviled him for trivia, they lapped it up when the literary world they knew and loved became the focus of such elegant satirical attentions. Bech was proclaimed Updike's best book. But almost everybody knew the serious case against him was closed. He was precious, facile, pretentious.

When he wrote about rural family life he was too small, they said, except when he dragged in all the highfalutin mythological nonsense in The Centaur-which was too big. When he wrote about suburban sexual behaviour he was merely sociological and much too long-winded. Only in Bech did he keep his place as a country cousin with a charming eye. But he had nothing to say.

Or so they said. There remains at the very least one large, stubborn fact: In the 15 years since Updike began to write professionally he has published an astonishing range and volume of work that cannot be airily dismissed as the mindless gush of the steady best seller "pro" nor the dreary stream of a genteel "quality author." There are three collections of verse, a large anthology of parodies, essays and reviews, four children's books, four collections of short stories and six novels. This may not in Updike's mind or ours constitute a Nabokovian oeuvre, but when one sits down and begins to read through these books the variety and professional effort command respect and critical scrutiny.

The publication of Rabbit Redux necessitated revaluation of his work.

Updike's three collections of verse-The Carpentered Hen (1958), Telephone Poles

(1963) and Midpoint (1969)-have genuine charm and offer the simple delights of wit.

[Seesampling of Updike poetry, pp. 42-43.]

Such wit depends, of course, on shared assumptions and social values; the poems tend to whimsy and worldly word play.

There are more serious poems, including "Midpoint" -which has much thought and confessional emotion obscured behind a picket fence of formal tricks-but on the whole the verse is small, clever, old-fashioned in its classy gleam, no more than it pretends to be. Yet a good light laugh is not to be taken for granted these days.

The anthology of Assorted Prose from The New Yorker, which appeared in 1965, is more substantial. It opens with a batch of parodies and "Talk of the Town" sketches.

Of these Updike once said in an interview "it was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations."

Then comes the famous essay on Ted Williams's last baseball game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." As sports writing, only Mailer's accounts of Patterson and Liston equal it. It's significant that Updike admires most of all Williams's professional discipline and energy; his batting prowess (like Nabokov's literary skill) is a model that Updike at 28 clearly wanted to imitate.

But the most impressive section of Assorted Prose is the last, the 17 reviews and literary essays. As a reviewer Updike's great intelligence and technical skill are immediately in evidence. His interests are wide, his prose is clear and straight, and his powers of organization and explication are formidable.

A

s a short story writer, though, Updike often gives the impression of a man who is warming himself up for a longer race. Updike's six novels are of much greater critical interest than his short stories. They fall into three groups: The Poorhouse Fair, his first novel, and Couples, his fifth-both romans a these, which work least well; The Centaur, his third novel, and Of the Farm, his fourth-both novels about Updike's family that draw in unexpected and highly different ways on the same material as the Olinger Stories;

finally, and most successfully, the two novels about Harry "Rabbit" AngstromRabbit, Run, Updike's second novel, and its sequel, Rabbit Redux, his sixth, which was recently published.

The two thesis novels-The Poorhouse Fair (1959) and Couples (1968)-were written to make a specific point about society, God and Man. A religious argument hovers in the background and Updike focuses on a group of people as they interact, not on individuals. Above the human comings and goings looms the God of Calvin and Karl Barth, absolutely transcendent, inhuman, "wholly Other," brooding over His Creation, turning the seasons, unexpectedly granting tiny rewards, illuminations, grace. Thus it is the landscape, the changes in weather, the surface of material things, the collective fantasies and feelings of a community that are the chief objects of Updike's attention. His complex metaphors strive to link these elements together. His goal is to achieve a deliberate, generalizing impersonality and distance. But this is what makes The Poorhouse Fair so claustral and cautious and makes Couples so endlessly detailed and confusing in its characters and affairs.

The Poorhouse Fair is a miniature ballet of crossing and crisscrossing characters, voices, points of view, overlapping feelings and events. Slowly, quietly, the thesis emerges. In a bland totalitarian future America, a group of indigent old people wanders around the grounds of a state poorhouse where they're confined and prepare their yearly handicrafts fair for the delectation of the neighbouring bourgeoisie. Out of the delicate suite of voices there arises a debate between a 94-year-old religious, patriotic relic of the age of individuality and the "prefect" of the poorhouse, whose ideal of a paradise achieved through secular social reform Updike clearly opposes. The religious backdrop gives the prose a consistently heightened air. One is left with the impression of an infinitely patient intelligence deliberately at work on every filigree that composes this microcosm. I find it claustrophobic.

Like some of the stories it does indeed deserve the label "precious."

Yet if The Poorhouse Fair is too tight,

himself up for a longer race.' His novels are of greater critical interest. its cousin Couples sprawls. In it Updike delineates suburban Massachusetts engineers, brokers, dentists, contractors and their wives, who engage in ritual games of week-end sports, parties and adultery in order to "break back into hedonism" and figuratively form a church, a "magic circle of heads to keep out the night." Updike drowns the reader in detail, blending the characters and their feelings to achieve a generalized effect. But he buries the religious thesis and its intricate symbolic details so deeply that it detaches itself from the realistic surface of the novel and feels wilful whenever it's alluded to.

U

nlike the thesis novels, Updike's two family novels-The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965), the first about his father, the second about a mother figure-are enormously readable and unexpectedly varied.

Although The Centaur is now commonly regarded as a pretentious mythic allegory piled on top of a tiny boyhood recollection, it is in fact intensely realistic in its rendering of small town Pennsylvania highschool days and is filled with energetic narrative and vivid characterization. It is not by any means all written in mythic elevation. There are no less than four. modes: one, a third person realistic narrative of three days in the life of George Cauldwell, a high school-teacher. Two, his son's first person realistic memoir of these same three days told within a small (but intrusive and unconvincing) frameworkin the present. Three, the notoriously florid mythological style in which the centaur talks with "milady Venus" or finds himselfin a bosky glen. And four: a brilliant double focus mode, a rapid surrealistic simultaneity of myth and realism that achieves a genuinely Joycean brio. This last is most fully achieved in the book's first chapter which culminates in a breathtaking rapid-fire classroom lecture on the history of the universe. Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote of this chapter, "I can think of nothing in fiction to surpass it since the Nighttown scene in Ulysses." This praise is too high but the impulse is right.

Nothing in the critical cliches about The Centaurcould lead one to imagine such an

enjoyable comic tour deforce of an opening.

But the great triumph of the book is not Updike's technical elan. It is the portrait of the father-the centaur himself -one of the best portraits of Depression man, or the Middle American, in postwar American fiction. Dramatic, self-pitying, generous, fearful, "obsequious and absurd, careless and stubborn," plugging away at a killing job with a violent energy that continually exasperates and embarrasses his loving son, George Cauldwell is a rural, Irish-German Protestant Herzog.

His voice, once heard, is never forgotten.

Updike's other family novel, Of the Farm, is quite short (less than 200 pages) and when it appeared in 1965 reviewers seemed to feel it wasn't "about anything."

A 35-year-old New York advertising man and his second wife and her son visit the farm of the hero's mother, recently widowed. In the course of the week-end, the son mows the field, buys some groceries, goes to church, watches over his mother's "spell" of angina and then drives back to New York. But within this tiny frame Updike has written a novel about agonized incestuous combat between the four characters.

Instead of comedy and psychoanalytic hyperbole, Updike chose a chaste Chekhovian realism. He dramatizes the crippling love of mother and son. The frightening betrayals and sexual drifts are conveyed almost entirely through the dialogue.

In Of the Farm Updike writes with a precision that is totally at odds with the received opinion of his style. The book is small the way Flannery O'Connor is small.

It is one of the finer American psychological novels, despite its limited scale.

U

pdike's:'Rabbit" novels-Rabbit ,Run and its sequel Rabbit Redux-are his best books. The thesis novels failed because his will and intelligence took the place of emotional force. The autobiographical family novels were full of emotional force yet in the effort to keep it under aesthetic control The Centaur sometimes became a shade too big and Of the Farm a shade too small. But in the Rabbit novels the use of the present tense and the choice of a character who stands at one remove from Updike's personal experience shield him

from the rushes of feeling that result in ornate prose, wilful intricacies or problems of scale in his other novels.

In Rabbit) Run a young man deserts his wife on an impulse, takes up with another woman, goes back to his wife and then runs off again. When the book first appeared, Richard Gilman described it well: "On one level, Rabbit) Run is a grotesque allegory of American life, with its myth of happiness and success, its dangerous innocence and crippling antagonism between value and fact. But much more significantly, it is a minor epic of the spirit thirsting for room to discover and be itself, ducking, dodging, staying out of reach of everything that will pin it down and impale it on fixed ... laws that are not of its own making and do not consider its integrity."

Norman Mailer, writing in Esquire magazine, greatly disliked Updike's prose but he did concede that "Updike has instincts for finding the heart of the conventional novel" and brilliantly expressed the emotional.and ultimately religious intensity of the book: "The merit of the book is not in the simplicity of its problem, but in the dread Updike manages to convey, despite the literary commercials in the style, of a young man who is beginning to lose nothing less than his good American soul, and yet it is not quite his fault. The power of the novel comes from the sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe." . What distinguishes Rabbit) Run from all of Updike's other work (until the appearance of its sequel) is its dynamic balance between description and narrative energy: As Rabbit escapes from one enclosing situation to another the. pace never flags and yet the physical and psychological details have never been more sharply in focus. The minutiae of the 1950s-the paradigmatic Mickey Mouse TV show, the religious revival, the All-American glamour of high-school heroes, the cramped apartments of small town sweethearts who married too young, the hallowed authority of athletic coaches and parentsall are perfectly there.

But the verisimilitude is more than skin

Updike has said that 'everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me.' deep. Updike meticulously conveys the longings and frustrations of family life. the interplay of love. tenderness. aggression and lust with self-esteem. the differences of feeling and speech from class to class and generation to generation. The prose speeds along with grace and strength; ·the present tense has given it dramatic immediacy and yet permitted a rapid flow of psychological nuance. Rabbit's wife. his mistress. the disapproving parents. his old coach, an all too modem Episcopal priest and his wife. the two young children all are brilliantly drawn. Rabbit is caught in the centre--a kind of anti-Job who won't abandon the pleasure principle, or a male Madame Bovary who instead of .killing himself simply runs away.

T

hus, the essential theme of Rabbit, Run is civilization and its discontents: the opposing claims of self and society. the sacrifices of energy and individuality that civilization demands. In Rabbit, Run Updike pulled against the 19505. defending the claims of the libidinous presocial self against the smothering complacencies of small town white America. In Rabbit Redux (that is, Rabbit «returns") he pulls against the 19605 and defends his hero's new commitment to civilization. his longing for social and personal continuity in an age where both are hard to come by.

In Rabbit Redux Rabbit has greatly changed; it's been 10 years since he last ran away. At 36 he's no longer a bounder. but plugs away, like his father. as a linotypist in a local print shop. He sticks to his responsibilities and lives by the old American rules which it cost him so much to learn: family loyalty. hard work. sexual compromise. But in the 19605 such rules no longer seem to apply. «Everybody's the way I used to be," he says.

Rabbit's wife, Janice, has also changed.

She is restless, no longer the gloomy stayat-home. Now she bustles out to work at her father's new Toyota agency. while Rabbit is stuck in his dwindling blue collar trade and is finally laid off cis obsolete.

Janice, not Rabbit, is the one who has an affair and runs away from home-for much the same reason as he once did.

Lonely, adrift, Rabbit takes an 18-yearold runaway girl into his house. The

family expands when she brings home another stray: a black Vietnam veteran on the run. who styles himself an agent of apocalypse-and indirectly brings down fire and brimstone on the house. Rabbit returns to his parents' home. Once again he sleeps in his old room. regresses into adolescent fantasies. But in the end his wife comes back to her family. A more complex health and order is achieved.

In Rabbit Redux, for the first time in his career. Updike deals in a large way with public subjects: the Vietnam war. black revolution. drug addiction. middle American anger and frustration, hippie life-styles. the moon shot. With great narrative facility he has integrated these volatile elements within a realistic novel of suburban life in 1969. In outline. the book may seem populated with cliches, but on the page they are redeemed by Updike's accurate evocation of people's voices and feelings as well as his description of physical details.

In Rabbit, Run the hero confronted an essentially static social situation and dove into his inner spaces to avoid it. In Rabbit Redux he confronts an unnervingly dynamic social situation that plunges him into outer space-beyond his family. his class. his race and his normal earth-bound feelings and behaviour. Rabbit, Run was a major book about the 'fifties; Rabbit Redux is. like Mailer's Armies of the Night, a major book about the 'sixties-tbe period when the struggles of the private self became political events and political events broke in on private lives.

Of the American writers who are working in a professional way to help us come to some unsteady and evolving understanding of our human and cultural predicament as we slide into the ·seventies. two in recent years are complementary-Norman Mailer and John Updike. A metaphor might help us here. Mailer is a mountain climber; Updike a miner. Mailer is heroically scaling the heights-of himself, of idt<as. of urban life. of the future. of- tlie sky. the outer spaces. He is aggressive. public. ostentatiously political, outrageously daring. unsparing of himself. Updike is an underground worker, chipping away at .banal circumstances and minute feelings, trying to find jewels in a little space. Until this book he was nearly apolitical and even

here he carefully grounds his characters' political opinions in their immediate social and psychological conditions. He is tender, not aggressive. His sexual descriptions are not boastful but reverent. His major characters include women as well as menwhich is remarkable in American fiction.

He is the nation's finest writer about children. He treats his characters with respect; there are no villains.

I

nan interview in 1966 Updike said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules:' In an interview two years later, he continued: "Everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me ... everything is infinitely fine and any opinion is somehow coarser than the texture of the real thing .... My work says <yes, but.'

Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but-the social fabric collapses murderously. Yes, in The Centaur, to selfsacrifice and duty. but-what of a man's private agony and dwindling? No, in The Poorhouse Fair, to social homogenization and loss of faith, but-listen to the voices, the joy of persistent existence. No, in Couples, to a religious community founded on physical and psychical interpenetrations, but-what else shall we do, as God destroys our churches? ... Domestic fierceness within the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind of evolution-these are some of [my] themes."

He has never treated them better than in Rabbit Redux where all is ambiguous, dialectical and yet, finally, novelistically resolved. There are no "Updikean" -curlicues of style or yawning gaps between symbol and event. All is dramatized.

There are some structural faults, and moments when characters don't ring true.

But I can think of no stronger vindication of the claims of essentially realistic fiction than this extraordinary synthesis of the disparate elements of contemporary experience. Rabbit Redux is a great achievement, by far the most audacious and successful book Updike has written.

END About the Autbor: An editor of The New York: Times Book Review, Richard Locke specializes in fU;tion, movies and psychology.

John Updike writes two kinds of short stories. The style of one borders on poetry-a beautifully convoluted prose in which word is set against word with lapidary precision. In his other stories, he is so intent on exploring the complex world of personal relations, understatement and subtle moods that he loses interest in 'showing off' his virtuosity with poetic prose. In this 'Updike Sampler,' SPAN offers examples of both types of fiction-plus a selection revealing the delightful and sophisticated humour of his poetry.

hirling, talking, IID began to enter Room 109. From the quality of the c1ass'sexcitement Mark Prosser guessed it would rain.

He had been teaching high school for three years,yet his students still impressed him; they weresuch sensitive animals. They reacted so infalliblyto merely barometric pressure.

In the doorway, Brute Young paused whilelittle Barry Snyder giggled at his elbow.

Barry's stagey laugh rose and fell, dipping downtowards some vile secret that had to be tastedand retasted, then soaring like a rocket to proclaim that he, little Barry, shared such a secret with the school's full-back. Being Brute's stooge was precious to Barry. The full-backpaid no attention to him; he twisted his neck to stare at something not yet come through the door. He yielded heavily to the processionpressing him forward.

Right under Mr. Prosser's eyes, like a murder suddenly appearing in an annalistic friezeof kings and queens, someone stabbed a girl in the back with a pencil. She ignored the assault saucily. Another hand yanked out GeoffreyLanger's shirt-tail. Geoffrey, a bright student, was uncertain whether to laugh it off or defend himself with anger, and made a weak, half-turning gesture of compromise, wearing an expression of distant arrogance thatProsserinstantly co-ordinated with baffied feelingshe used to have. All along the line, in the glitter of key chains and the acute

W

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND SO FORTH

self-confident mouths. A race of bluffers.His own bair was brown.

When Gloria, moving in a considered, stately way, had taken her seat, and Peter had swerved into his, Mr. Prosser said, "Peter Forrester." , "Yes?" Peter rose, scrabbling through his angles of turned-back shirt cuffs, an electricity book for the right place. was expressed.which simple weather couldn't "Kindly tell the class the exact meaning generate. of the words 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, Mark wondered if today Gloria Angstrom and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from wore that sweater, an ember-pink angora, with day to day,.n Peter glanced down at the high-school very brief sleeves. The virtual sleevelessness edition of Macbeth lying open on his desk. was the disturbing factor, the exposure of One of the duller girls tittered expectantly those two serene arms to the air, white as thighs against the delicate wool. from the back of the room. Peter was popular His guess was correct. A vivid pink patch with the girls; girls that age had minds like flashed through the jiggle of arms and sboul- moths.

"Peter. With your book shut. We have all ders as tbe final knot of youngsters entered memorized this passage for today. Rememthe room.

"Take your seats;' Mr. Prosser said. berT' The girl in the back of the room squeal"Come on. Let's go." ed in delight. Gloria laid her own book faceMost obeyed, but Peter Forrester, wbo open on her desk, where Peter could see it.

Peter shut his book with a bang and stared bad been at the centre of tbe group around Gloria, stiDlingered in tbe doorway with ber, into Gloria's. "Why," he said at last, "I think finishing some story, apparently determined it means pretty much what it says."

"Which is?" to 'make ber laugh or gasp. When sbe did gasp, be tossed. his bead witb satisfaction.

"Why, that tomorrow is something we His orange bair, preened into a kind of float- often think about. It creeps into our convering bang, bobbed. Mark bad always disliked sation all tbe time. We couldn't make any red-beaded males, with their white eyelasbes plans without thinking about tomorrow:' and puffyfaces and thyroid eyes, and absurdly "I see. Then you would say that Macbeth

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND SO FORTH

is here referring to the, the date-book aspect of life?"

Geoffrey Langer laughed, no doubt to please Mr. Prosser. For a moment, he was pleased. Then he realized he had been playi,ng for laughs at a student's expense.

His paraphrase had made. Peter's reading of the lines seem more ridiculous than it was.

He began to retract. "I admit-" , But Peter was going on; red-heads never know when to quit. "Macbeth means that if we quit worrying about tomorrow, and just live for today, we could appreciate all the wonderful things that are going on under our noses."

Mark considered this a moment before he spoke. He would not be sarcastic. "Uh, without denying that there is truth in what you say, Peter, do you think it likely that Macbeth, in his situation, would be expressing such"-he couldn't help himself-"such sunny sentiments?"

Geoffrey laughed again. Peter's neck reddened; he studied the floor. Gloria glared at Mr. Prosser, the indignation in her face clearly meant for him to see.

Mark hurried to undo his mistake. "Don't misunderstand me, please," he told Peter.

"I don't have all the answers myselL But it seems to me the whole speech, down to 'Signifyingnothing,' is saying that life is-well, a fraud. NO,thing wonderful about it."

"Did Shakespeare really think that?" Geoffrey Langer asked, a nervous quickness pitch. ing his voice high.

Mark read into Geoffrey's question his own adolescent premonitions of the terrible truth. The attempt he must make was plain.

He told ,Peter 'he could sit down and looked through the window towards the steadying sky. The clouds were gaining intensity. "There is," Mr. Prosser slowlybegan, "much darkness in Shakespeare's work, and no play is darker than Macbeth. The atmosphere is poisonous, oppressive. One critic has said that in this play, humanity suffocates." He felt himself in danger of suffocating, and cleared his throat.

"In the middle of his career, Shakespeare wrote plays about men like Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth-men who aren't allowed by their society, or bad luck, or some minor flaw in themselves, to become the great men they might have been. Even Shakespeare's comedies of this period deal with a world

gone sour. It is as if he had seen through the lingered there something of what Mr. Prosser bright, bold surface of his earlier comedies had been saying. With a bracing sense of and histories and had looked upon something chivalrous intercession, Mark said, "Peter, I terrible. It frightened him, just as some day gather froni this noise that you have someit may frighten some of you." In his determinathing to add to your theories." tion to find the right words, he had been starPeter responded courteously. "No, sir. I ing at Gloria, without meaning to. Embarhonestly don't understand the speech. Please, rassed, she nodded, and, realizing what had sir"what does it mean?" happened, he smiled at her.

This candid admission and odd request He tried to make his remarks gentle, even stunned the class. Every white, round face, diffident. "But then I think Shakespeare sensed eager, for once, to learn, turned towards a redeeming truth. His last plays are serene Mark. He said, "I don't know. I was hoping and symbolical, as if he had pierced through you would tell me." the ugly facts and reached a realm where the In college, when a professor made such a facts are again beautiful. In this way, Shakeremark, it was with grand effect. The prospeare's total work is a more complete image fessor's humility, the necessity for creative of life than that of any other writer, except interplay between teacher and student were perhaps for Dante, an Italian poet who wrote dramatically impressed upon the group. But several centuries earlier." He had been taken to lID, ignorance in an instructor was as far from the Macbeth soliloquy. Other teachwrong as a hole in a rooL It was as if Mark ers had been happy to tell him how the kids had held forty strings pulling forty faces taut made a game of getting him "going." He looktowards him and then had slashed the strings. ed towards Geoffrey. The boy was doodling Heads waggled, eyes dropped, voices buzzed. on his tablet, indifferent. Mr. Prosser conSome of the discipline problems, like Peter cluded, "The last play Shakespeare wrote is Forrester, smirked signals to one another . an extraordinary poem called The Tempest. . ."Quiet!" Mr. Prosser shouted. "All of you.

Some of you may want to read it for your Poetry isn't arithmetic. There's no single right next book reports-the ones due May 10th. answer. I don't want to force my own imIt's a short play." pression on you; that's not why I'm here." . The class had been taking a holiday. Barry The silent question, Why are you here? seemed to steady the air with suspense. "I'm here," Snyder was snicking BBs off the blackboard and glancing over at Brute Young to see if he . he said, "to let you teach yourselves." noticed. "Once more, Barry," Mr. Prosser said, Whether or not they believed him, they "and out you go." Barry blushed, and grinned subsided, somewhat. Mark judged he could safely reassume his human-among-humans' to cover the blush, his eyeballs sliding towards Brute. The dull girl in the rear of the room pose. He perched on the edge of the desk, was putting on lipstick. "Put that away, Alice," informal, friendly, and frankly beseeching.

Prosser said. "This isn't a beauty parlour."

"Now, honestly. Don't any of you have some personal feeling about the lines that you Sejak, the Polish boy who worked nights, would like to share with the class and me?" was asleep at his desk, his cheek white with One hand, with a flowered handkerchief pressure against the varnished wood, his mouth sagging sidewise. Mr. Prosser had an balled in it, unsteadily rose. "Go ahead, impulse to let him sleep. But the impulse might Teresa," Mr. Prosser said. She was a timid, not be true kindness, but just the self-consniffy girl whose mother was a Jehovah's gratulatory, kindly pose in which he someWitness.

"It makes me think of cloud shadows," times discovered himself. Besides, one breach of discipline encouraged others. He strode Teresa said. down the aisle and squeezed Sejak's shoulder; Geoffrey Langer laughed. ','Don't be rude, the boy awoke. A mumble was growing at the Geoff," Mr. Prosser said sideways, softly, front of the room. before throwing his voice forward: "Thank Peter Forrester was whispering to Gloria, you, Teresa. I think that's an interesting and trying to make her laugh. The girl's face, valid impression. Cloud movement has somethough, was cool and solemn, as if a thought thing in it of the slow, monotonous rhythm had been provoked in her head-as if there one feels in the line 'Tomorrow, and tomor-

row, and tomorrow.' It's a very grey line, isn't it, class?" No one agreed or disagreed.

Beyond the windows actual clouds were bunching rapidly, and erratic sections of sunlight slid around the room. Gloria's arm, crooked gracefully above her head, turned gold. "Gloria?" Mr. Prosser asked.

She looked up from something on her desk with a face of sullen radiance. "I think what Teresa said was very good," she said, glaring in the direction of Geoffrey Langer.

Geoffrey snickered defiantly. "And I have a question. What does 'petty pace' mean?"

"It means the trivial day-to-day sort oflife that, say, a bookkeeper or a bank clerk leads.

Or a school-teacher," he added, smiling.

She did not smile back. Thought wrinkles irritated her perfect brow. "But Macbeth has been fighting wars, and killing kings, and beinga king himself, and all," she pointed out.

"Yes, but ifs just these acts Macbeth is condemning as 'nothing.' Can you see that?"

Gloria shook her head. "Another thing I worry about-isn't it silly for Macbeth to be talking to himself right in the middle of this war, with his wife just dead, and al!?"

"I don't think so, Gloria. No matter how fast events happen, thought is faster."

His answer was weak; everyone knew it, even if Gloria hadn't mused, supposedly to herself, but in a voice the entire class could hear, "It seems so stupid."

Mark winced, pierced by the awful clarity with which his students saw him. Through their eyes, how queer he looked with his chalky hands, and his horn-rimmed glasses, and his hair never slicked down, all wrapped up in "literature," where, when things get rough, the king mumbles a poem nobody understands. He was suddenly conscious of a terrible tenderness in the young, a frightening patience and faith. It was so good of them not to laugh him out of the room. He looked down and rubbed his finger-tips together, trying to erase the chalk dust. The class noise sifted into unnatural quiet. "It's getting late," he said finally. "Lefs start the recitations of the memorized passage. Bernard Amilson, you begin."

Bernard had trouble enunciating, and his rendition began "'T'mau 'n' fmau 'n' t'mau'." It was reassuring,' the extent to which the class tried to repress its laughter.

Mr. Prosser wrote "A" in his marking book opposite Bernard's name. He always gave Bernard A on recitations, despite the school nurse, who claimed there was nothing organically wrong with the boy's mouth.

It was the custom, cruel but traditional, to deliverrecitations from the front of the room.

Alice, when her turn came, was reduced to a helpless state by the first funny face Peter Forrester made at her. Mark let her hang up there a good minute while her face ripened to cherry redness, and at last relented. "Alice, you may try it later." Many of the class knew the passage gratifyingly well, though there was a tendency to leave out the line "To the last syllable of recorded time" and to turn "struts and frets" into "frets and struts" or simply "struts and struts." Even Sejak, who couldn't have looked at the passage before he came to class, got through it as far as "And then is heard no more."

Geoffrey Langer showed off, as he always did, by interrupting his own recitation with bright questions. "'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'," he said, "'creeps in' -shouldn't that be 'creep in: Mr. Prosser?"

"It is 'creeps.' The trio is in effect singular.

Go on. Without the footnotes." Mr. Prosser was tired of coddling Langer. The boy's black hair, short and stiff, seemed deliberately rat-like. " 'Creepsss in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out-' " "No, no!" Mr. Prosser jumped out of his chair. "This is poetry. Don't mush mouth it!

Pause a little after 'Fools.' " Geoffrey looked genuinely startled this time, and Mark himself did not quite understand his annoyance and, mentally turning to see what was behind him, seemed to glimpse in the humid undergrowth the two stern eyes of the indignant look Gloria had thrown Geoffrey. He glimps- , ed himself in the absurd position of acting as Gloria's champion in her private war with this intelligent boy. He sighed apologetically.

"Poetry is made up of lines," he began, turning to the class. Gloria was passing a note to Peter Forrester.

The rudeness of it! To pass notes during a scolding that she herself had caused! Mark caged in his hand the girl's frail wrist and ripped the note from her fingers. He read it to himself, letting the class see he was reading it, though he despised such methods of discipline. The note went:

the buzzer sounded the end of the period. It was the last class of the day. The room quickly emptied, except for Gloria. The noise of lockers slamming open and books being thrown against metal and shouts drifted in.

"Who has a car?"

"Lend me a cig, pig."

"We can't have practice in this slop."

Mark hadn't noticed exactly when the rain started, but it was coming down hard now.

He moved around the room with the window pole, closing windows and pulling down shades. Spray bounced in on his hands. He began to talk to Gloria in a crisp voice that, like his device of shutting the windows, was intended to protect them both from embarrassment.

"About note-passing." She sat motionless at her desk in the front of the room, her short, brushed-up hair like a cool torch.

From the way she sat, her naked arms folded at her breasts and her shoulders hunched, he felt. she was chilly. "It is not only rude to scribble when a teacher is talking, it is stupid to put one's words down on paper, -where they look much more foolish than they might have sounded if spoken." He leaned the window pole in its corner and walked towards his desk.

"And about love. 'Love' is one of those words that illustrate what happens to an old, overworked language. These days, with movie stars and crooners and preachers and psychiatrists all pronouncing the word, it's come to mean nothing but a vague fondness for something. In this sense, I love the rain, this blackboard, these desks, you. It means nothing, you see, whereas once the word signified a quite explicit thing-a desire to share all you own and are with someone else.

It is time we coined a new word to mean that, and when you'think up the word you want to use, I suggest that you be economical with it.

Treat it as something you can spend only once-if not for your own sake, for the good of the language." He walked over to his own desk and dropped two pencils on it, as if to say, "Thafs all."

"I'm sorry," Gloria said.

Rather surprised, Mr. Prosser said, "Don't be."

Pete-I think you're wrong about Mr. Prosser. I think he's wonderful and I get a lot out of his class. He's heavenly with poetry. I think I love him. I really do love him. So there.

Mr. Prosser folded the note once and slipped it into his side coat pocket. "See me after class, Gloria," he said. Then, to Geoffrey, "Lefs try it again. Begin at the beginning."

While the boy was reciting the passage,

"But you don't understand."

"Of course I don't. I probably never did.

At your age, I was like Geoffrey Langer."

"I bet you weren't." The girl was almost crying; he was sure of that.

"Come on, Gloria. Run along. Forget it."

She slowly cradled her books between her¡ bare arm and her sweater, and left the room with that melancholy shuffling teen-age gait, Text continued on page 44

Poems from THE CARPENTERED HEN AND OTHER TAME 'CREATURES

At verses she was not inept, Her feet were neatly numbered.

She never cried, she softly wept, She never slept, she slumbered.

Professor Varder handles Dante With wry respect; while one can see It's all a lie, one must admit The "beauty" of the "imagery."

She never ate and rarely dined, Her tongue found sweetmeats sour.

She never guessed, but oft divined The secrets of a flower.

Professor Varder slyly smiles, Describing Hegel as a "sage;" But still, the man has value-he Reflects the "temper" of ills "age."

A flower! Fragrant, pliant, clean, More dear to her than crystal.

She knew what yearnings dozed between The stamen and the pistil.

Montaigne, Tom Paine, S1, Augustine: Although their notions came to naught, They still are "crucial figures" in The "pageantry" of "Western thought."

Dawn took her tillther to the wood, At even, home she illthered.

Ah, to the gentle Pan is goodShe never died, she withered.

"I despise mountains," Stravinsky declared contemptuously, "they don't tell me anything."

-Life

They [members of teen-age gangs] are respectful of their parents and particularly of their mothers -known as "moo" in their jargon.

-New York Times Magazine

Stravinsky looks upon the mountain, The mountain looks on him; They look (the mountain and Stravinsky) And both their views are dim.

Come moo, dear moo, let's you and me Sit down awhile and talk togee; My broo's at school and faa's away A-gaaing rosebuds while he may.

"You bore me, mountain," says Stravinsky, "I find you dull, and I Despise you!" Says the mountain: "Stravinsky, tell me why."

Of whence we come and whii we go Most moos nee know nor care to know, But you are not like any 00: You're always getting in a poo

Stravinsky bellows at the mountain And near¡ by valleys ring: "You don't confide in me-Stravinsky!

You never tell me anything!"

Or working up a dreadful laa Over nothing-nothing. Bah! Relax. You love me, I love you, And that's the way it shapes up, moo.

The hill is still before Stravinsky.

The skies in silence glisten.

At last, a rumble, then the mountain: "Igor, you never listen."

FIRED INTO BEING BY LIFE'S 48-STAR "WANTED:

AN AMERICAN

We have $3,000 savings to invest and believe in the dignity of man. Box Y-920.

-Personal notice in the Saturday Review

EDITORIAL,

NOVEL"

STROPHE

Ours is the most powerful nation in the world. It has had a decade of unparalleled prosperity. Yet it is still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual ....

"Lend money at usurious rates," I said. "It soon accumulates."

"Oh no!" he said. "It is unsound Artistically. Read Ezra Pound."

ANTISTROPHE

I'm going to write a novel, hey, I'll write it as per Life: I'm going to say "What a splendid day" And "How I love my wife!"

Let heroines be once again Pink, languid, soft, and tall, For from my pen shall flow forth men Heterosexual.

"Invest," I then suggested. "Deal Yourself a hand in U.S. Steel."

He snapped, "Big businessmen are sharks.

Peruse Das Kapital, by Marx."

STROPHE

Atomic fear or not, the incredible accomplishments day are surely the raw stuff of saga.

I met a fellow in whose hand Was hotly held a cool three grand.

"Inform me of," he said, "the best Technique of gaining interest."

of our

ANTI STROPHE

Raw stuff shall be the stuff of which My saga will be made: Brown soil, black pitch, the lovely rich, The noble poor, the raid On Harpers Ferry, Bunker Hill, Forefathers fairly met, The home, the mill, the hearth, the Bill Of Rights, et cet., et cet.

"Then buy some U.S. Savings Bonds, For Our Defence, which corresponds To Yours and Mine." He told me, "Cease!

Defence degrades. Read War and Peace."

He added, "Dignity of men Is what we most believe in." Then He slyly smiled and slowly backed Away, his principal intact.

STROPHE

Nobody wants a Pollyanna literature.

ANTI STROPHE

I shan't play Pollyanna, no, I'll stare facts in the eye: Folks come and go, experience woe, And, when they're tired, die.

Unflinchingly, I plan to write A book to comprehend Rape, fury, spite, and, burning bright, A sunset at The End. STROPHE

In every healthy man there is a wisdom deeper than his conscious mind, reaching beyond memory to the primeval rivers, a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life.

ANTISTROPHE

A wise and not unhealthy man, I'm telling everyone That deeper than the old brainpan Primeval rivers run; For Life is joy and Time is gay And Fortune smiles on those Good books that say, at some length, "Yea," And thereby spite the Noes.

PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, THE MADISON AVENUE HICK This was in Italy. The year was the thirty-seventh before the birth of Christ. The people were mighty hungry, for there was a famine in the land.

-the beginning of a Heritage Club advertisement, in The New Yorker, for The Georgics

It takes a heap 0' pluggin' l' make a classic sell, Fer folks are mighty up-to-date, an' jittery as hell; They got no yen to set aroun' with Vergil in their laps When they kin read the latest news in twenty-four-point caps.

Ye've got t' hit 'em clean an' hard, with simple predicates, An' keep the clauses short becuz these days nobody waits T' foller out a sentence thet all-likely lacks a punch When in the time 0' readin' they could grab a bite 0' lunch.

Ye've got t' hand 'em place an' time, an' then a pinch 0' slang T' make 'em feel right comfy in a Latinate shebang, An' ef your taste buds curdle an' your turn turns queasywell, It takes a heap 0' pluggin' l' make a classic sell.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND SO FORTH

so that her body above her thighs seemed to float over the desk tops.

What was it, Mark asked himself, these kids were after? What did they want? Glide, he decided, the quality of glide. To slip along, always in rhythm, always cool, the little wheels humming under you, going nowhere special. If Heaven existed, that's the way it would be there. He's heavenly with poetry.

They loved the word. Heaven was in half their songs.

"Christ, he's humming." Strunk, the physical ed teacher, had come into the room without Mark's noticing. Gloria had left the door ajar.

"Ah,"Marksaid, "a fallen angel,fullofgrit."

"What the hell makes you so happy?"

"I'm not happy, I'm just heavenly. I don't know why you don't appreciate me."

"Say." Strunk came up an aisle with a disagreeably effeminate waddle, pregnant with gossip. "Did you hear about Murchison?"

"No." Mark mimicked Strunk's whisper.

nyx and split cedar and bronze vessels lowered into still water: these things I offer.

Porphyry, teakwood, jasmine, and myrrh: these gifts I bring. The sheen of my sandals is dulled by the dust of cloves. My wings are waxed with nectar. My eyes are diamonds in whose facets red gold is mirrored. My face is a mask of ivory: Love me. Listen to my promises: Cold water will drip from the intricately chased designs of the bronze vessels. Thicklipped urns will sweat in the fragrant cellars.

The orchards never weary of bearing on my islands. The very leaves give nourishment.

The banked branches never crowd the paths.

The grape vines will grow unattended. The very seeds of the berries are sweet nuts. Why do you smile? Have you never been hungry?

The workmanship of the bowers will be immaculate. Where the elements are joined, the sword of the thinnest whisper will find its point excluded. Where the beams have been tapered, each swipe of the plane is continuous. Where the wood needed locking, pegs of a counter-grain have been driven.

The ceilings are. high, for coolness, and the

O

"He got the pants kidded off him today."

"Oh dear."

Strunk started to laugh, as he always did before beginning a story. "You know what a goddam lady's man he thinks he is?"

"You bet," Mark said, although Strunk said that about every male member of the faculty.

"You have Gloria Angstrom, don't you?"

"You bet."

"Well, this morning Murky intercepts a note she was writing, and the note says what a damn neat guy she thinks Murchison is and how she loves him!" Strunk waited for Mark to say something, and then, when he didn't, continued, "You could see he was tickled pink.

But-get this-it turns out at lunch that the same damn thing happened to Fryeburg in history yesterday!"

Strunk laughed and cracked his knuckles viciously. "The girl's too dumb to have thought it up herself. We all think it was Peter Forrester's idea."

"Probably was," Mark agreed. Strunk fol-

ARCHANGEL spaced shingles seal at the first breath of mist.

Though the windows are open, the eaves of the roof are so wide that nothing of the rain comes into the rooms but its scent. Mats of perfect cleanness cover the floor. The fire is cupped in black rock and sustained on a smooth breast of ash. Have you never lacked shelter?

Where, then, has your life been touched?

My pleasures are as specific as they are everlasting. The sliced edges of a fresh ream of laid paper, cream, stiff, rag-rich. The freckles of the closed eyelids of a woman attentive in the first white blush of morning. The ball diminishing well down the broad green throat of the first at Cape Ann. The good catch, a candy sun slatting the bleachers. The fair at the vanished poorhouse. The white arms of girls dancing, taffeta, white arms violet in the hollows music its ecstasies praise the white wrists of praise the white arms and the

lowed him out to his loc,ker, describing Murchison's expression when Fryeburg (in all. innocence, mind you) told what had happened to him.

Mark turned the combination of his locker, 18-24-3. "Would you excuse me, Dave?" he said. "My wife's in town waiting."

Strunk was too thick to catch Mark's anger. "I got to get over to the gym. Can't take the little darlings outside in the rain; their mommies' II write notes to teacher." He waddled down the hall and wheeled at the far end, shouting, "Now don't tell Youknow-who!"

Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke, and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that.

white paper trimmed the Euclidean proof of Pythagoras's theorem its tightening beauty the iridescence of an old copper found in the salt sand. The microscopic glitter in the ink of the leUers of words that are your own.

Certain moments, remembered or imagined, of childhood. Three-handed pinochle by the brown glow of the stained-glass lampshade, your parents out of their godliness silently. wishing you to win. The Brancusi room, silent.

Pines and Rocks, by Cezanne; and The LaceMaker in the Louvre hardly bigger than your spread hand.

Such glimmers I shall widen to rivers; nothing will be lost, not the least grain of remembered dust, and the multiplication shall be a thousand thousand fold; love me. Embrace me; come, touch my side, where honey flows. Do not be afraid. Why should my promises be vain? Jade and cinnamon: do you deny that such things exist? Why do you turn away? Is not my song a stream of balm? My arms are heaped with apples and ancient books; there is no harm in me; no.

Stay. Praise me. Your praise of me is praise of yourself; wait. Listen. I will begin again.

AMERICA'S FIRST EARTH-ORBITING SPACE STATION With the conclusion of the Apollo moon missions that snapped the shackles binding man to earth, the United States is about to undertake another dramatic experiment in space exploration and research. America's first earth-orbiting space station, called Skylab, is scheduled to be launched

in April 1973. And in the eight months following, three teams of three astronauts will live and work in this laboratory. They will be studying their own earth as well as the celestial bodies, for their goal is the improvement of human life as well as a better understanding of the universe.

1. The Skylab mission begins with the launching of an unmanned Saturn V. Payload consists of Workshop, Apollo Telescope Mount, Airlock Module and Multiple Docking Adapter.

2. Twenty-four hours later, the first astronaut crew is launched in a modified Apollo Module to rendezvous with the Workshop. The first mission will last 28 days.

3. About 60 days after the first crew returns, a second crew is launched. This . .mission will last 56 days.

4. The third astronaut crew is launched about 30 days after the return of the second crew. The duration of the third mission will be 56 days.

SKYLAB

contil/lled

Skylab's astronaut crews will conduct a wide range of experiments designed to increase man's knowledge of the sun, the stars and the earth. Many of their research projects are aimed at enriching the quality of life on earth. Shown on these pages are a few of the more than 50 experiments to be conducted by the astronaut scientists. The aim of one of these experiments, designed by Dr. P. Rama Pisharoty of the Indian Space Research Organization in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is a more effective management of India's vast natural resources.

STUDYIN~THE SUN

Skylab's solar experiments will be conducted mainly in the Multiple Docking Adapter (above), where the astronauts will use a television system to see images of the sun recorded by Skylab's telescopes.

Examples of such images are shown in the "solar activity" montage of sun photographs (top). Eight major solar instruments of Skylab's Apollo Telescope Mount will provide useful information and data on the solar radiation spectrum. Solar studies are important because the sun is the major source of energy and life on earth, and its behaviour affects all aspects of man's environment.

STUDYING MAN

All three Skvlab missions will carry out medical experiments such as the one depicted above in which a slight suction applied to the lower half of the astronaut's body places a stress on his heart and blood vessels. Responses to such stress before, during and after the flight will provide information about cardiovascular accommodation during extended space flights.

Another experiment (top) will measure bo h the quantity and quality of the I astronaut's sleep dUllng selected periods. Pt.!rpose>; k solutions to'the problell1f <langue c<Jusedby $leep ces.