SPAN: August 1975

WOODROW, WILSON AND THE INDIAN INDEPENDENCE i\AOVEMENT ". .

BY A. RANGANATHAN / / / / ··,WHATIS SCIENCE DOING TO ABOUSH PAIN? AN INDIAN LOOKS AT WALLACE STEVENS BY H. H. ANNIAH GOWDA ~ MUSEUMS THAT SAY ~PLEASE TOUCH'

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A young man sees himself silhouetted against an eerie spectrum of colored lights (below). Youngsters (above) cavort in a room that allows them seemingly to grow and shrink in size. Secret: The room's floor, walls and ceiling are set at odd, varying angles.

These are two of the many wonders at a San Francisco science museum called the "Exploratorium." (See patge 20.)

SPAN A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER More than once Indian readers of SPAN have said to me: "Can you print something about the ordinary American?

We enjoy all the articles by famous Americans or about them, but now and then we'd enjoy seeing a glimpse of how the average American lives and thinks."

What kind of "average American"? A manual laborer?

A farmer? A middle-class white-collar worker? Who is an average American? To compromise, we chose a truckdriver -a "working class" occupation but one with such a strong trade union that its members are financially "middle class."

In our profile (page 5) titled, "A Week in the Life of an American Truckdriver," a young writer spends nine days with driver AI Trafford as he hauls a truckload of furniture from one end of the United States to the other. Trafford discusses his job, his financial problems, his feelings about many issues. If Trafford is not an "average," he is certainly an American whose attitudes are shared by millions.

This issue's science article (page ]2) is a report on the progress of neurological research in the war against one of mankind's oldest but least understood enemies: physical pain. The article is in the form of an interview with one of the world's leading authorities on this subject, Dr. John J. Bonica. Besides bringing us up to date on latest methods for the alleviation of pain of all types, Dr. Bonica provides some fascinating factual tidbits, such as telling us about the Il?-0st excruciating pain known to medical science. (It's called tic douloureux, and Dr. Bonica describes it in detail on page 15.)

But this issue offers humor as well as pain. On page 49 and on the back cover Mario shows us what America looked like to him-at least the America of the big cities, for Bombay's Mario Miranda is as urban as he is urbane. These are only a few of the cartoons in the exhibit called "Mario's American Sketchbook" that has already been touring Indian cities for several months.

Many readers-and not just businessmen-will be interested in the picture essay on new prize-winning American prod ucts (page 40). Three examples: a device that tells scientists whether energy emitted by radar, radio transmitters, and microwave ovens is intense enough to be dangerous; a slide projector with a built-in unit to playa recorded commentary; a typewriter that makes its own erasures so perfectly that corrections are virtually impossible to detect.

Finally, I would like to welcome two new contributorsA. Ranganathan and Pr~fessor H.H. Anniah Gowda.

A. Ranganathan, a distinguished scholar, reminds us (page] 6) of a little-known tie between America and India: the influence of Woodrow Wilson on the Indian freedom movement. And Professor Gowda, who teaches English literature at the University of Mysore, pays a tribute to American poet Wallace Stevens on the 20th anniversary of the latter's death (page 34). Professor Gowda's intent is to show how Stevens's poetic imagination was influenced not only by Asian ideas but also by Asian poetic forms-and by "Asian" he means Indian as well as Chinese and Japanese.

The Indian influence on modern American literature is a fascinating subject-and one that SPAN has covered often in the past and will continue to cover in the future. And for those who feel the Indian influence on American writers is a new phenomenon, I was astonished by an article the other day that reminded me of a mid-19th-century American writer who said that one line from the Gita was worth the whole state of Massachusetts! An extravagant statement, perhaps, but this was an iconoclastic writer who loved to bait his countrymen. His name was Henry David Thoreau. -A.E.H.

Visiting American Editor Lauds Activism of U.s. Congress-

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What Is Science Doing About Pain?

An, InterlJjew With Dr. John J. Bonica

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Touring America: Navajo Land

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A Wallace Stevens Sampler

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Award-Winning New Products Come to Market

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by Mohammed Reyazuddin

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Wilder Is Alive and Well

by M;chael Kernan and Granville Hicks

An Eastern Light in t e Western Chamber

by H.H. Anniah Gowda

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46 48 49 Front cover: This young woman is one of 140,000 Navlljos, the largest "Indian" tribe in the U.S. today. For this issue's article on "Navajo Land," see page 26.

Back cover: Cartoonist Mario Miranda goes deep into the heart of New York City and this is what he sees. For more of "Mario's America," see page 49.

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu.

Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani. B. Roy Choudhury. Kanti Roy, Suhas Nimbalkar. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photograpbic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi·I 10 001. on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Vakils House. Sprott Road, 18 Ballard' Estate. Bombay·400 038.

Pbotographs: Front cover-Susanne Anderson. Inside front cover-Christopher Springmann. 5,7Franz Furst/Bill Bridges. 9-Dennis Chaikin. 13-Avinash Pasricha. 20, 21 top, 22·23-Christopher Springmann. 24 center-Charles H. Phillips. 26-Susanne Anderson. 27-Terry Eiler. 28-Bruce Dale ©National Geographic Society except left center by Lyntha Scott Eiler ~nd top right by Susanne Anderson. 33-Avinash Pasricha.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One Year, 18 rupees; single COPY. 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine.

24 Kasrurba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi·110 00t.

NEWS& VIEWS STOPPING NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION Ninety-four nations meeting in Geneva have reaffirmed "strong support" for the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and "continued dedication" to its principles, The four-week Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference ended on May 30 after adopting a declaration by consensus. U.S. representative David Klein, describing the declaration as a "realistic document," said it was "an important step forward."

Thedeclaration expressed the hope that states not yet parties to the treaty wou1d-"adhere to it at an early date."

It welcomed the various agreements on arms control and disarmament achieved in recent years but voiced "serious concern" that the arms race, particu1aFly the nuclear arms race, was "unabated."

It urged nuclear powers to agree on a comprehensive test ban.

Referring to the demand for a test ban, Klein told the conference that the U.S. wanted any agreement on nuclear weapons testing to ensure adequate verification of the honoring of the agreement and to solve the problem of peaceful nuclear explosions. "It would not be realistic to assume," he said, "that an agreement banning all nuclear weapons testing ... could be concluded before solutions to these problems .... " In a message to the conference, .

President Ford said: "Nuclear energy can and should promote the fortunes of nations assembled at this conference.

But its destructive potential can and must be contained." He described support for the Nuclear¡ Non-Proliferation Treaty as a "major tenet of American foreign policy."

"We welcome the important recent additions to the roster of parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as indications that others are moving toward adherence," President Ford said.

"We recognize that the treaty's promise is not yet f~lIy realized, but we take satisfaction from what has been achieved."

Some of the finest American films of recent years-The Godfather, The Exorcist, The Sting, That's Entertainment, The Towering Inferno, The Great Gatsby, The Way We Werewill soon be shown in Indian theaters.

The Government of India and the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA) nave agreed on the distribution of American films in India. The agreement, which will be in force until March 31, 1979, states that on April 1 every year the Government of India will authorize MPEAA to distribute 100 to 150 motion pictures in India. The imported films will be channeled through a Government of India agency that will act as film importer and that will levy a service charge on the American companies.

These are the first 64 films approved for import: United Artists Corporation: Avanti, Diamonds Are Forever, Fid- Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford dler on the Roof, Hospital. Juggernaut, . in The Way We Were, which will soon Man of La Man.cha, Magnificent be seen in Indian theaters.

Seven Ride, Sleeper, Tom Sawyer.

Universal Pictures: The Day of the Jackal, Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary Queen of Scots, Frenzy, Showdown, Joe Kidd, Follow Me, Sugarland Express, The Sting.

Paramount Pictures: Gunfight at O.K. Corral, The Great Gatsby, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Parallax View, Paper' Moon, Phase IV, Ten Commandments, Samson alJd Delilah, The Godfather.

Columbia Pictures: For Pete's Sake, 40 Carats, Golden Voyage of Sindbad, Lost Horizon, Nicholas Alexandra, The Odessa File, Siddhartha, The Way We Were, Young Winston, Butterflies Are Free.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: The Great Waltz, Hitler--The Last Ten Days, K.ansas City Bomber, Soylent Green, Travels With My Aunt, Shaft in Africa, That's Entertainment, Westworld.

Twentieth Century-Fox: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Conrack, Emperor of the North, Last American Hero, My Fair Lady, Neptune Factor, The Poseidon Adventure, Paper Chase, Zardoz.

Warner Brothers: Amarcord, The Macintosh Man, 0 Lucky Man, A Warm December, The Train Robbers, Thief Who Came to Dinner, The Towering Inferno, Freebie and the Bean, McQ, The Exorcist.

These films have been selected by the Indian Government in consultation with MPEAA members.

The agreement also states how the American companies will spend the money they make by showing their films in India. A part of it will be used to make films in India, to buy Indian films, and to extend loans to Indian Government bodies. Fifteen per cent of the money, not exceeding Rs. 25 1akhs per annum, will be remitted to the U.S. in quarterly installments.

The agreement also provides for the liquidation of "blocked rupee funds" -the money the American companies had made in India in past years. They will be allowed to remit back to the U.S.-in dollars-Rs. 25 lakhs per annum in half-yearly installments till the funds are liquidated. The Government of India will also consider proposals in nonfilm ventures to help liquidate the blocked rupee funds.

INDUSTRIAL NATIONS DISCUSS THIRD WORLD Ministers of the 24-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who met in Paris on May 28, resolved to "consider policies aimed at strengthening the position of developing countries in the world economy," and to discuss with them the problems of food production, energy, raw materials and development assistance.

In a declaration on "Relations With Developing Countries," the Ministers said that while many in the Third World had recorded "major progress," a large number of countries still faced "extremely severe problems of poverty."

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the conference that the world's economic well-being depended "on a structure of international co-operation in which the developing countries are, and perceive themselves to be, participants."

The U.S., he said, was ready "to seek solutions to the problems of international co-operation with imagination and compassion. But it is evident that others must be ready to follow a similar course. Confrontation and co-operation cannot be carried on simultaneously. International meetings that exhaust themselves in self-indulgent rhetoric or self-righteous

propaganda help no one and no cause."

Secretary Kissinger outlined new U.S. measures to help developing countries in the areas of food, raw materials and development assistance. He said America would try to provide at least four million tons of food aid annually. He also expressed U.S. support for two international organizations concerned with food-the newly-established Consultative Group on Food Production and Investment, and the proposed $1,000million International FUlid for Agriculturai Development.

The U.S. Secretary of State offered several suggestions on the issue of raw materials. He emphasized the U.S. position that "exclusive producers' organizations are not the best way to solve the commodity problem."

On the question of financial help to the poorest countries, Secretary Kissinger said the U.S. supported the creation by 1976 of a special $2,000 million IMF trust fund.

"In short, we propose to base the relationship between developed and developing nations on a spirit of co-operation and good will. We urge the developing countries to approach the issue w.ith the same attitude," Secretary Kissinger said.

CRITIC LESLIE FIE,DLER LEADS SEMINARS I¡N INDIA "It was different," says Panjab University Professor M.L. Raina, referring to the USIS-sponsored seminar on "The Writer and Society" which was held recently in Simla. "As a rule," Dr. Raina explains, "these seminars are just gatherings of academics where we do nothing but talk shop. This time there were different kinds of people-journalists, critics, and creative writers in the various languages. I think the battle lines were, clearly drawn-between the academics and the others-so some genuine heat was generated. And considerable light, as well."

The key speaker at the Simla seminar was the well-known American critic Leslie Fiedler who explored such subjects

as "The Relationship Between Popular Literature and High Literature," "The Writer and His Audience" and "The Writer and the Critic." Participants at the seminar included-to choose a few names at random-S.H. Vatsyayan, Ka Naa Subramanyam, Nissim Ezekiel, P. Lal, V.V. John, Nergis Dalal, Ashokamitran and Shiv K. Kumar.

Leslie Fiedler is widely known as an unorthodox and provocative interpreter of American literature, as well as the author of novels, short stories and poetry. His most famous work is Love and Death in the American Novel, which has been described as "a bold unmasking of the psychic complexities of American fiction." Fiedler is presently I

Samuel L. Clemens Professor and Chairman of the Department of English at the State University of New York.

During his one-month stay in India, Leslie Fiedler also participated in an American poetry workshop in Bangalore; addressed the Creative Writers Club at New Delhi's India International Centre; and was chief speaker at another seminar on "Creative Writing" in Calcutta. Everywhere he went, Dr. Fiedler's speeches were followed by lively question-and-answer sessions.

As one participant at the Simla semi" nar: said: "You may find that you disagree with .almost everything he says.

And yet you admire his courage, his learning-and his eloquence."

VISITING AMERICAN EDITOR LAUDS ACTIVISM OF¡ U.S. CONGRESS On his recent trip to India, an influential political analyst discussed the newly 'strengthened role of the United States Congress in the formulation of foreign policy.

Last May, Richard V. Holbrooke, managing editor of the American quarterly Foreign Policy, visited India and gave several talks il'l. New Delhi on the making of American foreign policy.

One of the main themes of Holbrooke's talks in India was the expanded role of the U.S. Congress in the formulation of foreign policy .. Speaking to members of the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi, Holbrooke referred to a speech made by Secretary of State Kissinger on April 17, 1975, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

That speech, said Holbrooke, was very significant because Dr. Kissinger conceded that "Congress is a coequal branch of government," and that "the Executive accepts that the Congress must have both the sense and reality of participation; foreign policy must be a shared enterprise."

How did the dominance of the Executive Branch in foreign affairs end and become a "shared enterprise" with the Legislative Branch?

Holbrooke's oneword answer is: "Vietnam."

He went on to list the important steps that the Congress had taken during and since the end of the Vietnam war to show how Congress has been asserting it'self.

For 30 years or so, the U.S. Congress (both the Senate and the House of Representatives) largely deferred to Presidential leadership in the conduct of international relations, said Holbrooke. "The pendulum was way out--the Executive Branch did everything in foreign policy.

Now the pendulum is coming back to the . middle-where it belongs. It should not, however, swing the other way-toward Congress," he felt.

Congress should not be involved in the day-to-day working of foreign affairs, Holbrooke said. "When Congress tries to get into the field of day-to-day

Richard V. Holbrooke fIGS been the Managing Editor of Foreign Policy magazine since 1972. First published five years ago, Foreign Policy has become, under Holbrooke's direction, an influential journal in the field of international affairs. It attempts to provide a forum for the discussion of major issues in American foreign policy. Holbrooke is also a frequent contributor to such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly. diplomacy, it gets into trouble.

It is, however, very good at setting up procedures which can be of great importance in the long run.

To show how such procedural mechanisms work, Holbrooke used the analogy of the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969, which requires that environmental impact statements be prepared before major federal actions that might adversely affect the environment.

This requirement ensures that environmental considerations are included in the

decision-making process without the need for Congress to vote up or down on specific projects.

In a similar way, ¡he noted, the U.S. Congress can set up procedural requirements to ensure that military arms sales abroad are considered in light of the nation's broad policy objectives. He said that efforts along these lines have already been made with passage of legislation directing the Executive Branch to notify Congress prior to any single arms sale over $25 million. Presently, Congress is considering additional legislation that would further enlarge its oversight capacity in this area by requiring arms control statements prior to all military sales.

Certainly, he acknowledged, actions by Congress "may pose stumbling blocks for the Executive Branch which previously operated with a great deal of latitude in the conduct of foreign affairs." He added: "This changing situation requires that the Executive Branch proceed with a new sensitivity to Congressional review authority. Presidents must be alert to acts which the Congress has already passed and to those which it is likely to enact."

But, he said, to conclude that this changed role will seriously threaten U.S. world leadership capabilities is wrong.

He emphasized: "I would caution any country, on the basis of these points of controversy between the two branches, against perceiving a substantial change in U.S. involvement and willingness to uphold its commitments overseas."

On the other hand, he said, a re-evaluation of excessive American involvement . in the affairs of every country in the world "is not a bad thing. It is an adjustment process to a new set of realities which is healthy-to recognition of what is within our means and wIlat is vital to our national interest."

0

At 5 :-15 P.M. one August Saturday, Al Trafford drives a tractor-trailer away from a warehouse in Carlstadt, New Jersey, and heads for California. Trafford, a 52-year-old native New Yorker, has been driving trucks of one kind or another for most of the last 35 years. He owns a tractor, which he leases, along with his services, to Bekins Van Lines, America's fifth largest interstate household goods moving carrier. On this particular Saturday his tractor is pulling a semitrailer loaded with 13,700 pounds of furniture and household goods belonging to a family that is moving from Short Hills, New Jersey, to La Canada, California'; 1,720 pounds of furniture and household goods owned by people going from Ironia, New Jersey, to Winnipeg, Manitoba (Trafford will set the 1,720pound load off at the Bekins Van Lines terminal in Hillside, Illinois, and another Bekins driver will take it 'from there to Canada while he continues west); and four V.P.l. teletype machines, weighing 600 pounds, bound for Skokie, Illinois, also to be off-loaded at Hillside. I am in the cab of the tractor because for a long time I have been curious about the lives of the drivers of the big trucks that go thundering down the highways, and Bekins has given me permission to accompany Trafford on a coast-to-coast run.

I spend half of the first hour in my aerie, a couple of feet above the adjacent . car tops, marveling at the sweeping view of the highway and the landscape-the gasoline-refinery wasteland of northern New Jersey, such as it is-and the other half trying to adjust to the bumpiness and the noise. Every crack in the road feels like a crevice, every pebble like a rock, and when I am not reaching for the handle on the dashboard to maintain my equilibrium, T am straining to hear what Trafford is shouting over the roar of his 318-horsepower diesel engine. As we bounce south on the Jersey Turnpike and then west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Trafford tells me that he purchased his tractor, a White Freightliner, in January 1970, for $23,275 .and that he has already put 219,500 miles on it. There are cheaper tractors to be had that will do the job, and Trafford has had them-his first diesel was a $13,000 '62G.M.C. ("a crackerbox on the outside, a monk's cell on the inside"), and his pre/

vious truck, a '67 Mack ("a lemon") cost month. Whatever he spends on fuel, tractor him $18,000-but this time he ordered the maintenance, and the wages of any best of everything. The price of the engine "helpers" he hires to assist him load and alone was $5,000, the 13-speed Road- unload comes out of his pocket. Bekins ranger transmission set him back $2,200 owns the $7,500 semitrailer Trafford is puland the roomy, brown-padded cab is ling, is responsible for its upkeep (washing, outfitted with air conditioning ($500), a replacing tires, etc.) and supplies it with stereo ($260) and two air-ride seats ($192 various pieces of equipment (18 dozen apiece). Sitting on a bag of air rather than furniture-wrapping pads at $48 a dozen, on a set of springs makes for a softer ride, 9 dozen smaller padded-cotton protective Trafford informs me, and I think to my- "skins" at $31.80 a dozen, a $275 ramp, self that on springs the pebbles must re- etc.). Licensing the tractor-trailer to operate in 48 states costs Bekins about $1,000 gister as boulders.

Traffic is light and Trafford stays in the a year. Though the cost of moving norright lane. Although he always keeps an mally strikes anyone engaged in moving eye on his mirrors for cops and wayward from one place to another as exorbitant, motorists and occasionally shifts up or plainly the wonder is that it is not still down a gear to keep his tachometer read- more expensive than it is.

Back on the road after dark, Trafford ing a steady 1,900 r.p.m., he makes the driving look effortless, which at this point expresses a variety of driving preferences, he claims it is. "Trucks aren't the clonkers such as running single. He has tried runthey were years ago," he says. "You used ning double but it was difficult to find to have to be pretty brawny to handle anyone he could put up with for 24 them. Women can drive them now and hours a day: Either a codriver talked too more and more of them are. I'd rather much or too little, or he didn't take enough showers, or he "made the gears growl and grumble." Many truckers roll between midnight and dawn (less traffic) but he is not nocturnally inclined and usually 'As we ride through the Ozark drives between the hours of 8 A.M. and 11 P.M. Trafford lives in the village of Mountains, Trafford talks Hastings-on-Hudson and likes going from about his wife Isabelle and the New York area to the Los Angeles area his four children, about how he rather than to, say, Seattle, because 'the southern route across the country has got into trucking, about how miles of two-lane highway, fewer he would like to get_out of it.' tewer hills, and fewer stretches of ice and snow in winter. Once he reaches the West Coast he wants to head right back to New York.

We get off the pike at the Carlisle, drive a truck than a car. There's more Pennsylvania, ~xit.'-At 10:45 P.M. Trafford legroom, greater visibility, the big wheel turns into the parking lot of a Carlisle makes steering easier, and cars show you truck stop and joins 45 or 50 refrigerated some respect. Behind the wheel of a car trucks ("reefers"), tankers, fellow moving I feel like a racing driver, all scrunched up. vans (known in the trade as "bedbug What's hard about driving a truck is being haulers"), and one truck through whose able to stay with it for 10 hours at a slats can be seen-and heard and smelled stretch, keeping the truck at maximum -a couple of hundred hogs. Trafford ususpeed and accomplishing some distance." ally sleeps in the bed behind the seats in Over a pair of grayish, rubberlike chop- his cab, but he has a sister in Carlisle, and ped steaks at a restaurant on the Pennsyl- he is going to spend the night with her. vania Turnpike, Trafford explains that Trafford's brother-in-law drives to the Bekins pays him by a complicated system truck stop to meet us, dropping me off at involving mileage and weight. He gets a motel on the way back to his house.

By 9 o'clock on Sunday morning we are between 25 cents a mile (when he is hauling 13,000 pounds or less) and 30 cents a mile working our way through the foothills of (for 19,001 pounds or more). In addition, the Alleghenies on the Pennsylvania TurnBekins pays him certain loading and un- pike. Sometimes another tractor-trailer loading charges ($ 1.34 a hundred pounds passes us. The minute it clears the front of Trafford's cab, he flicks his headlights for loading at a residence, $1.06 a hundred pounds for unloading at a residence). to let the passing driver know it is safe to Trafford's tractor payments are $400 a pull back in, and the other driver thanks

About the Author: In the photo above, Susan Sheehan is shown in the cab of Al Trafford's moving van, where she spent more than a week traveling with Trafford as he hauled a load of furniture from NewJersey to California. She is a writer on the staff of the New Yorker magazine.

him by blinking his rear marker lights twice. Each time Trafford passes a slower tractor-trailer, its driver extends the same courtesy to him. Traffic is mild, the tourists in their cars, station wagons and campers are behaving, the scenery is attractive (meadows of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod, weathered farmhouses, Hansel-and-Gretel hamlets nestled in summergreen valleys) and Trafford is content. "We'll have lunch at 1:45 and take fueht 5:15," he predicts at 10:45. Each day he announces where we will be three or five hours hence and acknowledges that one reason for sticking with the New York-to-Los Angeles run is that the route has become so f~miliar, he knows where he can get help if he has truck trouble and where the food is good, the showers clean, the fuel cheap.

"There he goes!" Trafford cries suddenly, waving exuberantly across the turnpike's grassy divider at an eastbound green-and-white Bekins truck. On twolane roads he waves at every tractortrailer traveling in the opposite direction; on four-lane roads, he waves only at his Bekins confreres. On all roads, however, tractor-trailer drivers headed opposite ways warn each other of the perils that lie ahead

by exchanging hand signals. The most frequently exchanged hand signal is the two-fingered V, which to Trafford signifies neither victory nor peace but police radar. "I never get a radar speeding ticket," he says with satisfaction, "and while I may be alone, I'm never lonely because I have so many friends on the road."

As the clock strikes 1:45 we stop for lunch at the Pennsylvania-Ohio truck stop just off Exit 16 on the Ohio Turnpike.

Like most truck stops, the Pennsylvania-Ohio has a prominently displayed sign warning tourists to PLEASE BE PATIENT! THIS IS A TRUCK STOP & OUR DRIVERS COME FIRST. We sit down in the section reserved for profes-. sional drivers and for the first time in my life I really feel like a member of the elite.

One old saw has it that truckdrivers are the gommets of the highway and that it is a wise motorist who stops to eat wherever he sees a congregation of tractortrailers. According to another old saw, the principal ingredient of a truck-stop meal is arsenic and the principal requirement for truck driving is a cast-iron stomach. A dozen meals at a dozen truck stops between Ohio and California conv{nce me that the truth lies midway between old saws. Truckdrivers eat at truck stops because they have adequate parking facilities for 50-foot' rigs (many roadside restaurants don't) and because truckers like each other's company. The principal ingredient of a truck-stop meal is not arsenic, it is grease. Truck-stop coffee is sturdy, truck stops sell an abundant selection of antacid tablets, and the wise motorist will find that most truck stops have better food, lower prices, more efficient waitresses and cleaner restrooms than most of the chain restaurants that have monopolies on the turnpikes and interstates.

As Trafford has predicted, it is exactly 5:15 when we pull up to a diesel pump at a truck stop off Exit 5 on the Ohio Turnpike.

While the truck puts away III gallons of diesel fuel, 2 quarts of oil and 2 quarts of transmission fluid, Trafford, a 6-foot, 210pounder, puts away a peach cobbler and three cups of black coffee sweetened with

sugar and cooled off with ice water. The truck averages five miles per gallon; Trafford averages 10 or 12cups of watereddown coffee a day. He takes a No-Doz very infrequently, doesn't take pep pills and doesn't drink when he is driving. "I don't do nothing to endanger my $23,000 investment," he says.

States have such disparate fuel taxes, speed limits and trucking regulations that long-distance truckers are given to saying, "This ain't the United States, it's the Untied States."

One of Trafford's favorite conversation topics is money. In New Jersey, when T asked where he had' purchased his tractor, he said he had bought it in California and had taken delivery of it in Nevada, thereby saving about a thousand dollars in sales tax. In Ohio, when I inquired if he would consider hauling freight or machines instead of bedbugs, he had replied, "Tell me what it pays; I'll tell you if I'll haul it."

Now, as we zip past the farms and cities of silent-majority America, Trafford reveals that he grosses about $40,000 a year and clears about $20,000, and that he is dissatisfied with his earnings. "I'm not doing any better than the guy who doesn't own a tractor and who is paid an hourly rate for driving for a company," he says. "And the company driver enjoys fringe benefits I don't get-paid vacations, sick leave, medical and dental insurance, pensions.

Owner-operators used to outearn other drivers, but in recent years increases in our mileage and loading rates, which are tied up with the tariff rates the van lines are allowed to charge customers, haven't kept pace with our rising operating costs.

We're caught in an economic squeeze. I pay $810 a year for driving insurance and $4 an hour and up for labor."

On Monday morning, Al Trafford takes the four U.P.I. teletypes out of their protective wrappings, wheels them out the trailer's back door and down a ramp onto a warehouse dock at Hillside, then lo.oks at his watch and says cheerfully: "That took 20 minutes and brought me $11, the minimum compensation for unloading a shipment at a dock." Over the next 45 minutes he earns another $IIJor unloading the I,nO-pound Winnipeg shipment.

Two young Bekins warehouse employees work with him. One checks each item Trafford sets off on the. dock against the inventory list for the Winnipeg load; the other examines each object to make sure it hasn't been damaged between Carlstadt and Hillside. Off the truck come a vacuum cleaner, a sewing machine, a wigbox

and a number of green and gold upholstered chairs.

"Garbage," observes Trafford, who is rarely impressed by the furniture he handles.

"Even in a big shipment the most you'JI see is one piece you'd want, perhaps an outstanding color TV or a stereo set. I've never yet seen a load I'd be wiJling to trade for the furniture in my own home."

As Trafford reaches over a carton packed with kitchen utensils for two yeJlow and brown hide-a-bed cushions, he somehow dislodges a hair drier, which tumbles to the floor. The bottom of the hair drier's beige plastic case splinters as it lands. The young man notes the damage on the inventory. Bekins drivers are responsible for paying up to $48 worth of damages per shipment and up to $250 for any item in a shipment they lose. The hair drier mishap doesn't bother Trafford-an occasional accident is inevitable and the bottoms of hair drier cases are inexpensive -but he does resent about half of the nine hundred doJlars he pays out each each year in claims-the half he considers were not his fault. "Sometimes, to save on labor costs, I hurry to load and don't note a cracked chair leg on the inventory list," he says. "Then the customer claims the chair leg was cracked during the move, and I have to pay for a new one. Many customers are foul baJls. Last year, I delivered a shipment, and the customer signed for it, saying she'd received everything in good condition. Later, she claimed a carton of linens worth S250 had been lost. I had to pay her S250 claim, and I'm convinced that the linens weren't lost. Bekins is too concerned with customer relations to fight claims as hard as it should. A man don't invest $23,000 in a tractor and then say: 'You take what you please out of my pocket.' They take money out of my pocket, they damn well know I'll take it out of theirs."

Around noon, Trafford receives his next assignment: He is to pick up a 2,000pound load of furniture and household goods at a warehouse in Joliet, Illinois, and drop it off in Phoenix on his way to La Canada. Between Hillside and Joliet we encounter a state police weighing station. Truck weighing stations are located across the country at strategic places to ensure compliance with state and federal

regulations against overloading trucks.

"With furniture there's almost no way I can be overloaded," Trafford says, after the state police weigh him and let him proceed.

"The empty weight of my tractor and trailer is 29,000 pounds, and the heaviest load of furniture I've ever hauled weighed 22,000 pounds, and with four axles I'm allowed a total of 60,000 pounds. It's easy to overload with freight and machines."

In midafternoon we arrive at the Joliet warehouse, which is owned by an indcpendent local moving firm that books interstate shipments with Bekins Van Lines.

Part of the Phoenix shipment-a box of Christmas ornaments, several Spanishstyle barstools, a carton with an artificial plant poking out the top-is sitting in the dirt driveway outside the warehouse.

Part of it-a Mediterranean-style chest of drawers, two bicycles with training wheels, a coffee table-is still in the semitrailer in which the shipment was picked up several days earlier from a home in

'The sun is setting 'when Trafford makes an attempt to repair the linkage at the border. I hold the flashlight for him while he uses a wrench. He starts the truck but his efforts seem to have made matters wors~.'

Joliet. We are delayed for two hours. First, the inventory list isn't ready. "This place is owned by a family and they're just getting started," Trafford says sympathetically. Then the skies open up, and the furniture in the driveway has to be hustled back onto the local semitrailer. "So much for the wash-job Bekins did on the trailer this morning," Trafford says. "You always get rain somewhere going across the country." The paperwork appears just as the rain stops, and Trafford starts to deal with the Phoenix shipment, unscrewing a table leg here, taping down a carton lid there.

To an amateur, the pieces look as if they cannot be compressed into the space formerly occupied by the teletypes and the Winnipeg shipment, but Trafford is a pro; he fits them on as if they were just so many

pieces of an easy jigsaw puzzle and winds up with plenty of van space to spare.

At dusk we are traveling southwest on the celebrated U.S. Route 66, which alternates with IS 55 in Illinois and IS 44 in Missouri. Among the cornfields, the grain elevators and the soybean fields we hurtle past are neon signs, biJlboards, hamburger stands, and drive-in theaters.

I find myself entertaining an unexpected and perhaps heretical thought: that road- • side commercialism provides a refreshing change from the antiseptic turnpikes and interstates.

We cross the muddy Mississippi at 9:30 on Tuesday morning. Missouri's roads are no smoother than New Jersey's, but the human body is adaptable, and by now I am aware of the truck's vibrations only when I try to take legible notes and end up with undecipherable chicken-scratches or when I hear my quavering voice singing along with Ray Conniff or Andy WiJliams on the stereo (Trafford is partial to "music that don't beat on the brain").

Sight-seeing and distance-accomplishing are incompatible, so not for us are the guidebook attractions-Six Flags Over Mid-America, Pony Express Museum, Meramec Caverns-that lie just off the highway. Instead of finding the cab or the road confining, I feel pleasantly free, perhaps because nothing has to be done, nothing can be done this day except proceed from Point A to Point B: Confinement becomes a form of freedom. I mentioned to Trafford that it is nice to be out of the reach of the telephone and far away from a desk fuJl of bills to be paid and other domestic chores. He agrees that being on the road has a few advantages"my wife gets someone else to cut the grass"-but of course it doesn't have the novelty for him that it has for me. He is home between 3 and I0 days a month and he has had enough of "missing ,out on three-quarters of aJl the family birthday parties, christenings, and barbecues."

As we ride through the Ozark Mountains, Trafford talks at length about his wife Isabelle and his four children, about how he got into trucking, and about how he would like to get out of it. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York', and graduated from high school in 1937. His father had a milk route and was able, even in that Depression year, to help him get a job driving a milk truck, a job he kept until he was drafted. After the war, he learned that other trucking jobs were more lucrative and went to work deliver-

Ai Trafford on one of those rare occasions when he is at home with his family. The photo was taken before the wedding of his daughter Nancy (right). At left, daughter Susyn sits with her husband, John Esau, next to Trafford's wife, Isabelle. On the /Ioor is daughter Jorie.

ing merchandise to a string of chain stores in the New York vicinity. In 1950, he bought his first truck, a $6,700 International. In 1952 he signed his first contract with Bekins. Shortly after four drivers working as a shuttle team took a load coast to coast. Trafford drove the New York to Chicago leg, which then took about 30 hours; a week's work was a round trip between the two cities. In 1955, Trafford was offered a contract to set up a loading and delivery service for Bekins Van Lines in the Washington, D.C., area.

Trailers would be shuttled into Washington by over-the-road drivers, and he would provide tractors to pull them to their local destinations. He stayed in Washington for seven years and prospered; one year he grossed SIOI,OOO and cleared $50,000.

He liked being home every night and looks back on those seven years as the best years of his life. He bought a home in Springfield, Virginia, and joined the American Legion post there, serving once as post commander. He enjoyed attending Legion conventions, taking weekly dancing lessons and going out on Saturday nights with his Legion friends. Bekins had told him when they offered him the Washington contract that it would eventually make the Washington area a company operation.

In 1962, Bekins bought Trafford's equipment from him (he had built the business up from one tractor to eight) and the

Traffords returned to New York. Trafford. bought his first diesel truck and. went back on the road. He had injured his back before the war while dumping a 40-quart can of milk, and. in 1964 his back began to give him trouble; he had to have a disc removed and two vertebrae fused. The doctors ruled out driving a truck for six months. He let another man use his tractor in exchange for keeping up the monthly payments and took a job as a dispatcher for a local moving outfit in New York City. The job paid $175 a week. "When I drove a truck I earned big money and always had a hundred dollars in my pocket," he says. "If someone suggested going out on Saturday night I said 'Fine, let's go.' When I became a dispatcher we lived hand-to-mouth. After paying for my lunches, my commutation ticket and my subway tokens, I might have only two dollars left. If someone suggested going out I hesitated; the $25 we'd spend for an evening could buy a pair of shoes. Money makes a real difference."

In 1966, the man who was driving Trafford's tractor was drafted. Trafford's back had healed; the tractor was paid for. He traded it in on a new one and hit the road.

If he doesn't care for being away from home 300 days a year, he does like what money can buy: His house is worth $50,000; he owns stocks and mutual funds, and he has a '72 Pontiac and a '69 Pontiac. He put

his son through William and Mary College; Allan Thomas Trafford Jr., 30, now works with computers for an insurance company and lives with his wife and two children in Louisiana. Susyn, 25, teaches grade school in Mount Vernon and is studying for her master's degree. Nancy, 19, is attending teachers' college. Both Susyn and Nancy were married recently.

The Traffords were able to pay for their wedding receptions ($2,400 dinner-dances) without withdrawing money from the bank. With only one college education and one wedding ahead of him-his youngest daughter, Jorie, is 10- Trafford. thinks he will be able to get by on less money in the future.

The hours go faster than the miles, and the 300 miles across Missouri peel off fast enough. We reach the Oklahoma border at four; Oklahoma is hot and dry. Polled Herefords are standing belly-deep in ponds, horses are seeking refuge in the shade cast by billboards along the turnpike, and I envy them slightly. It is in the 90s outside. It is 85 degrees in the truck-the air conditioning is on the blink-and we are riding west into a still-strong afternoon sun.

Eleven of the twelve truck stops where we consume our daily quota of canned. string beans and permanently pleated frozen French fries are modern oases. Many of the newer ones in the west are milliondollar extravaganzas, which offer truckers not only fuel and meals but also pleasant rooms and showers, barbershops, pool tables, color TV lounges, washers and driers, well-stocked stores, and saunas.

The atmosphere at these Formica-ed and wall-to-wall-carpeted places is very wholesome: No liquor is sold, the waitresses are friendly but never too friendly, not a loud word is heard above the Muzak, and at some truck stops church services are held on Sunday mornings. The 12th truck stop is the one where we have dinner that Tuesday evening near Oklahoma City. It is small and old, shabby and dark and filled with flies. The waitress looks stoned and acts surly. At the table next to us a muchmascara-ed woman in tight slacks, satin blouse and dyed black hair teased into a towering beehive, is planting an endless kiss on the lips of a beer-drinking, potbellied, tattooed young trucker. "Thought you ought to see what truck stops used to be like," Trafford says, as we leave before any money changes hands, before an X-rated scene is played out. "There are still a few truck stops where girls come

up to you in the parking lot and ask if you want to have a party, but they're dying out. Sex isn't good for business."

Wednesday morning. Texas. Cotton fields in bloom.

Grasshoppers pumping oil with a seesaw rhythm. Cropdusting planes gliding through Tiepolo-blue skies. Cowboys, sage, mesquite. Trafford waves continually at· cattle vans ("bullhaulers"), tankers, buses, and only waves at pickup trucks and delivery vans if they wave first ("they're not my peers"). He sails right past hitchhikers, most of them young men with long hair and bare chests. "I imagine most of them are all right," he allows. "They just don't look like much, and it wouldn't appeal to me to have one of them sweating all over the upholstery.

They usually don't have any money so I'd have to feed them whenever I stopped to eat." Trafford is a fastidious housekeeper. On the "doghouse" over the engine between the two seats, which he has covered with a piece of shocking-pink textured carpet, he keeps a stack of paper towels and uses them often to wipe the cab interior clean. His plaid sport shirts and double-knit pants always look neat; he keeps a large supply of clothes in a chest of drawers in the trailer, and Isabelle Trafford washes them whenever he gets home.

Wednesday afternoon: Sweetwater to El Paso. Cattle feed lots, oil refineries, heat lightning. Texas cops wearing Stetsons, signs saying "Drive Friendly," Burl Ives on the stereo singing "Heading for the Last Round Up." When he is not talking about the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, Trafford is often talking about "njggers." "Do you change tires on the side of the road if you get a flat?" I ask.

"I go to the service station," he replies.

"I'm no nigger." When he points to a Bekins warehouse along the highway he says with pride, "Bekins is a high-class outfit. All our warehouses are in swanky areas, not in niggertown." Shortly before midnight as we reach the outskirts of El Paso, I am surprised to hear that there are two "colored" families living on his block in Hastings. One of his black neighbors is an airlines lawyer, the other a utilities company executive. When one "colored" neighbor drove his wife to the

hospital to have their second child, Trafford's wife kept .the' first child. He had admired a gas lamp that the neighbor had installed on his lawn and came home from a recent trip to find a similar lamp had been placed on his lawn by his neighbor as a gift. I finally ask him the difference between 'a nigger and a colored person and learn that niggers either hold lowly jobs or get welfare and that niggers have messy family lives. "When they live on my block, theire colored," he explains.

"They have money; :they educate their kids; they live in $45,000 homes zoned for one family. The colored on my block are my friends. They're so nice that after a while you don't know they're colored."

On Thursday morning Trafford calls me at my hotel in £1 Paso an,d reports that the El Paso White Shop-"one of the best in the country" -has time to repair his air conditioning and to do some other necessary minor work on his tractor. We meet again at 2 P.M. on Friday at the White Shop and "bobtail" to the truck stop where he had parked the trailer for two nights while the tractor was undergoing $133.70 worth of repairs.

The air conditioning has been fixed in El Paso-too well. Now on the lowest setting it is a frigid 60 degrees inside thetruck. Otherwise the truck seems a little poky, but Trafford blames that on headwinds and then sidewinds. No- matter. We are soon in Arizona where the towns are 30 miles apart, and the stars over the desert are like cut glass. We spend the night in Tucson.

At the Bekins warehouse in Phoenix on Saturday morning, Trafford obtains directions to the McCords' and hires a helper.

Like the man who helped him put the McCords' shipment on his trailer in Joliet, the Phoenix helper is a schoolteacher who is loading and unloading furniture during his summer vacation to make ends meet.

At noon we pull up to modest ranch house on a quiet street lined with mulberry trees and close-together look-alike homes. Jo Ann McCord, an attractive young woman wearing a short checkered smock, comes to the door. Trafford greets her cordially and asks if she has the money ready. She gives him $423 in cash, and he asks her where she wants him to put her furniture. She explains that the ranch house belongs to relatives with whom she and her husband and three children are staying until their own home is completed in a month; everything is to go into the relatives' empty den, please. The McCords have no immediate

need for their furniture but are glad to see the wardrobe boxes containing their clothes. Bill McCord, a tall, lean man with a mustache, is obviously delighted to be in Phoenix. "We moved to Phoenix a year ago," he says. "Jo Ann got homesick for Joliet and we went back. Then she realized it wasn't so great after all. I was in clothing in Illinois, but I've found a good job here with an interior-finishing firm. The job opportunities are better out West. Phoenix is cleaner, warmer and friendlier than Joliet. There's not such a gap between the lower middle class and the upper middle class." The McCord boys, aged six, four, and six months, watch Trafford and his schoolteacher-helper unload the furniture without a mishap in the 101-degree heat, only occasionally getting underfoot. By one o'clock everything is in the now-packed den. The McCords are happy that their move cost them $27 less than the Bekins estimate of $450. They had chosen Bekins because it had given them a lower estimate than the three largest moving companies in the U.S., Allied, North American, and Aero-Mayflower.

Between Tucson and Phoenix the truck had been sluggish. On the road that cuts through the desert west of Phoenix, it is obvious that something is seriously wrong with the truck. The tachometer reads 1,800 r.p.m. when Trafford is in ninth gear, poking along at 40 miles per hour, and he can't shift up to 10th, much less 13th.

"The engine's turning too fast," he says.

"It just won't drop down and let me shift.

I think something's wrong with the linkage [part of the fuel-feed system]. The linkage is right near the air conditioning and when the mechanic in £1 Paso worked on that, he must have hurt the linkage. I don't dare work on it out in the middle of the desert." Normally very appreciative of the scenery and knowledgeable about the terrain, Trafford ignores the swirling dust devils and cactus bandits and stares straight ahead. Until Phoenix he had often commented, "See how uneventful a truck trip across the country is? There's nothing more to it than a pleasure trip in a car." Now he says nothing, and I respect his silence. It takes us four hours to travel the 120 miles between Phoenix and the Arizona-California border. "Time was when this was the fastest trucks went, but then you didn't know any better," Trafford says, as we stop to have the truck's permit checked. "Fighting the truck like this for four hours takes all the fun out of driving."

The sun is setting when Trafford makes an attempt to repair the linkage at the border. I hold the flashlight for him while he uses a wrench. He starts the truck but his efforts seem to have made matters worse: Now his fuel feed pedal is sticking, and something smells as if it is burning.

He goes inside to the inspection station and takes the advice of the Arizona inspectors to call Leo, a mechanic in the border town of Blythe, California. Leo shows up a long half-hour later. He is a talkative old man who really knows his trucks. He talks for 45 minutes and fixes the linkage in 15 minutes for a modest $10.35. Trafford watches him and says he got more than $10.35 worth of information from Leo; next time he will be able to fix the linkage himself. We are off to California. After dinner in Blythe I lie down on the bunk and doze for a few hours.

Trafford lets me off at a motel outside Los Angeles at 3:30 A.M. Sunday. The desk clerk sees that I have left the space for "license number" blank and gives me the fishy look desk clerks reserve for those who turn up at motels without automobiles. I explain that I have come to California from New Jersey by truck.

The desk clerk looks at me coolly, hands me a room key, and says, "You've come a long.way, baby."

On Monday morning, Al Trafford hires two helpers-one of them thin, one of them fat-at the Bekins Van Lines Terminal in Montebello, California, and drives to the new home of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Lomenzo in La Canada to unload the 13,700 pounds of household goods that were the main object of our coast-to-coast voyage. Trafford, who is wearing white Bekins overalls, sets the air brakes with a loud w-h-hush-h in the driveway outside the Lomenzos' ranch house and says approvingly, "La Canada is a very slick suburb. And this place is much nicer than

'Trafford lets me off at a motel outside Los Angeles.

The desk clerk looks at me <;oolly, hands me a room key, and says, "You've come a long way, baby.'"

their old three-story stucco in Short Hills." Marie Lomenzo, a jolly woman with a lilting New Zealand accent, and her husband Peter, a bespectacled man nattily turned out in polo shirt, Bermuda shorts, sneakers and wool socks, greet Trafford as if he were an old friend. Eightyear-old Monica, the youngest of the Lomenzos' eight children and the only one on hand for moving-in day, cries out, "AI, come see my new room," and "AI, where's the box with my things?" and "AI, did you bring my slingshot?"

In the 96-degree heat, a record for the day in Los Angeles, Trafford unwraps each piece of furniture and then folds and stacks the pads and skins in the van while his helpers carry the furniture toward the house. "Where do want this?" asks Linzy, the fat helper, who has a carton labeled "books and records" strapped to his back.

"In the den," Peter Lomenzo answers.

"What about this laundry you had on the line in New Jersey?" Trafford asks Mrs. Lomenzo, holding up a green plastic trash bag. "In the kitchen, please," she replies.

"Who gets the canopy bed?" Bill, the thin helper inquires. "Me, me, me!" says Monica Margaret Lomenzo. The three men agree that it is a relatively easy move -"no stairs, no bad halls"-but they are drenched with perspiration.

Only one object, a small mirror, is broken during the seven hours it takes to unload the Lomenzos' worldly belongings.

One other item, an end-table that had been refinished in New Jersey prior to departure, has bubbled from the heat in the van in transit and will be re-refinished in California at Bekins's expense. The Lomenzos seem pleased with their move.

"I think I'm going to love it here," Mrs. Lomenzo says, listening to the songbirds twittering and fluttering in the eucalyptus trees. Lomenzo, liberated from shoveling the snow out of Eastern driveways, offers a bag of salt that had been packed by mistake to anyone who wants it. He tips Linzy and Bill and says to Trafford, "You did a nice job, thanks. If they transfer me again I'll ask for you." "I'm glad you're pleased," Trafford replies.

Between the time Trafford loaded the Lomenzos' furniture in Short Hills and the present, he has earned $1,325. Out of this sum he has to pay $213 for the helpers he hired to assist him in Short Hills, Phoenix, and La Canada. $153.85 for the fuel his truck consumed between coasts, 144.05 for repairs in EI Paso and Blythe, and about $100 for his meals. Later he will pay for any damage claims that come in on the four shipments he has handled.

He calculates that his tractor has depreciated at the rate of $20 a day.

It is 5:15 P.M. on Monday, nine days after we set out, when Trafford uses the Lomenzos' newly installed phone to call the Bekins dispatcher for southern California to get his next load. He is assigned 12,000 pounds for Cold Spring, New York.

He will put that on the truck on Tuesday and then call the dispatcher again when he sees how much space is left. "That's good," he says of the Cold Spring load.

"That will take me right back east.

I'll be home in time for the Labor Day 0 week-end."

Reprinted fro111U.S. News & World Report, December 30, 1974, published at Washington, D.C.

WHAT IS SCIENCE DOING ABOUT IT?

QUESTION: Dr. Bonica, what is pain? Can science actually define the sensation?

BONICA: If you asked 100 different authorities that question, you would get 100 different answers.

In my view, pain can be simply defined as an emotional experience either provoked by tissue injury or described by the patient in terms of tissue damage, or both.

QUESTION: Pain is important to the person suffering it, of course, but is it also a major health problem?

BONICA: It certainly is. I consider chronic pain the foremost health-economic problem.

For example, we have about 19 million arthritics in the U.S. who have pain, and about 40 per cent of these suffer partial or total disability as a result. It costs billions of dollars in lost work productivity just from this one cause.

Each day there are an estimated seven million Americans who are in bed with lowback pain, and this might cost another $1,000 million a year.

Add to that the millions of people who lose a week or two a year from headaches or other pain, and you can understand why it is difficult to add up the total cost.

QUESTION: Where does pain come from, and how do wefeel it?

BONICA: For about 2,000 years we followed Aristotle, who said that pain is felt in the heart and is simply an emotional experience opposite to pleasure. But 150 years ago we began to study pain scientifically, which led to the belief that pain is a specific sensation.

Up to two decades ago we thought that injury produced "pain messages" which were sent to the brain along specific nerve tracts in a straight-through fashion without modification. However, recent research indicates that the process is much more complex and is influenced by activity in virtually every part of the nervous system and by mental, emotional and environmental factors.

QUESTION: What is the new theory of pain?

BONICA: It works something like this: In-

Research in the United States is uncovering the secrets of one of mankind's oldest but least understood enemies.

In this interview Dr. Bonica, a world authorjty on anesthesiology, discusses some of the latest weapons in the war against pain, including mental conditioning, electric probes and stereotactic surgery. formation is sent from the body to the brain by sensory nerves which supply every part of the body with nerve endings called "receptors," each of which responds specifically to certain stimuli. Some receptors are stimulated by light, others by other special senses, and some by mechanical, temperature or chemical stimulation.

Each sensory nerve contains thousands of fibers of different size. The large and some small fibers convey such sensations as touch, position sense, and temperature. But some small fibers are used to carry electrical impulses or messages initiated by tissue injury, such as a burn or severe blow. The tissue damage constitutes noxious stimulation which produces impulses that are transmitted to the spinal cord.

These peripheral fibers are linked to an intricate network of nerve cells in the spinal cord. The point of contact is called a "synapse"-a very small gap which can be thought of as a gate. Messages jump from one nerve to another through a complex electrochemical process.

QUESTION: Do these nerves transmit pain?

BONICA: The transmission of impulses from peripheral nerves to the cells in the spinal cord

is influenced by impulses coming from the large and small fibers and also from other parts of the spinal cord and brain. If the largefiber activity predominates, it produces an inhibitory effect on the transmissions and closes the gates. When the small fibers predominate, the gates are open and we feel pain.

This is the famous "Melzack- Wall gate theory" of pain, named after the two professors who pronounced it in 1965. It is undoubtedly one of the major revolutions in our concept of pain in the last 100 years.

QUESTION: How does the brain figure in all of this?

BONICA: The brain is an incredibly complex computer that interprets the information it receives and decides what the response should be. The higher part of the brain-the cortex and the associated systems-analyzes the message in the light of past experience, the mental activities and the emotions existing at that particular time, and then sends messages to the spinal cord and lower part of the brain that initiate an appropriate response.

In most instances of an injury, these messages produce an overt response-a scream, withdrawal of the injured part, changes in heart rate, blood pressure and other body functions. Tn some instances, the brain sends messages which decrease or even stop the pain, while in others the brain is so busy that it ignores the pain messages.

QUESTION: What determines how the brain will respond to pain?

BONICA: What the brain decides to do varies greatly among different individuals and in the same person under different circumstances.

The response is influenced by early learning, ethnic background, personality, susceptibility to suggestion, concentration, mood and other factors. Fear and anxiety cause an exaggerated response.

If you use a needle to prick the finger of a very apprehensive child, he screams, cries, and his over-all response is exaggerated. We think that anxiety causes the brain to send messages down to the spinal cord to open the

gates so that, in fact, he feels more pain. But if you prepare the child for the prick, emphasizing that it will cause only a little pain, and keep talking to him while the prick is made, his response is much subdued. Under these circumstances the brain sends messages to close the gates.

QUESTION: Is the brain the only part of the body that can turn on or shut off feelings pain?

of

BONICA: No, the mechanism is more complex than that. We know now that these processes, coming from the brain and also from various parts of the spinal cord and brain stem at all levels, are modulating constantly.

QUESTION: You said that ethnic background and early life experience influence individual response to pain. Does this mean that some groups of people respond differently to the same type of injury?

BONICA: Yes. It has been appreciated for several centuries that Nordic people respond to similar injuries differently than do the Latins and certain Mediterranean races. The Nordic person bites his lip and complains little or not at all, even though he experiences as much pain, whereas the Latins complain bitterly. This is not a matter of courage. Recent studies indicate that this is a matter of upbringing and culture which not only influence the response but, through psychodynamic processes, may actually influence the pain messages received. by the brain.

When the Italian child cries, his mother will hug him and make a big fuss about the injury. That tends to encourage the child to continue the crying and thus reinforces the response of behavior to pain. When the child grows into an adult, this learned and rather exaggerated behavior continues. Moreover, because of the intense emotions provoked by the injury, it is possible that the brain sends impulses that help to open the gates so that the person actually feels more pain.

Nordic people, with an upbringing which usually discourages overt pain behavior, not only respond less but may actually feel slightly less pain because their emotion helps them to partially close the gates.

QUESTION: Can people withstand pain better in some circumstances than in others?

BONICA: Yes. The football player, for instance, often does not feel pain at the time of an injury. The strong suggestion of the coach, yelling of the crowd, the intense concentration and emotions-all of these act to suppress feeling of pain.

During World War II, I asked soldiers who had severe injuries, "At the very time you got hit, did you feel pain?" They said, "No, it wasn't until many minutes later that I felt pain." Again, this was because of their intense concentration, emotion and motivation, the . noise of battle and other factors, consuming all the attention of the brain and probably 14

'There is no medical school that teaches how to manage patients in pain. They have courses in how to treat cancer but not how to treat the pain problem, which in itself is a disease.' sending impulses to the spinal cord to close the gates.

Strangely enough, when these people were given a hypo for medication, they often screamed and squirmed from what amounted to only a fraction of the pain from the injury.

They were conditioned not to feel the pain of injury, but were not ready for a needle.

QUESTION: What about those Indian fakirs who lie on beds of nails or run across hot coals barefoot?

BONICA: They've conditioned themselvesmobilizing mental activities which send impulses to suppress pain. In fact, they do not feel any pain. We've done operations in the U.S. by using hypnosis as an anesthetic in the same way.

QUESTION: Is aspirin still the old reliable stand-by for pain?

BONICA: It depends on the case. Aspirin is still the best and cheapest analgesic there is.

The claims of superiority made for other preparations are really not based on scientific fact. But if the pain persists, you should see a doctor, because it could be something serious.

QUESTION: How do you differentiate between types of pain?

BONICA: One can classify pain in different ways based on the duration, the intensity, the quality and the factors that cause it. 'At the outset, one can break it down into acute pain and chronic pain.

Acute pain is a very useful thing because it warns the individual that something is wrong and prompts him to go to the doctor, and also helps the physician make a diagnosis. If someone comes in and says, "I have a lot of pain in my lower right abdomen," the doctor immediately thinks of appendicitis. Acute pain is usually treatable and can be permanently eliminated by the use of drugs, surgery and other methods.

In contrast, chronic pain has no value to the individual but rather is the cause of prolonged disability. It persists for months and years and wears the individual physically and emotionally and is associated with depression.

QUESTION: What causes chronic pain?

BONICA: Simplistically, the causes of chronic pain may be classified into three: chronic disease in some part of the body, chronic disease of the central nervous system, and primarily emotional factors. Unfortunately, there are many voids in our knowledge of how

these produce persistent pain. We don't really know why some arthritis patients have severe pain and others don't. We don't know the exact mechanism by which chronic pain is caused by cancer, late stages of diabetes and nerve injuries.

QUESTION: Is there such a thing as imaginary pain?

BONICA: Yes and no, depending on what you mean. There are some psychiatric patients who complain of pain as part of a hysterical conversion, without having disease. However, if you accept my definition of pain being an emotional experience, then their pain is just as real as if they had a disease.

But these cases are rare. More frequently there are patients who have pain of primarily psychological origin. Migraine headache is one, and the pain of peptic ulcer is another example. Both are initiated by psychological factors-that is, emotional stress. The point is that through psychosomatic mechanisms, these emotional factors produce tissue damage which then causes pain.

QUESTION: Can you give an example?

BONICA: Take a housewife in her middle 40s who has been neglected by her husband.

She falls and actually suffers a back strain.

Immediately, the husband becomes very solicitous. Other members of the family want to help-maybe take over household chores.

Subconsciously, this woman has an emotional need for this kind of response. She goes to the doctor and gets drugs, and this further reinforces the pain reaction. Two months later the back is healed, but the patient now has developed a chronic pain behavior. She may stay in bed for 15 hours a day.

We have had patients, for example, who haven't worked for 15 years because of an old injury. But when you investigate them intensely and give them a battery of tests, you find they really have virtually no pathology. You start looking at the psychological and sociological factors, fit all these pieces together, and you can see the pattern.

QUESTION: Are these people fakers?

BONICA: No, not at all. This is the point to be stressed: They really feel the pain.

QUESTION: How do you treat this kind of patient?

BONICA: We bring them into the hospital for about four weeks to carry out an "operant conditioning" program which gradually eliminates the positive reinforcers. The staff ignores the patient when she manifests pain behavior and encourages her when she is active. If the patient's words tell. us she is in pain, nothing is said. But if she is active, she is encouraged by such comments as: "Mrs. Jones, that's great. You're doing fine."

QUESTION: What good does that do?

BONICA: It is part of a deconditioning process-eliminating the positive reinforcements that have kept the pain going.

Another part of the program is to eliminate tion where an electrode is placed in the upper tration and othet mental activities.

Through such training, individuals are all drugs. Some of them may be taking half portion of the spinal cord to burn out the a dozen medications, and these all interact "pain" tract. That's very good with 'cancer able to control virtually any function, including those usually considered "involunand confuse the patient. Then she is given patients, for example.

There's another technique called "stereo- tary," such as heart rate, blood pressure, methadone or some other strong narcotic disguised in a liquid with strong taste which we tactic surgery." This involves locating the temperature, functions of the intestines call "pain cocktail." Gradually the dosage is precise pathway in the brain that is carrying and bladder. the pain message and destroying it by insert- QUESTION: Does acupuncture prevent the reduced until the patient is not getting any.

A very important part of the treatment is ing probes at different angles. It requires feeling of pain? to give the medication at a set time-not when sophisticated instruments to localize exactly BONICA: I visited China for three weeks the patient asks for it because of the pain. the part of the brain you want to damage. It in 1973 and I can tell you that acupuncture That eliminates the reinforcement. This is ac- may be as small as the head of a match. does work in some patients, but is very much companied by a progressive increase in exer- QUESTION: What about new drugs to relieve misunderstood in the U.S. It is not the panacea to cure all diseases, as many people cise.The patient's family must agree to do the pain? same thing at hoine-that is, eliminate the BONICA: Actually, there are very few drugs believe. It does relieve some forms of chronic positive reinforcements .... to relieve pain. We still rely on systemic an- pain and permits highly selected patients to algesics, which include aspirin and the other tolerate surgery.

QUESTION: What is the worst pain known?

I believe pain is diminished by several BONICA: One of the worst is a disease nonaddictive drugs. Another group is the known as "trigeminal neuralgia," or tic doul- low-addictive narcotics, such as codeine and mechanisms: Darvon. Here we have a new drug called One is that the needle apparently stimulates oureux. It's a condition described more than large-nerve fibers which inhibit sensation 300 years ago and affects between 60,000 and Talwin, which does not have the addiction of pain at the spinal-cord level and also in 70,000 Americans every year, usually those liability of morphine.

Then, of course, there are the narcotics. the brain. in their 40s or older.

Secondly, I think there is a psychophysThis disease is characterized by very sud: Morphine is still the best there is. We are den onset of absolutely excruciating pain now learning that morphine has powerful iological phenomenon in which acupuncture which causes the patient to stop in his tracks, effects-not only on the brain but on the sends messages through the nervous system remain motionless, and even hold his breath spinal cord as well. The unfortunate thing is to stop the pain. This probably is the result until the attack is over. that all of these drugs have side effects, and of intense national pride by the (:hinese in acupuncture and very close collaboration Accompanying the pain is usually a violent they are addictive.

A new approach is to identify the body between patient and doctor .... movement of the face-mumping of the jaw or other grimaces. That's why the French call chemicals that are sensitizing the nerve end- QUESTION: Science really has not discovered it tic douloureux. The pain only lasts 15 or 20 ings and causing the pain. Once this is done, all the answers to pain-is that right? seconds, but gradually becomes more fre- we can develop other drugs that inhibit the BONICA: Right. And I think it's a sad thing quent. The terrible thing about it is that the production of these pain-producing sub- that we can monitor the heartbeat of a man patient doesn't know when the pain will hit. stances or destroy them and thus stop the going to the moon and back but are unable pain. It's a very promising new area, but we to help patients who are suffering.

QUESTION: What can be done about it?

QUESTION: Why isn't faster progress being BONICA: We can administer drugs that pro- are just beginning to unravel this picture. vide good relief in a significant percentage of QUESTION: There are reports of mild made? patients. If these fail, then the patient should el~ctrical stimulation being used to give relief BONICA: One reason is that we simply don't have enough knowledge. Also, whathave the affected nerve injected with alcohol, from pain. Does that work? which usually stops the pain for a couple of BONICA: This is one of the most exciting ever knowledge we do have is not properly years. Another and newer effective method is areas of research going on today. It has been applied. Most physicians are taught only to coagulation of the center of the nerve. found that there are a group of nerve cells use pain as a diagnostic aid. They look at chronic pain just like they look at acute pain, QUESTION: Is science making progress in the brain which have powerful inhibitory against pain? effect. In many animals and in a few patients but it's really a totally different condition.

There is no medical school in the U.S. that BONICA: We are making headway. We've it has been shown that by implanting a small learned more in the last 20 years than in the electrode into these cells and connecting these teaches how to manage patients in pain. They previous 100. But there is still a lot to do. to a battery, we can stimulate the cells and have courses in how to treat cancer but not how to treat the pain problem, which in QUESTION: Does this progress involve more produce powerful analgesia. use of surgery to give people reliej7 Every time the patient gets a pain, he turns itself is a disease. Fortunately, during the BONICA: No. In fact, we rely less on surgery on a small battery that stimulates the inhibit- past few years there has been a great deal than we did a few years ago. One of the tradi- ing mechanisms and thus gets relief. This is of interest in pain research and pain therapy. tional techniques was to open up the spine, still experimental and has been done only We are making advances, but much more expose the spinal cord and then delicately cut on a few patients, but it promises to provide remains to be done.

0 the nerve tracts involved. major relief from chronic pain.

But very nearby are other important tracts QUESTION: Are there any new methods of that control motor activity-like, say, bladder lessening pain that don't involve surgery or Dr. John J. Bonica is the director of the pain function. One of the problems was that if the medication? surgeon didn't cut wide enough, the patient BONICA: One very interesting development clinic and anesthesiology department at the Unididn't get relief from the pain. If he cut just is something called "biofeedback." This versity of Washington in Seattle. He has written eight books and some 140 articles on the subject one millimeter too much, the leg might be technique involves the use of highly sophistiof pain and its eradication. For his pioneering work paralyzed. cated electronic equipment that monitors in this field, he has been honored by many nations QUESTION: Are you trying new surgical bodily functions to allow the individual to including the United Kingdom, West Germany techniques to avoid this? see or hear what is going on and to train and Italy. He has also served as an anesthesiBONICA: Yes. Now there's a closed opera- him to change that function through concen- ological consultant to agencies in many countries.

15

WOODROW WILSON AND THE INDIAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT This month, as India celebrates the 28th anniversary of its independence, a noted scholar explores a little-known aspect of the Indian freedom movementWoodrow Wilson's influence on such nationalist leaders as Annie Besant, Sir Subramania Aiyar and V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. The Wilson-India connection is recalled here by A. Ranganathan whose granduncle, Sir Sivaswamy Aiyer, discussed India's freedom with the U.S. President when he visited America in 1922.

Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan, in his article on Woodrow Wilson in the December '74 SPAN, observes that it is 50 years since Wilson died, "but it does not seem 50 years: more like 250. We are uncomfortable with Wilson in the 20th century, he seems more the kind of man who came early rather than late in our national life when of a sudden we were to find that far from being the youngest of governments we had become virtually the oldest. Yet none would disagree that he shaped this century as no other American has done."

Dr. Moynihan is right in viewing Wilsonian liberalism as an asset rather than as a liability in the balance sheet of international relations in the 20th century. For so much good and bad blood has been spilled in the name of Wilson that it has taken 50 years to arrive at a just appreciation of the Wilsonian achievement. To dissociate the permanent from the temporary, to understand the man who was a pioneer in perceiving the liberal significance of American Presidential activism in the international setting, and finally to comprehend the Burkean nature of the Wilsonian impact on Indian nationalism, is no easy task.

Left: Portraits of Woodrow Wilson (far left) and three early Indian freedom fighters who lauded Wilson's ideal of a world of free nations. From top: Sir Sivaswamy Aiyer, Sir Subramania Aiyar and the Right Honorable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri.

Viciously indicted by the eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes as "the greatest fraud on earth," Wilson was visualized by the great Indian jurist Sir S. Subramania Aiyar as "an instrument of God in the reconstruction of the world" (in Aiyar's letter to Wilson, dated June 24, 1917). Actually Keynes berates Wilson with merciless prose in his Economic Consequences of the Peace: "What chance could such a man have against Mr. Lloyd George's unerring, almost mediumlike sensibility to everyone immediately around him? To see the British Prime Minister watching the company with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging .character, motive and subconscious impulse ... and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing 'blind man's buff' in that party." To put it frankly, this piece of invective, which was unworthy of Keynes, could be traced to Wilson's rejection of the Keynesian plan to have the United States underwrite German bonds. "How," asked President Wilson, "can anyone expect America to turn over to Germany in any considerable measure new working capital to take the place of that which the European nations have determined to take from her?" Any action that the U.S. might consider, Wilson explained, should be "along independent lines," though "in close and cordial co-operation with European governments." Indeed, what Keynes failed to understand was Wilson's global vision, which could not be circumscribed by the usual round of interminable discussions on reparations clauses!

Wilson regarded himself as an American Edmund .

Burke when he launched forth on his political career at the turn of the century. And in the ultimate analysis, Wilson's vision was inspired by the Burkeall tradition of "magnanimity in politics."

"Magnanimity in politics," declared Burke, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." Yet paradoxically enough, it is one of the ironies of history that Warren Hastings who did so . much for promoting studies in Indian culture (Emerson's English Traits pays him a glowing tribute) should have been the object of a celebrated attack by Burke who was also inspired by kindred ideals for the same cause of abstract justice. While it was a personal injustice to Warren Hastings, it cannot be denied that Burke's speeches constitute the starting point for the modern history of English libera1-

The foreword to 'Woodrow Wilson's Message for the Eastern Nations' was written by V.S. Srinivasa Sastri who said of Wilson: 'Imagination fails to picture the wild delirium of joy with which he would have been welcomed in Asian capitals ... as though one of the great teachers of humanity, Christ or Buddha, had come back to his home.' ism in regard to the Indian situation. This priceless legacy of political wisdom which Burke transmitted to posterity in his double capacity as a liberal statesman and a conservative political philosopher is believed to have inspired Wilson's conception of the transformation of the East.

Burke's reverence for the cultures and civilizations of all nations, not only his own, distinguished him as the prophet of philosophical conservatism. His profound admiration for the permanent values of Indian civilization led him to believe that the people of "Hindusthan" must be "governed upon their principles and not upon ours."

Burke's argument against the French Revolution was equally based on his great regard for the culture of France.

And his attitude toward the "American problem" was due to his reverence for the British Constitution. He argued that "to prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of the principles and deriding some of those feelings for which our ancestors have shed their blood."

Paradoxical as it might appear, it is his very conservatism that made Burke evolve a philosophy of liberalism.

For every "constitutional difficulty" could be solved, according to Burke, by consulting "the genius of the English Constitution." And this sentiment was in a sense echoed by Wilson in an article published in 1901, which foresaw the transformation of the East: "The East is to be opened and transformed whether we will or no .... Nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened, and made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas ....

It is our peculiar duty, as it is also England's, to moderate the process in the interests of liberty: to impart to the peoples thus driven out upon the road of change . . . the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long ago got out of the strenuous processes of English history; secure for them, when we may, the free intercourse and the natural development which shall make them at least equal members of the family of nations."

Ambassador Moynihan also states in his article that Wilson "had no little distaste" for "a political reality of a multi ethnic population" in the United States. In fact, one of the reasons for America's rejection of the League of Nations (and hence rejection of Wilson) was the opposition of certain ethnic groups like German-Americans and IrishAmericans who were bitterly critical of the Treaty of Versailles for its failure to satisfy the aspirations of their original native lands. However, what Dr. Moynihan suggestively characterizes as "the political eschatology of Wilsonianism" acquired a different meaning in the context of the Indian attitude to the Pax Britannica. Seen in this context, Wilson's vision not only surveyed his own time but was projected far into the future, since his oratorical utterances were at once practical and philosophical. And these ideas influenced the minds of some of the leading political and legal figures of India like Sir S. Subramania Aiyar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Right Honorable V.S. Srinivasa

Sastri and Sir P.S. Sivaswamy Aiyer.

Strange as it may seem, England herself was responsible for the national movement in India. While the policy of some of the British colonial administrators had intensified the Indian struggle for freedom, it was the attitude of great British leaders like Burke, Wilberforce and Cobden as well as the dedicated contributions of personalities like A.a. Hume and Mrs. Annie Besant that had inspired in us the love of freedom. And the political activities of Mrs. Besant not only highlighted the impact of Irish nationalism on the Indian political scene, but also constituted the link between the Indian national movement and President Wilson.

The year 1917 was a memorable one in Indian politicsit changed once and for all the nature of the Pax Britannica.

Before this time, the Indian freedom struggle was regarded as an internal affair of the British Empire; in 1917, it became an issue of international significance.

Some historians trace this development to President Wilson's momentous message to the U.S. Congress on April 2, 1917, asking for a declaration of war on Germany.

The speech was no less than a charter of justice in international relations, that upheld the cause of small nations and peoples fighting for freedom.

"Our object," Wilson said, "is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of these principles." He said America would be glad to fight "for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience."

Wilson's speech was acclaimed with delight in India, for many parts of it were in perfect accord with Indian thought. And it is said that his address was framed and prominently hung by freedom fighters in many places in India. "Mr. Wilson fashioned a formidable weapon for extremist India against British suzerainty," said an article in the New York Times Current History of August 1922,

by Maurice Joachim, "a native ofIndia, educated at Oxford, now in the United States."

Wilson's address inspired Sir Subramania Aiyar-a great judge and a prominent figure in India's freedom movement, one of the founders of the Indian National Congress in 1885-to write to the U.S. President. The letter, written on June 24,1917, did much to swing American public opinion in favor of India's freedom struggle. The transparent sincerity of this great judge gained him the support of several influential Americans including Robert Lansing, Colonel E.M. House, Henry Morgenthau and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is worth quoting from Sir Subramania Aiyar's letter: "It is the very relationship of the Indian Nationalist Movement to the War that urges the necessity for an immediate promise of home rule-autonomy-for India, as it would result in an offer from India of at least five million

men in three months for service at the front, and of five million more in another three months. India can do this because she has a population of three hundred and fifteen million-three times that of the United States, and almost equal to the combined population of all the Allies. The people of India will do this, because then they would be free men and not slaves.

"At present we are a subject nation, held in chains, forbidden by our alien rulers to express publicly our desire for the ideals presented in your famous War Message: ' ...

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.'

"It is our earnest hope that you may so completely convert England to your ideals of world liberation that together you will make it possible for India's millions to lend assistance in this War." Not surprisingly, the tremor caused by Sir Subramania Aiyar's letter to President Wilson was felt in England! For the Secretary of State, Edwin Samuel Montagu, thundered against the great judge in the House of Commons: "The impropriety of this disgraceful letter is all the more inexcusable owing to the position of the writer. The assertions in the letter are too wild and baseless to require or receive notice from any responsible authority. No action has as yet been taken regarding the matter and I am communicating with the Viceroy."

The British approach to Indian constitutional problems can be viewed as a sequence of continually shifting perspectives of liberalism. It is this liberal tradition which resulted in the transformation of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. Actually the British connection with India has been the subject of many famous addresses by Indian National Congress presidents. The goal of the political evolution of India as an equal partner in the Commonwealth and not as a "trustee dependent" was set forth in the presidential address of Sir Henry Cotton at Bombay in 1904. The political accents of Sir Henry Cotton were echoed

by Gopal Krishna Gokhale at Banaras in 1905 and restructured by Mrs. Besant at Calcutta in 1917. Soon the conception of the evolution of India assumed a new significance in the wake of the enunciation of "The Fourteen Points of January 18, 1918," which constituted the Wilsonian blueprint of the emerging world. Also, Wilson's confident assertion that "national aspirations must be respected" elevated him to the status of a prophet in what was then known as the British Empire. "Imagination fails to picture the wild delirium of joy," wrote the Right Honorable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri in his foreword to Woodrow Wilson's Message for the Eastern Nations, "with which he would have been welcomed in Asian capitals. It would have been as though one of the great teachers of humanity, Christ or Buddha, had come back to his home, crowned with the glory that the centuries had brought him since he last walked the earth." It is well to recall at this point that Tilak's pamphlet entitled Self-Determination for India was acknowledged by Wilson in a communication despatched from Paris. The fact that the Wilsonian ideal was originally meant for nationalist groups within the Austrian Empire did not unduly bother the Indian leaders! And Mrs. Annie Besant's "Commonwealth of India Bill" which embodied the Wilsonian ideal of self-determination was introduced in the House of Commons a few years later.

The scene then shifted to Washington, D.C., where Wilson received two distinguished Indians-the liberal statesman, diplomat and orator, the Right Honorable V.S.

Srinivasa Sastri, and India's foremost constitutional lawyer, Sir P.S. Sivasw,amy Aiyer. Celebrated as a silver-tongued orator, Srinivasa Sastri symbolized the golden mean in Indian politics. He represented India at the Limitation of Armaments Conference in Washington, D.C., which was held in November 1921. As could be expected, Srinivasa Sastri had a meaningful dialogue with Wilson. Interestingly enough, Wilson remarked hopefully to Sastri "that his country would soon join the League of Nations and help it assume the tone and authority befitting it." The hope was certainly premature! Again Sir Sivaswamy Aiyer (the present writer's granduncle), after representing India at the League of Nations in Geneva, visited the United States, and called on Wilson at his residence on S Street (Washington) in the year 1922. The conversation between the old prophet and the Indian jurist covered a variety of subjects ranging from America's role in international affairs as well as the projected Wilsonian "philosophy of politics" to the future of India in an international pluralistic society.

It is true, of course, that America's interest in India began long before Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. In one of his Gottesman lectures on "The Nature of American Nationalism" at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the American historian Henry Steele Commager set out the thesis that "America could be romantic and democratic, romantic and equalitarian, romantic and progressive." If, then, the American concept of their nation was born of a romantic tradition, America's interest in India derived from American romanticism drawn from Coleridge, Schelling and Oriental writings, especially Indian philosophy. And the leader of this movement was Emerson, whose immediate influence was felt in the writings of Whitman and Thoreau.

In terms of the Indian freedom movement, however, the Indo-American connection began-on the American sidewith Woodrow Wilson. In a 1916 address in Washington, Wilson had said: "We believe these fundamental things: First, that every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live....

Second, that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect and insist upon. And third, that the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations."

In an earlier address, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Bible's translation into English, Wilson had said: "We do not judge progress by material standards.

America is not ahead of other nations of the world because she is rich. Nothing makes America great except her thoughts, except her ideals ... ."

Such statements drew the minds of Indian freedom fighters to America. "Any influence that the American people have over the affairs of the world," Wilson said once, "is measured by their sympathy with the aspirations of free men everywhere. America does love freedom, and T believe that she loves freedom unselfishly. But if she does not, she will not and cannot help the influence to which she justly aspires."

0 About the Author: A. Ranganathan. a prolific writer on a variety of subjects, is also well known as an AIR broadcaster on political, scientific and cultural affairs. His articles have frequently appeared in scholarly journals not only in India but also in the United States, Japan, Australia and several European countries.

He is the winner of numerous awards including the George Bernard Shaw Centenat~vMedal and the M.N. Saha Popular Science Prize.

MUSEUMS THAT SAY

Through the eyes of a child, the world is a wondrous place, a constant source of excitement and discovery. This sense of wonder is kept alive-and heightened-by some unusual museums in the United States which at the same time demonstrate important scientific principles. The museums invite children not merely to look at exhibits and read labels-but to listen, touch, poke, climb into, or play with the objects on display. In fact, most of the museum's exhibits won't do anything at all unless the visitor first pushes, pulls, turns, peers into or fiddles with something. The photographs on these pages show eager-eyed children at three such museums-the Exploratorium at San Francisco; the Explore Gallery for children in the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington; and the Discovery Room in the Museum of Natural History, Washington.

All of the~ exemplify the aim of the Exploratorium's founder and director, Dr. Frank Oppenheimer: "We try to break down the barriers that separate people from science."

The barriers are .broken with techniques that make science interesting, that urge the visitor to get involved with science and discover its principles for himself. The youngsters are open in their reactions, total in their absorption, as they travel ramps, grimace into a mirror, explore a crocodile's snout, turn valves

and press electric buttons. What they are doing is exploring phenomena of sight, sound and touch, and the relationships between light, electricity and magnetism.

These museums are meant for children, but adults also like to lose themselves in the world of beauty and fantasy that lies within the museum's four walls. They are museums seeking to prove that science need not be a remote, esoteric discipline but can communicate to many people on many levels as a game, as an object of beauty, as a puzzle and as a way of understanding ourselves and our world. "It's as though you could pet the animals in the zoo or climb on the sculptures at an art gallery," a delighted visitor once remarked.

Right: Viewing a dry sponge through magnifying glasses, two boys are intrigued at the complex network of "caves" and ''passages'' inside the sponge. Below, far right: Two girls peer at each other through a pinhole in a magnifying glass. Each sees distorted views of the other's face. Below, center: Child with chin on table tests peripheral vision by looking straight ahead and trying to see a block that moves around table edge. Results show that the eye initially senses motion, then color, finally the words written on the block. Below, left: Two youngsters play with stereophonic hearing instruments that enable them to locate the source of a sound.

San Francisco's Exploratorium

The real and the unreal are difficult to tell apart at San Francisco's exciting new museum, the Exploratorium. The visitor gets a surprise at the entrance: He drops a coin into a barrel, and 300,000 volts of purple lightning shoot up a tall pole, turning on five fluorescent tubes. The Exploratorium abounds in such marvels, a few of which are shown in the photographs on these pages. The brainchild of atomic physicist Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, the Exploratorium began in 1969 with a grant of $50,000. It then had three exhibits. Now there are close to 300, and some 400,000 visitors come every year. The museum's staff members-which include teachers, engineers, designers, sociologists, musicians, writers-wander around to see how visitors use and enjoy the exhibits. Besides exhibits, the Exploratorium sponsors weekly concerts, science courses, school tours and apprenticeships for high school students in its electrical, mechanical and art workshops. Expansion plans call for 800 exhibits and a library of portable displays which will be taken round schools all over the United States.

Above: Built-in skylight prism fragments sunlight into vivid, shifting colors on a mammoth screen. Above, left: A luminescent bone shows how much stress it can take (color of the bone varies with pressure).

Above, far left: A boy stares intently into a tan~ of sea-floor growth. Left: A magnifying glass has strangely distorted the heads and shoulders of a group of children. Left, center: This electronic tree reacts to sound; it blinks lightly at a quiet child, flashes wildly at yells. Far left: A blaze of multicolored mirrors offers visitor a fantastic multifaceted view of himself.

Washington's Explore Gallery and Discovery Room

Far right, above: His eyes reveal his excitement as a child enters the Explore Gallery through a round hole at the bottom of the door. Far right, below: A freeze-dried crocodile leers open-jawed. and a visitor to the Museum of Natural History feels its teeth. Right, center: "What does the hollow of a whale vertebra look like?" Right: Children romp through a ramp with a colorful patchwork of carpet squares below a 20-foot snake with knitted, colored skin. Above: Visitors invent their own use for gallery's exhibits. This child converts a tube into a musical instrument.

Children enter Washington's Explore Gallery through a round hole at the bottom of the door. Inside, they find a rooi:ii¡of bright colors, varied textures, moving lights, where they can frolic and roll along a ramp of deep-piled, bright-colored carpets under a 20-foot-Iong synthetic snake (below). They can gaze at a portrait gallery through a distorting mirror, explore a sculpture garden. Equally popular with Washingtonians is the Discovery Room of the Museum of Natural History. Here, visitors are encouraged to touch and feel shells, sponges, even live fish in tanks. They can swing elephant tusks over their heads, put snake fangs on their own teeth, rap their knuckles on a sea turtle's back. In these unusual museums where you never see a "Don't Touch" sign, "the barriers that separate people from science," as Dr. Frank Oppenheimer put it, come crashing down.

TOURING AMERICA

NAVAJO ND

No tourist in the United States really feels satisfied until he's seen a few of the "first Americans," the "red Indians." Although they live in all sections of the U.S., one of the best places to see them is Navajo Land, the home of the larges t tribe, a beautiful and vast area in the desert of the American Southwest. The Navajos are by tradition shepherds and horsemen (right), bUt(in recent years they have been seeking more modern roles-factory workers, policemen, engineers -as depicted and described in the photographs and article on the following pages.

E

mbracing a huge portion of the State of Arizona and smaller sections of New Mexico and Utah, Navajo Land contains some of the most dramatic scenery in the American Southwestthe sand dunes of the Painted Desert, the sculptured buttes, the arches of Monument Valley, mountains thick with ponderosa pine, and prehistoric Indian cliff dwellings. This vast area of 65,000 square kilometers (larger than Himachal Pradesh) is the home of the Navajo Indians, the largest Red Indian tribe in the United States today.

Disproving the widespread but erroneous cliche of the "vanishing Indian," the Navajos' birth rate is higher than the U.S. average.

Their numbers have been growing for decades. In 1868-before the American Southwest was "opened up" and before there were any major Indian wars in that region-there were some 12,000 Navajos. Today there are more than 140,000. (The figures for the total number of Indians in the U.S. are similarly interesting.

In 1890, there were 250,000 American Indians; the 1970 census found their numbers had increased to 792,730.)

The Navajos-or the Earth People, as they call themselvesare great learners and adapters. But over the centuries they have learned only what they chose to learn-and in their own good time. They gradually changed from food-collecting nomads to gardeners and pastoralists, to modern wage earners.

Their transition into the 20th century has been brought about by a new generation of Navajos who firmly believe that their future lies in !he mainstream of American life. One such Navajo is Peter MacDonald who, despite his Scottish name, is 100 per cent Navajo. MacDonald was elected chairman of the 74-member Navajo Tribal Council in 1970. An activist from the start, he spent a lot of time lobbying in Washington for greater autonomy for the Navajos. In 1972 he got what he wanted. He officially accepted a U.S. Government offer to let the Navajos run their own reservation. The mantle of authority was transferred from the U.S. Government's Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Navajo Tribal Council, headed by MacDonald himself.

Peter MacDonald is optimistic about the future of his people.

"Our potential is so good," he says. "And it gets better all the time, with education of our people, with health problems being licked, with population increasing and plans for ever more jobs."

How does he plan to build for the future? "First," says MacDonald, "you have to develop the private sector of your economy, which should be as free as possible. We need to build the private sector in order to gain the resources to meet the second problem -social service. If you only concentrate on the latter, you remain dependent on somebody, and it's a never-ending cycle of poverty.

Development means jobs, better health, education, better incomes, a decent way of life."

Income from mineral leases and bonuses on their oil, gas and uranium deposits gave the Navajos the necessary capital for developmental work. The Tribal Council has invested the money wisely in public works and factories and set up a $10 million scholarship fund.

The tribe's most successful economic project has been Fairchild Semiconductor's big electronics plant at Shiprock, Arizona, now America's largest nonfederal employer of American Indian labor. Nearly 1,000 Indians are employed in this plant.

Another center of Navajo development is the town of Kayenta, also in Arizona, where the Peabody Coal Company's Black Mesa Mine employs 100 Navajos. And at the Navajo Forest Products Industries (NFPI), some 500 Indians last year produced more than 12 million board meters in logs and earned for themselves and their tribe $2.5 million. NFPI operates the largest sawmill in Arizona and one of the largest in America.

The new life the Navajos have chosen is apparent in their cverincreasing contact with the world outside. Paved highways have made many of Navajo Land's remote areas accessible to tourism and development. Unlike many Indian tribes, the Navajos do not like to congregate in large groups, but prefer to live in privacy in widely separated family units. For this reason there are very few villages or towns in Navajo Land. Its "capital city" is Window Rock, Arizona, which the visitor reaches by crossing a seemingly endless expanse of desert and sagebrush. The land is dotted with tiny houses and anthill-like log-and-earth hogans.

Here and there are small herds of sheep. Window Rock, however, is a modern town. It boasts a new bank, a Kentucky Fried Chicken emporium, a Navajo Motor Inn, gasoline stations and other enterprises run by Indians. And of course distinctive Navajo rugs and blankets, made on home looms, can be bought in Window Rock's tourist shops.

Navajo Land has more schools than ever before. And in the town of Many Farms, Arizona, is the campus of the Navajo Community College, the first institution of higher education organized and controlled by Indians.

This is not to say that all is well with the Navajo Indians.

Problems of health and sanitation loom large in Peter MacDonald's schemes for improvement. Isolation and unemployment are other problems. Chairman MacDonald, however, is determined to lick these problems and to lead his people into the 20th century. And under his leadership the Navajos, with the dignity and dedicated eagerness of a free people, are taking the road that leads them into the mainstream of American life. But as they do so, they are determined, says Peter MacDonald, not to lose their own centuries-old traditions of love for art, beauty, and the mysticism of nature. If the technological civilization of the 20th century has much to offer the Navajos, perhaps the Navajos have much to offer modern technological man. One of their most notable chants proclaims: I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.

I walk with beauty before me, J walk with beauty behind me, I walk with beauty above me, I walk with beauty around me, My words will be beautiful.

Opposite page, clockwise from bottom: Navajo Indians wire miniature circuits at the Fairchild Semiconductor plant at Shiprock, Arizona; a Navajo student who returns home every summer to do social work among her tribe; a Navajo policeman directing traffic; a traditional Navajo tribal dance.

TBOBIITOII WlLDBB IS ALIVI AID WILL For half a century, he has mesmerized his audience, critics and prize committees alike, says the author in this profile of the famous American novelist, who is now 78. Yet the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner is in no mood to call it a day. He recently wrote another book, which is reviewed on the opposite page.

.TIE WIITEI ...

One reviewer, taking note of the didactic tone in Theophilus North, speculated that its 78-year-old author, Thornton Wilder, might be doing a Pro spero number.

Prospero, it will be recalled, was the retirement-age magician in Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, whom many scholars believe to be a metaphor for the Bard himself, gently relinquishing his powers and releasing his demons to the elements from which he had charmed them.

It can be said now, on the hard evidence of a luncheon interview with the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner on his favored New York turf, the Algonquin hotel, that Wilder has his demons very much about him.

Because this is the central fact about Thornton Wilder: His basic approach to writing, in contrast to the other great authors of his time, is that of a wizard, a magus, a

~ ~ '"l.'1.-0

by MICHAEL KERNAN

waver of wands who summons up shapes from chaos and conjures worlds out of clouds, all in an instant.

Like any wizard he hates to be surprised.

He carries two pairs of glasses with his name and address taped to their horn-rims. And like any wizard he delights in his own magic.

"Did you laugh at Theophilus?" he asked, the first thing.

A Prospero figure-a controller of destinies -appears in nearly all of Wilder's works: the narrator in his first book, The Cabala, whose form so neatly echoes that of his latest; the Stage Manager in Our Town; Dolly Levi, the ebullient heroine of The Merchant of Yonkers and The Matchmaker, later set to music in Hello, Dolly! and Theophilus North himself, whose life events uncannily resemble Wilder's own. In the book, Theophilus North is a young itinerant tutor who spends the

summer of 1926 in New Port, Rhode Island, as did Wilder. When Theophilus touches the unhappy lives of assorted people he somehow changes them, nudges them into new paths.

And somehow, mesmerized like so many Trilbys, they acquiesce.

All his literary life, Wilder has had a mesmerizing effect on his audience, critics and prize committees included. He never served an apprenticeship, apparently, but seemed to materialize fully matured. True, there was that play he wrote as an undergraduate at Yale (class of 'twenty), presumably of apprentice quality though it did win a prize. And The Cabala didn't take the world by storm, though critics called it brilliant.

But in 1927 Wilder wrote a thin novel about the collapse of a bridge in Peru (which he wasn't to visit until 15 years later). The Bridge of San Luis Rey won a Pulitzer. He tried his hand at the stage again in 1938 with a kind of homespun Everyman called Our Town, and won another Pulitzer, and five years after that he wrote a strange chronicle, The Skin of Our Teeth, that took mankind from the Stone Age to New Jersey and beyond. A third Pulitzer. In 1968 The Eighth Day won the National Book Award, and there are seven lines listing assorted awards in Who's Who. Talk about bewitched!

The Wilder technique appears perhaps most successfully in Our Town. For two acts, events jog along pleasantly; the Stage Manager describes the languid life of a New Hampshir-e- village, its, morning sounds, its beliefs and its people; a boy and girl fall in love; a character talks of seeing "Paris, France" before she dies. It is amusing, sometimes touching, occasionally sentimental.

The third act begins. Something has changed. Suddenly we discover that we have been pulled into the lives of these rather slight characters, that they mean something to us and we care what happens to them, more than we ever could have imagined, for just as Emily is allowed to revisit the past and see her 12-year-old self passing the moments of her short life with poignant unconcern as though time would never run out, so we are touched with awareness. Even if only briefly, we see ourselves.

Over and over, Wilder achieves this effect in his novels and plays: Lives are casually laid out in no apparent pattern, seemingly unconnected as in the vignettes of Bridge of San Luis Rey and Theophilus North, and then-sometimes in the very last sentencesome invisible string is yanked and it all comes together. The impact can be overwhelming.

"Prospero? Not at all. It would be pretentious of me to sign off like that," says Wilder.

He sat in the darkest corner of the Algon-

quin bar, where he could get a good look at people coming in before they saw him. His sister Isabel, with whom he has lived for years in Hamden, Connecticut, sat beside him. At first she carried the conversation, but soon he began adding to her comments and volunteering his own. Then she left.

"I hadn't expected to write another book," he said, "but this new one came upon me and I worked on it one year, April to April.

I was born a twin, did you know that? My older brother was Amos Theophilus. Died an hour after he was born. This book is his story with my life events. I imagine him the opposite of me: a rogue and a scoundrel, a saint manque, a saint malgre lui who would have chosen a different path."

This personal bond may explain why Wilder at times appears to poke gentle fun at Theophilus, more so than at the other narrators.

Critics and scholars frequently bump heads over their interpretations of the man and his philosophy as revealed in works ranging from the farcical Merchant of Yonkers to the mordant epistolary novel about Caesar's death, The Ides of March (his own favorite), and The Eighth Day, perhaps his darkest novel as well as his longest. None of this bothers the author in the slightest.

"We are all six or seven persons," he said.

"There is an ebb and flow. I don't worry about it. Gertrude Stein once said-she would meditate in her rocking chair and say these things [he closed his eyes, pressed his hands together and rocked]-'Don't pay attention to outside voices, especially your cousin and your cleaning woman. Don't worry about 'em, listen only to your own voice and even that very closely, for false notes.' " The- photographer wanted some shots in the Algonquin lobby, a cramped, Victorian arrangement of fumed-oak partitions with etched glass, where you can sit on an antique stuffed chair and ring a little bell for a drink

and watch Arthur Miller making a phone call from the vintage wooden booth.

Wilder, hungry and anxious about his luncheon reservations-he didn't seem to realize that the management was as discreetly aware of him as if he had been Winston Churchill incognito-waved his hands politely as though he would like to make the photographer disappear. "Three more pictures," he announced. She smiled at him. "Okay," she said. And took three more pictures. And disappeared.

At lunch the stories began. They covered the years in China, where his father was given a diplomatic post in 1906, school days in California, Oberlin (Ohio), Yale and Princeton, the study of archeology in Rome, the translations of 16th-century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, the teaching jobs at Lawrenceville and University of Chicago ("I taught six years in school and six years in college and then the light went out for me, that was enough for me"), and Hollywood, where he wrote the screenplay for director Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, worked on a couple other projects ("Take the cash and let the credit go, as Omar Khayyam says") and had a run-in with Sam Goldwyn, whose style was so different from his.

There was the Princeton tryout of Our Town, a play whose skeletal sets shook up a generation of audiences, when the people walked out because they thought the scenery hadn't arrived. There was the shaky first week of The Skin of Our Teeth: A cabby asked Wilder, "What's going on in that theater anyway? I never saw a play where people left after the first act." There was the pseudo-controversy over whether The Skin of Our Teeth was simply a rewrite of Irish novelist James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

"It's not theft," Wilder beamed, "it's passing on a torch. I spent seven years reading Finnegan, and I'm still finding new puns and references and richnesses. Theophilus is

full of old themes. Look at Shakespeare and what he did with those old stories. He didn't shrink from platitudes, either; he just orchestrated 'em beautifully. Theft? No. Every masterpiece was written this morning."

Thornton Wilder tends to talk in aphorisms, a habit of which he is thoroughly aware. ("It's terrible to generalize . . . but worse not to.") These thoughts and other bits of observation come out of notebooks that he has kept for years, just like Theophilus North.

"A writer should keep notebooks and write letters. Balzac and Flaubert were great letter writers_ It keeps your hand in. But you've got to learn to throw stuff away; the wastebasket is the writer's best friend."

That quiet remark, along with the fact that his new book so exhausted him that he was hospitalized with back trouble, was his only indication of the cost of artistic control.

The existence of the notebooks begged the question: Will there be more Wilder books?

His smile was illumined with the sheer joy of being inscrutable and ambiguous. "I could follow Theophilus further on in my own life, I suppose. He's quite a do-gooder, you know." He would say no more.

The inscrutable, the ambiguous, breeds magic. Dusk, between day and night, is the witching hour, and the predictions of sibyls mean many things and before history began, great powers were ascribed to those figures who seemed to hover between godhood and humanity, balanced on what has been called the "knife-edge line between being and nonbeing where the gods appear and the impossible becomes possible." The nonwriter Theophilus North has "written" a book. The born-twin Thornton Wilder has never known his twin. Wizards no longer wear pointed hats and spangled robes, but they exist, all right.

0 About the Author: Michael Kernan is a writer on the editorial staff of the Washington Post.

... AID BIS LATEST BOOI Of the eight eminent writers of the 'twenties and 'thirties about whom Malcolm Cowley writes in A Second Flowering, only one is still alive, Thornton Wilder. Wilder survives not merely as a man but also as a writer. In 1962, when he was 65, he retired to the Arizona desert to meditate upon a novel, which became The Eighth Day and won a National Book Award. Now, he has another book, Theophilus North, which might conceivably equal the popularity of his second book and first bestseller, now half a century old, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

From the beginning each of Wilder's books has been a new departure. The Eighth Day, a combination of mystery story and family chronicle, differed from anytb.ing he had previously written in tone, narrative method and setting. Theophilus North takes off in an even more surprising direction. Although it is fair enough, as such things go, for the publisher to call it a novel, a term more and more loosely used, it is a novel made up of closely related short stories. So far as I can remember, Wilder has published no short stories in the past, though many short plays,

and so once more we find him at work in a medium that is new to him. The stories, moreover, as stories, are adroit, amusing and altogether successful in an old-fashioned way.

The principal unifying factor is Theophilus North, who is both narrator and hero. Like T. Wilder, T. North was born in Wisconsin in 1897, the son of an influential newspaper editor, and received part of his education in China, his father being Consul General in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He spent a year during World War I in the Coast Artillery and returned to Yale to get his Bachelor of

Arts degree in 1920. He-the pronoun still refers to either T. Wilder or T. North-taught for some years at a private school in New Jersey and took his Master of Arts degree at Princeton. But outward characteristics of this order often seem to play a small part in Wilder's work, and it may be that the resemblances here are part of some game with which Wilder is amusing himself. At any rate it is clear that the novel, or whatever you choose to call it, is not autobiographical in any important way. Whether in some subtler sense North stands for Wilder is a harder question to dispose of. For example, Wilder writes in the first chapter: ... "I was 29 years old, about to turn 30. I had saved $2,000set aside, not to be touched-for either a return to Europe (I had spent a year in Italy and France in 1920-1921) or for my expenses as a graduate student in some university. It was not clear to me what I wanted to do in life. I did not want to teach, though I knew I had a talent for it; the teaching profession is often a safety net for just such indeterminate natures. I did not want to be a writer in the sense of one who earns his living by his pen; I wanted to be far more immersed in life than that. If I were to do any so-called 'writing,' it would not be before I had reached the age of 50. If I were destined to die before that, I wanted to be sure that I had encompassed as varied a range of experience as I could-that I had not narrowed my focus to that noble but largely sedentary pursuit that is covered by the word 'art.' " Wilder's plan for a collection of closely related stories requires an approximate unity of time and place, and it is further necessary that North, in order to perform his dual role, must be able to observe and participate in a variety of actions on several social levels.

Wilder solves the prOblems with an ingenuity that is concealed by his offhand manner.

Having settled by chance in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1926, after giving up his job in the New Jersey prep school, North supports himself by teaching tennis to boys and girls and by reading in any of several languages to people who need his services.

Soon he knows the city well, and comes to believe that in Newport, there are nine cities.

He sees most frequently the inhabitants of the sixth city, the very rich, and those of the seventh, their servants, and strongly prefers the latter to the former.

There are a dozen incidents in which Theophilus proves helpful to inhabitants of Newport. His specialty is saving marriages and smoothing the course of true love, but he also practices his own brand of exorcism on a haunted house, thwarts the avaricious heirs of a gifted old man, saves a young man from being the victim of a talent for what North calls "calligraphic mimicry," and helps a legless boy live up to his potentialities.

Sometimes Theophilus does his good deed by means of a trick that might have been employed by O. Henry, but the trick always turns out to have deeper implications than O. Henry would have given it. In "Diana Bell," for instance, Theophilus prevents Diana from eloping by giving her and her lover opportunity to bore one another. Wilder tells the story with humor and gusto, but Theophilus is concerned with more than the snobbish wishes of Diana's parents, and he has something to say about incompatibility.

In the same way a little common sense is enough to dispose of the neurotic symptoms of the aging but by no means moribund Dr. Bosworth; a large part of his trouble, however, is what Theophilus calls "the death watch," the vigilance of heirs to speed a rich relative on his path to the grave, and that is harder to deal with.

Wilder's tone remains consistently lively, is often comic, and the book is extraordinarily entertaining. There are those, I have no doubt, who will call it corny, and sometimes it comes recklessly close to sentimentality.-:.. as Our Town does, or, for that matter, The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker.

But in spite of an excess of sweetness now and then and some obvious manipulation for the sake of happy endings, the stories hold the reader in a firm grip.

It might be enough to say that the book is fun to read and let the matter rest there, but Wilder's works as a rule have multiple meanings, and I have a persistent sense that these stories are saying something, though not in a loud voice. According to Cowley, Wilder describes himself as "fundamentally a happy person." Cowley continues: "He likes to find the goodness or greatness in people and books. He is optimistic by instinct, in the fashion of an older America." At the same time there is in his make-up a tough streak of pessimism. The Bridge of San Luis Rey was widely believed to carry a message of consolation and hope, which is probably why it sold so well, but in the end of Brother Juniper's examination of the lives of the victims of the bridge's fall he can conclude only that there was "perhaps an intention."

If Wilder is an optimist, his optimism operates only in the short run, for his view of man's fate is by no means cheerful. But he does see that there are happy passages along life's way, and he seems to believe that we should make the most of them, not merely in the sense of seizing the day but also as experiences to be taken into account in our judgment of the human condition.

What Theophilus North learns in Newport is that most people could be happier than they are, and experimentation teaches him that sometimes he can improve their lot.

His first name proclaims that he is a lover of God, but we see him as one who loves his

fellow man which may be the same thing.

As for the second name, it may be a reminder of the cold wind of skepticism. It is like Wilder that he should celebrate 50 years of distinguished writing by producing a book that is gayer in spirit than anything he had previously written, that generously displays his varied talents and that asks more questions than it answers.

It might be argued that Theophilus is what some critics would call a Jesus-figure. He heals the sick after his own fashion, and his deeds attract a large following. Members of the Establishment denounce him for stirring up the people. But I don't want to push this as far as it might be pushed. It is more useful to suggest that Theophilus in various complicated ways fulfilled his early ambition to be a saint. He lists saintliness first among the nine ambitions that he held at one time or another in his youth: ... "At various times I had been afire with NINE LIFE AMBITIONS-not necessarily successive, sometimes concurrent, sometimes dropped and later revived, sometimes very lively but under a different form and only recognized, with astonishment, after the events which had invoked them from the submerged depths of consciousness.

"The First, the earliest, made its appearance during my 12th to 14th years. I record it with shame. I resolved to become a saint. I saw myself as a missionary among primitive peoples. I had never met a saint but I had read and heard a great deal about them. I was attending a school in North China and the parents of all my fellow students (and my teachers in their way) were missionaries. My first shock came when I became aware that (perhaps covertly) they regarded the Chinese as a primitive people. I knew better than that. But I clung to the notion that I would be a missionary to a really primitive tribe. I would lead an exemplary life and perhaps rise to the crown of martyrdom. Gradually during the next 10 years I became aware of the obstacles in my path. All I knew about sainthood was that the candidate must be totally absorbed in a relationship with God, in pleasing Him, and in serving His creatures here on earth. Unfortunately I had ceased to believe -in the existence of God in 1914 (my 17th year), my view of the intrinsic divinity in my fellow men (and in myself) had deteriorated, and I knew that I was incapable of meeting the strictest demands of selflessness, truthfulness and celibacy."

Eventually he abandoned this ambition as beyond him, but all his ambitions influenced his life. "The past and the future are always present within us."

0 About the Author: Granville Hicks is a well-known editor, literary critic and author of many books including The Great Tradition and I Like America.

WILDER IIIIDIA One of the most durable of Wilder's plays-it was written in 1954-is The Matchmaker, better known by its screen version Hello, Dolly! The play was recently staged by the American Embassy School in New Delhi, and the photos on this page were taken at that performance.

The Matchmaker revolves around two youngstersCornelius and Barnaby-who leave their employer, Mr. Vandergelder, and go to New York, vowing not to return till they have kissed a girl.

In New York, Cornelius begins wooing Mrs. Molloy-the lady his boss wants to marry.

Meanwhile the city's busybody ",idow, Mrs. Dolly Levi, plans to marry Vandergelder who also has family problems: His niece wants to marry an artist, and the two elope to New York. Utter chaos ensues as all three parties meet in a restaurant.

Reviewing the American Embassy School's production, one critic observed that the students "handle a' difficult comedy without mishap."

An EastemLight in the In this tribute to the American poet Wallace Stevens who died 20 years ago, in August 1955, the author traces the Indian and other Asian influences in his poetry. He concludes that 'Stevens was perhaps the most highly cultivated mind in pQetry that America has produced and certainly one of the most refined and inspired poets writing in English in the present century.'

For well over a millennium poets and thinkers in the West inhabited a chamber enclosed by walls with murals depicting their own Western folkways. What windows of the bolder imagination there may have been resembled the miraculously stained glass of medieval churches, still more strictly confining all persons within the given area., But of late the Western chamber, finds itself illuminated through windows opening out upon the greatest possible distances and in directions of which serious minds have been hitherto superficially aware if conscious at all.

It was after the Reformation that Western thinking became more explorative. Hence, second thoughts about Asia and Mrica show that the West has created a new fertilization within its own mind. No longer so largely self-contained, the Western chamber has installed its new Eastern windows with surprising and deeply fascinating results. Most Western intellectuals still remain profoundly Western but, especially when imaginative or poetic, they look with increasing frequency to civilizations other than their own. Ethnology, anthropology and archaeology manifest this, but above all the new impetus in literature and the arts, to glance 'outward, has been incalculably strong. Even when not deliberately inquisitive, the typical Western writer is halfconsciously enjoying a light that streams from outside into his ancestral chamber. The more sophisticated and the more representative of advanced tendencies he proves to be, the more likely is this to be the case.

With these generalizations in mind, in the interests of economy and concretion, our attention may turn to a single American poet, Wallace Stevens, who died 20 years ago this month. Stevens was perhaps the most highly cultivated mind in poetry that America has thus far produced and certainly one of the most refined and inspired poets writing in English in the present century. Such claims are by no means extravagant. Although he neither sought nor won the warmer and wider acclaim granted certain of his contemporaries-Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas-criticism has increasingly raised the probability that his reputation will in time equal or surpass theirs. And already, with fastidious judges, he holds a place among 20th-century masters of verse second to none.

At first glance no one would associate him with non-European traditions. At the same time highly individual and spiritually a traditionalist, he seems approximately one-third American and two-thirds European. Indubitably, he speaks as a Westerner.

Much of the ablest writing about him stresses his deep indebtedness to English poetry from as early as the 16th century. He has also studied Baudelaire, Mallarme and their followers. His pages

are rich in allusions to the Western scene. Yet precisely because this is the case, his vistas into non-Western worlds prove thoughtprovoking and noteworthy.

Stev.ens assumes his Western position at the same time that he accepts, no doubt for poetical purposes rather than from philosophical conviction, Spengler's view of the downfall of the West. He writes: Horridfigures of Medusa, These accents explicate The sparkling fall of night On Europe, to the last Alp, And the sheeted Atlantic.

If the West is to be relatively less important, the East, one presumes, will be relatively more important. Nevertheless, in one of his chief poems, "The Comedian as the Letter C," he asserts the poet's need to reflect his own environment. Apparently with Oriental mysticism chiefly in mind, he declares: It seemed Illusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, Wrong as a divagation to Peking ....

Yet all this notwithstanding, he is singularly fascinated by the cultures of Africa, India, China, and Japan. He himself never physically departed from North America, but spiritually, to an exceptional and a prophetic degree, he thought and wrote as a citizen of the world.

Tropical cultures and, indeed, the problems of the relation of climate to art and civilization deeply attracted him. On turning his glance southward, he immediately encountered the African inhabitants of the West Indies. He celebrated the sonorous voices' and passionate moods of these Negroes. His inclination was to see the widest possible gulf between the black man of the South and the white man of the North. His was possibly too facile a distinction, yet it haunts his early poetry and contri- . butes an¡important impulse to this phase of his work and thought.

He was well aware of the increasing influence from African art and music on Western thought from at least the early year-s of Picasso's painting and Stravinsky's composing. In his fine poem "The Auroras of Autumn," the title piece of his fourth volume, he also stresses the role of the Negro in dance. Iq "Owl's Clover," he speculates at length on Mrican culture. The third and most brilliant section of this long poem begins: Large-leaved and many-footed shadowing, What god rules over Africa, what shape, What avuncular cloud-men, beamier than speakers?

The' heaven of Europe is empty, like a Schloss Abandoned because of taxes ....

The poem proceeds to a harsh picture of African religions, derived, as Stevens interprets them, from the experience of fear.

The arts of Europe, or rather of the North, are declared to be unfit for Mrican consumption. Nevertheless, if he is at times negative in his view of the cultural interpenetration, he definitely is hostile to the militant colonialism of Europe. He seldom if ever wrote a more brilliant verse-paragraph than his mockery of

Westem Chamber

_

He quoi! Angels go pricking elephants?

Wings spread and whirling over jaguar-men?

Stevens's poetry gives scant evidence that he thought long or continuously about Africa, but it does show that he thought of it passionately and intensively.

Stevens as a rule regarded Africa as a useful foil to his favorite themes. Civilization-in its ,most advanced and mature phasesis what chiefly concerned him. His glances at the American Indians are slight and few in number. His mind turned with far greater avidity to Asia. This view was, of course, much favored by poets, critics, and painters active in the early years of the century, the majority of whom were, like Stevens, esthetically minded, though some cultivated a mystical or religious outlook.

Stevens's mind was half that of a powerfully creative and eminently original artist and half that of a museum curator. In this regard he resembled Ezra Pound, whom he knew personally.

He was not, like Longfellow, an accomplished linguist and translator, but was, like Clive Bell or Lawrence Binyon, a person who turned almost instinctively to the rich cultures of the Orient.

This, to repeat, was symptomatic of his times. Japanese and Chinese art were being installed in New England museums in astonishing volume. Poets as radically dissimilar as the scholarly T.S. Eliot and the naive Vachel Lindsay participated in the movement. One does not forget that the last words of Eliot's major poem are a Sanskrit prayer or that one of Lindsay's most popular pieces was "The Chinese Nightingale." Amy Lowell, Winter Bynner, John Gould Fletcher and innumerable other American poets were similarly allured by the East. The scholar Paul Elmer Moore, who taught both Eliot and Stevens at Harvard, had a Sanskrit inscription placed above the entrance of his home in New York's Adirondack Mountains.

To Stevens, confirmed in his own independence, mere agreement with a vogue was an impossibility. But the serious undercurrent was strong, while he was himself peculiarly equipped to feel its power. Three areas of thinking were above all dear to him: philosophy, conservatism, and art. All three he found richly exemplified in the East. India was perhaps first in religion or metaphysical philosophy. China he might have found first in conservatism, or, to use a phrase from Stevens himself, in "ideas of order." And in Japan he found devotion to esthetics, to rigid and brilliant art forms. China was probably central in his thinking of the East-as it was in most Westerners of his erabut India and Japan were also of great and peculiar importance.

Although Stevens is something of a virtuoso in the matter of vocabulary, such is not the case in the matter of his allusions.

About the Author: H.H.

Anniah Gowda is a professor of English at the University of Mysore and the editor of the Literary Half-Yearly. He is author of numerous scholarly articles and two books: The Revivalof English Poetic Drama and Dramatic Poetry of which the London Times Literary Supplement says: "His book has the quality of gusto."

Unlike Eliot and Pound, he never parades his learning. Indeed, he conceals his tracks from his readers and in some cases may ,even have covered them up from his own conscious eye. His powerful personality enabled him to assimilate his materials completely. That he felt foreign influences strongly is clear but the paths-direct or indirect-by whiCh his knowledge came to him often remain tantalizingly obscure. Be this as it may, the opening strophe in his masterpiece, "The Auroras of Autumn," is a perfect Sanskrit hymn but that he so intended it is neither demonstrable nor probable. He must have known in general the profoundly Oriental quality of his thought and images.

But one must go further than this in a final appraisal. The strophe follows: .

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

His head is air. Beneath his tip at night Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg, Another image at the end of the cave, Another bodiless for the body's slough?

This is where the serpent livf1s. This is his nest, Thesefields, these hills, these tinted distances, And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness, Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances And the serpent bady¡flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base These lights may finally attain a pole In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there, In another nest, the master of the maze Of body and air and forms and images, Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve Even that. His meditations in the ferns, When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun, Made us no less sure. We saw in his head, Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal, The moving grass, the Indian in liis glade.

The follower of Buddha and the Taoist mystic alike sit with the serpent coiled beneath them. Hindu myths of the eclipse and legends of the insatiable bird Garuda are both contained in the sixth strophe of his memorable poem, "Esthetique du Mal": The sun, in clownish yellow, but not a clown, Brings the day to perfection and then fails. He dwells In a consummate prime, yet still desires A further consummation. For the lunar month He makes the tenderest research, intent On a transmutation which, when seen, appears To be askew. And space is filled with his Rejected years. A big bird pecks at him

At night, by thejire, The colors of the bushes And of the fallen leaves, Repeating themselves,¡ Turned in the room, Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks (7ame striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails Were like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room, Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks Down to the ground.

I heard them cry-the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the jire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loudjire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window, I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the Wind.

I saw how the night came, (7ame striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks Ifelt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

For food. The big bird's bony appetite Is as insatiable as the sun's. The bird Rose from an imperfection of its own To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit Dropped down from turquoise leaves. In the landscape of The sun, its grossest appetite becomes less gross, Yet, when corrected, has its curious lapses, Its glitters, its divinations of serene Indulgence out of all celestial sight.

Stevens was a singularly persistent man, haunted or even possessed by a few dominant ideas but never a consistent thinker.

Thus he was 'almost equally moved by the centripetal force of monotheism and by the centrifugal force of estheticism. As a traditionalist in theology, he leaned in one direction; a tribute to mountain worship of the One God begot such a poem as "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," reminding its reader of Zoroastrianism or of the Biblical verse "I wi11lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help." The wonderful dance poem "Domination of Black" combines an image of the peacock in service of cosmic thinking that is explicitly Oriental.

The dance of Siva has seldom-if ever-been more perfectly conceived.

Bird imagery with a metaphysical connotation and a sentiment of the Oriental bestiary is almost as conspicuous in Stevens's work as in Yeats's. Thus the ironic "The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws" [see page 39] is a satire on a mysticism which in other poems Stevens himself approves. A more notable approach to an Indian sentiment in religion is seen in Stevens's fondness for imagery derived from breath as the basic fact of our physical existence and mysterious key to spiritual life. In the poem "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," which symbolizes God as a mountain, the mountain is described as first of all human in that he breathes: Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.

He was not man yet he was nothing else ....

He breathed in crystal-pointed change the whole Experience of night, as if he breathed A consciousness from solitude, inhaled A freedom out of silver-shaping size ....

Stevens's poems give many variants of significant imagery where breath is concerned, all of which suggest Indian belief and practice. "Montrachet-Ie-Jardin" affords a good example. On the symbol of breath this poem dealing with the essentially human comes to its climax and conclusion:

Item: Breathe, breathe upon the centre of The breath life's latest, thousand senses.

But let this one sense be the single main.

There must be mercy in Asia and divine Shadows of scholars bent upon their books, Divine orations from lean sacristans ....

As a traditionalist in esthetics, Stevens leaned on a conceptIon of moments of perfect insight attained only through art. The religious outlook he found expressed with least equivocation by Tndia, the esthetic outlook by Japan and both outlooks by the pliant schools of Chinese thinking.

Stevens's poetry is virtually obsessed by a conception of "the way." Never strictly Taoistic, "the way" strongly suggests Taoism. The good life for Stevens is a life of enlightenment through the imagination. The Chinese sage, to be sure, is likely to require cosmic vision and Stevens is no transcendentalist. But Taoism was also to no small degree a cult of art through nature and of nature through art, a wedding of the material and the spiritual. This is likewise the core of much of Stevens's thinking.

Dissenting from the cult of erotic mystics in the Near East or in Platonic Europe, Stevens, though as a poet highly erotic, declines to place his main focus on sexuality. His consciousness is singularly excursive, ranging through innumerable realms of art and nature. As a highly civilized and sophisticated thinker he favored a humorous philosophy in revolt from the tyranny of rationalism, in which he approaches at least the more moderate phase of Taoism. His remarkable comic irony bears a likeness to that of the Chinese dramatic masterpiece, The Western Chamber. His sense for the refinement of sensuality is at least in broad terms predominantly Oriental. His distrust of an austere morality is in keeping with another aspect of Oriental imaginative writing. Like the Chinese, he is inclined to shun the extreme positions taken by tragedy and comedy and to reconcile true seriousness with lightness of touch. He exhibits the strong Oriental liking for concentration on minute objects.

Since much of Stevens's writing associates him with the Imagist movement, he naturally was strongly influenced by modern painting, and thence by painting in general, which is the art predominantly devoted to the image. Many of his poems, as "The Glass of Water," are clearly still-life paintings done in words. Naturally, he turned to the newly popular Oriental painting, rich in so many different provinces of the art. The philosophical landscape painting of the Chinese masters especially attracted him. Thus a Sung fan painting is easily imagined to stand behind the first section in the poem, "Six Significant Landscapes" [see page 38]. Stevens may not have studied the philosophies of the East intensively, but he certainly knew that in them lay a close kinship to his thought, closer, perhaps, than any kinship to any of the leading systems of the West.

It is clear that to Stevens a foremost claim of the Far Eastern arts to favorable attention was their love for implication and their distrust of overt statement. Stevens was devoted to metaphor and symbolism, but it would be even more correct to say that he cherished implication. Clearly, his "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" [see page 38] is derived from the Japanese haiku.

Tn raising estheticism virtually to the elevation of a religious doctrine or "way of life," Stevens employs an imagery and a method of thought eminently Oriental. His celebrated aphoristic poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," silently intimates the possibility that a culture of an Oriental refinement has invaded and for at least a brief and blessed moment conquered the desert or, to use Stevens's word, "wilderness" of Tennessee:

I placed a jar ill Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion The jar was gray It did not give of Like nothing else

everywhere. and bare. bird or bush, in Tennessee.

Why a jar and why a bare jar? The conception is a eulogy of pure form, pure by virtue of both its simplicity and perfection.

As he admirably says of "the good" in "Montrachet-Ie-Jardin": All men can speak of it in the voice of gods.

But to speak simply of good is like to love.

Whatever doubt may attach to the suggestion that this jar itself is a specimen of Oriental ceramics should be dispelled by noting the appearance ofthe image in two pieces composed in the same period of his career, "Bowl," and the semi-Oriental play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. In "Bowl," the bowl is intended to be the globe itself. Its opening lines contain an explicitly Chinese allusion: For what emperor Was this bowl of Earth designed?

Here are more things Than on any bowl of the Sungs, Even the rarest.

Tn Stevens's play three Chinese sages, incongruously sitting by night on a hill in Pennsylvania, meditate on a jar placed before them, or, in other terms, in the center of the stage. A candle lights the jar, revealing to their meditative minds all worldly truth. Tn short, the candle is both the sun and the imagination, while the jar's surface is a screenlike medium reflecting and interpreting all images of reality. Surely, it is a Chinese jar that the sages extract from their basket. Their mountain meditation by night suggests the legend of the Japanese sages who, on bending over their go-board, perceive all reality. The meditative and static quality of Stevens's play also strongly suggests the Noh drama, so powerful in its spiritual and subjective insights, so strikingly unorthodox to Western eyes by virtue of its parsimony of plot or action. Like almost all the rest of Stevens's poetry, this play eschews direct borrowings from the Oriental but neverthel~ss shows his indebtedness to the classical cultures of the East.

Stevens, in short, affords an instance of an unmistakably Western man much of whose enlightenment derives from almost furtive glances out the window upon the landscape of long-established cultures in other parts of the globe. The jar was round because so in essence is the world for which it stands. The candle of his imagination shines on all the world and so shines by virtue of the fact that at last a cultivated Westerner, even one who has never left his own country, may derive much of his inspiration from other lands and their traditions. What he gains from the East is never superficially applied to his pages but thoroughly assimilated by his creative genius. The imaginative Westerner no longer inhabits a house whose opaque shell limits his vision to his own tradition. For his spiritual environment he chooses the entire earth. How eloquent and convincing is Stevens's choice may be discerned by'any syinpathetic reader of his poems.

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AWallace Stevens Sampler SIX SIGNIFICANT LANDSCAPES

Nor the mallets of the domes And high towers, Can carve What one star can carve, Shining through the grape-leaves ..

I

An old man sits In the shadow of a pine tree In China.

He sees larkspur, Blue and white, At the edge of the shadow, Move in the wind.

His beard moves in the wind.

The pine tree moves in the wind.

Thus water flows Over weeds.

VI Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling.

They confine themselves To right-angled triangles.

If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipsesAs, for example, the ellipse of the half-moonRationalists would wear sombreros.

II

The night is of the color Of a woman's arm: Night, the female, Obscure, Fragrant and supple, Conceals herself.

A pool shines, Like a bracelet Shaken in a dance.

THIR TEEN WAYS

OF LOOKI G AT A BLACKBIRD

VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.

VII men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

o thin

VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.

X

III I measure myself Against a tall tree.

I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun, With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear.

Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

IV When my dream was near the moon, The white folds of its gown Filled with yellow light.

The soles of its feet Grew red.

Its hair filled With certain blue crystallizations From stars, Not far off.

V

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Nor the chisels of the long streets,

I

Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV A man and a woman Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or j list after.

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds.

XII The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat Tn the cedar-limbs.

THE BIRD WITH THE COPPERY, KEEN CLAWS Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around, -Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)

His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets, Of his gold ether, golden alguazil, Except because he broods there and is still.

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy Upward and outward, in green-vented forms, His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate As his pure intellect applies its laws, He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock, To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound.

The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains,' remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

She says, "I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm 'fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"

There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the glflden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened bIrds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss."

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers. waiting, sleeplessly.

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

AWARDWINNING NEW PRODUCTS COMETO MARKET Late each year, a prominent U.S. technical magazine, Industrial Research, selects the year's 100 most significant new products.

A distinguished panel of internationally known scientists and engineers judges entries on the basis of "importance, uniqueness and usefulness."

Recent prize-winning products include a new anesthetic that makes surgery and recovery from surgery easier for the body to bear; an "eye" that permits firemen to look through dense smoke; and many other things¡-heart-pacers, loud-speakers, hydrofoils, correcting typewriters-all of which make life safer, easier, more pleasant and Gives Prescriptions even longer. Most of the winners vvere for Eyeglasses developed by U.S. corporations, univer- The Auto-Refractor (top) is a sities and government agencies. But not all. computerized system which analyzes Several of them have been developed out- the properties of a person's side the United States. Only products on eyes and automatically decides upon the market-or with a scheduled market the correct prescription for eyeglasses. It is expected to be date-are considered for awards. SPAN especially helpful in testing presents on these pages a broad sample the eyes of patients with whom of the award-winning products. communication is difficult.

Recalls and Records Dreams The young lady (above) is hooked up to a Sleep Dream Monitor which identifies periods of time spent dreaming. The instrument, which provides a positive method of recalling and recording complete dreams, is regarded as a major breakthrough in the research of sleep disorders.

Microcapsules Kill Pests These pinhead-size microcapsules, magnified 100 times ( left) , contain a highly toxic chemical used to kill crop pests.

Sprayed directly onto the crops, the capsules release their chemical at tontrolled rates, thereby spacing out treatment and lessening hazards to the environment.

Corrects Misspellings

Sees Through Darkness First of a new type of anesthetics, enflurane, marketed under the name Ethrane (top), does not produce the postoperative side effects commo/.J to many anesthetics. Characteristically, many anesthetics are subject to chemical breakdown into possibly toxic by-products.

Ethrane does not undergo this breakdown.

Further, it can be inhaled and exhaled easily in surgical procedures with little change in metabolic functions. It is lVell tolerated by patients and easy to administer and control.

A hand-held device called Probeye (above) detects objects in the dark. Giving off no light itself, Probeye detects infrared radiation and presents visible images of ubjects from their heat pattern.

Probeye is used for fire fighting, mine inspection and police surveillance.

The typist's life has been made easier, thanks to this new correcting typewriter (center).

The system, for use with typewriters that use carbon film ribbons, has a special adhesive tape which lifts the wrong letters off the paper. When correctiQns are made, they are virtually impossible to detect.

These cups (above) are made of a new crystalline thermoplastic resin which, when buried in soil, is almost totally consumed by microorganisms within a year, thus eliminating a pollution problem.

It will facilitate the manufacture of such items as disposable camping supplies.

Prints 100 Pages on 35-mm Negative

This organ-preservation system (below) keeps human organs in good condition while preparing a transplant recipient for surgery.

The system duplicates the heart's function by using a pulsating pump.

It also prevents potential damage to the liver, kidneys, heart or lungs which can result from increases in arterial pressure.

The system makes it easier to transport organs from one location to another' without deterioration.

Cruises Over High Waves The Jetjoil929-100 (bottom) is a high-speed, advanceddesign commercial hydrofoil boat. It is designed to cruise smoothly over four-meter-high waves at 45 knots. Because it skims the surface of the water, there is virtually no wake.

The vessel can carry 250 passengers and is expected to become a popular means of commuting to and from cities accessi Ie by water.

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A variable pressure controller regulates low gas flow at constant rates under conditions of changing pressure. A new design (below) makes disassembly and servicing easy and eliminates the need for such troublesome parts as needle valves.

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Capable of putting 100 pages of reading matter on one 35-mm negative, Microaperture (below) represents a major advance in the technique of microprinting. This device can be used for printing miniaturized versions of maintenance manuals, price lists and catalogues.

In addition, Microaperture cuts both paper and postal costs.

b

.r

Impro~

a~gational Data

A new type of satellite (above) can provide more precise navigational information for ships and airplanes; It circles the earth in a path that can be predicted a thousanq times more accurately than before, because ltis~impervious to orbit-altering air drag and solar radiation pressure.

Measures Electron Energy This precision electron energy analyzer (above) was designed to determine the energy of electrons ejected from a material's surface as a result of some external stimulation. It is especially useful for studying the fundamental electronic properties of materials.

Catalyst for Antiknock Gas

This single-unit audio-visual system (below) can play back a recorded commentary to accompany slide presentations. Each recording is made on five-centimeter strips of magnetic tape that adheres to the slide mount and thus is synchronized to the visual presentation.

A new reforming catalyst (bottom) can be used in oil refineries to convert petroleum naphthas into high-grade antiknock gasoline.

This" catalyst is two to four times as active as and significantly more stable than conventional platinum reforming catalysts, enabling simpler processing and appreciable financial savings on production.

Shock-Absorbing

Bus Bumper Called HELP, a unique energy-absorbing bumper system (below) has been developed for buses.

The bumper is made of an extremely strong rubberized synthetic material. It has an inner chamber that is pressurized and equipped with relief valves which open on impact, allowing pressure to be vented. Crash tests show the bumper protects against damage to a vehicle when driven into a wall at eight kilometers an hour.

Detector for Drunk Drivers ALERT -Alcohol Level Evaluation Roadside Tester-a breath analyzer (bottom), registers the amount of alcohol in a person's blood.

Primarily for use by policemen in suspected drunken driving cases, it takes only 30 seconds to make a measurement.

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Measures Hazardous Radio Waves put of concern over the possible hazards of powerful radio waves, scientists at the U.S. Government's National Bureau of Standards have developed an electric density meter (right). The device measures complex electromagnetic fields and tells scientists whether energy emitted by radar, microwave ovens and radio transmitters is intense enough to be dangerous. Tiny antennas detect energy impulses, which are amplified and displayed on a meter.

Produces Postage Stamp-size X-rays

Transmits Graphics

by Telephone

X-rays the size of postage stamps are produced by this radiographic minification system (above). Radiographs are reduced to 43x50 mm, while maintaining faithful diagnostic quality. The new process aims at saving time, space and money, while improving patient care and ensuring more accurate record keeping.

Graphs, charts, plans, sketches and other graphics can be transmitted over regular telephone lines with an Audiografix System (right). The user speaks into a microphone while writing on a transparent, electrically active sheet placed over the graphics to be transmitted, and both graphics and voice flow simultaneously.

The system also enables people who speak different languages to communicate with symbols.

STRENGTHENING THE WORLD ECONOMY In a recent speech to the Kansas City Internatiomll Relations Council, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stressed the need for co-operation, not confrontation, between the industrialized nations and the developing nations. Excerpts from the speech are printed below.

The paramount necessity of our time is the preservation of peace. But history has shown that international political stability requires international economic stability_ Order cannot survive if economic arrangements are constantly buffeted by crisis or if they fail to meet the aspirations of nations and peoples for progress ....

What the United States does-or fails to do-has an enormous impact on the rest of the world. With one-third of the output of the noncommunist world, the American economy is still the great engine of world prosperity. Without us, there is no prospect of solution. When we are in recession, it spreads; without American expansion, the world economy tends to stagnate. . . .

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the developing countries. One of the central proposals is that the prices of primary products should be set by international agreements at new high levels and then pegged to an index of world inflation. The objective, as with the oil price increases, is a massive redistribution of the world's wealth.

This challenge has many aspects. At one level, it is an effort to make the availability of vital natural resources depend on political decision, particularly with respect to energy, but increasingly involving other materials as well. More fundamentally, it is a result of the new dispersion of economic power, among developed and developing countries ....

The United States is prepared to study * * * * * these views attentively, but we are c,onThe recession and inflation of the last vineed that the present economic system few years-which spFead around the world has generally served the world well. We -have reminded us that nations thrive are prepared to consider realistic proor suffer together. No country-not even posals, but we are convinced that poorer the United States-can solve its econo- nations benefit most from an expanding mic problems in isolation. Consciousness world economy. History has proved the of interdependence has been most suc- prosperity of each nation requires excessfully implemented among the in- pansion of global prosperity. This should dustrialized countries. When the energy be the focus of our efforts. crisis first hit us, the industrial countries The United States is convinced that an agreed that they would not resort to uni- international system overshadowed by lateral, restrictive trade measures .... That the rivalry of nations or blocs will propledge was respected, and will be renewed duce instability and confrontation. This this year .... will prove disastrous to every nation* * * * * but above all to the weakest and the Global interdependence is a reality. poorest.

The United States therefore is comThere is no alternative to international collaboration if growth is to be sustained. mitted to a co-operative approach. We But the world economic structure is under recognize that an international order will increasing challenge from many countries be durable only if its members truly which believe that it does not fairly meet accept it. And while the participation of developing countries has increased, it is their needs.

The challenge finds its most acute and clear that the energy producers and the articulate expression in the program ad- emerging nations in Latin America, Asia and Africa have believed themselves to vanced in the name of the so-called "Third World." This calls for a totally new eco- be outside the system. We have a duty to nomic order, founded on ideology and warn against, and to resist, confrontation. national self-interest. It is stimulated by But we are prepared to strengthen and resentments over past exploitation' and it expand the international economic system. is sustained by the view that the current A serious concern must be the needs of system is loaded against the interests of the poorest. They have been the most

grievously affected by the food and energy crises of the past two years. Their prosperity would contribute to ours. And their participation in the global economy is required so that all nations, and not only the richest, have a stake in the world which we are building ....

The United States is aware of the dependence of many countries on their earnings from a single commodity. It is legitimate and reasonable that they should seek a reliable, long-term, stable source of earned income for their development. However, we do not believe that tying commodity prices to a world index of inflation is the best solution. First, price indexing would strengthen those least in need of help because most raw materials production still takes place in the industrial countries; and price indexing would harm those most in need of help because the poorest, most populous states are net importers of raw materials. Finally, such a scheme would introduce artificial rigidities which are likely to result in misallocatipn of resources and scarce capital and underutilization of needed productive capacity in many parts of the world.

We are prepared to discuss these issues in a co-operative spirit ....

* * * * * These issues are not technical; they go to the heart of the problem of infernational order: whether the major industrial nations and the developing nations can resolve their problems co-operatively, or whether we are headed for an era in which economic problems and political challenges are solved by tests of strength.

Will the world face up to the imperative of interdependence? Or will it be engulfed in contests of nations or blocs? ..

We have a stake in the world's success.

It will be our own success. If we respond to the challenge with the vision and determination that the world has corne to expect from America, our children will look back upon this period as the beginning of America's greatest triumphs.

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NAG CHAUDHURI IN AMERICA Dr. B.D. Nag Chaudhuri, Vice Chancellor of New Delhi's lawaharlal Nehru Unirersity, l'isited the U.S. recently to take part 'in the 1975 Lincoln Lecturer Program for American and Foreign Scholars. Established in 1972, the program gires American audiences the benefit of the views and ideas of distinguished visitors from abroad. Apart from the three Lincoln lectures, he also addressed several American colleges and universities.

Dr. Nag Chaudhuri is the chairman of the subcommission on science and technology set up under the Indo-U.S. loint Commission, and a member of the education subcommission.

He also heads a Government of India committee on environmental concerns. He was formerly the scientifie adviser to the Defence Ministry. Dr. Nag Chaudhuri was interviewed in the U.S. for SPAN toward the end of his three-week l'isit. Excerpts from the interview are printed below.

QUESTION: Dr. Nag Chaudhuri, how would you characterize the current level of understanding between the United States and India?

ANSWER: The amount of bilateral exchange is rather small. I would also say that there are large areas of ignorance in the United States about India, which is mainly due to a lack of information and a lack of contact with living conditions in India. I also criticize some of my own countrymen-students who are not as well informed about their own country as I would like them to be, because they could fill a gap if they made some effort.

QUESTION: Would you comment on the progress of the joint Indo-U.S. subcommissions on which you serve?

ANSWER: On the science subcommission, we have already sent certain proposals to our counterparts here, and I understand they are being processed and they have been provisionally agreed to.

I think we can soon have these agreed programs started.

There are a number of other programs in the mill. They have to be looked into from several angles. We hope we shall meet again by November or December.

~

I In terms of the subcommission on education and culture, a few programs have been initiated. The education part is fairly straightforward.

The culture part is a little more complex because we have a plethora -of things-music, dance, drama, art-and we have very little money. One has to be very careful in ~electing and choosing something which is meaningful in America; something which is worthwhile back in India.

QUESTION: Can you specify any of the exchanges planned?

ANSWER: Yes. With the education subcommission, there are straightforward university exchange programs in history, economics, sociology. Even in sciencethat's a part of education, too! In music, there is a feeling that there is already some exchange going on at a very informal level. And if there is anything that we can do to help and support it, we would like to do that. For example, having good trios, quartets, chamber music. We feel symphony orchestras are too big to handle. We would like some art exhibitions. One or two Indian artists have been exhibited in the United States.

One or two art exhibitions from the U.S. have been in India.

QUESTION: What were the themes of

your three lectures under the Lincoln Lecturer Program?

ANSWER: The first lecture was on science and Indian society. We started out with a description of Indian society as it has developed over the ages. We went on to the description of the plus and the minus points of Indian society as it relates to modern science. Then we went on to the current era in which the concern is not only with science but with technology.

The second theme involved the problems of technology transfer in India. This was explained through case studies about what has happened in the drug industry, in atomic energy, in the machine tool industry. The discussion also coyered the idea of technological self-reliance-what role it plays today in the military area, the atomic energy area, the chemical and metallurgical areas.

The third theme was more or less what one might call techno-economics, which really meant looking into national expenditures on research and development over the last 25 years or so, and how they 'have grown from about Rs. 30 million or so in 1950 to about Rs. 2,000 million today. And with this growth, manpower in this field has grown from about 3,000 or 4,000 at that time to more than 150,000 today, We then examined what areas attracted what amounts of money-how much went to defense or to atomic energy or industrial and chemical research, what went to health and what went to food or agriculture, and so on ... and how and what relationship, if any, there is between the expenditures incurred, the economic benefits that accrued to the nation, and the technological benefits which resulted ... how much this promoted our selfreliance or technological independence, right up to the modern age ... what were the factors-apart from political factors -which might have conditioned the government's mind in various ways.

QUESTION: How did audiences respond to your presentations, and what aspects evoked the keenest interest?

ANSWER: It depends on the audience.

The "Science and Indian Society" topic

-

seemed to prompt a great deal of interest exist in very small numbers and unless visited their homes and one day had both at the University of California at one is careful they will disappear. supper with a Navajo Indian family who Berkeley and the University of Illinois at We have another type of concern on served the traditional fried bread and Urbana. On both of these campuses there the environmental side: industrial pollu- mutton stew. are strong groups-not so much in science tion. In cities like Calcutta, Delhi, BangaFrom a professional standpoint, it is . but in Asian studies and South Asian lore, Kanpur-not so much nombay as very difficult to say. But I would put the studies, people who are very knowledgeable yet, but i(is coming up very fast-urban . Urbana, Illinois, visit as the most rewardin these areas. They found things worth industries have produced problems of .ing professionally because of some of the probing, and I could understand why various sorts: noise, carbon dioxide, Work that I was able to see there. In just many of the questions came from the carbon monoxide, dusts of various kinds, 'two days you can't really absorb very economists, the sociologists,. the students and so on. much, but I found the work of Paul in Asian studies.

The third consideration involves prob- Handler, for example, very interesting, as well as because here is a physicist who is trying However, there were also a number of lems of public health-rural, , questions from the scientists and tech- urban-and how we can combine health to get into demographic work. nologists-particularly in the second two considerations with a good environment QUESTION: You were a student at the lectures. On the Urbana campus there so that we don't have diseases, we don't University of California and have since were questions on defense expenditures have too much dust and so on. traveled to the United States on 'several and the defense results in terms of QUESTION: How would you rank environ- occasions. During this trip were you immilitary strength, ability and capacity. mental concerns among the concerns of the pressed by any changes that have occurred on the American scene?

QUESTION: You are currently head of a . Indian Government?

Government of India committee on the \ ANSWER: They rank relatively low at ANSWER: I would say that apart from the present time. There are many more the technological changes, one also notices environment. What are the primary conpressing problems that we have. cerns of this committee? social changes. For example, on the ANSWER: Our main concerns are in QUESTION: From either a personal or campuses where I spent most of my three or four areas because of certain professional standpoint, what were the high- time, I see the youth as' much more selfproblems that we see. For example, the lights of your visit? assured, and much more clear in their first is preservation of certain threatened ANSWER: From the personal stand- minds as to what they want out of life.

Another change is that one finds the species. These threatened species may be point, the most singular experience was animal or plant species. Some of them' my visit to a place called Tsaile on the people I met in the academic worldare valuable and some of them are exotic Navajo Indian Reservation [see page 26]. those I have been going with-much and nice to have around. For example, a This was something unique. I had never more mature than the U.S. academic valuable species would be something like visited such a place before. The warmth world of, let us say, the late 1930s or the 1947-48 period. They have their feet the wild rice species, which, if it should and the directness were very, very heartdisappear, would result in the permanent warming. And to them also it was a much more on the ground. They are loss of a genetic resource for plant hybri. unique experience because not many much more realistic in their assessment dization .. That would be a serious loss. from the outside world go there. I visited of the world. And there is a certain sense And then there are exotic things like their laboratories and spoke with students of feeling that "Well, all the answers do the rhinoceros or the lion which 'now at the Navajo community college. I also not come out so easily."

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HIGHLIGHTS

SPAN

OF THE NEXT ISSUE'

• The Most Dangerous Man in Americaa book review by Nayantara Sahgal • A new short story by William Saroyan • The Courts and the Citizen in the U.S. • The Art of Thomas Hart Benton • An Astronaut's Prophecies

by Neil Armstrong TO SUBSCRIBE, fill out coupon on reverse side and mail to: SPAN Magazine Subscription Service Sundeep, 4, New Marine Lines, Bombay 400 020 Paid subscribers please note: If you change your address, you should also notify SPAN Magazine Subscription Service at the above Bombay address.

Peter Drocker irrelevant to India' Dear Sir: The profile of Peter Drucker [March 1975 SPAN] is as illuminating as the article by him on multinational corporations.

I would like to mention a few criticisms one frequently hears about Drucker with which I tend to agree. First, his ideas are "theoretical." It is obvious that they emanate from a thinker, not a manager.

Second, his texts are deficient in case studies, which other authors on management cite in abundance. Rarely does Drucker mention practical situations handled by him as a management consultant. Third, his style is like that of James Joyce-the flow of thought is not continuous.

I would add one more criticism: that his theories are not germane to India, where management science, with the exception of some of the top "giants" listed annually by the Economic Times, is in its infancy. It would be fatuous to transplant to India systems and concepts

derived from the U.S. business world.

But perhaps students of management expect too much from Drucker's books when they look for instant formulas in them. Management is too complex a science for any such formulas, even from a Drucker.

N.VARADAN Thakur, Vaidyanath Aiyar & Co. New Delhi

'Bfficiency reports' irrelevant to India' Dear Sir: Herbert E. Meyer's delightful article "The Science of Telling Executives How They're Doing" [December 1974 SPAN] is based on certain unstated assumptions peculiar to America and to the West in general. I think it is important to know what they are because the way we manage organizations is inextricably interwoven with the fabric of social values. The way people relate to their peers, bosses, subordinates, government and local community is not universal-it changes with social values and the economic structure.

SPAN ORDER FORM

Pragmatism, mobility and a highly innovative spirit are key elements in American society. The individual is paramount in the American system. If the individual does not achieve the expected results he is "sacked" without much ado.

The natural corollary of all this is that before you assess a man on his merits you have to tell him what he is supposed to do. Hence the emergence of job descriptions and the performance evaluations Herbert Meyer talks about.

Because of the pre-eminence of the American economy and the material well-being the American system has been able to achieve, there is a rush in developing countries to emulate the American experience. The range and variety of approaches to management of organizations, however, preclude the emergence of any universal model. Telling executives how 'they are doing is an exercise which may not have the same relevance everywhere-as the Japanese experience, for example, so vividly shows.

SUBASH K. BULAN! Works Manager Parle Products Vile Parle East, Bombay

TO: SPAN Magazine Subscription Service Sundeep 4, New Marine Lines Bombay 400 020

BAllO'S

ABIIICI "'''I like to stand by and watch life drift past," says cartoonist Mario Miranda. The sketches on this page and on the back cover show that Mario's 'watchful eye misses nothing. He visited the U.S. recently with wife Habiba, met Americans from many walks of life, fell in love with San Francisco ("one of the world's most beautiful cities"), traded gags and sketches with American cartoonists. On his return, Mario drew vignettes of American life in his oWJ:l.inimitable Itt. Thirty-three of these sketches ar~ displayed .. Ii exhibition that has toured Bombay, Panaji, Madras and Calcutta. It will visit Delhi in September. Exuberant, richly detailed, perceptive, the sketches reveal Mario's gift for the comic and the incongruous and his intense interest in people. ("I'm a chronic people watcher," says Mario.) And the people in Mario's America come in many colors-gamblers, pacifists, musicians, artists, politicians .... It! baring¡ their moods, f<;ldsand frailties., Mario is nungent, occaslonallymrchievous, blitralWays delightful.

GiRL \'lITH

HARP Ot.: A

s,;~FRAWCl5CO

SIDE~ALK

"Mario's America" is invariably an urban America, often a musical Americ{l, as shown by this samplinga street musician in San Francisco(top left), a black soul band in Washington (top right), a holiday crowd taking a bus to Disneyland (left), the Hare Krishna clan in Washington (above). Back cover: New York.