SPAN: March 1962

UT of the evening sky, an airliner follows brilliant light patterns on its approach to National Airport which serves Washington, capital of the United States. This panorama, seen by arriving passengers, is dominated by the Washington Monument at left of centre, a memorial to the country's first President.

The terminal is located on a bank of the Potomac River, three and a half miles from downtown Washington. It was opened twenty-one years ago in 1941 and in its first full year of operation

O

served 453,000 incoming and outgoing passengers.

Last year it served more than eleven times as many, over five million. On an average day, a plane lands or takes off every 100 seconds.

Today a new airport to serve Washington is under construction at ChantiJIy, Virginia, 27 miles west of the capital. Named Dulles International Airport, in honour of the late U.S. Secretary of State, it will be twelve times the size of National Airport and will accommodate 600-miJe-an-hour jets .•

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-I,. 11.f~t-c THE COVER Louis Armstrong, legendary trumpeter and master of jazz.

See page twelve.

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PHOTOGRAPH

BY ELIOT

ELISOFON

THE NEGRO TODAY-~

by V. S. Nanda

WILLIAM

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SIDNEY MOUNT

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JAZZ:

EVOLUTION

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OF A NEW MUSIC - 1\1

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prejudices which exist In the world today are more irrational than racial or colour bias which continues to bedevil human relations in many countries. One may, however, find consolation in the fact that the collective conscience of mankind is increasingly opposed to racial discrimination and the constitution of almost every country in the world outlaws it.

The racial problem in the United States has been largely concerned with the Negro American who represents about eleven per cent of the population and is the descendant of the Africans brought to America during the 17th and 18th centuries when the slave trade was flourishing.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, millions of Negro slaves in the Southern States were suddenly freed and found themselves in an anomalous position. The majority were illiterate and without training for any except unskilled work on the farms and plantations, which were in a state of ruin as a result of the war. The freed slaves were hard put to find food and shelter. Conservative elements among the southern white men were not easily reconciled to the implications of the Northern States' victory in the Civil War and were determined to maintain a white man's govern-

The Negro Today ment free from federal interference.

On the other hand, the more radical elements in the North were resolved on a harsh policy towards the "treasonous South."

In a number of moves and countermoves which took place in the first half of the 19th century during the prolonged political tussle for power between the North and the South of the United States, it was the Negroes who suffered most. In sheer desperation most of them, after the end of the Civil War, drifted back to the southern plantations where they had formerly been employed, and where they werere-employed on terms which often severelyrestricted their mobility and economic opportunities. The white farmers were themselves bankrupt and the South faced the task of complete reconstruction of its economy.

Even after Congress passed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing all American citizens equal protection under the laws and specifyingthat no citizen's right to vote could be denied because of colour or previous condition of servitude, the southern states found ways, through technical evasions and sometimes by intimidation of secret organizations, to prevent most Negroes from voting. There were also few social contacts between the Negr0es

and their fonner white masters, and it is not surprising that segregation became widespread in the region.

The process was assisted by a narrow interpretation of the 14th and 15th Amendments by the Supreme Court which ruled in the Plessy-Ferguson case of 1896 that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional.

At the end of the last century the Negro American was thus at the bottom of the national economic ladder and his plight was indeed discouraging. But during the last quarter of the 19th century, public consciousness began to be aroused as a result of the reformist activities of various writers, religious leaders, labour leaders and others. A group of white leaders, including a southerner, joined with outstanding Negroes to form the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which has done particularly useful work in gaining favourable court decisions for Negroes in the area of civil rights. Simultaneously another organization, the National -. Urban League, was formed to obtain better employment opportunities for Negroes.

Both these bodies are multi-racial and have grown in influence and importance over the years. Their efforts to gain full equality for the Negro and to improve race relations

have been supplemented by other private groups, as well as by newspaper editors and authors in the South, by churchmen and by many business and industrial leaders.

Perhaps the most potent factor in the evolution of race relations in the United States during this century has been the large-scale migration of Negroes from south to north and from rural to urban areas in the South. It is estimated that from the First World War to the early 1920's, some two million Negroes migrated, stimulating greater attention to race relations and a broad change in attitudes. The evolution was speeded by the capacity which the Negroes displayed in various fields of activityart, literature, music and sports.

By the 1930's the tide had definitely turned and there was a steady improvement in the social and economic status of Negroes. In 1935 the Supreme Court held that the exclusion of Negroes from juries was evidence of discrimination, and three years later it ruled, on a reference regarding admission of Negroes to law schools, that states with ~egregated school systems must provide facilities for Negro students if they offered those facilities to white students. Most southern states could not afford to establish new law institutions or

The Negro Today

(Col/til/lled)

other special faculties exclusively for Negroes, so that this decision led to the first admission of Negroes to several tax-supported institutions previously reserved for whites.

The Negro American's progress in education in recent years is evident in many ways. While at the beginning of this century about half the total Negro population was illiterate, it is now compulsory for all Negro children, as for white children, to attend school regularly and there are more than 200,000 Negro students in American colleges and universities. There are also some 300 Negro faculty members teaching in a hundred predominantly white colleges.

The Second World War witnessed another great wave of emigration from the South to northern industrial centres. One important result of this was that large numbers of Negroes became members of trade unions and participated in such benefits of collective bargaining as more secure jobs, uniform wages and equal participation in the democratic processes of organized labour.

W

HA T is the position of the Negro American today? What is the extent of racial prejudice and racial segregation in the United States?

In many parts of the United States today there is little evidence of racial prejudice but it does exist still in certain other parts, especially in some of the southern states. Even in these states, however, racial prejudice is decried by an increasing number of social, educational, religious, business and political leaders. Prejudice is on the decline and also the Negro continues to advance steadily on all fronts. Unfortunately within a democratic system and a free press, isolated racial incidents are widely publicized and, thus, usually occupy an exaggerated portion of current news, resulting in a distortion of the total picture of race relations.

For example, while earlier incidents at Little Rock, Arkansas, focused world attention on the intolerance practised by a small group in a specific southern city, the considerable degree of integration achieved in educational institutions elsewhere in Arkansas and other southern states, at that time and since, is often overlooked.

Since the 1954 decision of the U.s.

Supreme Court banning segregation by races in public schools, some 800 school districts in the southern United States have integrated their schools.

The integration of publicly supported schools has also inspired desegregation in private schools. Unlike secondary schools, the process of desegregation in higher education began in the 1930's

and has been accelerated since the Supreme Court decision was¡ given.

Seven more public institutions of higher learning in the South admitted Negroes for the first time in 1961, bringing the total of integrated state universities and colleges to more than 200. At the same time, formerly all-Negro colleges are being attended by white students also. Only three states-Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina-still have not commenced racial integration of their public schools.

The Negro's achievements 111 spheres other than education are equally impressive. Of every six per.sons employed in American industry today, one is a Negro and nearly 150,000 Negroes are doctors, dentists, teachers, lawyers or skilled technicians.

Over 4,000 make their living as performers in the theatre: there are scores of ballet dancers, some internationally known, and many famous singers and musicians. Negroes figure among well-known writers, artists, sculptors and sports champions. They own banks, businesses, service establishments, manufacturing plants and insurance companies. There are about 150 Negro-owned newspapers in the nation.

A good indicator of Negro advancement is also provided by the progress made in the field of housing. Today at least one-third of all Negro families own their homes. One out of every five Negroes owns an automobile.

In 1960 the per capita income for America's 19 million Negroes was over $1,000 per year: the corresponding figure for all persons in Western European countries was $650.

An indicative example of the Negro's improving economic position has been provided by Professor Henry Allen Bullock, a Negro sociologist, who three years ago conducted an economic survey in Houston, Texas. Professor Bullock found that Houston's Negro population of 156,000 spends $168,000,000 a year.

Constituting 21.2 per cent of the total population of the city, they account for 15 per cent of its purchases and their spending power is backed by a property investment of $45,000,000. Professor Bullock also noted that the average income of the Negro household in Houston at the time of his survey was $4,016 as compared with $2,900 in 1940.

The gains of Negro Americans in the political field have also been noteworthy. These gains have come both from their personal initiative and from,support of the Federal Government through court decisions. The Negro vote in eleven southern states was only 200,000 in 1940; in 1958 the figure was 1,304,000. In recent

An indllstrial worker and labollr IInion member.

general elections both major political parties have actively sought the Negro vote and candidates have been quick to denounce any suggestion of racial or colour prejudice. There are at present four Negroes in the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress and Negro members in twenty-three state legislatures. Many of these, as well as countless other Negroes who hold smaller elective offices throughout the country, were elected by both Negro and white voters.

The Constitution of the United States guarantees to all citizens, regardless of race, the right to vote and the right to political organization but, as noted earlier, some states found ways of circumventing the Constitution. Two recent legislative measures-the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960-are designed to give further assurance to Negroes in the exercise of their voting rights in elections. The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice has been empowered by this legislation to bring civil actions on

behalf of persons deprived of their right to vote on account of race; also, the acts provide for arrest and punishment of persons who by threats or force attempt to interfere with Federal Court orders.

Federal law and the policies and actions of the Federal Government are indeed among the most powerful factors which are helping the Negro achieve full and active equality with other American citizens in all parts of the nation. Shortly after his inauguration, President Kennedy appointed more than twenty qualified Negroes to important policy-making, administrative and judicial posts in his Administration.

The U.S. Department of Labour also plays an important role in eliminating discrimination against employment of Negro workers. It operates a minority-groups programme in all the states through an agency known as the United States Employment Services, which co-operates with the President's Committee and pursues the objective of "promoting employ-

ment of workers belonging to various minority groups on the basis of their skills, abilities and performance on the job."

The military services of the United States were racially integrated in 1948, and since then Negro graduates of military training schools have advanced to high ranks in all branches of the armed services. In 1960 there were about 5,000 Negro commissioned and warrant officers in the American armed forces.

But government policies in a free, democratic country are after all moulded by public opinion. It is largely through the voluntary thinking and voluntary efforts of individuals and various civic and social groups that the process of integration in different spheres of American life is being accelerated. Not the least important elements in the changing pattern are the initiative and determination, the improved economic status and higher purchasing power, and the many-sided progress of the Negro American himself.

The existence of some racial prejudice in the United States today cannot be denied. There are occasional localized setbacks to the Government's and the people's efforts at continued improvement of race relations. But, as Robert Kennedy, U.S. AttorneyGeneral and brother of the President, has said: "It seems to me that what is important is the fact that the people of America are not accepting the status

quo ....

"Just as every nation has problems and difficulties which sometimes divide its people, so Americans have them.

And we have a society in which everyone knows it when something goes wrong .... When we have riots in Alabama, the whole world knows about this failure in the United States.

That's the kind of society we have.

"But I think the important thing is that the Federal Government and vast majority of the American people are working to eliminate these problems. And we will continue to work at them.".

I

N EVERY age there have been artists who have rebelled against restraints imposed by convention and tradition. Refusing to adopt the practices, styles and techniques of established "schools," they have preferred to choose their own subjects and their own forms of artistic interpretation. Gustave Courbet, the French artist and Whistler's teacher in his Paris days gave him this advice: "Paint what you see. Schools have no right to existence, there should only be painters."

A nineteenth-century American artist who painted what he saw and deliberately discarded the grand style of his contemporaries was William Sidney Mount.

Born in 1807 in Setauket, Long Island, young William was moved after his father's death to his grandfather Hawkins' tavern at nearby Stony Brook. He was brought up in an environment marked by a variety of creative activity. His uncle, Micah Hawkins, combined a greengrocer's business with that of a successful opera producer and writer of humorous epitaphs. One of his brothers became a musician and dancing master and the other two, painters. When William was old enough to take to a profession, he was apprenticed to elder brother Henry who had e-stablished his reputation as a sign painter and was elected to the National Academy of Design.

While still painting signs, William Mount became keenly interested in pictures.

His early canvases, which he began painting when he was about twenty, seemed to conform to the fashionable and internationally accepted mode of the time. This decreed that the only fit subjects for the artist were the miracles of saints and prophets and the glorious deeds of kings and generals. Scenes of everyday life-the pursuits, pleasures and pastimes of the common man-were not deemed worthy of the painter's brush. But even in his early work Mount showed signs of revolt against these artificial standards. For instance, in his picture "Christ Raising the Daughter of Jairus," he introduced the typically American four-poster bed instead of a Biblical couch or a classical divan.

It was not long before he broke away completely from tradition and took delight in painting familiar subjects which he found near his own home or within a few miles

8

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March 1962 Right and Left (1856) Suffolk

Museum

~:gdJwy~

(Contil/ued)

of it. As he noted in his own journal, his objective was "to paint for the many, not for the few" and the success of such early works as "The Rustic Dance," which was shown at the National Academy in 1830, showed that the public too was tired of the imported grand style and welcomed his portrayals of natural, earthy subjects.

Before he was thirty, Mount's reputation as a true genre painter was well established and had even spread to Europe. He had succeeded in revolutionizing American taste and ushering in what might be called the era of the common man in art.

Particularly notable is the fact that, in his portrayal of the life around him, Mount included an important element of the rural communitythe Negro labourer. His paintings of the Negro, either alone or in mixed groups, portray him as a useful, congenial member of the community, helping with the day's labours or participating in group amusements.

In Farmers Nooning, which was described by a contemporary as "a perfect transcript from life," Mount painted a familiar scene showing four farm workers-three white youths and a Negro-and a small boy. The workers are resting from their labours in the field where they have been stacking hay and perhaps had their midday meal a little earlier. The Negro, who is having a nap, is a ready target for the playful mischief of the boy. Altogether this picture conveys a pleasant impression of rural life and camaraderie.

Mount's love of music-he designed a new type of hollow-backed violin-was reflected in his pictures of impromptu musicales and his portraits of Negro fiddlers. The excellent portrait reproduced on page nine is of a lefthanded Negro fiddler at a rural square dance.

One of the artist's most famous canvases is Eel Spearing at Setauket, which he painted in 1845. The boy in the picture is supposed to be a nephew of George Washington Strong, who commissioned the painting, while the woman is Rachel Hart, a nurse in the Strong home. Here again is a picture true to life which has effectively captured not only the rugged beauty of the farmland with the river in the foreground but also something of the vitality of the countryside.

It is significant that throughout his career, and in spite of tempting offers from patrons and dealers, Mount declined to leave his own native surroundings and travel abroad. In fact his few journeys were mainly restricted to New York and its art centre. He found ample material for his subjects during his rambles near his own home and when, a few years before his death in 1868, ill health prevented any long walks, he began to move about in a specially designed mobile studioa covered wagon with glass walls.

William Sidney Mount is not reckoned among the world's foremost artists but as a pioneer genre painter and the first to portray the Negro with sympathy and understanding, he is deserving of an honourable place in the galaxy of American painters .â&#x20AC;˘

JAZZ was still an unnamed musical foundling at the turp. of the century. Its home was on the back streets of sprawling rivertowns, in work camps clearing the way for farms and railroads, and along country roads winding through tIle' rustic landscape of the American South.

Its artists were guilar pickers, piano players, harmonica .;blowers, ballad singers-'-obscure Negro musicians :\'1ho' carved this music out of the, hard rock their lives sharing it with a people who found in its rhythmic, bitter: sweet flavour the fulfilment of some inner, yearning need' for beauty of their own creation. It was they who conceived it, nurtured it, arid -gave it form. Jazz was the Negro's gift to America and America's gift to the arts. , ~omparing the early origins of Jazz with its presentday form-instrumentally complex, a delicate blend of tho~ghtful conservatory precision and free virtuoso improvisation, as much at home on the concert stage as in the side-street bistro-it becomes apparent that what has 'happened to this music is no mere transition; it is a revolution, in fact, strOJ~glysimilar to that, whjch classical ' music required several hundred years to achieve.

But evolution of the jazz form has been so incredibly swift-most of it happening within the span of a single lifetime-that even those closest to it still find it an unpre¡dictable and enigmatic art.

There is,,cP.tlething about jazz, however, on which nearly everyone'wm agree,=.-it is a performers' art, and 1 its form has evolved through the creative interchange ' of idfas among its players. In playing, one member of a jazz group conceives an idea-sometimes only a passing phrase in the course of improvising; another player expands it and passes it along. In the same way, another musician pJ;esent for the performance or listening to the group on a phonograph record may catch an idea that intrigues him-and he will take it away with him and-try it out on Iiis own group. Thus', ideas pas's from player to- player, from group to group, and the mainstream of , . t~e music moves along, growing and deepening as it flows. â&#x20AC;˘

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Today, interest in jazz, particip~i6~ in it, and aw;re- 1 ness ?f its value and character. have spread worldwideand It has engaged the attentIOn of som~ of the most prominent classical musicians of our day. Indeed" a I modern jazz musician-'-usually conservatory- or univer!sity-trained-is likely to resent a contrast being drawn between serious music and jazz. To him, jazz is a serious . and legitimate form of musical creation. And there' is ,ample justification for this pqint of view,' for jazz today lis at least a highly developed folk-art, and quite possibly l<l.,;;newfOlm of fine art. !Ii ' t WIth all Its new refinements and appeals, however, ijazz is by no means the only kind of music heard, practised, \ and loved in the United States. Although jazz attracts a multimillion audience, the truth is that n,ot all Americans fare j'!zz fans or even mild enthusiasts, and performances , of authentiti~zz still have a generally smaller audience than some other kinds of music that are less indigenous , or original with the United States. But through the years jazz has grown to be a kind of music-perhaps the only kind-that all Americans recognize as their own. ' , And the story of jazz is in many ways like the story of the lapd and pyople that gave it birth, for it seems .,that in its music as in other aspects of its culture Arilerica !f is sometimes characterized more by the shifting ,elements of change and diversity than by unity. Unity rests in the fact that flourish and thrive ~ all the diverse ~ elements can..... ...

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JAZZ together within a tradition of individual choice and mutual tolerancean atmosphere in which the individual can express himself freely, according to his skill and talent, working with others towards a common concept of harmony. This, indeed, is the essence of jazz.

The beginnings of jazz were vocal. Its tap. roots sink deep into the traditions of Negro folksinging that once flourished throughout the rural Southland of the United States, when for the Negro-owning no musical instruments except a few crude improvisations made from boxes, barrels, and brooms-the voice was the principal means of musical expression.

Songs of work and play, trouble and hope, rose on rich and rhythmic voices at every hand-from peddlers crying their wares to the countryside, from work gangs on the railroads, from families gathered at day's end to sing away their weariness in the shadow of unpainted porches overlooking dusty cotton fields, from wayside churches ringing with the sound of Sabbath praise. These were the voices that early Negro musicians instinctively imitated and transferred to their horns when they taught themselves to play the discarded band instruments that came into their hands at the close of the Civil War in the 1860's. As played by their proud new owners, the instruments became extensions of the human voicesinging horns opening the way to jazz.

Tirelessly experimenting, freely improvising (and thus beginning the traditions of improvisation that jazz would never lose), the new musicians turned their lack of training into a virtue-at least as far as the future of jazz was concerned. Unhampered by the established technical rules of instrumental range and harmonic purpose, and simply playing their horns the way the music sounded best to them, they discovered a rich variety of exotic tone colours and extended the range of their instruments far beyond the former traditional limits. Louis Armstrong in later years might never have hit his famous High C, except that :/'Bunk Johnson and King Oliver, the oldtimers who helped to teach him, never knew-or cared-that this was a range in which the trumpet was never intended to play.

Inability to read music, and a consequent lack of familiarity with the eightnote musical scale on which Western music relies, resulted in still another innovation: the invention of a ten-note scale. This was done by adding two new notes, a flattened third and a flattened seventh, to the standard eight of the Western scale. These were the blue notes, essential to the future jazz idiom, and marking its melodic texture with a tonal identity of its own.

The blue notes were somewhere in between the usual notes of Westcrn music but linked directly to Africa where the musical language makes frequent use of quarter tones.

For their rhythms the new musicians looked again to their African heritage, underlaying nearly all their music with the fluid and polyphonic voice of the African drums. The rigid rhythmic patterns of Western music with their fixed time signatures and even-numbered bar lines of two, three, four, six and eight beats were largely ignored.

But if Africa spoke loudest in this music, it did not speak alone. The early musicians dipped boldly into all the musical resources around them, stirring in elements of European hymns, polkas, arias, folksongs, marches and any others that caught their fancy. Even such non-musical materials as the sound of a railroad train came in for attention. Long hours of patient effort were spent trying to capture in music the mournful wail of a train whistle and the pounding rhythm of the wheels.

The result was a musical hybrid-earthy, vigorous, and unmistakably new. Part of it was diverted into the already established body of religious music that later developed into the Negro Spiritual. The mainstream poured into marches, ragtime and the blues.

For the moment, the blues had the spotlight. Ragtime was essentially a piano music, and pianos were scarce; marches required a brass band, and although many of the early musicians had by now become individually proficient on their cornets, trombones, and tubas, ensemble playing was still crudely inexpert. The blues, however, was a basically vocal music, requiring no more accompaniment than a guitar or harmonica-and it spoke a language that the folk-Negro of the 1880's understood and responded to with deep satisfaction.

A song speech stemming directly from the singer's emotions, the blues spoke frankly, tearing the veil from life with uninhibited candour.

14

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March 1962

Using the blues to tell about troubles or joys or to give expression to general attitudes about life and love became deeply rooted in the life of the Negro community. Sometimes gay and boisterous, but most often sentimental, and always carrying a hint of pain, the blues became a Negro folk-poetry of the times.

Blues singers wandered the South with their battered guitars and worn harmonicas, singing verses they invented, embellished or borrowed. They earned a meagre living on street corners, in rough barrooms, and at picnic outings.

But what they lacked in monetary reward was often more than offset by the popularity that they gathered from admirers along the way. And in their hands the blues developed a set of standards and a recognizable, if elastic, form-usually twelve bars, the words set into three-line stanzas that began with an establishing statement, then repeated it, finally carried it forward, and ended with a final statement of hope, resignation, or cynicism.

Meanwhile, the crudeness had gradually disappeared from the playing of the brass bands, and these, too, began to become a popular fixture in the community life of the Southern Negro. The bandsmen were called on to perform for all sorts of social events. They played for dances, weddings, picnics, parades, and just for the sheer love of hearing the new voices that their horns gave them. They played anything and everything. In the funeral marches, doleful dirges would be played on the way to the cemetery, but once the funeral was over, the band would parade back playing gay and spirited tunes or a rollicking blues.

And wherever they played, the bands were always followed by the second line, a dancing, music-loving crowd of children and adults who gathered to urge them on.

The seeds of jazz had been sown. Many of the men who had planted these seeds would never hear the word jazz, for the term was not applied musically at all before about 1920. And even if they could somehow have known what was to come, it is likely that few would have been impressed. The music they played was a way of life. To them, that was enough.

While no one city can accurately claim distinction as the birthplace of jazz, New Orleans-a sprawling port city at the mouth of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico-was the music's busiest and most colourful centre during the early years. Here, the music was given its name. And more important, New Orleans was the home of many of the best known pioneer musicians who gave jazz its first ensemble voice and established its first orchestral disciplines.

Once known as marketplace to the nation, New Orleans was a bustling cultural crossroads in the late 1800's. Its carefree big-city air and its comparatively liberal attitude towards race drew itinerant blues players and wandering bandsmen from the surrounding countryside like a magnet, and it surrounded them with a rich variety of other music. The first regularly programmed opera performances in America had taken place here early in the 1800's with performers brought from Europe.

The city's musical groups now ranged from parade bands to chamber ensembles and singing societies. The city literally throbbed with music-for concerts, parades and lawn parties, for riverboat excursions, banquets and balls.

In a city originally French, much of the music had the light beat of the quadrille, but nearly-pure African rhythms rang out from Congo Square, a Negro meeting place; and Spanish rhythms drifted up from the Caribbean on cargo ships. Adding to the musical colour were the city's innumerable vendors-Negro, Italian, Portuguese, Mexican and others-who roamed the streets, everyone advertising his wares with a song.

For Negro musicians, the atmosphere was particularly exhilarating. Through their music they gained a new and heady power. They were able to weave a spell

over crowds, to be somebody, and they made the most of it. Brass bands paraded through town almost daily, marching proudly in the hot sunlight or riding in trucks to advertise dances and outings. At night they played indoors for dances, using smallfout and five-man groups of brass instrumentalists to which piano and banjo were often added. Blues singers and piano players, too, found a ready reception and a constantly increasing audience for their fare.

Just before the turn of the century, a young New Orleans barber and part-time musician. Buddy Bolden, organized a small band combining a clarinet, trombone, guitar and string bass with his own cornet. One of the most popular musicians of the day, Bolden literally had his choice of playing engagements, but his favourite spot was Johnson Park where, according to legend, he used his unmatched lungpower to draw customers from a rival park some distance away. "Now it's time to call my children home," Bolden would say as he put his lips to the mouthpiece, and blasted with a tone that could be heard for miles on a still night.

The children answered Bolden's call, and when they came they stayed to dance to the infectious new music.

It was jazz, and it took the town by storm.

Almost overnight the demand for jazz bandsincluding a few white ones-sprang up, while a long list of legendary New Orleans names like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet were serving a feverish apprenticeship before going out to become headline jazz personalities on their own. In Storyville, a disreputable New Orleans section of gaudy saloons and lavish cabarets, several other legendary figures like Jellyroll Morton and Tony Jackson had established themselves as popular pianists and blues composers. These men and others like them were the First Generation of jazz. The music that they were playing was Dixieland jazz, forerunner of all that was to come.

One of the most stimulating characteristics of this First Generation jazz, contributing greatly to its rich variety and fresh beauty, was its continual flow and interweaving of melodic lines. Although all players improvised on the melody simultaneously, the music was not-as it may seem at first hearing-simply an impromptu, free-wheel affair with every man for himself.

It had definite pattern and a correct way of being played.

Every performer-at least every good performer-knew

the rules, the restrictions he must accept, and the latitude permitted him. Every player knew, too, where he had to be, harmonically and melodically, at the right time. In a typical Dixieland treatment of a familiar tune, for example, one player would state the rapid, repeated lead phrases while another pl.ayed the long-held notes or slow-moving lines wIth. off-b~at accents, and perhaps a third played the InVerSIOns.The result was a subtle interplay of statement and answer and a tightly unified musical form.

F

OR most New Orleans jazzmen, the main avenue leading outwards to the rest of the country was the broad, traffic-laden Mississippi River. Dozens of huge riverboats catered to the crowded traffic, and whether the passengers were on board for a day, a week-end, or a full week's tour, they expected entertainment. By the early 1900's most of their entertainment was jazz.

No one now remembers the names of the first New Orleans jazzmen to play the riverboats, but some of those who came later are now famous.

One was "Sugar Johnny," a cornetist who travelled the river circuit with a six-piece band for several years, finally settling in Chicago in 1916. Here he ~ntroduced s?m~thing. of an innovation by addIng a female ptalllSt to hISgroup, Lillian Hardin a young Memphis college student who had com~ to Chicago to extend her studies in classical music but found her real interest in jazz. She late;' became Mrs. Louis Armstrong. !

One of the largest of the excursion bands, and r perhaps the one that took more musicians north! by the river route than any other, was a ten-piece group headed by a St. Louis pianist, Fate Marable. !

Marabl~'s. bal;1d car.ried many of New Orleans r most dIstIngUIshed Jazzmen as members of its r crew at one time or another, including Louis Armstrong. According to legend, Louis would I often start playing choruses at Alton, Illinois and ~ would still be improvising on them whe~ the l boat .tied up at St. Louis, fifteen miles farther along the rIver. .

I O . ne ~xc,!rsIOn route turned west along the: MISSOUrIRiver and on to Kansas City where the New Orleans ensemble virtuosity fell on fertile soil. Already a home of the heavy-rhythmed bluesbased piano style that was later to become 'known as ~oogie-woogie,and with a large Negro population which supported several large ballrooms and dancehalls, Kansas City not only absorbed New Orleans jazz but chall~nged it. Here, the travelling bands found a mUSICperhaps less refined than theirs but one which pulsed with a bolder, harder-driving beat and one more intense in its earthy folkblues flavour. Kansas City musicians came to listen and learn from the New Orleans jazzmen but if the riverboats left part of New Orlean~ behind when th~y pulled away from the pier, they took somethIng of Kansas City with them.

By the mid-twenties nearly all the scattered strands of jazz-New Orleans, Kansas City Memphis. St. Louis and the others-had com~ , together in Chicago. Just as good-paying jobs

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, ha~ attracted tho.usands of Southern Negroes to Chlc~g~ ste~l mIlls and stockyards, the city's , flOUrIshIngllIght life and hundreds of night spots drew jazzmen from all over the country. , It seemed that. they were all there. King Oliver had sent for LoUISArmstrong to join him in 1922.

Doc Cooke had a fourteen-piece band at the Dreamland Cafe. Jellyroll Morton and W. C. Handy joined forces to tour nearby Kansas and Missouri. Pinetop Smith, Jimmie Yancey and Clarence Lofton were pounding out their rolling boogie-woogie piano rhythms in small bars and night clubs.

Chicago's Negro jazz audience welcomed the stream of expert musicians onto the city's jazz scene, and to a growing white audience the music was little. less than sensational. Not' only were many whIte audiences hearing top-flight jazz for the first time, but more than a few musicians among them went away fascinated to form jazz bands of their own. They formed the nucleus of what would become known as "Chicago-style" jazz.

The biggest news in jazz as the twenties drew to a ~lo.se,h?wever, .was in New York City, now dra~Ing the Jazz maIn.stream away from Chicago as Inexorably as Chicago had drawn it from New Orleans a decade before. Louis Armstrong ha~ arrived in H~rlem to make a group of bestselling records With one of the most imaginative young bandleaders in jazz, Fletcher Henderson.

Duke Ellington, a popular pianist and band leader from Washington, D.C., had moved to the Kentucky Club on Broadway and had composed and recorded his "East St. Louis Toodle-O" later famous as his radio theme. Red Nichols ;on of a college music J?rofessor, was the centre of'a growing New Yark clique of white musicians. . Jazz was, on the move. The changing scene with ItS new faces, new audiences and new ideas pointed to OI~ething: the First Generation of jazz was endIng and the Second Generation was taking over. .Jazz entered i~s se~ond generation at the beginâ&#x20AC;˘I lllng of the 1930 s stIll strongly flavoured with the I

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free-blown fervour of New Orleans I and the rugged syncopation of the , Chicago era. Its audience was grow- : ing rapidly through radio broadcasts I and records, but to most Americans I it remained a remote and unfamiliar i music. By the early forties, however, jazz had developed a finn orchestral I discipline, a smoothly coordinated l ensemble voice, and was on its way I to becoming a national favourite. j The changes came about less by seeking change than by a natural 1 evolution among the musicians and their audiences.

For one thing, many jazz musicians of the twenties had established themselves as outstanding players of their instruments and had attracted j enthusiastic followers who demanded to hear more of their favourites. And, as more and more jazz bands came into being and competition among them increased, the featuring of name soloists became the popular way for a band to gather a following. ' This had two results. First, it placed new emphasis on the soloist.

It was no longer enough for a musician to improvise along easy vocal lines; he had to play with virtuoso brilliance and vivid imagination. As for the band itself, some way had to be found to provide an I unobtrusive rhythmic and harmonic ii', accompaniment for the soloist-one that would not compete with him for attention but which would still provide a solid background for him to work against.

One answer to the problem was the riff, a terse melodic phrase, which, when repeated with slight variations in an extended series, formed a flexible musical pattern ideally suited to the jazz form. While the rest of the band rocked along in the background with a rhythmic pattern of riffs, the soloist would take over the lead with an improvised ride out front. It was a simple but effective device, especially in the hands of a band leader like Bill "Count" Basie 'of Kansas City. Basie did not go to New York until 1936 but his records and radio broadcasts had won him fans there long before his arrival, and his use of the riff had reached the city ahead of him. , Meanwhile, another new figure had entered onto the jazz scene-the arranger. One of the best of these was Duke Ellington. Ellington's views .were abstract. Conceiving of the jazz voice as a choir of tonal colours, Ellington remained faithful to the traditional rhythmic beat, but he placed the primary emphasis on rich chord effects and exotic ensemble voicing through imaginative use of instrumental timbres.

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To get the effect he wanted, Ellington chose musicians with an eye to how well each would fit the texture , of his music. Most of the melodies that he used were written either by him or one of his artists and he wrote the various instrumental parts directly for the individuality of each of his soloists, not only scoring the ensemble passages in detail but indicating the directions that improvised solos should take during the breaks.

Using his orchestra in much the same manner as a soloist used a single instrument, Ellington became : more than a leader and arranger; he 'was a composer and conductor. : With the coming of World War II, many jazz musicians-sometimes entire bands-enlisted in the war effort; and as America turned her attention to the more serious business of the fight for freedom, the jazz form seemed to be at a standstill.

When the country resumed its !civilian life in the mid-forties, jazz I fans were surprised to find a music being played as jazz that seemed to I bear little relation to that which [they had been accustomed to hearing , i before the war. The confusion even extended to the name of the new l sound: it was called bop. The Second 1 Generation of jazz was being challenged by the Third.

Jazz today is well into its third generation of development. Light, â&#x20AC;˘ precise-often chamber-like and , qui~tly under~tated-the modern jazz 'A maInstream IS as much un, ~/J like the heavy-bodied inten, sity of its second period as that form was different from I,the boisterous overstatement 'of 1920 Dixieland. No longer Idance-designed, it has moved I from the ballroom to the concert , istage, becoming a listening musIc i ,created for an audience attentiveness 'commonly associated with the :symphonic concert.

I Step by step, the newest jazz I took shape. It advanced boldly into composition. drawing on both the thematic material of traditional fjazz and the avant-garde experiments of contemporary classical music.

The big question, of course, is: , , "Where does jazz go from here?" j No one can be certain, for, as always, the current jazz scene is alive with growth and change. There lis one thing, however, that may be a clue to its future; more and more ,jazz musicians are writing in a ]classical vein, and more than a few ,;, I ~lassical co~posers. are using the I iJazz form In theIr own works.

I Meanwhile, as the debate goes on, :so does jazz-a deepening and 1many-sided art, "calling its children i Ihome" from all over the world as I Buddy Bolden first called them home in New Orleans fifty years ago .â&#x20AC;˘ I

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A pre-Hispanic Peruvian whistling jar.

A Burmese shoulder harp, strikingly similar to the ~';;'2 ancient Egyptian shoulder harp.

An 18th century French lyre guitar, popular among fashionable ladies of that era.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS of FIVE CONTINENTS INCE the time primitive man designed the first crude cymbals and drums for his tribal dances, musical instruments have developed in many interesting and even exotic forms in different parts of the world.

One of the largest collections of musical instruments is that in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which has some 4,000 specimens collected from all parts of the world and ranging in period from pre-historic to modern times. Owing to lack of exhibit space, most of these instruments have remained in the museum's storerooms but recently a public display of about 1,500 selected pieces was organized, to honour the International Musicological Society and the American Musicological Society which met in New York.

Aptly termed "Musical Instruments of Five Continents," the exhibition included Asian and European instruments in many unusual and beautifully designed forms. There were the Indian Mayuri, a stringed instrument in the form of a mythical peacock, and a cobrashaped bell used in Hindu religious ceremonies. There was also the Indian Sur-sanga, decorated with paintings of gods and mythological heroes. Among other Asian instruments were a Burmese xylophone mounted on a dragon's back, a Japanese drum in the flowing form of a fish, and a Japanese temple instrument shaped as a crouching wooden tiger with bristling whiskers.

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In the European section, one of the most impressive exhibits was a golden harpsichord, dating back to the 17th century and supposed to have been designed by the Italian baroque sculptor Alessandro Algardi. An exquisite piece of craftsmanship, the harpsichord is covered with gilded relief sculpture and is carried on the backs of gilded tritons wading waist-deep in rippling waves. The European keyboard instruments also included the historic

The saw-toothed spine of this tiger, a revered Japanese temple instrument, emits a rattling sound whell scraped with a stick.

This Japanese drum, resting on a pillow, was used for court ml/sic.

An Indian mayuri in the shape

0/ Saraswati's peacock.

Cristofori piano, one of the two existing pianos built by their inventor in the 18th century. In addition there were Stradivari violins, delicate bagpipes played by ladies at the court of Louis XV, and the lyre guitars fashionable among the French of the Empire period.

Prominent among Nortll and South American exhibits were the brilliantly painted Red Indian rattles carved in the form of birds. A pre-Hispanic Peruvian clay trumpet took the form of a snarling jaguar, and a Peruvian whistling jar appeared as a man in a sitting posture playing the flute.

The bizarre and the grisly also figured in the exhibition. On display were a series of African lyres made of human skulls and animal horns.

But in contrast African specimens also included delicate stringed instruments, with intricate carving and colourful metallic inlays.

This unique museum collection dates from the 1870's when Mrs. John Crosby purchased a little ivory pandourina while travelling in Italy. By 1889 she had collected about 300 instruments and decided to transfer them from her home in Orange Mountain, New Jersey, to the Metropolitan Museum. She continued in the following years to add to the collection by newer and more extensive purchases. It was also further increased by gifts from another American collector, Mrs. Joseph Drexel, and from the noted Indian musicologist, Raja Sourindro Mohun Tagore. A later notable addition to the group of Oriental instruments was made in 1946 by Miss Alice Getty.

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MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

(Continued)

To suit modern needs, the Metropolitan Museum, originally founded in 1870, was extensively reconstructed and rehabilitated over a period of several years commencing in 1949.

It now has nearly a hundred galleries of paintings as well as several period rooms, a richly decorated restaurant and an auditorium.

As at present organized, the Metropolitan Museum is a composite of five separate units: the museum of ancient art, devoted to the civilizations of the Mediterranean Basin, Egypt, the Near and Middle East, Greece and Rome; the museum of Oriental art covering the civilizations of Islam and the Far East; the museum of American art covering American painting, sculpture and the various phases of American decorative arts; the picture gallery; and the museum of European decorative arts. The enormous collection of objects in a single building represents an encyc10paedic assembly of cultures from the world's most ancient to the contemporary. As an example, the Egyptian collection of 36,000 objects presents a chronological picture of 40 centuries.

Holding of special exhibitions such as that of the musical instruments, which proved to be unusually popular with the public, is part of the Metropolitan Museum's regular schedule of activities .â&#x20AC;˘

An Indian ceremonial bell hung from the mouth of a brass cobra.

RAYl SHANKAR, the Sitar Wizard, as he has been called, was acclaimed on his recent -wast-to-coast tour of the United States as "most gifted master of improvisation" and his performances described as "stimulating, fascinating and remarkable," as "great total beauty."

This was not Shankar's first visit to the United States in pursuit of what he calls his mission to acquaint the West with Indian music. He made his first American trip at the age of twelve, when he came as a dancer in the troupe of his illustrious elder brother, the well-known dancer Uday Shankar. He appeared with his brother on three other tours

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Dr. Howard Hanson, second from right, Director of the Eastman School and a leading American conductorcomposer, welcomes Ravi Shankar, second from left, to the school.

and it was only in 1956-57that he made his first American trip on his own as a musician. Shankar's music is known to Americans not only through these personal appearances in the U.S. but through three long-playing record albums and the musical scores he composed for the prize-winning Indian film trilogy, Pather Panchali, which has had highly successful showings throughout the United States.

His present tour, which covered a period of two and a half months, was sponsored by the Asia Society, an organization formed in 1957 and designed to bring to American audiences the best of Asian music, dance and theatre art. Appearing with 24

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Shankar on the tour were Kanai Dutta, who accompanied him on the tabla, and N. C. Mullick, who played the tamboura.

Everywhere, the recitals attracted a capacity audience. Some of Shankar's memorable performances on his most recent tour were those given at the National Education Association in Washington, at Stanford University in California, at the University of California at Los Angeles, at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and his Gandhi Memorial recital in New York City.

The latter was sponsored by the Society for Asian Music whose directors include Shankar's old friend

March 1962 The Indian musicians explain their techniques to Eastman stue/ents.

Yehudi Menuhin, the famed violonist who himself -has done much to encourage the appreciation of Indian music in the U.S., as well as musicians Howard L. Boatwright, Jr., who taught Western music in India for a time, and Dr. Henry Coall who composed the Madras Symphony which was performed in that city in 1958.

Describing Shankar's performance as "remarkable," The New York Times critic declared that "every once in a while an artist of a cultural tradition alien to our own can come across the barriers that divide man and reach us. Ravi Shankar is one of those artists." The critic also spoke of the sitar's "wide variety of colours ranging from a metallic glitter to an almost vocal tone" which, he said, "in the hands of an artist like Mr. Shankar can carry the weight of a great tradition in a fresh creative style."

But the recitals were not all. This trip for Shankar was also an occasion to renew his contacts with the world of American music. In several press interviews he tried to explain the essence of Indian music which he called, not a museum piece, but a music vivant, as much alive as music anywhere. He also hoped for a new distinctive pattern to emerge as a result of the combination of Eastern and Western methods of music, despite their fundamental differences.

Shankar's rendition of classical Indian ragas impressed particularly jazz lovers, one of whom described it as "the coolest jazz this side of DeIhL" The aspect of improvisation being fundamental to both, Shankar felt that jazz and Indian music might possibly have a meeting ground .â&#x20AC;˘

Kanai Dutla, above, demonstrates his virtuosity on the tabla.

He is shown below with Ravi Shankar during one of their recitals ill the United States.

Richard D. Ahern is Senior City Planner, Urban Design Division, of the Detroit, Michigan, City Plan Commission. He also has his own part-time architectural practice in Detroit and Washington, D.C. Last year he visited India for several months. The sketches which illustrate this article he made all the sites portrayed.

India's Lessons for Urban Design W

India's traditional amenities of building offer a rich legacy for the new art of urban design

HENEVERand whereverprofcssional planners meet, the conversation inevitably turns to theories concerning greenbelts surrounding cities, express highways bypassing congested areas, and maximum desirable population densities. In this, India is no exception.

The most advanced master plans for the orderly growth of ] ndian cities allocate suitable areas to industrial, residential, commercial, institutional, and recreational land uses. These are so related that one use will not interfere with another but will, indeed, complement it. Each land use is located with due consideration of optimum transportation facilities, best use of the topography, and proper climatic conditions.

High standards for water supply, sewer systems, electricity, schools, health centres, cultu-

ral facilities, and public housing are at the core of every planning process.

All of these elements, though not the exclusive domain of the West, are things in which the West is generally considered to be the pace-setter.

Master plans for Western cities are frequently the models on which future planning standards in Asian cities are based.

Yet, while city planners of the East are getting their education in London or Boston, Paris or Stockholm, their foreign colleagues are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that all of the solutions to modern planning problems cannot be found in contemporary methods. We frequently solve one problem only to find that its solution gives rise to another which is still more complex. At other times we

find the planned portion of our cities lacking something quite indefinable.

A few illustrations should suffice to clarify this situation.

Gigantic octopus-like traffic arteries are built to satisfy the demands of the ever-increasing number of motor vehicles. That solves one problem, but creates a downtown parking problem proportionate to the success of the new expressway. The parking problem is solved by destroying existing buildings to make way for parking lots and garages. This removes valuable urban assets from the tax rolls, makes pedestrian circulation more hazardous, and renders that portion of the city a less desirable place in which to live and work. This in turn leads to mass exodus of city dwellers to the suburbs, often outside the city limits, thereby creating an even greater taxation problem.

To counteract the forces of urban decay, costly urban renewal projects are now being undertaken. It would be miraculous if these do not upset existing land use patterns and give rise to further more serious problems, perhaps this time in the suburbs. Such are the consequences of a growing population, changing social patterns, and a rising standard of living.

It may seem strange to many that some of America's most creative planners find considerable inspiration for solutions to modern problems in concepts of the past. The heritage of the ancient cities of the West has become the happy hunting ground for new ideas appropriate to the twentieth century. We find Louis Kahn of Philadelphia comparing his dynamic system of vehicular ramps leading to parking garages to the likewise utilitarian but always impressive fortifications of old. Charles Blessing of Detroit dreams of creating a civic skyline that could surpass those of the great cities of the Mayans of Central America.

It is natural, then, that some planners today find a very special appeal in the great urban heritage of the East. We recognize especially the important tradition of skilful integration of a number of different disciplines-architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, and the plastic arts. Altogether they form a unified composition of structures, spaces, and other elements, which has recently

begun to be referred to as the art of urban design. In the West, it is most often the individual cathedral or palace, garden or park, bridge or fountain, to which the greatest attention has been given, often without sufficient relationship to the surrounding elements in the urban scene.

Even the Palace of Versailles is adjacent to its garden, not a part of it; how different from the Red Forts of Agra, Delhi, and Lahore! Indeed those European settings that seem most often to please the modern urban designer are the market spaces and piazzas that were a result of organic growth rather than conceived from the start as a unified plan.

In the East, with the exception of Nepal, one misses the great vernacular traditions that have left the West such public, spatial masterpieces as the Piazza San Marco in Venice or the public squares of the City of Bruges; but compensations in the fonl1 of other urban amenities are ample. It is these from which the

Western planner can find much that is instructive; it is these that India offers in greater abundance and more variety than does any other Asian country.

Perhaps the one element of greatest interest to the Western planner is the universal tradition of the courtyard, common to huts and palaces, temples and mosques, universities and caravanserais. As cities of the twentieth century grow, ever denser, privacy becomes increasingly critical. The single family house on a large plot of ground is wasteful of land and more costly for streets and utilities. When located on small city plots it becomes a farce, for privacy ceases to exist when one's window is only a few feet from that of the neighbour's house.

Outdoor living, now so popular, is dubious pleasure if lack of court yardtype privacy leads to squabbles between neighbours. The large front and rear lawns, which are signs of prestige, are now becoming recognized as burdens to maintain by those who

India's Lessons

(Continued)

do not prefer to spend all their spare time in fertilizing, mowing and raking the grass, planting flowers, raking leaves. So it is that the compact residential courtyard is being introduced in some new areas in the United States. The treatment of the courtyard as found in Indian homes, therefore, becomes of great interest. How effective the single spreading tree! How simple yet pleasant the arcaded veranda, the paving, the single tulsi plant, the raised platform around the pipal tree, and the stairs leading to the rooftop terrace!

But the courtyard has broader uses than for residential areas alone.

Consider the office worker who, at lunchtime or coffee break, wishes to have a breath of fresh air, or eat his lunch outside. Few old buildings in the West had proper space for these relaxing activities, but some modern office buildings are now providing courtyards for this purpose.

However, they seldom achieve the serene atmosphere of Indian temple grounds or the refreshingly simple space of the courtyard of an old mosque with its one pool and a few plants or, as at Fatehpur Sikri, only a pool and a single tree which serves to soften the otherwise bleak plane

of the pavement. One frequently wishes that the Western tradition of lawns to be looked at could be tempered by giving greater attention to paving to be walked on.

Probably no country in the world offers a greater rate of visual interest for the pedestrian walking through its old towns and cities than does India.

While the West has its market squares, India has its continuous bazars with a seemingly infinite variety of goods on display. How different this is from the anonymous character of so many new communities which have so little of interest to offer either pedestrian or motorist! Part of this is, of course, inevitable, due to twentieth century separation of house and shop. Yet, in the new shopping centres there is little excuse for the banal; here the glamour of the bazar can readily be achieved with only a slight flexing of the imagination.

As for housing, the rows upon rows of identical houses need not be so monotonous if a large variety of

interchangeable, standardized building units were to be made available to contractors. This would lend interest, be economical, and allow for differences in personal taste and functional requirements all at the same time. The genuinely old Indian quarters set a high standard for variety; no two houses are alike, yet all harmonize to form a homogeneous urban composition.

The forgotten man in twentieth century cities is the pedestrian. The streets he must cross are sometimes so wide that he must wait for two traffic light cycles before he can reach the other side. He is frequently to be seen measuring his gait with his eyes focused on the next traffic light so that he can make it to the next street in time to cross it on the green light.

He must learn to ignore the unpleasant vista of large areas of open parking lots. By contrast, the old Indian towns with their narrow lanes provide reasonably safe, leisurely, shaded places in which to shop. Canvas canopies and occasional trees cool the remaining unshaded areas. Wells become nuclei for social intercourse.

Fast vehicular traffic cannot enter, yet tongas and other slow-moving vehicles provide door-to-door transportation for those who desire it. This is not at all far removed from architect Victor Gruen's radical proposal for the complete prohibition of fast-moving vehicles from the central business district of Fort Worth, Texas. Only pedestrians and four-miles-per-hour buses would enter the new landscaped downtown area of Gruen's urban design. Trucks would move underground. The parking garages and broad vehicular highway would surround rather than penetrate the urban core, allowing shoppers and office workers once again to enjoy a leisurely stroll in the heart of their city.

There is no feature of an old Indian community more striking than its baoli. At a time when these tanks are being filled in in India, they begin to give clues for possible utilization in the West. Their beneficial effect on microclimatology, their adaptability as cooling tanks for air-conditioned buildings, or as swimming pools in residential areas, will certainly lead to much more widespread acceptance in somewhat modified foml in Western countries. Architect Eero Saarinen's lake at the General Motors Technical Centre near Detroit, Michigan, is an excellent example of the use of water which is not only beautiful but functional, as it is used in conjunction with the air-conditioning system of the buildings.

The use of water in India finds limitless expression in the Moghul gardens, in the palace courtyards,

in religious sanctuaries, and in the villages themselves. If only the parks of Western cities could make similar use of water in its varied forms and could be divided into multi-levelled areas to increase the apparent size and to define different activity areas, how much more interesting they would be than the stereotyped layout of criss-crossed paths with a single statue of a forgotten politician in the centre and the ubiquitous and always offensive keep-off-the-grass signs posted on the lawns!

In architecture the influence of Indian traditions can be clearly seen in the works of two Americans, Edward Stone, designer of the United States Embassy in New Delhi, and Minoru Yamasaki, who created the United States Pavilion at the New Delhi Exhibition grounds.

In the former, the plinth, the continuous arcade, fountains, a protective screen against the sun, and a landscaped interior courtyard are all integrated into the design. In the latter, one sees two series of sprightly domes held

THE AUTHOR'S CONCEPT of how the Banaras contours and configuration to a modern building

ghat below might development.

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aloft by slender columns, colours typical of India, and a use of ramps, screen walls, and waterscaping reminiscent of many Indian environments.

Interestingly enough, these influences did not cease with the New Delhi buildings, for both architects have continued to use such devices in their buildings in America, much to the delight of the Americans, who are captivated with their novel teauty.

But surely, one might think, the great sculptured surfaces of the Hindu temples in Southern India or at Khajuraho or Bhubaneswar would have no application to modern usage.

Perhaps there is no direct influence, yet it is interesting to observe the consistent trend towards sculptured and textured surfaces in modern American architecture.

Sometimes it is due to a need to increase the strength of the new metal curtain walls, while in other instances the motive is primarily to give relief to otherwise bare wall surfaces so frequently found in contemporary buildings. There is a great deal of the East in the buildings designed by America's greatest architect, the late Frank Lloyd Wright, and one has a curious feeling in passing through the grounds of Hindu temple complexes in particular, that they are very much akin to the works of Mr. Wright, though separated by centuries.

Such are the influences direct, indirect or conjectural, that rove existed or are being exerted on modern planning and architecture in the West, although I have chosen to give only American examples. But perhaps the greatest influence is yet to come, for we must again attain that "indefin<l ble something" that our present-day communities lack but which may be seen in such places as Banaras or Jaipur, Mount Abu or Nalanda. It is a sense of drama, as if they were the 'setting for a daily play of life.

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Is it too difficult to visualize modern apartment houses as breathtakingly sited as the palaces of the maharajas?

Is a "pink city" to be achieved only once in the history of urban design?

Are our most precious topographical features-our hilltops-to remain unexploited, or can we not develop them, by means of modern transportation systems, in as powerful a manner as have the J ains with their temple complexes? And what new university-city could compare for sheer grandeur with that of ancient Nalanda?

Thus, while the influences of the East have so far been restricted to smaller elements of our environment, the great opportunity lies in the inspiration-value of the ancient cities for renewed attempts to create urban areas with content of character and unity of expression. Life in cities, to compete with that in the suburbs, must regain the emotional appeal which one can still find in some- of India's greatest civic centres.

India is today building one of the most impressive examples of modern planning in the world-that monumental achievement, the capital of the Punjab, Chandigarh.

Its planning techniques are exemplary and will serve as the highest standards by which future planning in India can be judged. In view of such an accomplishment, it overshadows any adverse criticisms that its detractors might make. It is a magnificent beginning for modern planning in the new India.

What is the next step; what comes after Chandigarh?

The answer is clear, for as Chandigarh is the greatest physical symbol of India's entrance into the twentieth century, future planning could well integrate the best of the ancient Indian heritage into its new urban pattern. By this one must not visualize any form of imitation or retum to sentimental values, but,

instead, a continuation of close integration of all the design disciplines and all the elements of nature and of human creativity to form a unified urban design composition with high emotional appeal.

This must be achieved without sacrificing advanced technological means, and without forgetting the frequently superior technical means of the past, as, for example, climate control.

Before this can be accomplished, however, a greater appreciation of the inherent qualities of historic cities must be realized. Surely books have been written on the Taj Mahal, but where can one find an authoritative and scholarly account of old Indian cities? The research to be done is staggering for so much has been lost through wars, fires, over-building, and also monSOOl1~ that have destroyed the whole pattern of urban spaces between thatch-roofed kutcha houses.

We cannot get a true picture of cities as they were several hundred years ago simply by walking through existing old towns and urban areas. One suspects that they were once far cleaner, far lovelier, more spacious (yet intimate) than the remaining old quarters imply. In the case of Delhi, old maps prove this to be true. Even so, the vibrant life of these old quarters, so varied in sociological relationships, in some ways puts the relatively lifeless, more recently built, westernized areas at a disadvantage' when they are compared without prejudiced thoughts concerning cleanliness or relative economic status.

In the fascinating, shaded lanes leading to the ghats, in the majestic palaces, in picturesque, balconied houses facing private courtyards, and in the public, arcaded pavilions, can be found not only the lessons that India has to offer to the West, but more than that, the lessons that India has to offer to the ent:ire East, and to India herself .â&#x20AC;˘

The New York Public Library HE MAIN building of the New York Public Library, the marble Renaissance palace created by the architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings was opened fifty-one years ago in 1911. The building was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, who declared: "This day crowns a work of national importance."

Three characteristics of the library are the unconstrained affection in which it is held by its users (a good many of whom write books) and, acknowledge the library's inestimable help in doing so; the liking the library has for its readers, in return, and the library's policy of making its services and collections available to everyone.

The library once said unequivocally of itself that it is "used by more persons for more purposes than any

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other library in the world;" it has not been contradicted.

Any day of the year-there is none on which at least the great Main Reading Room is not open-some 8,300 people are likely to visit the library. It is estimated that an average of 700 questions a day are asked of the three librarians at telephones behind the information desk, a hollow square manned by 21 men and women.

How many are asked of the valiant remainder not even Archibald DeWeese, the Information Division's chief for 15 years, is prepared to speculate. Six thousand or so letters a year, no less importunate in their demands for information, also reach his division.

The library's reference resources are so vast that the barest statistical

En/ranee To the library, an imposing example of modern Renaissance architecture

The New York Publ ic Li brary

(Colltillued)

The library's main reading room can accommodate eight hundred readers.

cataloguing is staggering to contemplate: Eighty miles of bookshelves on seven levels, exclusive of the reading rooms; 4,100,000 books written in 3,000 languages and dialects (the first Gutenberg Bible to be brought to the United States among them); 9,000,000 manuscript letters and documents (quarto and folio printings of William Shakespeare, George Washington's manuscript of his FareweII Address, Christopher Columbus's letter to Queen IsabeIIa announcing discovery of the New World and Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence to name a few of the priceless displays); more than 4,000,000 pictures; 3,000,000 broadsides, posters, photographs and slides; more than 5,000,000 of what the library caIIs "ephemera" -permanent research files of clippings, pamphlets, pictures, maps and so on; millions of other maps, music scores, phonograph records, film and microfilm reels, fine prints, globes; Braille and recorded books, periodicals and music scores for the blind.

In all, it has a total of something like 28,000,000 items-and this does not include almost 3,000,000 books in the library's eighty-one branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten 32

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March 1962

Island. Contrary to popular belief, the library is run on private moneyendowment funds and contributions; the city pays only the operating costs of the branches, the circulation department of the Fifth Avenue Library and part of that building's maintenance costs.

The most important criterion governing the library's selection or rejection of material is: will it be as valuable for research and information in fifty years as it is today?

Towards that end, division chiefs and specialists regularly go over a thousand bibliographical aids from book reviews to publishers' lists, obtained from every corner of the planet. Their selections are made on the basis of the judgment of each chief and his specialists. When broader questions of policy come up-the addition, for example, of large bodies of material offered to the librarythey are decided by a Book Selection Committee, a group of division chiefs that meets monthly.

At the point at which items come into the library, they are examined once more. If it is then decided that they do not meet the criterion, they are used for exchange with other libraries. The library thus adds up to 100,000 books a year and hundreds

of thousands of other specimens. It never throws anything away.

There are signs posted at the desks where borrowers draw books. They read, "If you do not receive your book within 15 minutes, please notify the window attendant."

The average time is less than ten minutes.

"This is an archival library," Harold Ostvold, who heads the Reference Department, once told a visitor. "We attempt to preserve everything forever.

It's an ideal we can't hope to live up to but we do attempt to approllimate it. And, we're constantly testing our own premises. We can test them by the use made of the library by scholars doing fundamental research and by the use made of the materials-both materials from different parts of the world and from different periods of . time-that aren't available anywhere else." "It seems," he finished, "the premises stand up. If the library didn't match up, we would know."

The testing of the library's premises is carried on unremittingly, year in and year out, in the many ehaIIenges from people representing every occupation and preoccupation known to man; for reasons that are sometimes frivolous; and with exciting results that are now and then, crucial to the welfare of the nation.

Dr. Edward G. Freelzafer, Director of the New York Public Librmy, joined the staff thirty years ago as a reference assistant.

Arched rotunda of the Fifth Avenue entrance.

Use is piled upon use. Three years were spent in the library by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in the course of putting together his definitive, l6-volume Hebrew dictionary.

I n the autumn of 1960, a few days after the election, The New York Times called the library to identify a book President-elect Kennedy was holding in a photograph. Only the title showed.

Information determined quickly that it was a pre-publication copy of Richard E. Neustadt's Presidential

Power.

A short time ago, the Consul General of New Zealand was being shown about the library by Mr. OstvoId when the two men ran into Marchette Chute, the historical novelist, in the Main Reading Room, "I hope you realize," said Miss Chute, who has written more than one fine book in the library, "you are in the most fascinating and the most wonderful institution in the country."

In the Theatre Collection, Curator George Freedley welcomed the Countess Bernadotte of Stockholm.

She was looking for photographs of Eugene O'Neill for a biography of the playwright to be published in Sweden.

She had been recommended to the library by the proprietors of a Swedish glassware shop on Madison Avenue.

At the same time Joseph P. Hudyma of Detroit, a retired cinematographer, was looking for material on the Russian motion-picture director, Dovzhenko.

Hudyma had worked as a second camera man under Dovzhenko in the 1920's and had revisited the Soviet Union as a tourist in 1960. He had been asked for help by two writers working on a biography of Dovzhenko.

Down the hall, in the Slavonic Collection, Igor Rubach, a clerk for an auctioneer of rare stamps, was reading The Fifty Year Jubilee of the

Law School in Petersburg, 1885. "I have a law degree from that school," he said. He had left Russia in 1920, left Yugoslavia when communism arrived there and made his way to the United States eight years ago via Austria and Germany.

Across the hall, in Oriental, Professor Franz Rosenthal, the great authority on Semitic languages and author of Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, was writing a paper on The Tale of Anthony the Hermit, a ninthcentury Arabic work, to be presented at a meeting of the American Oriental Society.

Charles Bracelen Flood, a 3l-yearold novelist (Tell Me, Stranger, among others), emerged from the Frederick

Lewis Allen Room, which accommodates a dozen or so writers in individual cubicles. Each gets a key to the room and the door is kept locked to outsiders.

Flood said he had been working in the room on a novel with a Revolutionary War background for a year and a half and was about done.

"I have a strong, strong sense of security here," he said. "This is my office, my place of work. And the exchange of ideas! Why, here I was working on the Revolution with James Flexner on one side of me and Broadus Mitchell on the other side. Mitchell was doing Alexander Hamilton; Flexner was writing a history of American painting. They helped me greatly."

Two floors above, Karl Kup put on his coat and got ready to leave his domain-Art and Architecture and Prints-for the day. "The satisfaction," he said; "does not come from the appreciation of the trustees-they take you on faith; it does not come from your friends-they praise you too much. The satisfaction comes from the use of the material by the scholar." â&#x20AC;˘

Š

1961 by The New York Times Company.

The New York Times Magazine.

OCEAN EXPLORATION

~ ~ }(NOWLEDGE of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it." With these words, President John F. Kennedy asked the Congress of the United States to increase Federal support for surveys and research of the ocean.

Man lives on only one-third of the earth's surface; the rest is covered with the 300,000,000 cubic miles of water that we call the oceans. The potential of this vast resource has hardly been tapped.

We now know relatively little about this huge tract that the President referred to as earth's "inner space."

Oceanographic surveys have discovered the major undersea mountain ranges such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Mid-Pacific Mountains southwest of Hawaii. Deep ocean trenches and isolated undersea peaks or seamounts also have been discovered, but only two per cent of the ocean bottom is adequately charted and this charting has been limited almost exclusively to the comparatively shallow continental shelf.

Š

1961 by The New York Times Company.

The New York Times Magazine.

OCEAN EXPLORATION

(Continued)

Aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Atlantis, one crewman (top below) prepares a water temperature chart, while another maps a continuous profile of the ocean bottom with a precision echo-sounding recorder.

The major surface currents in the oceans have been known for years, but we are just beginning to discover those of the subsurface. It is only within the past ten years, for example, that the Cromwell Current, or Equatorial Undercurrent, has been discovered and marked out in the Pacific.

This ribbon-like, subsurface flow, moving at speeds of up to three knots, carries eastward some 40,000,000 tons of sea water per second. It is quite probable that a similar current exists in the equatorial Atlantic, but it has yet to be delineated.

Biologists have long been studying the life in the sea, but knowledge of life at great depths is lacking. In 1960, we learned that fish live in the deepest known part of the ocean, below nearly seven miles of water. How can life withstand the tremendous pressures?

What is the pattern and speed of the deep circulation that brings the lifesustaining, oxygenated waters to these great depths? These and many other questions relevant to life in the sea remain unanswered.

In the oceans exist almost unlimited new fields for exploration and discovery. Among the major mysteries is the interaction of the sea and the atmosphere. Water, so common on earth, is nevertheless a singularly strange liquid. One of its strange characteristics is its ability to absorb and hold vast quantities of heat.

Thus, the seas are a great heat engine that drives the atmospheric circulation. As warm tropical waters are carried towards the polar regions, they release their heat to the atmosphere to moderate the climate. The Gulf Stream, through this mechanism, makes the climate of northwestern Europe much more salubrious than that at comparable latitudes on the northeast coast of North America.

The transfer of energy between the sea and atmosphere is little understood. We have few measurements

From a research vessel somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a Nallsell bottle is lowered to test water temperatures and salinity.

of the incoming solar radiation at sea or of the heat reflected and radiated back into the atmosphere.

Without these measurements, meteorologists can only theorize on the airsea heat budget.

Winds blowing the surface waters away from some coasts cause colder water to well up from beneath. This redistributes the warm and cold waters in the oceans and -in turn affects the atmospheric circulation, demonstrating an intricate feedback mechanism between the air and the sea. More knowledge and understanding of how this mechanism works not only will bring about better weather prediction, but also may result in influencing the weather.

For example, diversion of an ocean current could radically change an area's climate. It is entirely possible that a nuclear reactor placed on the ocean floor off our coast could warm the bottom water sufficiently to cause it to rise in a vertical current; this upwelling could modify the coastal climate. Again, acres of barges filled with ine;xpensive, nuclear-powered heat generators and anchored offshore with their tops awash, would cause rising currents of warm, watersaturated air that could be moved inland by prevailing winds to drop moisture on otherwise arid lands.

Another important phenomenon of the oceans that must receive further study is the disastrous tsunamis, the "tidal waves" that often engulf coastal areas. We know that the waves are generated by underwater earthquakes, but we do not know just how this is accomplished. ÂŁt is only recently that the Coast and Geodetic Survey of the U.S. Department of Commerce has been able to develop a system for the prediction of the arrival-times of these waves at distant points. However, we still don't know enough about them to predict the heights they will reach once they get to a coast. More research here may mean lives saved and less destruction of property.

The mineralogy of the rocks beneath the sediment blanket on the ocean bottom is almost completely unknown. There may even be rich ore deposits comparable to some of those on land. There is, however, a known wealth of minerals within the sea. minerals derived not from the rocks beneath the sea, but from the bordering land areas.

Ever since the primordial oceans were formed, the mineral resources of the land have been eroded and carried by our rivers to the sea. There they lie, untapped. As man depletes his supply on land he will be forced to turn to the sea to look for possible ore bodies and to recover the minerals

Scientists aboard floating laboratory study samples 0/ ocean life.

OCEAN EXPLORATION

(Continued)

stripped from the continents during the passage of time.

Underwater photographs have already shown that at least a part of the ocean's storehouse of minerals lies exposed on the surface of the sea floor. Off the west coast of Central America, for example, deep-sea cameras lowered from Russian and United States oceanographic ships have revealed areas where the floor of the ocean is 80 to 90 per cent covered with nodules that are rich in manganese, nickel and cobalt. How they are formed is not properly understood. One school of thought believes them to be the result of the activity of microscopic organisms that, in a manner unknown, are able to concentrate these minerals.

In addition to the minerals available in solid form on the ocean bottom, many more will eventually be extracted from sea water. For example, magnesium has been recovered from sea water by a chemical process that is able to compete successfully with the production from the land. As other mineral resources are depleted on land, it will become economically more feasible to obtain them through a like process.

Of great importance to the exploding world population is the possibility of increasing our utilization of the

Each 0/ the explorers in this underwater ballet carries an hour's supply 0/ air in the cylinders on his back.

self-renewing food supply that exists within the seas. Today only about one per cent of mankind's food comes from the oceans. But, with a better understanding of the relationship between our commercial fish and their world, this need not always be so.

Of immediate concern to fishery biologists is the problem of improving our ability to predict where commercial quantities of fish can be found. The current approach is to study not only the whereabouts and movements of the fish themselves, but also the distribution of such factors as water temperature, salt content and food supply. Until such studies mature, we must be hunters rather than farmers, searching out the game and capturing it rather than raising it, as we do on land. When the situation reverses itself we will have entered upon a new age: an age of aquaculture.

The biological oceanographer has long dreamed of the day when his research will provide the knowledge

required for efficient farming of the oceans. Such farming might take place within specially established coastal ponds-lagoons or sea areas blocked off from adjacent waterswhere environment could be controlled to a certain degree. Within these ponds the survival of fish eggs, larvae and small fish could be assured.

Survival, and the size of the fish as well, could also be enhanced by adding nutrients to the waters through fertilization methods similar to those now used on¡ land.

In addition to all the ways mentioned here in which mankind will benefit from increasing effort in oceanography, there are probably many others which cannot now even be suspected. Man is an innately curious creature, and it is this curiosity that has led to many of the world's great discoveries. Who can tell what unsuspected dividends may come from this programme to explore our oceans?-

â&#x20AC;¢

India In P\merica

HEMINGWAY'S tragedy of the common man

"H

EMINGWAY wrote beautiful prose, but he didn't believe in sin," a knowledgeable American said the other day at a literary meeting in Delhi.

"Nothing was sacred to him."

The gentleman was expressing one widespread view of the Nobel Prize writer who died in the summer of 1961 at the age of 62: the view that Ernest Hemingway was a great prose technician, a master craftsman to whom two generations of writers have turned for their model of English prose, but whose fiction was insufficiently moral.

Those who maintain this view generally fail to perceive that Hemingway was indeed a moralist, even a Puritan. They may have been misled by the public image of the man as a playboy-soldier who roamed the world looking for wars, bars, and bullfights, accumulating scars like notches on the pistol-butt of a cowboy. Actually his life consisted of hard play and hard work which he maintained in fine balance, as this .third-person remark he wrote about himself twenty-five years before his death reveals: "The author has made his own living since he was sixteen years old and has worked, before it was fashionable, as a day laborer, farmhand, dishwasher, waiter, sparring partner, newspaper reporter, foreign correspondent, and since 1926, he has supported himself and his family as a writer. . .. Since he was a young boy he has cared greatly for fishing and shooting. If he had not spent so much time at them, at skiing, at the bull ring, and in a boat, he might have written much more. On the other hand, he might have shot himself. He would rather read than do anything else except write, and nothing can make him so happy as having written well. He has been very lucky in his life and would like his luck to. hold a little while longer."

Most of the time he wrote well, indeed. And if it is not always recognized that he wrote with an austere sense of justice and truth, it is because the morality in his work is unconventional and appears in unfamiliar forms; and because, having come to distrust the Victorian morality of his fathers and their society, he distrusted anything which appeared in their language and manner. This was one reason why he developed a style bare of preaching and judgments and high-sounding abstractions.

For, in both style and substance, Hemingway's work was a moralist's effort to discover and reveal the truth.

The Old Man and the Sea, his last published novel, is Hemingway's most affirmative work. It is a tragedya tragedy of the common man-dramatizing the power of an unaided man to confront the elements and-though he is by nature hedged, finite, doomed to loss and deathto achieve a victory. Yet, while the novel affirms the dignity of the human spirit and while Hemingway's other writings have been called pessimistic, even nihilistic, The Old Man and the Sea is nevertheless a fulfilment of themes and techniques which Hemingway developed over a lifetime. Forty years' worth of writing work, these books contain Hemingway's vision of Western man in the twentieth century-man alone, lonely man, confronting the forces of a universe of which he is a tiny part and in which he has to create his own significance if he is to have any.

To express this vision, in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway set his hero on the open sea-a setting also used in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Stephen Crane's The Open Boat, two great nineteenth century American works about the relationship between man and the universe. The hero of The Old Man and the Sea is a poor fisherman of low estate and no importance .in the world. He is what he is and what he can make of hImself.

Of worldly goods, he has barely what he needs to work and to survive-a hut, a cot, a table; a small fishing boat, simple fishing gear, a sail as patched and sunbleached as his shirt. Unlike the princely heroes of the Greek and Elizabethan tragedies, he does not derive stature from his position in the State; no external significance attaches to his fate from title, rank, or function. Like the heroes of the older epics, however, Santiago goes out into uncharted wilderness and kills a giant in solitary combat. Without supernatural powers, with only his skill and his courage and his will and his endurance, he performs the heroic deed; and the giant is a fish, as real as the man and as much a part of the natural world.

Having gone eighty-four days without a catch, the old fisherman goes out very far on the fateful eightyfifth day and hooks the biggest marlin he has ever seen or heard of. Then, for three days and two nights, the old man grips the line-his body wearying and aching, his hands burning-while the marlin swims out to sea pulling boat and man after him. The amazing duration and intensity of the combat between man and fish, the very size of the fish, and the old man's mighty feat when, despite blind exhaustion, he pulls the marlin to the boat and harpoons it, would be quite unbelievable were it not for the realistic details. "He can't be that big," the old man thinks when he first sees the fish. But the fish is that big. And we know too that the old man has caught it.

When the fish is at last secured, however, interminable sharks come and tear the flesh. The old man, as in a war with death, kills shark after shark, with harpoon, then knife, oar, even a fragment of his tiller, but he loses his catch and brings home a giant skeleton-testimony to the limits of a man's strength, yet testimony also to his achievement.

In the crises of the battle with the marlin and then with the sharks, the old man yearns for his friend, the boy whose faith in him gives Santiago will and strength; he calls for help from a God he does not believe is There; and, even as he does, he gently mocks both himself for being weak-for being but a man-and the Universe for lacking a God. Without divine support and guidance, the old man must find his own way through the ambiguities of moral truth. His catch is his greatest feat, yet he wonders whether killing is a sin. When he kills, he kills with kindness, to make the suffering short. His 42

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March 1962

triumph appears to him a treachery, for he has come to love the fish he kills. Like Hamlet, musing alternately on the futility of life ("What is this quintessence of dust?") and the nobility of a human being ("What a piece of work is man!"), so Santiago-though he never hesitates-personifies the tragic paradox of man's fatc.

The old man knows now that he went out too far, beyond the distance from his native land-element that a man should go. As the sharks tear at the corpse, he realizes the sea is reclaiming its own-though he would do it again. For this is the order of things, the Cosmic Joke, that a man should want to do more than he is capable of doing and that the human race never learns its lesson. Aware that the Joke is on him, Santiago refuses to be merely its victim, using his small corner of freedom to live these three days in a way he deems right.

As in all tragedy, there is both defeat and victory for the hero. The sharks lurk and death waits not far off, while the aging man demonstrates a human being's utmost capacity for dedication and endurance in the face of adversity.

HEMINGWAY'S tragic vision is an evolution from his earliest works, which reflect a far less affirmative view of things though it is as scrupulously honest and as honestly set down. The characters of his novels and stories can be seen in a progression, as if a boy were growing to adolescence, young manhood, and gradual maturity. In the initial stage, the boys of Hemingway's stories, glimpsing pain and evil and death for the first time, try to rationalize them away. Nick Adams in "Indian Camp," secretly watching his surgeon-father deliver a baby by Caesarean, suddenly realizes that the woman's husband is dead, has slashed his throat because he couldn't bear her screaming. Nick broods about death for a 'white and decides it's an awful thing but it has nothing to do with him.

Then comes the facing up to things-and disenchantment. "My Old Man," a short story published in 1923, resembles the last novel not only in title but in the motif of the love'--betweenan older man and a boy as a sustaining force in a lonely world-an important secondary theme in The Old Man and the Sea. It is the story of a boy's loss of his father, a middle-aging jockey who is killed before the boy's eyes in a racing accident. It is not only that the father dies, but that simultaneously the boy's image of him is destroyed and with it all sense of order.

Whereas in The Old Man and the Sea Santiago lives up to the ideals the boy loves him for; at the end of "My Old Man," the boy learns that his father had been as corrupt as the rest of the world. "Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing," he mourns.

For suddenly, everything is gone and he hasn't even a memory.

The story is one of many that Hemingway wrote about the quality of "nothing"-about loss and disillusionment, about the way a person, especially a young one with strong true feelings; is betrayed and left without faith. These are works about "the failure of Idealism in the light of actualities; it is the integrity of the charactersand their creator-that they refuse to hold onto old comforting belief once it has been proved false. In the sudden void, some (like the Swede in "The Killers") give up; some try at least to survive, to endure with dignity. The children growing up to adult reality, the adolescents who are shocked abruptly into awareness of the facts of life (like Nick in "The Killers"), are analogues of the disenchanted inhabitants of the Wasteland, the members of the Lost Generation, the disillusioned soldiers. The Sun Also Rises (also published under the

title Fiesta) is a classic depiction of the post-World War I generation in its lost state; A Farewell to Arms, written later but going back to the War for its setting, is a classic account of the process of disillusionment. Both novels are about people without a country, without a home or family, without a true vocation, usually without love.

In a world they never made, they fought a war they never made, in good faith, only to discover that everybody was the loser, the survivors on both sides as well as the dead; and by that time they had also learned that what they were supposed to be fighting for did not exist.

Thousands of Americans had been lifted out of their provincial smugness into the larger world and had suffered the shock of discovering the gap between the slogans about the nobility of martial heroism and the realities of bullets and mud.

There is a passage from A Farewell to Arms that is frequently quoted, and it should be, because we have to understand it to understand Hemingway; it explains what happened not only to those who fought in the war, but also to the disillusioned people in Hemingway's other books-and, without much doubt, to Hemingway himself.

The passage reveals the thoughts of Frederic Henry, the American hero and narrator of the novel, after an Italian soldier tells him that the battles of that summer cannot have been fought in vain: "I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing

in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters, over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifice was like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity .... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates .... " In these terms, Hemingway's focus on nothingness is a stage in the process of moral development. It is an act of morality of the highest and most courageous order to renounce false gods when to go on believing would be more comfortable. The morality of Hemingway-and Frederic Henry-was an effort to correlate beliefs with perceptions. As a writer, Hemingway's integrity was a determination to write only about what he knew from first-hand experience, a determination that put him in a great fraternity of writers from Jane Austen to Flaubertto have the objective correlative before writing about the emotion-to write with an absolute conscience.

In order to write truly, one must learn to see, unlearning what one has been taught, "to see it clear and as a whole," Hemingway said. Frederic Henry, after his flight from the war, finished with it, lies on the floor of a

INGWA Y

(Continued)

boxcar and thinks that he is "seeing now very clearly and coldly-not so coldly as clearly and emptily." It is the emptiness of honest vision. As a y~ung report~r, Hemingway was trained to get the facts nght and wnte them straight. As a novelist, his concern was stating precise surface details to suggest the depths and range of emotion.

Hemingway thus wrote in two great American traditions: In the tradition of self-reliance, he followed Emerson's dictum that "whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist"; in the tradition of practical idealism, he rooted all ideas in facts, agreeing with Robert Frost that "The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows."

The Sun Also Rises sketches the patterns of dislocation as a group of expatriates move from bar to bar from Paris to Spain, from hotel rooms to the bullfight are~a. It is a novel about people with nothing to do, making the valiant effort to endure with stoicism, merely to endure; yet attempting also to find .some ne~ way of life and make a new start. The most lyncal prose 1ll the novel is about a fishing trip to the mountains. Like the pastoral stories of In Our Time, the fishing episode allows an escape-a return-to nature from civilization and decadence. ("The earth abideth forever," says the passage from Ecclesiastes which gave the novel its title. "The sun also ariseth .... ") One can get back to oneself by way of the clear brook, the good fishing, the food and wine, the simple companionship-which are small truths, but nevertheless truths.

The main focus of the novel, however, and the principal source of a life's meaning to which the char~cters turn, is bullfighting. The model of noble conduct IS the

Hemingway, an ardent fisherman, is shown below cruising in the Caribbean Sea, setting for his novel, The Old Man and the Sea, which was cited in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

young bullfighter Romero, who pursues his vocation and his life with courage, skill, and integrity. The concentration on bullfighting is a serious flaw in the novel because it asks us to become emotionally and morally involved in an activity which most of us find meaningless if not distasteful. While Hemingway and his favoured characters are bullfight aficionados, we cannot share their passion. Irony would have been a more appropriate tone than adulation, we feel, when the search for vicarious rejuvenation and virility leads to the ritualized public slaying of a bull.

T HE FLAW was extended when Hemingway wrote about other forms of expertness, rituals per se, as if they were the stuff of life-as if one could fill the void by skilful doing, whatever it is one does. It is this equation of expertise with morality which makes a parody of Across the River and Into the Trees, a novel about an aging soldier whose character consists of such talents as sniffing the precise direction of the wind, pacing his walk to the exact second, and ordering wine to the rarest vintage.

"We smoked expertly in the dark," Hemingway once wrote, a sentence which is the reductio ad absurdum of this tendency. By contrast, the minute details about Santiago's skill at fishing and Robert Jordan's competence in using explosives (in For Whom the Bell Tolls) enhance the sense of purposeful life.

In A Farewell to Arms, there is an Italian army surgeon who goes through the motions of his profession, at which he is expert, staving off the sense of desperate emptiness that fills him as soon as he stops. There is also a priest from a small village in the mountains. an advocate and exemplar of peace on earth and love among men, forced by circumstances and his conscience to walk among the fighters. Between these two, stands the protagonist Frederic Henry-half-way in the progression of Hemingway's tragic vision. Henry has his rituals of eating and drinking and a capacity for the stoical endurance of his lot. Yet he seeks a more positive existence, first in war and then in love.

When Frederic Henry retreats with the Italian army, the long line of soldiers and vehicles keeps breaking upthe disintegration of a society-into smaller and more isolated units until he is separated from the last of his companions. Facing execution at the hands of officers of the army he has faithfully served, Henry runs. It is an act of integrity as well as self-preservation-a desertion of an army and a community which he has found rotten.

Henry flees to Catherine Barkley-from the arms of war to the arms of love. The bliss of their idyll in the mountains is heightened by its contrast with the embattled world below. But Henry cannot fill his life with this love.

As Hemingway was to say later and as he already knew well enough to write about it, "a man both is and is not an island." And, despite Henry's bravado about making a clean break and forgetting the war that betrayed him, he is haunted by the betrayal and he does keep thinking and brooding, missing the men, the camaraderie and friendship and the common shared purpose. Like most Hemingway heroes, he is a man who wants to dedicate himself, needs to, though he must have a pure cause.

When Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was as if he were writing A Farewell to Arms for a second time, writing again-but from a new vantage point-a novel about love and war and about an American volunteer committing himself to fight on a European battleground. Where Frederic Henry is never very ardent about the Italian cause, though he is earnest enough and breaks with it when he can no longer believe in it at all, Robert Jordan is more dedicated than any previous Hemingway hero; and it also happens that Jordan is

DR. WILLIAM FISHER, 42, is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. At present he is in India on a temporary assignment as Visiting Lecturer in American Literature at Delhi University under the Fulbright educational exchange programme.

After receiving his A.B. degree from Wi11iam and Mary Col1ege in 1941, Dr. Fisher worked as a nnrspaper reporter, drama and music critic and radio script writer. He qualified for his M.A. degree from the University of Arizona ill 1945 and joined [he teaching profession in the same year. He took his Ph.D. ill American literature from New York University in 1952. During the last sixteen years Dr. Fisher has held various positions as Instructor at the University of Arizona, Graduate Assistant, Ford Foundation Teaching Fellow and Instructor at New York University, Lecturer on the Graduate Faculty of Columbia University, and Instructor and Lecturer at Rutgers University before his appointment there in 1957 as Assistant Professor.

In the course of his professional career Dr. Fisher has edited, and contributed to, several publications including Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays, just published, of which he was co-editor with Oscar Cargill and Bryllion Fagin, the American Quarterly, the English Journal, the Educational Theatre Journal and South Atlantic Quarterly. He is at present editing an anthology of American literature especial1y designed for Indian students.

more dedicated to the cause of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War than he has ever been to anything in his life. It is not that he has developed or found a new set of values, but that he has gained a heightened awareness of what he treasures and is willing to fight for; and it is also that he is joining a nation of people at the point where they are fighting for their survival as free individuals.

As Sinclair Lewis pointed out, the little group on the mountainside represents, beyond the Spanish nation, "the world revolution that began long ago ... and that will not cease till the human world has either been civilized or destroyed."

Jordan's idealism about fighting "for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny," has cooled at each encounter with the people and the political realities that make up the war, and when one of his own men runs off with the dynamite equipment Jordan needs for his strategic assignment, he denounces "the country and everybody-everybody but the people and then be damned careful what they turn into when they have power." It is the familiar process of disillusionment.

The difference-and it is an important step in the evolution of the tragic vision-is that Robert Jordan retains a large measure of involvement; continues to believe in the anti-fascist forces as a liberation, however weighed down with bureaucracy and corruption; continues loyal to the Army and especially to the people he is working with. And Jordan's death follows a victory for the human spirit, as he completes his almost impossible task of blowing up the bridge, and, wounded and trapped, keeps fighting to cover the retreat of his friends and his beloved.

HEMINGWAY himself faced death in an amazing variety of situations, and even had the rare opportunity of reading his own obituaries after he was erroneously reported killed in a plane crash in Africa. "In all obituaries, or almost all, it was emphasized that I had sought death all my life," Hemingway said later. "Can one imagine if one sought death all of his life he could not have

found her before the age of 54? ... If you have spent your life avoiding death as cagily as possible but on the other hand taking no back chat from her and studying her ... you have not sought her."

In talking about The Old Man and the Sea with an interviewer from the Paris Review, Hemingway said, "I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things." This is Hemingway talking, the man whom some once called a nihilist, complaining about the lack of goodness in modern literature. In that same interview, which appeared in the spring of 1958, Hemingway declared that "survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no quarter given and no quarter received, fight that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die." He had come a long hard honest way from the time when he wrote in A Farewell to Arms that the allimportant word honour was an "obscenity." He had, at last, after writing about the defeat that ends in "nothing" and about endurance with honour, written about the search for some form of assertion, until in the final novel he had written about an old man who lost his prize but lost not a whit of faith, remaining at the end of the book and near the hinted end of his life, rooted in his life-values. In his Nobel message, Hemingway said, "Writing at its best is a lonely life.... It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him." In his last years, Hemingway tried to write harder and faster; he felt time crowding him. When age and illness finally got him, and, perhaps defeated, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot, he had lasted long enough and worked truly enough, and greatly, so that there remains very much alive a shelf of novels and short stories that are among the finest of our times .â&#x20AC;˘ ~.~

March 1962

45

astronaut JOHN GLENN

Colonel John Glenn, leji, all February 20, 1962, became the first Americall to orbit the earth in space flight. GleIm made three circuits around the earth at altitudes between 100 and 160 miles.

His controlled space capsule, similar to that in which Astronauts Alall Shepard and Virgil Grissom had previously made suborbital flights, ll:as launched by the 7.5 million horsepower Atlas missile, above. In orbit Glenn's capsule travelled at a speed of 17,530 miles per hour.

HAT leg~ndary and c.olourful figure, the American .cowboy, is still p.erhaps the domlllant figure the panorama of the Amcncan West. EspecIally at T the time of spring and autumn cattle roundup in the vast grazing lands in the III

West the cowboy comes into his own.

Cowboy skills and the technique of roundup have changed very little since the settling of the western frontier. The cowboy has not only to be a skilled horseman and dexterous in the use of the rope or "lariat," but he must be a hardy individual prepared for a rough and lonely life. After riding hard all day long under a blistering sun or through driving rain, he may have to sleep on the ground, and there is little to divert him when he is on the cattle trail.

But it is a life he loves, as much as does the sailor his life on the sea.

In the spring roundup the young calves are separated for branding, dehorning, castrating and inoculation against disease. In the autumn the heifers and steers are gathered together for shipment to distant markets.

A spring roundup operation starts with the cowboys assembling at their headquarters in the early dawn. After a frugal breakfast, they mount their trained horses and begin the journey which often takes them through many miles of pasture land. In the dim morning light the animals, hidden behind trees and rocks, are hardly visible but the cowboys spot them with trained eyes.

Slowly forming a great line across the plain or valley, they await the signal,

Cattle

Roundup

(Continued)

Cattle

Rou nd up

(Continued)

The cowboy is still a dominant jigure ill the image of the American West.

Below, with their trained ponies, they nimbly herd cattle for the drive to the gathering place.

The branding is all over in a minute

the buyers, the animals are usually transported by semi-trailer type trucks.

A short trek is, however, often undertaken when the cattle have to be taken from one range or location to another, and the traditional skills of the cowboy are called into play to see the herd arrive safely at its destination.

With changing times, the old, romantic picture of the American cowboy is perhaps no longer quite true of his modern counterpart. In the words of cattleman Monte Ritchie

of the big Texas ranch on which the pictures reproduced on these pages were taken: "The old-time cowboy is doomed....

Certainly he must ride and rope and brand, but he now must also carry a wrench in his pocket." But, in spite of the changes in cattle breeding, transporting and marketing techniques, the cowboy still rides the range at the Ritchie ranch and elsewhere. Even today his vocation has plenty of scope for the skill and hardihood which distinguished his predecessor of the last century .â&#x20AC;˘

Its mother soothes a branded calf The cowhand opposite has worked on the big Texas ranch for thirty-jive years.