The stately old building that ornaments Pennsylvania A venue between the White House and the Capitol in Washington, D. c., has a rich past and a promising future. Once the central office for the Washington, D.C., mail service, the Old Post Office is now a showcase of the nation's history and a modern shopping center. It preserves a bit of American heritage and invites new commerce. The lO-story post office, built in 1899 of gray Maine granite, boasts red oak woodwork, frosted glass and Victorian-style brass fittings in its three-level atrium, now called The Pavilion. The sunlit Pavilion is home to many shops and restaurants, the other seven stories are devoted to government and private offices. In 1971, the building was to be torn down, but it was saved by the National Endowment for the Arts. After five years, the building was completely refurbished at a cost of $30 million in federal funds. Now residents and visitors to the nation's capital can enjoy the performances of musicians, dancers and other performers while they look around this born-again landmark. From the top of its 100-meter Romanesque clock tower to its patterned marble floor, the Old Post Office again "has become one of the historical attractions of Washington, D.C.
A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER The Festival of America in India, which last month brought the irresistible combinationof India's greatest conductor and one of the world's greatest symphonyorchestras, the NewYork Philhannonic, this monthwill present another stellar musical event: The Ambassadorsof Opera, a group of singers whohave ,II' _ per~o~ed at Ne~York's. venerable Metropol~tan Opera. The Met, as lt lS affectlOnately known, celebrated ltS centenary la~t lid. ~~e~1 =~ year. The Ambassadorsof Opera (see page 43) carry portfohos I HOMECOMING bulging with classical arias and songs from the Broadwaymusical AFTER =: theater as well. Theywill perfonn in a numberof cities in ~ JEARS India this month. ~- The Indo-U.S. Subcorrnnission on Education and Culture, which sponsors the Festival of America events as it will the Festival of India in the United States next year, has assured that the festival will not be confined to 1984 and that new attractions will be presented into 1985 in India. Wewere delighted with the wannth of the reception of maestro Mehta's masterly musicianship and found it particularly gratifying that Doordarshangave millions of Indian viewers the chance to see the concert in Delhi on national television. The potential of that mediumto create a global village has often been written about; I feel the actuality is delightfully summedup in the accompanyingcartoon by Sudhir Dar from The Hindustan Times.
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Just as Indian audiences were wannly appreciative of Western music, Americans have been discovering spiritual affinities in the music of India. Twoarticles in SPAN this month exemplify the power of the links forged by music. A prime proponent of this fusion is composerPhilip Glass, whose recent work is discussed in the article on page 40. About 20 years ago, Glass relates, he was introduced to the mysteries of Indian music whenhe undertook to notate some music by Pandit Ravi Shankar for Western instruments. His fascination with Indian music led to the first of Glass' manytrips to India, and of course to the composition of his opera sattagraha, which has a libretto in Sanskrit and is based on incidents in the 11 of MahatmaGandhi. In January Glass gave a lecture in Delhi, one of the first events of the Festival, and spoke of his eagerness to arrange an Indian production of his work.
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Less well known,but no less engaging, is the musical career of Christopher Ris (see page 33), a youngAmericanwhohas dedicated his life to playing the sarod, under the inspiration and tutelage of Ali Akbar Khan. Ris was one of the youths whothought they had "discovered" Indian music during the late 1960s, but unlike manyof them, he stuck with the study through lean times. He has persevered and earned recognition for his abilities both in the United States and in India. In this issue SPAN pays tribute to a person whopersonified the spirit of cooperation between our two countries, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. She demonstrated great interest in India and affection for its people and was rewarded by an outpouring of wannth. October 11 would have been her hundredth birthday and the¡ resonance of her humanitarian regard for all the peoples of the world remains vibrant. - -J .A.M.
r,
SPANocWber James
Publisher A. McGinley
Editor Mal Oettinger
3 The Triumph of a Naturalist
Managing Editor Himadri Dhanda
by Stephen Jay Gould
Assistant Managing Editor Krishan Gabrani
5 Darwin's Direct Descendant by.Jerry Adler with John Carey
Senior Editor Aruna Dasgupta
10 The Spirit of the Games
Copy Editor Murari Saha Editorial Assistant Rocque Fernandes
12 Ideas for Our Times by Alvin P. Sanot!
Photo Editor A vinash Pas rich a
16 Eleanor Roosevelt Remembered
Art Director Nand Katyal
by Mary Ann Whitten
Associate Art Director Kanti Roy
19 A National Treasure Trove
Assistant Art Director Bimanesh Roy Choudhury
by Nemai Sadhan Bose
Chief of Production Awtar S. Marwaha
23 Marisol's Movers and Shakers by A vis Berman
Circulation Manager Y.P. Pandhi Photographic USIS Photographic
Service Services Unit
Photographs: Front cover-sculptures courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New York; bottom center-Hans Namuth © 1983. Inside front cover-left-Carol Hightower; right- Volkmar Wentzel, © 1983National Geographic Society. I-Sudhir Oar, courtesy The by Gary Kelley for Hindustan Times. 4-Painting Science 81. 5-Wally McNamee, Newsweek; illustration by Ib Ohlsson. lO-Pix I-Robert Lachman; 4-Jayne Kamin; both © The Los Angeles Times 1984. National Photo Pool; 5-Jack Smith, [nternational Olympic Photo Pool. ll-Pat Downs, © The Los Angeles Times 1984; National Photo Pool. 12-© Verne Walker. 13 top-© Eric David Loring; bottom-© Peter Vates. 14-C. Battelle. 15-Martin L. Schneider. 19-20-Pranab Mukerji. 23 and 27courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New Vork. 26Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New Vork. 29 left-R.K. Sharma. 30-courtesy Darshan Singh Maini. 33 center-Avinash Pasricha. 33 lOp, 35. 36-courtesy Ali Akbar College of Music, San Rafael, California. 38-39-Carol Hightower. 40- Tom Caravaglia from International Production Associates Inc. 41 top-courtesy Metropolitan Opera Association; bot· tom left-James Hefferman; bottom right-courtesy Metropolitan Opera Association. 43-courtesy Ambassadors of Opera .. 45-© Nancy B. Frank. 47-Nand Katyal. 48-49-Sam Abell. 50-Isabelle Carlota Rodiquez from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 51-Nand Katyal. Inside back cover-Pix I, 3-Jayne Kamin; 4-Larry Bessel; 5-Con Keyes; 6, 8-Barry Fitzgerald; 7-Jay Dickman; 9-Joe Kennedy. Photos © The Los Angeles Times 1984, National Photo Pool. Back cover-Rick Corrales, © The Los Angeles Times 1984. National Photo Pool.
Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed by Rajkumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.
30 Going Greyhound by Darshan Singh Maini
33 At the Feet of the Master
__ I
by Christopher Ris
37 On the Lighter Side 38 Republicans Seek "Four More Years" 40 The World at His Fingertips by David Garland
Front cover: With cutting insight and innovative style, Marisol Escobar has captured American artists she reveres in powerful rough-hewn images. See pages 23-27. Back cover: Mark Gorski and Nelson Vails, winners of the gold and in the 1,000silver, respectively, meter bicycle sprint final at the Los Angeles Games, wave the American flag as they acknowledge the spectators' cheers. See also pages 10-11 and inside back cover. Announcement: The new dates for the American porcelain exhibition in Madras are October 15-30, and for Bombay November 9-22.
44 The Job Is to Pour Out Your Heart by Edward Hoagland
46 The Courage of Turtles An Essay by Edward Hoagland
Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues), Rs. 25; single copy, Rs. 4, For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 52,
Triumph of a
It would be churlish indeed to argue that James D. Watson and Francis Crick's elucidation of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953 was anything less than one of the great scientific achievements of modern history. Yet, in a curious way, this discovery differed from other revolutionary events in science by its doubly conservative nature. First, it seemed to confirm the canonical view of genetical systems as rows of beads (genes) on strings (chromosomes), which implies that evolution proceeds slowly and gradually, based ultimately on the generation of new genetic variation (mutation) by pinpoint changes within the beads (substitution of one nucleic acid base for another yielding a different amino acid in the translated protein). Second, it represented the greatest modem triumph of the standard methodology that has ruled orthodox science ever since Descartes: reductionism, with its particular claim (in this case) that the complex forms of completed organisms could be explained, ultimately, as the translated products of an inherited program coded by a simple mechanism of four bases variously arranged in groups of three. Had not Watson built his double helix as a tinker-toy machine based on the sizes and fits of constituent parts? And had not Crick, soon afterward, proclaimed the "central dogma" (his words) of the new biology: that DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein, in a one-way flow of information, a unidirectional process of mechanical construction7' It is a credit to the power of Watson and Crick's model and to the fruitfulness of good science in general that, 30 years later, this Cartesian view of molecular genetics has been superseded, as a second revolution transmutes our view of inheritance and development. The
Through "global, intuitive insight," Barbara McClintock has won numerous awards, including a Nobel Prize, for her brilliant" work in plant genetics. genome, a cell's compendium of genetic information, is not a stationary setofbeads on strings, subject to change only by substituting one bead for another. The genome is fluid and mobile, changing constantly in quality and quantity, and replete with hierarchical systems of regulation and control. Genes come in pieces, and the shuffling of their segments can produce new combinations. Some genes can excise themselves from a chromosome and move to other locations in the genome; if these "transposable elements" operate as regulators to turn adjacent genes on and Qff, their movement to other places (and near different genes) can have major effects on the timing and control of development. Other genes make copies of themselves, and these identical daughters can then either reside next to their parent or move to other chromosomes. In this way, hundreds or thousands of copies of the same gene may be repeated within an organism's genetic program. The multiple copies of this "gene family" may then diverge in function, thus providing a solution to the old conundrum of how anything novel can evolve if all genes make products necessary for an organism's construction and wellbeing. (Original copies may continue to. make the required product, while new copies are "free" to alter and experiment.) If these processes replace a static with a more mobile genome subject to rapid and
profound rearrangement, the central dogma with its one-way flow of information from code to product has also been breached. A substance called "reverse transcriptase" can read RNA into DNA and insert new material into genetic programs by running backward along the supposedly one-way street of the central dogma. A class of objects, called retroviruses, uses this backward path, placing new material into chromosomal DNA from the outside. In short, a set of new themes-mobility, rearrangement, regulation and interaction-has transformed our view of genomes from stable and linear arrays, altered piece by piece and shielded from any interaction with their products, to fluid systems with potential for rapid reorganization and extensive feedback from their own products and other sources of RNA. The implications for embryology and evolution are profound, and largely unexplored. Barbara McClintock is the godparent and instigator of this second revolution. Her discovery of transposable elements in maize-so-called "jumping genes"first presented in the early 1950s before her field had any language to express such a heterodox idea, was, in retrospect, the beginning of modern molecular genetics. She suffered the fate of many pioneersincomprehension and bewilderment from most colleagues who could not read her maps of terra incognita. But by tenacity, the blessings of long life and continuous fruitful activity, she has avoided the maudlin ending of most tales in the annals of exploration, and has lived to savor her triumph in the midst of an active career. Now in her 80s, and committed as ever to research on maize in her laboratories at Cold Spring Harbor in Maine, she has won every major award
that science and an adoring public can bestow, from MacArthur laureate to Nobel Prize. And, as a supreme irony, this intensely private woman, who has worked all her life for personal and intellectual reward, can only view such recognition as a bother and impediment. (Most of us, so honored, feel compelled to make some public comment to the same, selfless effect, but we love the accolade and bask in the notoriety; I believe that Barbara McClintock may be unique in truly feeling more discomfort than vindication.) Such heroic tales are the stuff of simplistic mythology, and McClintock's catapulting into public recognition has fostered vulgar versions of what she did, thereby obscuring a more subtle story and, in a perverse if unintended way, degrading McClintock's formidable achievements. The vulgarized accounts
try to use her as an exemplar for one of two archetypical stories in the sociology of science, either (1) the woman in science, a brilliant mind rejected by prejudice against the color or sex of the body housing it, or (2) the maverick genius who, despite heroic efforts, obtains no hearing because colleagues simply cannot hear a different drummer. The story is never so simple, never a clear-cut contrast of unblemished individual genius and benighted establishment. Just as McClintock's work helped to break the central dogma and establish interaction between code and product, so must the complex tale of her long rejection be cast as an interplay between her own idiosyncracies and the reactions of her colleagues. The strength of Eyelyn Fox Keller's book A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
lies in her successful attempt to avoid the myths and capture the subtleties, thereby providing a rare and deep understanding of a troubling, fascinating and general tale in the history of science-initial rejection (or, more frustratingly, simple incomprehension) of great insights. Keller, who has written with much' force about the trials of women in science (as in her previous book Working It Out), understands especially well why this theme cannot provide a central explanation for the career of so special a person as Barbara McClintock. The first theme, the woman in science, fails to explain her long years of intellectual loneliness after the discovery of jumping genes in maize. I do not say, of course, that she suffered no prejudice on the basis of sex; such discrimination was pervasive and affected every stage of her (Continued on page 6)
Darwin's Direct Descendant
Stephen Jay Gould, author of the accompanying article, is a rare combination of innovative scientist and writer, Above., right, Gould with his son Ethan in the Bahamas; below, with an old friend.
In 1902, 70 million years after it tripped lightly through the Mesozoic forests in search of meat, the skeleton of a 6-meterhigh Tyrannosaurus was dynamited out of a sandstone bluff near Hell Creek, Montana, Wrapped in burlap and plaster and shipped back to New York, the bones were painstakingly reassembled by fossil curator Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History. There, one day in 1947, they happened to scare 5-year-old Stephen Jay Gould. With a mouthful of teeth as big as bananas, the remains of the great reptile gaped down at the little mammal and set him scurrying for the safety of his daddy's pants leg. It was a sublime epiphany. Long after Gould could stare with equanimity at the skull of the Tyrannosaurus, he was haunted by the essential mystery that still motivates him as perhaps America's foremost writer and thinker on evolution: Why should dinosaurs have ended up in human museums instead of-as one among an infinite number of evolutionary possibilities-the other way around? One morning not long ago, Gould was on his hands and knees in a grove of casuarina pine trees on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. He was pursuing his fieldwork on Cerion, a genus of land snail that grows to the unimpressive length, compared to dinosaurs, of 4 centimeters, At noon he stood, dusted off his blue trousers and headed for the airport to catch a plane to New York, where he was to receive the National Book Critics Circle Award the next day for his book on intelligence testing, The Mismeasure (Continued on page 7) Copyright by Newsweek. Ine. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Naturalist continued from page 4 •
developing career to her practical disadvantage. Yet it would denigrate her remarkable achievements to attribute her experience of isolation, a key event in her intellectual history, to blind prejudice over which she had no control. For Barbara McClintock, in her distinctive and personal way, had overcome these pervasive prejudices by the acknowledged brilliance of her work long before she discovered transposable elements in maize. Great achievements often wipe out the public's memory and restart a person's professional clock. Darwin, for example, had a successful career as a geologist before he published a word on the origin of species, but how many of his admirers and denigrators know that he solved the problem of the origin of coral atolls? Since McClintock has been. so honored for the jumping genes that ushered in the second revolution in molecular genetics, many commentators do not realize that transposable elements were not the discovery of a brash young investigator, but a further step built upon a recognized and distinguished career. Since a scientist cannot look consciously for the unexpected, McClintock found transposable elements while probing another question then largely ignored by geneticists but of central importance to the study of development, and particularly suited to her talents. She wanted to learn how some genes affect the timing of development by regulating activity of other genes that build parts of the body. Maize is particularly well suited for such studies because differences in timing often translate into clear effects in the color of husks and kernels. Her reductionist colleagues, who avoided such complex creatures and tried to get closer to molecules by manipulating the simplest of unicellular organisms, were not then studying problems of regulationth~:lUghmany molecular geneticists do today because the issue is so fundamental to what Aristotle recognized as the central problem of biology: the development of organic form. McClintock found regulatory elements in maize and then, incidentally while probing their inheritance and expression, discovered that they move. McClintock could study the difficult problem of regulation successfully because she had already established a career as one of America's most distinguished students of cytogenetics-the branch of biology that investigates the physical basis of inheritance by linking observed genetic patterns with the struc-
ture of chromosomes and other components of the cell. McClintock had ushered in the modern era of maize genetics in a series of careful studies that developed techniques for naming, visualizing and characterizing the 10 pairs of chromosomes that carry the DNA program of corn. She also performed a series of classic experiments in cytogenetics that established the physical ground for basic principles of heredity. Most famous was her proof, published with Harriet Creighton in 1931, that chromosomes really do carry genetic programs in the linear order that traditional breeding experiments with Mendelian pedigrees had indicated. (She did this by studying the process called "crossing over," in which chromosomes paired during meiosis-the cellular divisions that form eggs and sperm-exchange genes. She proved that this genetic crisscross corresponds exactly with the breaking off and mutual exchange of chromosomal segments.)
or this elegant and path breaking work, and in the face of continual impediments raised by prejudices against women in science, McClintock was abundantly recognized and honored by her colleagues. She served as vice-president of the Genetics Society of America in 1939, and as president in 1945. In 1944 she reached the pinnacle of peer recognition in American science and became the third woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. At that time, she wrote to Tracy Sonneborn in the only contemporary, explicit reference she ever made (in Keller's citation) to the problems of women scientists: It was both thoughtful and generous of you to write me as you did concerning the National Academy. I must admit I was stunned. Jews, women and Negroes are accustomed to discrimination and don't expect much. I am not a feminist, but I am always gratified when illogical barriers are broken .... It helps all of us.
McClintock surely suffered from all the prejudices, subtle and overt, directed against women in science, but she overcame them by dint of personal genius and an awesome inner strength that few of us can hope to possess. She will not serve as an exemplar of this troubling theme, and it will not explain the primary event of her public life-the stony silence that accompanied her most important discov-
ery of transposable elements. The second theme-genius so far ahead of her time that no one can understand-also contains a partial truth, but will not suffice because it foists all explanation upon external reception beyond McClintock's control. Her transition from peerless scientist to pariah owed as much to her personal style as to any inability of colleagues to grasp a radical new idea. McClintock has always worked for herself and in her own way, never tailoring her efforts to win acceptance or even to promote understanding among those who might need a little extra prodding or clarity to appreciate an unconventional notion. She lost the only regular academic job she ever held (at the University of Missouri, where women could, and occasionally did, win promotion) largely as a result of her personal preferences (her disinclination to teach formal classes, and her contempt for what academic departments call "good citizenship"-primarily a euphemism tor submission to myriad, meaningless hours of soul-sapping committee work). Some of the idiosyncracies that Keller describes are certainly mild ones, and we must therefore accept her argument that the combination of woman and maverick, in synergism, ultimately led to McClintock's dismissal. (One day, for example, arriving at her lab without keys, she climbed up the side of the building and crawled in through a window, all in the unsuspected presence of a hidden photographer. But what else could she do? Who wouldn't try acrobatics in such a frustrating situation? I certainly would, and have.) More importantly, she never did all she could to promote her chances in the admittedly tough battle for acceptance and understanding of transposable elements. She planned a minor campaign, writing an introductory paper and presenting a seminar to key peopl~ at Cold Spring Harbor. But when these initial forays met with little response and general incomprehension, she folded her tent. With her usual fortitude and self-reliance (though not, of course, without bitter disappointment), and usingber own version of the immemorial phrase "Bugger them!" she pressed on in her own way, knowing that she was right and that the rest of the world would eventually catch up. She published most of her subsequent work in the annual reports of her laboratory, surely an inauspicious place to launch a scientific revolution. I have read her main papers and they are, to put it (Continued on page 8)
Darwin's Direct Descendant He picked up the award and the relentless competition among indi- the rate at which fossils accumulate, in immediately returned to the Bahamas. viduals for limited resources and mates. which 50,000 years is little more than an That was in January, a month in which Giraffes are the winners of a long race to instant. To geneticists, for whom the Gould delivered three papers at the the top of the acacia tree; human beings crucial unit of time is the 10-day reproductive cycle of the fruit fly, that's just annual meeting of the American Associa- are the survivors in a rigorous contest, tion for the Advancement of Science; renewed each generation, to outsmart the kind of attitude they'd expect from a their fellow sapiens. It is the awesome pick-and-hammer scientist. flew to Chicago to discuss his MacArthur Foundation grant ($38,400 a year for five responsibility of every creature to adThese disagreements were thrashed years); dispatched an essay to The New vance the cause of his kind. out in healthy debate, stopping just short But here was a way to lift some of the of character assassination, at the Chicago York Times about the Arkansas creationism trial (for which he was star witness for burden of natural selection from indi- conference on evolution in 1980. Gould the anticreationists); wrote a magazine viduals. Members of the same species was at the center of the controversy. But article on evolution, plus his regular appear to compete within a range of those on both sides of the battle feared monthly column in Natural History maga- values fixed when the species originated; that creationists, who have fought Darzine, and gave the last few lectures in his their life-and-death struggle takes on less win for so long, might seize on any enormously popular course at Harvard, significance, because it produces very criticism of him as vindication for their ambitiously titled "History of Earth and little evolutionary change. Instead, by own faith. Nothing could be more misLife." mechanisms not yet understood, new taken, says Gould. "Evolution is a fact, In one sense Gould is just another species appear to split off at random from like apples falling out of trees. Darwin enlisted man of science, pushing back by existing ones. If they have some advan- proposed a theory, natural selection, to a few inches the frontiers of man's tage, they may in time supplant their explain that fact. Newton's theory of knowledge of snails; but he is also a ancestors, although it is also possible that gravitation was eventually superseded by general relativity. But apples didn't stop general who has helped transform the both species will coexist for a long timeuntil a major change in the environment entire landscape of evolutionary theory. in midair while physicists debated the His chief weapon is his uncanny knack for wipes out one or both of them. question." In fact, his Natural History communicating ideas simply, elegantly Steven M. Stanley, a Johns Hopkins column has been one of the more paleontologist who has been a leading imaginative and effective defenders of and persuasively. evolutionary enlightenment. The unsoIn 1972 Gould and Niles Eldredge-a contributor to the new theory, presents paleontologist at the American Museum evidence in a recent book, The New phisticated defense rests on the perfection of Natural History-collaborated on a Evolutionary Timetable, to show that of nature: the polar bear so ingeniously, paper intended at the time merely to human beings did not evolve by the invisibly white; the great veldt-colored resolve a professional embarrassment for gradual growth of the brain from one cat streaking across the plain in streampaleontologists: their inability to find the generation to the next but discontinuouslined pursuit of dinner. But Gould confossils of transitional forms between spe- ly, with the replacement of small-brained siders that a weak argument; creationists cies, the so-called "missing links." Dar- species by larger-brained ones (see dia- could just as easily-and do-argue that win, and most of those who followed him, gram). By implication, we can no)ong~r , these perfect adaptations are the product believed that the work of evolution was view ourselves as the perfect result of a of an omniscient Creator. Gould's subtler slow, gradual and continuous and that a process of testing and refinement going defense rests on the odd detours and complete lineage of ancestors, shading back three million years to Australopithedead ends of evolution, testifying to the imperceptibly one into the next, could in cus. We are merely the latest, and hit-and-miss processes of nature. theory be reconstructed for all living perhaps not the last, of a series of Consider, he urged in one famous animals. In practice, Darwin conceded, hominid species. essay, the panda's thumb. It is an appenthe fossil record was much too spotty to For all the excitement it has generated, dage beautifully suited to the panda's sole demonstrate those gradual changes, punctuated equilibrium still smacks of occupation, which is peeling the leaves though he was confident that they would heresy to many scientists. It does not off tasty bamboo shoots, but it is not a eventually turn up. But a century of explain what many regard as the crucial digit at all. The evolutionary pathway digging since then has only made their point: how and why a new species springs leading to opposable thumbs, which absence more glaring. up. Evolutionary biology is an uneasy simians embarked on millions of years Eldredge and Gould theorized that synthesis of paleontology, population before there were baseballs to throw with rather than transforming gradually, most genetics and comparative anatomy, each them, was not taken by the panda's of the species in the world appear to have with its own point of view and priorities. ancestors. Like all bears, the panda has evolved relatively quickly (on the scale of Population geneticists have worked for five forward-pointing fingers suitable for decades among their fruit-fly bottles to running and stabbing; its "thumb" is geologic time) and to have persisted, virtually unchanged, for millions of years. explain evolution by the gradual spread improbably constructed out of a greatly of genetic change among individuals, and enlarged wristbone, the radial sesamoid. That seemingly innocent proposition was the wedge that helped break open they can't believe that a totally new It is an inelegant solution, whose only the ruling scientific consensus about mechanism is responsible for all the truly virtue is that it works. Surely, Gould evolution. If Eldredge and Gould's important evolutionary events. There is a argues, if God had made the panda, he theory of "punctuated equilibrium" is vast conceptual gap between the two would have done a neater job. correct, we are forced to revise our views disciplines as well. As a paleontologist, Although he never surrendered his first about natural selection, the keystone of Gould deals casually in eons and epochs; love, the dinosaur, Gould eventually came Darwin's thinking. Evolution, in the when he asserts that species arise "re- to the realization that it was a poor orthodox Darwinian view, is driven by latively quickly," he means in relation to (Continued on page 9) of Man.
Naturalist continued from page 6
and mildly, tough slogging. With their unre- style was presented not by a psychologist of my own discipline-evolutionary lenting passive voice, and their compres- or neurologist, but by another mystery taxonomic biology. We work directly writer, Dorothy Sayers, who, I am con- with complex organisms and their insion of complex reasoning and experiment into single paragraphs, they are marvels vinced, worked this way herself and teraction with each other and their of their genre but not models of optimal established Lord Peter Wimsey as a physical environment in growth and adult conscious antidote to the Sherlock life. We accept the individuality of each communication. organism as fundamentally irreducible, as Keller argues, I think correctly, that a Holmes tradition of logical deduction. third reason eclipses gender and collegial Now Wimsey was no intellectual slouch, the definition of biology's uniqueness and obtuseness as a primary explanation for and (in his impeccable upper-class style) complexity. (This individuality is, for McClintock's years as a voice crying in was certainly not a fuzzy romantic mystic. example, the source of Darwinian evolution since natural selection cannot operthe wilderness: her¡ unconventional style But he solved his cases by integrative of scientific thinking. Her different in- insight (and these I usually do figure out). ate unless populations present a wide spiration transcends mere empirical con- In the first Wimsey novel, Whose Body?, spectrum of variation among their constituent members.) tention and embraces a mode of reason- Sayers describes the process explicitly: ing quite foreign to the procedures of And then it happened-the thing he had been most experimental science. half-consciously expecting. It happened suddenFirst, and more general, McClintock ly, surely, as unmistakably as sunrise. He redoes not follow the styJe of logical and membered-not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything-the sequential thinking often takeq as a whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions canonical mode of reasoning in science. as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside cClintock chose an She works by a kind of global, intuitive the world and saw it suspended in an infinitely insight. If she is stuck on a problem, she dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason organism that most molecular geneticists will not set it out in -rigorous order, write. about it, or even to think about it. He knew it. would shun as recalcitrant and hopelessly down the deduced consequences and Second, and more specifically but more complex for discovering anything funwork her way through step by step, but importantly, McClintock practices a style damental about genetic systems. Maize will take a long walk or sit down in the of biology quite foreign to the norms of grows only one generation per year, and its woods and try to think of something else, molecular biology and genetics (and many parts are subject to a baftling array of utterly confident that a solution will often denigrated, sometimes explicitly, noncoded modifications responsive to local environments of growth. (Bacteria eventually come to her in extenso. This by leaders of these professions-though may divide in 20 minutes. Populations procedure makes scientists suspicious and less so now than before, as appreciation of billions, with no discernible has often led colleagues to label her as a and recognition mount). Keller captures for valued new "mystic" in the pejorative, not apprecia- this style in her well-chosen title, A individuality-save tive, sense. ~. Feeling for the Organism. The ex- mutants that can then be cloned by the be readily Nothing could be more inappropriate perimental sciences (like molecular biolo- billions themselves-can generated.) But McClintock has always than the word "mystic" applied to this gy) generally work in the reductionistic style of reasoning. It is a common proce- mode, trying to establish simple and believed that one must follow the pecudure for some people, though perhaps linear chains of cause and effect: They liarities of individuals, not the mass rare (and certainly not generally appreci- prefer explanations rising from the lowest properties of millions. She is a true ated) in science. It is neither mystical level of molecules and their¡ physico- taxonomic biologist, a naturalist not a nor, in another vulgar misrepresentation, chemical properties. To reach this mystic, working in a field unfamiliar with feminine as opposed to masculine in "basic" level, they work with the simplest (and often alienated from) this approach. I see a happy lesson in McClintock's character. We dub it mysterious because organisms and try consciously to avoid we have neither good words nor concepts the individuality of any particular crea- story and in the triumph of her unconvenin our largely linear language to express ture. They concentrate instead on the tional style. She chose to work as a such a modality. I am particularly sensi- repeatable properties of large groups (so naturalist with a complex organism that tive to its denigration because it happens that a clone of bacteria becomes the most colleagues wouldn't touch. With to be my own style of working. (I am analogue of a population of atoms with maize, she could study basic problems that bacteria do not well exemplify-genetic hopeless at deductive sequencing and can no individuality by definition). regulation of timing in growth and mornever work out the simplest Agatha This style has had remarkable triumphs Christie or Sherlock Holmes plot-the in the history of biology, though I believe phogenesis, for example. But when she best stereotypical representations of this that it has now reached definite limits in made her unanticipated and greatest disconventional mode. I never scored partic- the attempt to understand genetic sys- covery of transposable elements, conularly well on so-called objective tests of tems and their complex interactions with firmation and generalization required intelligence because they stress logical the developing form of organisms. It the different procedures of reductionistic molecular genetics. Biology is a unity, and reasoning and do not capture this style of must also be admitted that, although simultaneous integration of many pieces McClintock first found transposable ele- we will not solve Aristotle's dilemma of into single structures. The difference, of ments with her different manner of work- morphogenesis, the origin and developcourse, between McClintock and me is ing, the discovery that proved her right ment of organic form, until we marry that she is a genius who can depend upon and elevated her to heights of peer and the distinctive styles of natural history and reductionistic experiment. Barbara integrative insight for the solution to public recognition came from molecular McClintock, with her "feeling for the major scientific problems; I can only be biologists working with simple unicellular organism" and her uncanny ability to sure that the "correct" outline for an organisms as physical objects. article will eventually come to me in McClintock's style is not uncommon; it perform the most rigorous and elegant just isn't widely used in her own subfield experiments, points the way better than toto. ) any other scientist I know. 0 I think that the best description of this of biology. It is, in fact, the procedure
Darwin's Direct Descendant organism on which to base a study of phenomenon. Humans and chimpanzees, evolution; the specimens are too few, too for example, are remarkably similar in large to fit in the lab and they can't be their genetic compositions-so much so bred. He has embraced instead the land that Goulcl believes it might be possible snail, a far more practical animal, and for the two species to hybridize in what one that is not without interest in its own he calls "the most potentially interesting right. Gould is most interested in the and ethically unacceptable experiment I genus Cerion, which since its first descrip- can imagine." To turn a chimpanzee into tion by Linnaeus in the 18th century has a person, a small number of genetic been divided into 600 different species, changes, slowing down the rate of debased on a baffling diversity of size, velopment to retain some juvenile feashape, color and shell texture. The divi- tures, may be all that's needed. sions were made by 19th-century natural.' The correlation between the growth of ists who cruised among the Bahamas as various parts of an¡ animal-the field the guests of rich yachtsmen and col- known as allometry-has long been one lected snails at each beach; if they had of Gould's main interests. Snails are extroubled to walk between the beaches, as cellent animals on which to study Gould has done, they would have found allometry, since they preserve a record of the hybrid zones that link many of the growth from birth. But they lack seemingly separate colonies. What drama-compared, say, to the Irish elk, appeared to' be separate species are in a fossil deer that stood higher than a man fact no more different than Eskimos and and swung 40-kilogram antlers that were Tatars. About twice every year for the ...--------------------, past decade, Gould and Woodruff have Some excerpts from Gould's writings visited the islands, and are well along in We are inextricably part of nature, but the task of reclassifying Cerion into fewer human uniqueness is not negated therethan 20 legitimate species, demolishing by. "Nothing but" an animal is as fallaalong the way 2,000 pages of taxonomy. cious a statement as "created in God's They hope to identify the boundary own image." It is not mere hubris to between two neighboring species: the argue that Homo sapiens is special in cylindrical, brown-striped C. glans, and some sense-for each species is unique in the conical, aU-white C. agassizi. On a its own way; shall we judge among the recent trip, working very close to clear dance of the bees, the song of the humpglans territory, Gould picked up an back whale, and human intelligence? almost perfect agassizi. "This is technical(The Mismeasure of Man) ly known as an anomaly," Woodruff explained. "In an earlier age, it would have Life is a series of trades. We have lost been dealt with by tossing it as far into the the comfort of [naturalist Louis]. Agaswoods as possible." siz's belief that a superior intelligence Gould picked up a specimen from the directly regulates every step of life's hishybrid zone. "See that purple on the top tory according to a plan that places us of the shell?" he mused. "You see that above all other creatures .... We have sometimes after an injury. It makes sense found a message in the animals and plants if you think of hybridization as a form of of the Galapagos, and all other places, injury ... it discombobulates the develop- that enables us to appreciate them, not as mental system." At the end of the day, disconnected bits of wonder, but as inteGould was well satisfied. "We made a grated products of a satisfactory and major discovery today. There's no way it general theory of life's history. That, to will interest more than eight people in the me at least, is a good trade. ("Agassiz in the world, but those eight people really care." Galapagos" in Natural History, December 1981) Gould's work is aimed at isolating, The average species of fossil invertefrom the welter of varying shapes and sizes of snails, a few basic mathematical brate lives five to ten million years. .. , Vertebrate species tend to live for principles which underlie the construcshorter times. If we are still here to tion of all of them. One reason for suspecting that such principles exist is that witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, Woodruff has shown that no matter how then we will have achieved something so different their shells look, the genetic unprecedented in the history of life that makeup of cerions varies little. So we should be willing to sing our swan perhaps just a few master, or "regulasong with joy-sic transit gloria mundi tory ," genes controlling the rate of growth [thus passes the glory of the world]. are responsible for different shells. (The Panda's Thumb) Biologists believe this is a common 1.--'
about 3.5 meters across, a formidable organ of dominance. For one of his more memorable essays, Gould set out to measure the skeleton of every Irish elk he could find in the museums and discovered that allometric principles operated even on such grand excrescences: a simple formula related the size of the antlers to the size of the deer that bore them. Gould considers this one of the most important and powerful of evolutionary principles, because it frees scientists from the need to explain all the parts of an animal in terms of their evolutionary usefulness. If the growth of different parts is linked, then much of what we see in an organism may be just an accidental consequence of something else more important. The principle is as obvious as your big toe, which appears to have developed as it did for no better reason than to keep up with your thumb. "Repeated parts of the body are not fashioned by the action of individual genes," Gould has written; "there is no gene 'for' your thumb, another for your big toe .... Repeated parts are coordinated in development .... It may be genetically more complex to enlarge a thumb and not to modify a big toe, than to increase both together." This runs counter to the powerful tradition of adaptation in evolutionary thought: the tendency to atomize organisms into separate traits, each with its 'own history and justification. Gould's most recent book, The Mismeasure of Man, is a detailed history of the scientific attempts to rank people by intelligence, all of which, he says, failed as science, and most of which curiously arrived at the conclusion that the topmost rung was occupied by white males of the scientist's own nationality. The book contains an entertaining evocation of an earlier age in which skulls were measured by filling them with mustard seeds, but it is permeated by Gould's implicit assumption that dwelling on the differences between people is an essentially mischievous exercise. If Darwin dealt a blow to the notion . that man was created by divine edict, Gould has upset the marginally comforting image of evolution as a gradual climb up the slope of perfection, at whose crest stands man, We have, instead, a kind of sideways dance in which the last few steps, luckily for us, have been in our direction. We have no way of knowing where it's headed next; all we can say for sure is that it will go on. 0 About the Authors: Jerry Adler and John Carey are on the staff of Newsweekmagazine.
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The Spiritof the Games
1. A moment from the AustralianIndian hockey match which the Australians won 4-2. Although both teams finished with the same number of points in group one, the Australians qualified for the semifinals on a better goal average. 2. Cyclist Alexi Grewal, an American of Indian descent, happily shows off the gold medal he won in the individual190-kilometer road race.
3. U.S. swimmers Carrie Steinseifer (left) and Nancy Hogshead are jubilant after tying in the women's IOO-meter freestyle. Both won gold medals. 4. Anisoara Stanciu of Romania in her winning style that brought her the gold for the long jump. 5. Great Britain's Sebastian Coe (# 359), Spain's Jose Abascal (# 219) and Tanzania's James 19ohe (#823) in close competition during the first heat of the 1,500-meter semifinal run.
The 1984 Summer Olympic Games were truly Los Angeles and athletics at their best. From its Opening Ceremonies in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (which was built for the 1932 Olympics) to its Closing Ceremonies, with Lionel Ritchie singing his hit song, "All Night Long," the 23rd Olympiad was a resounding success. For 16 days the world stopped to watch some 7,000 athletes at their best. Almost six million admission tickets were sold, and more than 2,500 million people around the world watched the spectacle on television and cheered. A new Olympic record was set in international attendance. Twenty-one countries were represented for the first time. The first Olympics to actually make a profit, the Los Angeles Games were privately financed by American and world business enterprises. Athletes from every country performed superbly. Fifteen world records and 71 Olympic records were set in the 220 events. The United States took 83 gold medals and Romania was second with a total of 21 golds. America won a total of 174 medals and West Germany was second with 59. The Games were declared an athletic and artistic success, and scored "a perfect 10" in the words of President Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee. Right: Maria Puica, another fine Romanian athlete, is triumphant in the women's 3,000 meters.
Ideas for Our Times by ALVIN P. SANOFF
In laboratories and even in backyards around the nation, America's "ideas people" are fashioning inventions designed to improve the quality of life. Facing page: Arthur Sable, afree-lance inventor, has some 50 inventions to his credit. Above: Larry Pierce is a backyard tinkerer whose inventions include a heater for bending and manipulating plastics and a system of marking and identifying X-rays. Left: A self-educated physicist who never attended a college, Stanford Ovshinsky made the important discovery of amorphous materials in the 1960s, when most scientists questioned whether these materials even existed.
erica
is losing its creative edge, or so some critics say. But that view would be hotly debated by the peo~ ple who shape the country's technology. In laboratories and workshops across the nation, U.S. scientists are devising the inventions that will define the postindustrial future, just as the electric light bulb, the telephone and the automobile helped mold the Industrial Age. One sign of their success: Patent applications are at an all-time high. Though a growing proportion of applications come from other countries, Melvin Kranzberg, professor of the history of technology at Georgia Tech, says, "U.S. inventiveness and ingenuity have not declined at all." The rise in foreign patents, Kranzberg explains, simply demonstrates that "tech~ nology is a form of knowledge that the United States can't maintain a monopoly on for very long." Nowadays, most American inventors work as part of sophisticated research teams based in laboratories, a far cry from the days when people involved in product development often labored alone in makeshift surroundings. Increasingly, inventors faced with high research costs turn to big business for financial backing. Yet major breakthroughs still come from inventors acting alone. Says patent attorney Michael Ebert, "The American corporate structure is largely dedicated to short-term profits and is wary of taking entrepreneurial risks on untested ideas." A prime example is Chester Carlson, whose invention was turned down by giant businesses that saw no future in his idea. Carlson finally linked up with a small Rochester, New York, company that later grew into one of the nation's major corporations, Xerox, thanks to Carlson's invention of xerography. For every Chester Carlson, there are many other inventors whose devices alter people's lives in significant if less dramatic ways. Here are five who show the great diversity of American inventiveness.
Troubleshooter for Hire When a Golden, Colorado, medicalproducts manufacturer had a problem, he called in Arthur Sable. So did a Denver producer of baby products; a Burlington, Massachusetts, computer-graphics company and a baby-furniture factory in Manhattan.Answering such calls is all in a day's work for Sable, who is a rare breed in the world of science and technology: an inventor for hire. "The satisfaction I get is not necessarily in the quality of technical achievement;"
he says, "but in helping people solve problems that are important to them." A holder of about 50 patents, Sable decided to become a free-lance inventor in 1974 after 25 years as an engineer, manager and entrepreneur. He realized that what he really enjoyed was inventing, not the process of bringing a product to market. So he became an inventor-forhire. It was hard at first, but after 10 years he has enough clients to make a comfortable living. The 59-year-old Sable describes inventing as hard work, not a matter of magic formulas: "When I come up with an innovative or creative solution, it's because I've worked on it a lot, not because somethiQg dawned on me while I was shaving." He has applied his skills to such products as intrusion alarms, watercycling systems and telescopic gunsights. He worries that innovation is being discouraged by American society's increasing tendency to play it safe. "Everyone wants guarantees. I would like to see a return to taking risks."
Winning Over the Skeptics When Stanford Ovshinsky of Troy, Michigan, says that "inventing is not something you do for recognition, because it can take a long time before your idea wins out," he knows what he is talking about. A self-educated physicist who never went to college, Ovshinsky was scoffed at by many scientists in the 1960s when he first presented a radical discovery: amorphous materials in which atoms are not linked together in precise order. He believed that these relatively low-cost materials could be used in everything from energy development to electronics, but some physicists questioned whether the materials even existed. Despite such skepticism, Ovshinsky pushed ahead, and gradually the bulk of the research community agreed he was on solid ground. Today, he holds more than 100 patents and is a member in good standing of the scientific establishment that once snubbed him. Moreover, he -has the unusual distinction of having added a word to the English language. Ovonic, the term he coined to describe the materials, is now listed in Webster's New World Dictionary. The word takes its first two letters from Ovshinsky's last name and its last four from the word electronic. Now 61, Ovshinsky, who was trained as a toolmaker and machinist, recalls that even as a youth, he wanted to create. "Science was exciting; learning was excit-
ing," he says. A voracious reader, he was once warned by a librarian that if he did not slow down, he would end up finishing every book in the library and have nothing left to devour when he grew up. Although Ovshinsky's ideas have been accepted, the firm he and his wife founded in 1960, Energy Conversion Devices, still is seeking commercial success. However, the company now employs more than 300 people in a wide variety of joint ventures with several major corporations. "You can get things done a lot faster if you are financed," he asserts. "Inventors can't operate on a shoestring." Together with Sharp-a Japanese electronic-products maker-and Standard Oil (Ohio), Ovshinsky's firm is mass-producing solar energy cells made of amorphous materials. For now, they are being used in calculators, but Ovshinsky looks forward to a day when solar devices using his materials will power homes and factories at a cost competitive -with conventionally produced electricity. This would free the world from reliance on nonrenewable energy sources such as oil and gas, he maintains. "The future of technological society depends upon removing the constraints imposed by naturally occurring, rare and depletable materials," says Ovshinsky. "New materials have to be created out of the minds of men and women rather than out of the mines and mills that have characterized our society since the Industrial Revolution."
Learning From Failures As a child in Hawaii, Larry Pierce was a tinkerer. He would bicycle to the dump and bring back treasures to tear apart. Today, 41-year-old Pierce is a full-time tinkerer working in a cluster of mobile homes and metal buildings behind his house near downtown Atlanta, Georgia. An antique tractor, a windmill, helicopter and an amusement-park airplane
Left: Raymond Kurzweil (standing) listens to music played by composer Andrew Asch on a digital keyboard invented by Kurzweil. The instrument reproduces 50 musical sounds. Far left: Robert Leininger is proud of devising a way to bind an anticlotting drug to plastic. Before this, use of plastic tubes often led to clotting, endangering the lives of patients.
all rest in his yard. "It gives you a good feeling to have these mechanical things around," he explains. Inventing has been a series of zigs and zags for Pierce. His successes include a' wind deflector for camping vehicles, a heater for bending and manipulating plastics, and a system for marking and identifying X-rays. It took him five years to sell his X-ray clip and four years to land an account for the wind deflector. "We still count deflectors on the interstate highway," says his wife, June. "We love it." Among the failures was a Tube Saucer, a one-person motorized raft with headrest and food-and-beverage case which cost $5,000 to develop and went nowhere. Pierce, who had dropped out of college because he wanted to use his hands as well as his mind, twice became so discouraged that he took out newspaper ads to sell his equipment. "Nobody bought it, so I had to keep at it," he explains. The dominance of a few large companies has created a monolithic structure that makes it difficult for an independent inventor to break through, he contends. To sell today, he says, "you have to have a product twice as good as what's on the market but costs half as much." Nevertheless, he believes even the failures are worth the effort because he ends up learning techniques and concepts that help in developing later inventions. As he surveys today's technological landscape, Pierce sometimes feels he would have been better off in an earlier age: "I think if I had been born at the turn of the century, I would have been in heaven. Whatever you made, the world was waiting for it."
Joining Hands for Progress
all of his 36-year career at BattelleColumbus (Ohio) Laboratories, a leading independent research-and-development group. The 65-year-old chemist finds working with people who bring diverse skills to the task at hand more stimulating and productive than being on his own. "You get the views of a number of people, and the work gets done faster," he says. "I am interested in fields where no one person knows everything." Much of Leininger's research deals with materials that come into contact with blood in the body. He is proud of having worked with a group that devised a way to bind an anticlotting drug to plastic. Before this advance, use of plastic tubes during surgery led to clotting and endangered the lives of patients. Now, plastic shunts and drains are¡ used in surgery with little chance of clotting. "It is nice to think that something you did directly benefits people," Leininger says. Usually, he and his colleagues become involved in a project after an outside firm contracts with Battelle for research. If the research leads to an invention, the end product is turned over to the outside firm. Sometimes Leininger never learns whether an invention is utilized, which can be frustrating: "We get it so far, somebody else takes over, and after that, we don't hear anything." For Leininger, inventing is simple. "You attack the problem logically" until you solve it. Yet, for all of the sophistication of modern science, he admits that inventing sometimes is "a process of trial and error until you find the combination that works." Will he continue inventing after he retires next year? ,IAs long as working in the lab stays interesting," he says, "I will keep doing it."
In Robert Leininger's world, inventing is synonymous with teamwork. Leininger, who holds about a dozen patents, has been part of teams during
About the Author: Alvin P. Sanot! is a senior editor with U.S. News & World Report magazine.
Words, Music-From
Computers
For Raymond Kurzweil, inventing means doing what comes naturally. At age 17 he won a prize at the International Science Fair by devising a computer program that composed music he now dismisses as "second-rate Mozart." He went on to create the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which may be the greatest boon to the blind since the invention of Braille. The machine scans words printed on a page and transforms them into spoken language at the rate of 250 words per minute. Through a special control panel, a blind operator can even command the machine to spell a printed word aloud. Kurzweil also invented a device that enables computers to scan printed matter for specific items or topics and record the contents automatically without anyone's punching a keyboard. Now the 36-year-old graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up with a computerized instrument that reproduces more than four dozen musical sounds, including piano, cello, guitar and percussion. Kurzweil's creations have found their niche in the marketplace. He has done so well that his firm, Kurzweil Comp'uter Products, was sold to the Xerox Corporation in 1980 for $6 million. He reaped substantial profits from the sale and today draws a six-figure salary as part-time chairman. . But success has not dimmed his taste for inventing. "Money to an inventor is like clay to a sculptor," he says. "It's not an end in itself, but a way of translating ideas into reality." His next project is a voice-activated word processor for busy executives. He also hopes to design a device that will allow deaf people to talk on the telephone with the aid of a word processor. "Projects of this magnitude can't be done by one guy hacking away in a basement," says Kurzweil, who employs a team of technical and engineering. advisers and works in a 5-by-6-meter office that overlooks the Charles River in Boston. Kurzweil has little use for inventors who complain that the world won't accept their ideas. Many unsuccessful inventors have not done their homework, he observes, adding, "The world doesn't just want more gadgets; it wants them to 0 fill a need."
On her birth centenary, Eleanor Roosevelt-a President's wife, humanitarian, tireless crusader for human rights, delegate to the United Nations-is still, for many, "The First Lady of the World." ) ELEANO~ ROOSEVELT ZINOABAOj{ With these words the people of India welcomed the widow of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when she arrived in Delhi on February 27, 1952, for a four-week visit. In Bombay, a millhand spread 100 meters of silk on her path as she toured an industrial district. Overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm, Mrs. Roosevelt responded in her simple, unassuming way-head bowed, she joined her hands in the traditional namaste. She was then 67 years old and had been in the public eye for more than 40 years. Influential as the wife of "FDR," the only man ever elected President of the United States four times, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to be a strong force for peace and social justice in her own right during 17 years of public life after FDR's death in April 1945. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born 100 years ago, on October 11, 1884, into a life of inherited wealth and Victorian values, but also one filled with loneliness and personal tragedy. Eleanor's' strikingly beautiful mother made no secret of her dis~ppointment with this solemn, plain-looking daughter and mockingly nicknamed her "Granny." By the age of 10, Eleanor had 'suffered many losses-in 1891 her parents separated; in 1892 her mother died of diphtheria, as did her younger brother Elliott one year later. She was sent to live with her stern grandmother, but dreamed of reunion with her vigorous, affectionate father whom she adored. She was not told that he was an alcoholic considered unfit to raise his children. The visits from her father were Eleanor's happiest times, but these ended with his death in 1894. Not until she went abroad to school did Eleanor find the beginnings of happiness. Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, headmistress of the French school outside London to which Eleanor was sent, was the first to help Eleanor realize the value of her mental abilities and her worth as a human being. It was during these years that the shy, self-conscious Eleanor wrote-perhaps in part to convince herself-"No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face all will be attracted to her, and she will do good to all who come near." Upon her return to New York, Eleanor reluctantly made her New York society debut, convinced that she would be aT! embarrassment to her family with its tradition of beautiful, vivacious debutantes. Despite certain unattractive features, Eleanor had many assets-intelligence, graciousness, the inner strength appreciated by Mlle. Souvestre, and, in appearance, a tall, slender figure and patrician bearing. She never dreamed that her dashing, athletic, handsome cousin Franklin would take an interest in her, but it is to his credit that he recognized Eleanor's qualities and the ways in which they would complement his own. He proposed marriage to the 19-year-old Eleanor-much to his mother's dismay. Eleanor was not the sort of girl the formidable Sara Delano Roosevelt had in mind for her son-perhaps no girl would have been-but Eleanor was determined to earn her mother-in-law's love. After their 1905 wedding-at which Eleanor's uncle,
President Theodore Roosevelt, gave her away-the couple set up housekeeping under the watchful eye and constant interference of Franklin's mother. Franklin and Eleanor's first child, Anna, was born in 1906. Five more children followed during the next 10 years, and one-the first Franklin, Jr.-died in infancy. Eleanor put all of her considerable energy into the responsibilities of motherhood, while Franklin planned his career in politics. In 1911, at the age of 29, Franklin was already a New York state senator, and he served as President Woodrow Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913-1920. FDR was the Democratic Party nominee for Vice President in 1920, running mate to James M. Cox. The Republicans, Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, won the election, but FDR's national reputation was made and his political future seemed assured. By this time Eleanor, too, had reached a turning point-World War I had awakened her to the injustice and misery of the ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
11.
A warm Indian welcome for Mrs. Roosevelt in 1952. 2. Regular radio broadcasts brought Mrs. Roosevelt's message of peace to her many admirers. 3. The Government of India honored her with a commemorative stamp on the 15th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1963. 4. Prime Minister Nehru greets Mrs. Roosevelt in Delhi in February 1952. 5. On the same occasion, she chats with Rajendra Prasad, President of India. 6. Although political foes at first, John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt came to have great respect for each other's moral courage. 7. Making the rounds of military hospitals on the European and South Pacific fronts, during World War II.
Left: Early in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's political career, Mrs. Roosevelt preferred to remain in the background. By the 1950s, however, she had become one of the Democratic Party's most tireless campaigners. Below: President and Mrs. Roosevelt returning to the White House after FDR's third inauguration, January 1941. Within the year, the attack on Pearl Harbor would bring America into World War II.
world, and her discovery of Franklin's infidelity with her friend Lucy Mercer shocked her into a new self-reliance. The marriage was saved, but was never again the same. Tragedy struck once again in 1921 when FDR was crippled by poliomyelitis. Sara Roosevelt was determined to keep Frankiin quietly at home for the rest of his life, but Eleanor knew the idleness would destroy her husband. For the first time, Eleanor firmly opposed her mother-in-law, insisting that Franklin return to public life. With her encouragement, he ran for and won the governorship of New York in 1928. When FDR decided to run for President in 1932, Eleanor was less than enthusiastic about the narrow, ceremonial role of First Lady. She campaigned tirelessly for him, however, and was proud of his decisive victory over the incumbent President, Herbert Hoover. Eleanor Roosevelt changed the role of First Lady nearly as radically as her husband transformed that of President. Her critics considered her a meddler and do-gooder, but millions of Americans saw her as a tireless crusader for human rights. These were bleak times, and FDR's bold program for economic and social recovery-the New Deal-drew Eleanor into a busy life of public service. She lent her talents to reforms in public health, education, civil rights, labor welfare, housing, maternal and child welfare, and aid to the handicapped. She also worked to improve international relations and promote the arts. To further these causes, she traveled thousands of miles, lectured widely, and wrote books, articles and her syndicated newspaper column, "My Day." This daughter of the privileged, protected world of New York society became the champion of the oppressed and powerless. The shy, insecure Eleanor blossomed into an exponent of the finest human qualities-compassion, moral courage, honesty. She had learned, she later wrote, that "no one can make you feel inferior without your consent." She also remarked that women in politics needed "the wisdom of the serpent and the guileless appearance of the dove." As FDR's closest adviser-some called her the "assistant president"-she could use her remarkable energy as the "eyes and ears" of the crippled President. Always modest about her accomplishments, Eleanor Roosevelt believed that her syndicated column, "My Day," was of interest only because she was FOR's wife. When FDR died in the early days of his fourth term, Eleanor told reporters who came to interview her, "The story is over." In fact, she would continue to write, lecture, travel, appear on radio and television, and campaign for the Democratic Party. Her greatest legacy, however, lies in her work at the United Nations. FOR's successor, Harry S. Truman, appointed her a U.S. delegate to the first session of the United Nations. Although inexperienced as a diplomat-and initially unwelcomed by her colleagues on the U.S. delegation-Eleanor 'Roosevelt approached her U.N. duties with her customary dedication, seriousness of purpose and intellectual honesty, and proved to be one of America's ablest and most respected representatives. As chairman of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, she focused all her resources on the formidable task of drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and was finally able to wrest agreement on the concepts of human freedom embodied in the text. The drafting of a declaration in terms acceptable to all was a remarkable achievement. For the first time, representatives from all parts of the world agreed on basic rights belonging to every human being. Although Mrs. Roosevelt downplayed her own role in the process, her successor as chairman, Charles Malik of Lebanon, set the record straight: "I
do not see how without her presence we could have accomplished what we actually did accomplish." Some years later, the first U.N. Human Rights prize was awarded posthumously to Eleanor Roosevelt. At the United Nations Mrs. Roosevelt became troubled by the bitterness of many Near Eastern and Asian countries toward the United States. "They feel," she wrote, "we have overemphasized help to Europe as against help in either Latin America or Asia. In fact, Mr. Bokhari of India told me we were willing to try to save the children of Europe but we did not care whether the children of India died or lived." She suggested to President Truman that he send a goodwill ambassador to these countries to gain "insight to these people and their problems." Truman selected his best goodwill ambassador-Mrs. Roosevelt herself. In early 1952, she set off on her "voyage of discovery" to the Middle East, Pakistan, India and the Far East, recording her impressions first in the "My Day" columns filed during the journey and, later, in her India and the Awakening East. Although her trip to India was not an official visit, she was given the sort of treatment normally reserved for heads of state. With her graciousness and lack of pretension, Mrs. Roosevelt seemed equally at ease in Rashtrapati Bhavan and in tiny mud huts, and she gave her warmth and attention equally to Delhi society and impoverished Harijans. In India she tried her hand at a Gandhian spinning wheel (without much success), and, in Pakistan, taught an American folk dance to delighted teenagers. The three honorary doctorates awarded her by Indian universities were well deserved, but she, typically, believed them to be tributes to her late husband. Her address to the Indian Parliament was simple and warm. She understood, she said, India's desire for nonalignment and distance from its former colonial masters. The United States had had similar needs in its history, she noted. "Your problems are more difficult," she said, "but you are meeting them in the way our people met theirs." The affe<:tion Mrs. Roosevelt felt for India remained strong all her life, and the Indian people returned her love. Former U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, "I was in India when word came of her death. I had the flag at the embassy lowered to half-staff ... it was what the Indians expected. Our loss was equally theirs." At the time of her death in 1962 at age 78, Eleanor Roosevelt was still active-a member of the U.S. delegation to the 15th U.N. General Assembly, honorary chairman of the National Committee of Arts, Letters and Sciences, and chairman of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women. Year after year, she was voted "the most admired woman in America." Although she was the wife of one of the most extraordinary leaders of the 20th century, she is chiefly remembered for her own achievements. She reminded the world that personal integrity, deep compassion, intellectual honesty, and the strength to fight for one's convictions are the stuff of heroines as well as heroesyet she was no saintly goody-goody. She had no patience with fools or hypocrites, and could devastate her opponents with deceptively mild rebukes. She never abandoned her dream of a better world to come. Her work at the United Nations was aimed toward her two most cherished goals-equality and universal peace. Poet Archibald MacLeish said: "She was a 'great lady ... the first lady of the world'-but what the world found in her was a woman-a warm, completely honest, fearless woman who lived a woman's life, accepted a woman's responsibilities, and changed the history of her time." D
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National Treasure Trove by NEMAI SADHAN BOSE
An ancient stone (below) that unlocks the secrets of a Mauryan script; an 11th-century illustrated Buddhist palm-leaf manuscript (left); a portrait of Persian scholar Sir William Jones (above, left); and a library reading room crammed with scholars at work-you'll find them all at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta.
he founding of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784 was a landmark in the cultural history of India. The activities of its founding members, led by Supreme Court Associate Justice Sir William Jones, Governor General Warren Hastings and officials of the East India Company, brought about a widespread revival of interest in Indian culture and traditions. The growing awareness of and curiosity about India's rich heritage played a major role in India's 19th-century cultural renaissance and contributed to the growth of Indian self-confidence and nationalism. In her address inaugurating the Society's bicentenary celebrations this year, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said: "Some institutions reflect history and some contribute to it. The Society has done both. Through its work it revealed India's cultural and intellectual achievements to Europe. When we were enveloped in doubt and difficulty, it let in a ray of light to our people. This meant a rediscovery of our heritage and restored our self-respect. It can be said that the revival of India's spirit originated there." Sir William Jones, who arrived in Calcutta in September 1783, was an accomplished Persian scholar. His translations of Persian poetry and his grammar of the Persian language had earned him an enviable reputation among European scholars, and he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society in London. One of his ambitions had been to know India "better than any other European ever knew it," and soon after his arrival he began searching for others who might be interested in starting an organization to study "the history and antiquities, arts, sciences and literature of Asia." Fortunately for William Jones and for the future growth of Orientalism and Indology there was a group of Europeans in the city who shared his scholarly interest. Responding to his initiative, about 30 of the elite of Calcutta's English society met on January 15, 1784, in the grand jury room of the Supreme Court under the presidency of Chief Justice Robert Chambers. Among them were Mr. Justice Hyde, John Carnac, John Shore, Charles Wilkins, Francis Gladwin and Jonathan Duncan. They resolved to form an Asiatic Society, and Jones appealed to them to devote their leisure hours to the study of Asia, "the nurse of science, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious action, fertile in the production of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs and languages, as well as in the features and complexions of men." The scope of investigation to be undertaken by the Society was to be "Man and Nature: whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other" within the geographical limits of Asia. The major concerns were to be the study of history, science and art. Presidency of the new organization was first offered to the Governor General; when he declined because of pressure of work, Jones was elected president and G.H. Barlow was chosen secretary. This was the first Oriental society in the British Commonwealth. The first in the world was the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap, founded six years earlier in Batavia, but that organization never attracted worldwide attention nor achieved the pre-eminence in its sphere gained by the Asiatic Society. The Bengal group was the parent of all other Asiatic societies, including the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (formed in 1823), which became affiliated with the
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A visitor scrutinizes the Bairat Rock Edict of the Maurya Emperor Asoka (250 B.C.).
Calcutta society in the year 1829. William Jones' pioneering translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala (1789), the Gitagovinda (1789) and the Manusamhita (1794) revealed to the Western world the rich treasure house of Sanskrit literature. These and a series of other scholarly publications over many decades, covering almost every branch of knowledge of the Asiatic world in general and of India in particular, brought about a significant change in the Western attitude toward the Orient and Oriental studies. Two of the greatest discoveries made on the basis of the Society's archaeological researches were the deciphering of the Indian Pali and the Arian Pali alphabets. Members' early studies of Indian antiquities pioneered the reconstruction of Oriental history and culture. Members made many memorable contributions to the reading and translation of ancient inscriptions. During the brief span of five years beginning in 1834, the Society'S secretary, James Prinsep, discovered the value of the alphabet and the language of the pillars and rock inscriptions which had been "the wonder of the learned" and laid the foundation of our knowledge of the ancient Indian language and the development of the art of writing in India. The Asiatic Society also established the fact that no countries except Greece and Rome had made greater contributions to the science of philology. Not limited to the languages of India, its philological researchers also covered China, Armenia, Turkistan and other countries and regions. In 1806 the Society began work on its famous series of publications Bibliotheca Indiatranslations of short works in Sanskrit and other Asiatic languages, and of extracts from and descriptive accounts of books of greater length in those languages. Since the first volume was published in 1847, several hundred valuable texts in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tibetan and other Asian languages have been issued, in both the original language and in translation. Some of the most important books of Hindu astronomy and medicine have been included in the Bibliotheca. In 1805 the Indian Government granted the Asiatic Soci-
ety's application for a plot of land at the intersection of Park Street and Chowringhee Road, and Captain Lock of the Bengal Engineers designed a building to house its activities. Members raised the funds, and builder Jacques Pinchon began construction the same year. Work was completed early in 1808, for a total cost of Rs. 30,000. The architectural style of the building was 18th-century British Colonial. It was a period when British architects in India looked to contemporary England for models to be adapted to local conditions-by adding south-facing wide verandas and providing Venetian blinds for doors and windows to ward off the tropical heat while ensuring ventilation. Compared to other contemporary buildings in Calcutta, the exterior of the Society's headquarters was quite simple. Entry was from the west, and there was no special emphasis on the main entrance. The attractions were inside: the grand staircase and the first-floor central hall. Instead of a veranda, the south side had a long, narrow room adorned by a series of arched openings for doors. In 1814 the Asiatic Society established a museum "for the reception of all articles that might be sent to illustrate Oriental manners and history, or to elucidate the peculiarities of Art and Nature in the East." One of its first important collections was ancient coins. The initial collection was soon enriched by gifts from numerous sources, and in 1859 a major acquisition was made by purchase of "the magnificent and representative collection of Colonel Stacy." The most valuable coins were transferred in 1866 to the Indian Museum, a newly established offspring of the Society. But the remaining collections of gold, silver and copper coins are representative, varied in character and of considerable historical and numismatic significance. A major attraction of the museum is the Bairat Rock Edict of the Maurya Emperor Asoka, dated 250 B.C. This famous edict in Pali is written in the Brahmi script. The museum also has copper plates in Kharosti, Nagari and Bengali scripts. Through the years the museum and the library have received priceless manuscripts, books, journals, archival material and paintings. Every language and every script of India is represented in the hundreds of manuscripts. The books include works in almost all the European languages. Illuminated and illustrated manuscripts of various schools and periods are among the museum's most prized possessions. The earliest palm-leaf manuscript is the Kubjikamatam, a Tantric text on the worship of the goddess Kubjika dated approximately 7th century A.D. The Nilamata-Purana is on Kashmiri paper in Sharda script, the Ganapalka on solapith (Aeschynomene Paludosa) in Bengali script, the Ramayana Manjari on birch bark, Kammava Pahdar on gold-lacquered leaves in Burmese, and Miracles of Jesus on parchment in Armenian script. They are considered unique for their calligraphy, delicacy of line, glowing colors and elegance of composition. Most of the paintings in the collection are portraits. The best known one is by Joshua Reynolds of William Jones as a young student with dark eyes and short brown hair, wearing a red blouse and sitting in a window reading. The Infant Christ and The Crowning of Marie de Medici are by Rubens. Cleopatra by Guido Rene has attracted considerable attention. An Italian art expert declared in 1899 that "in the public and private picture galleries at Rome, no Cleopatra exists equal to the one you have in Calcutta." Many of the paintings were in the collection
of R. Home, a well-known artist who took an active interest in the Asiatic Society, and were donated by his son after his death. In January 1829, at the suggestion of H.H. Wilson, Indians were admitted as members of the Asiatic Society for the first time. The founding members had been mostly British Orientalists, and it was primarily in Europe that their researches created an interest in the culture, ancient knowledge and wisdom of the East. The new members accepted before 1829 were all Europeans. The first Indian members were Prasanna Kumar Tagore, Dwarkanath Tagore, Russamay Dutt and Ram Camul Sen. In December 1832 Raja Radhakanta Deb of Shobhabazar was invited to join. (continued on next page)
Treasuring a Treasure After the years of discouraging struggle to reverse the decline of the Asiatic Society before its bicentenary year rolled around, "there was almost a sense of disbelief when it was announced that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was coming to Calcutta on January 11 to inaugurate the celebrations," says the author of this article, Nemai Sadhan Bose. The opening ceremony at Rabindra Sadan was to be followed by a visit to the Society building, opening of an exhibition of rare manuscripts and other historical objects, and unveiling of a portrait of the late Satyendranath Sen, a former president of the Society and former vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta. Then Mrs. Gandhi was to have lunch at Raj Bhavan with members of the Society's governing council and other dignitaries. "It was unbelievable that she would spend practically a whole day for the Asiatic Society, about whose functions, if not existence, commoners in West Bengal and outside the state knew very little," Bose explained. He then added wryly: "And most of the knowledgeable people had a poor opinion of its present state and prospects for the future. "As was to be expected, the announcement of her plans brought a mad rush for invitations to the inaugural functions. On the day of the ceremony, hundreds of people, including celebrities and higher-ups, were patiently waiting for the doors to open. When the function finally began, in an overflowing and rather mismanaged hall, there sat on the beautifully decorated dais the Prime Minister; the Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, who was also cochairman of the Bicentenary Reception Committee; the chief guest, Sri A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chaudhury, the Minister for Railways; and a number of other Central ministers. Someone whispered, 'It seems that half the Cabinet is attending.' "After Mrs. Gandhi's beautiful and touching speech, there was a big question in everybody's mind: Was she going to make any announcement? She did not disappoint. Toward the end of her speech she said, 'I have decided to declare the Asiatic Society an Institution of National Importance. As you know, the Central government is giving it large grants; if we had more funds ourselves, we would help it more. But this grant does not in any way affect its autonomy. We do not want to interfere with its functions or with its programs.' "The announcement and assurances were received with thunderous, prolonged cheers. There could not be a more auspicious beginning to the third century of the Asiatic Society's glorious history."
In 1833 Ram CamulSen was appointed the first "Native Secretary" of the Society. And in 1885-the year of birth of the Indian National Congress-Rajendralala Mitra was chosen president of the Society, the first Indian to hold the highest office. However, the Society had for some time depended heavily on the cooperation of pundits. The first issue of Asiatick Researches included contributions by Rarillachan Pandit, Radhakanta Sarman and Goverdhan Kaul. Although the influence of the Asiatic Society's work was felt first in Europe, it soon began to have an impact in the United States. Relations between members in Calcutta and American scholars can be traced back to the last decade of the 18th century. The earliest recorded evidence is dated February 25, 1796, when the corresponding secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent a set of its Memoirs to the Asiatic Society (referred to in the record as "a young distant institution"), and requested of President Sir William Jones some information about Jewish Indians and their literature. The letter also expressed interest in acquiring some of the Society'S research publications. In 1835, after numerous exchanges of documents and research reports, an American professor, Issac Lea of Philadelphia, was elected an honorary member of the Asiatic Society. Benjamin Franklin, who was a friend and correspondent of Sir William's, had exchanged views on the purposes and organization of such a society from his experience in developing the American Philosophical Society. During the 19th century, American scholars Henry Princeton (1848), W.O. Whitney (1883) and C.R. Lanmann (1896) were elected honorary members of the Asiatic Society. The 20thcentury list includes Albert Einstein and H.F. Osborn. The proceedings of the Society also mention contacts witjl many American institutions, including Harvard University and its Medical School, the American Oriental Society, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and a number of educational foundations interested in the preservation of rare books and manuscripts. Arrangements for exchange of publications with most of these organizations are still in effect. In its early days the Asiatic Society depended for support on the enthusiasm and voluntary contributions of its members and friends. The process of institutionalization took quite some time. The adoption of a rigid constitution and of compulsory regular subscriptions smoothed the path for subsequent growth. Its achievements in various fields came to be recognized throughout the world as stupendous. The high standard of scholarship displayed in its deliberations and publications drew the respectful attention of scholars everywhere. Its development and its contributions were inseparably interwoven with the history of India's intellectual and cultural renaissance. Its glorious history and accomplishments were a source of national pride. But with the advancement ot-knowledge in the 20th century and the establishment of institutions for the promotion of special branches of arts and sciences-some sponsored and nurtured and all encouraged by the Society-the Asiatic Society itself gradually lost its unique position. Orientalism also lost much of its earlier glamour, utility and scholarly attention. Newer fields of study attracted the enthusiasm and the funding. In the course of time the cumulative effect of all this became
glaringly evident. The Society'S library and museum suffered from shortage of space, lack of funds and even callous neglect. Manuscripts, rare books and journals, paintings and archival material were not properly preserved. The lack of modern facilities and equipment exacerbated the situation and it eventually became alarming. The Journal and other publications came out irregularly and lost much of their traditional exacting standard of scholarship. The old building was urgently in need of repair and renovation. The ceaseless quest for more space to accommodate books, manuscripts and donations to the collections led to pulling down parts of the building for senseless new constructions, ruining its architectural style and character. Worse yet, some of these were rented out, to help with maintenance costs. However, there was still no money for even essential repairs. The amount needed to maintain the Society's buildings and activities grew so far beyond budgetary realities that the Society, on the verge of its bicentenary, seemed to be a dying institution. There was nationwide concern about its future. When officials in desperation began to talk of demolishing the old building, the Ford Foundation came forward to offer assistance. The Ford Foundation commissioned a study of the possibility of restoration, with detailed estimates ofthe cost of the work that would be required. The report says that restoration according to generally accepted norms of historic preservation would cost Rs. 1 million. Now, with confidence that the old headquarters will regain some of its former grandeur, a dedicated team spirit on the part of the Society's governing council, enthusiastic support from the membership, recognition ofthe Asiatic Society as an "Institution of National Importance," and liberal financial assistance from the government, the dynamic young general secretary of the council, Dr. Chandan Roychaudhuri, visualizes a bright future. The Government of India is sponsoring an ambitious development project involving estimated expenses of Rs. 20 million, including construction of a Bicentenary Block for which Mrs. Gandhi laid the foundation stone. Dr. Roychaudhuri ventured to take responsibility for the Society at a time when no seasoned scholar of long experience was willing to be the executive head. Thanks to the courage, energy and leadership ability of this young medical man, helped by a council with an effective blend of youth and experience, the sick institution has been revived. The new head, who was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Asiatic Society last month, is a professor of physiology at the Postgraduate College of Medicine of the University of Calcutta, and a member of the university Senate. Much remains to be retrieved, restored and rejuvenated. The objectives and activities of the Society must be reviewed and readjusted to the needs of the changing times. New frontiers of knowledge are open to exploration, and some of the former areas of study may have to give way. The efforts of the Asiatic Society to regain its rightful position as a vital institution in the forefront of the arts and sciences, not only nationally but internationally, will be watched with interest and hope by its admirers and well-wishers around the world. 0 About the Author: Nemai Sadhan Bose is a professor of history at Jadavpur University, Calcutta.
eorgia O'Keeffe locked glances with Louise Nevelson. The two of them seemed imported from some ancient myth, warring goddesses simultaneously majestic and peevish. Martha Graham's expression, as she stared straight ahead, was an echo of the terror-stricken creature of Munch's The Scream. Willem de Kooning, distraught and vulnerable, seemed to long for a soothing hand, whereas Virgil Thomson, stately and plump beside his piano, was a figure untroubled by torments. Picasso was there. And Marcel Duchamp. The mandarins, sculptured portraits all, were gathered at the Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan, New York City, in the spring of 1981. They were the latest subjects of scrutiny by Marisol, the Venezuelan-American sculptor who did much to enliven the New York art scene just as it was turning Pop. The pieces on view were done in homage, but they were oddly unsettling paeans, too, studded with cautionary observations on the price paid for a seat in the cultural pantheon. The weather-beaten wood she used, lovingly blasted, scarred and chipped, was the ideal material for suggesting the contrast between emotional vitality and the physical frailty of old age. Not that Marisol, an acknowledged whiz at satire and whimsy, has grown solemn or unsmiling. Visitors to the gallery could hardly decide what to admire most-the tender carving, the variety of textures, the blend of poignancy and charm, the incisiveness of character unsparingly caught to the life, or the adroitness with which the artist invigorated the supposedly moribund tradition of portrait sculpture without skidding into hagiography or camp mannerism. Here was sculpture that made everyone want to come back for more. Yet few people could fail to notice that something had decidedly changed. Instead of offering sly generalized criticism of the rituals of American social and political life as she had before, Marisol focused on more pointedly personal ruminations in delineating beings she views as mentors and beacons. Marisol says she was moved to sculpt her artists because they are the people
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she reveres, and leaves it at that. But the questions of maturity, achievement and esteem, whether or not they were raised consciously, are not idle or extraneous to Marisol's preoccupations. For one thing, identity has long been a favorite theme of hers. For another, the 1981 show, in which she also exhibited a memorable interpretation of Leonardo's The Virgin and Child With St. Anne, took her five years to compile and was an event of some moment. It signaled a public reemergence after some fairly quiet years, in which she seemed to stand on the artistic sidelines. And, for this observer at least, the new series of portraits appeared when Marisol could have found herself in the disorienting-or liberating-predicament not uncommon to artists who experience substantial success in their youth. Her early career, though not without its fluctuations and reversals, was a relatively straightforward trajectory of study, apprenticeship, invention, attention and fruition in a development in tune with the prevailing stylistic impulses of the time. Now, although she is creating some of her strongest, most self-willed images, her individual style no longer meshes with what is au courant, and the fashion inevitably moves on. To see how she was resolving these and other practical problems of life, I paid a visit to Marisol not long ago. With her dark, shoulder-length hair barely touched with gray, her large, inquisitive eyes, her energetic stride, and her trim, hardy physique zipped into a white cotton jumpsuit, it is hard to believe that this woman is 54. Her severe, linear beauty has always caused heads to turn, but maturity has actually enhanced the distinction of her face. Marisol's conversation is not what you would call irrepressible, but neither is she, as has been alleged rather unfairly, "a sphinx without a riddle." Marisollives in a loft in lower Manhattan, in an industrial district close by the Hudson River not yet overrun by PostModernist restaurants and New Wave clothing stores. The central space is given over to a srtJdio that looks like a carpentry shop. Marisol Escobar was born in Paris 011
May 22, 1930, and raised there and in Caracas. Her parents were well-off Venezuelans who traveled and socialized extensively, and she and her brother, now an economist, were uprooted many times. When Marisol was 11 her mother died, and the little girl was placed in a succession of schools, eventually in Long Island and then Los Angeles. According to a 1975 interview in People magazine, she was a confused teenager. She disapproved of the "wild parties" her parents threw, refused to talk because she "didn't want to sound the way other people did," and had visions of becoming a saint, reminiscing, "I started walking on my knees until they bled, and I tied ropes around my waist until they really hurt." That phase lasted about two years, followed by expulsion from high school for being a "bad influence" on the other girls. Nonetheless Marisol discovered she was adept at drawing, kept at it, and confirmed her early desire to be a painter. Her father encouraged her in this and in 1949 she moved to Paris for a year's study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But Marisol preferred New York. She arrived in Manhattan in 1950 and has called it home ever since. After a brief, unsatisfactory stint at the Art Students League, she was advised by a classmate to transfer to Hans Hofmann's legendary school, where pupils learned to paint by dispensing with objects and conventional perspective and concentrating on the "push and pull" of plastic forces. Marisol was an attentive student, but as she later recognized, she could not think about art as an exercise in abstract form, and she did not progress much past imitating her teacher. However, Marisol adds, "Hans Hofmann taught you to be proud. to be an artist, which was especially important in those days when most people thought that was a bad idea. It was important to feel that it was important to be an artist." Hofmann also told her about the Cedar Street Tavern (located on University Place), popularly known as the Cedar Bar, a noisy Greenwich Village hangout where the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Philip Guston (then just emerging as major American painters) would sidle up to the
bar for a beer and an evening of congenial, bibulous argument. Her glamour and nonconformity attracted de Kooning, who befriended her. "De Kooning was my hero-actually, he is still my hero-and I learned a lot from him," Marisol says. Even in a city at home with immigrants and outsiders, Marisol was an unusual presence who radiated elegance and unpredictability. A well-known episode in the Marisol annals is based on an appearance she made on an artists' panel in 1961. All the participants were dressed conventionally except Marisol, who sported a stark-white Japanese-style mask. As the evening wore on and the audience grew rowdier, hecklers yelled, "Take off your mask! Let's see your face!" Marisol carefully untied the strings. She had painted her face as an identical copy of the mask she wore. "What a stunt! ... it brought down the house," reminisced Al Hansen in The New York Times Magazine. Her capacity for the unexpected has become legendary. "One evening Marisol called to tell me she was going off to do a little deepsea diving," recalls her friend and fellow artist William Katz. "She came back a year and a half later, after a detour through Nepal, Tibet and Tahiti." In 1954 things began crystallizing for Marisol, who was tired of brushing away at perfunctory abstract pictures and lounging around the Cedar Bar. She met the painter Alex Katz and sculptor William King, who shared an enthusiasm for the cunningly conceived toys, signs and utensils carved by American folk artists. In particular, Marisol came under the influence of King, who was experimenting with small painted figures and was technically well versed in modeling, carving and joinery. A study of preColumbian artifacts, which she had first seen in 1951, completed her new education. Marisol jettisoned easels and canvases for wood and clay and took the human figure as the center of her art. In 1957 Marisol emerged as a sculptor, participating in group shows on Tenth Street, then the site of galleries that served as incubators for the young avantgarde. She was gouging out frightening
totemic figures and filling boxes originally meant for printers' type with what looked like votive figurines of terra-cotta. Her wit and invention impressed a collectorturned-dealer named Leo Castelli, who had just opened a gallery in his apartment. He offered her a one-woman show, and Marisol soloed there in November, several months before Castelli electrified art audiences by promoting the peculiar productions of two hitherto underground
Born in Venezuela, seasoned in the New York art scene of the 1950s, Marisol has a style all her own. painters, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Marisol was greeted with positive reviews. She was on her way, it seemed. But the image of herself as a popular young comer frightened her. Filled with doubt, Marisol fled to Italy and stayed away for a year. Explaining that difficult interlude, she says: "The beginning of my real development, in my late 20s, started after I spent a year in Rome. There I stayed alone, trying to rid myself of the feeling society had given me. It was a feeling that I had to reject something in order to be a strong person, even to be myself; I was so used to the idea that I would become nothing if I didn't. After a year I rid myself of this idea and, to my amazement, the contrary was true. It opened everything for me. I felt free and generous. I started doing my best work in 1960, after I came back to New York." Castelli, whose status as entrepreneurial standard-bearer of the new and controversial had been ardently reconfirmed by a one-man show he gave to 24-yearold Frank Stella, was living up to expectations by spotlighting and bringing together painters whose notions and priorities revolted the old Cedar Bar
crowd. His new batch of proteges-Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist-specialized in deadpan examinations of mass culture, particularly its manifestations in TV, movies, advertising, comic books and fast food. What incensed the older artists, who treasured the painterly brushstroke and the skill of the hand, was that the newcomers commandeered the blatant features of billboards, trashy book covers and other crude illustrations, and the most garish colors and banal lines of commercial art to deliver their message. The stalwarts of the New York School had struggled long and hard for acclaim; the Pop artists, entertaining and broadly understood, had an instant appeal. The first group constantly measured themselves against the giants of modernism. Whereas they wanted to make art for the ages, Pop Art was, as the critic Lucy Lippard pointed out, "determinedly of the present." The spread of the Pop idiom, aided by a good dose of the antiart ironies of Marcel Duchamp, then living quietly but sociably in the West Village, infused the art community with zest. Marisol responded emphatically with platoons of huge, empty-headed figures, stiff as Egyptian statues and animated by a whiff of Magritte. Symbols of hollowness within marriage and the family unit (especially domestic coziness and child raising), military might, social demeanor and the presentation of the self to the rest of the world, they demonstrated Marisol's uncanny receptiveness to what was going on around her. The torso of each figure was usually a cube or rectangular block of wood. Onto this she typically painted, stenciled, drew and nailed other pieces of wood; as time went on, she added plaster, plastic, metal, fabric and glass to her arsenal. The basic tableau was further augmented by real props, from her own clothing to street finds of toys, furnishings and appliances that acted as a recognizable counterpoint to the fantasy of the figures. The juxtaposition of traditional painterly and sculptural methods with rough carving and battered objects alive with association was strong enough to support the
coexistence of devastating criticism and playful humor. Another device Marisol manipulated to perfection was the introduction of photographs, drawings and plaster casts of her own face and body into her environments. At first she used herself as a model because she did a lot of her work late at night and no one else was available, but quickly enough the potential of studied narcissism for injecting melancholy or enigmatic surrealist notes into her art dawned on her. Illustrations of Marisol on Marisol range from Baby Boy and Baby Girl, in which monstrous toddlers (each more than two meters high) display tiny Marisol dolls, to The Party, her apotheosis of multiple selves. In this room-filling installation there are 15 figures, all bearing Marisol's features, as if their creator were the ultimate assemblage or found object. (Although Marisol's hand exempted no one, a repeated target seemed to be the inanities of women's lives, perhaps an oblique reference to the kind of existence her mother led, but also a sharp insight into an untenable social situation.) Between 1960 and 1964, a succession of single figures and elaborate tableaux poured forth from Marisol's studio, each more surprising than the last. Important exhibitions followed. Most notably, she was invited to be in the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA's) definitive "Art of Assemblage" (1961), which conferred respectability on her technique. She also participated in a show at MOMA in 1963, where she had a traffic-stopping room of her own. Between 1962 and 1964 MOMA, the Whitney Museum and Buffalo's Albright-Knox all acquired pieces for their permanent collections. In time Marisol was taken up by Vogue, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Writers cooed over her looks, her figure, her clothes, the parties she attendedand her silences. It was then that the Marisol myth was given its permanent shape: that ot an enigmatic "Latin Garbo," someone who wouldn't mind being marooned on a desert island with only herself. Marisol regarded her quiet demeanor as a shield, not a weakness. "In those days," she observes, "I didn't want to give statements or interviews. It seemed a good idea to be like that. Now I see I should have said something. It was a mistake." The public obsession with Marisol's
Marisol's arresting figures of the early 1960s, of which the two-meter-high Baby Girl is one, brought her to the attention of collectors. Her enigmatic doll here displays a tiny image of Marisol herself. social life and silence trivia!ized her. Being categorized as a mysteriously unreal creature was, she told art historian Cindy Nemser in 1975, "a way to wipe me out ... in the 1960s the men did not feel threatened by me. They thought I was cute and spooky, but they didn't take my art so seriously. Now, they take my art more seriously, but they don't like me so much." When I asked Marisol how she felt about
those years as a subject of incessant interest, she said, "You get a lot of praise and a lot of resentment at the same time. It's not so difficult to be suc.cessful. What is difficult is to keep it up." The ominous American mood of the late 1960s so disturbed Marisol that she left the country. She did not show in New York between 1967 and 1973. She traveled extensively in t~e Caribbean, South America, India and the Far East. She discovered scuba diving, which led to underwater photography and a series of long, gleaming, weaponlike fish with Marisol faces. A' departure from the rough-hewn, fun-and-games Marisol, the
fish sculptures and the figure and landscape drawings received polite but unenthusiastic reviews. The turning point evidently came in 1976, when she quit using drawings and plaster casts of herself as an element in her sculpture. Marisol explains, "Originally using my face was like a search for the self. I don't have to do that anymore because I know I'll never find it." Clearly she was looking outward for renewal, fastening on monuments of perseverance and stability and launching into her remarkable portrayals of de Kooning, O'Keeffe, Nevelson and their contemporaries. Contemplating this cluster of
As a child, Marisol had visions of becoming a saint. Shown above is her Madonna, Child, St. Anne and St. John. work and other examples of Marisol at her best, it is apparent that this artist's abiding theme is the tensions, dislocations, curiosities and reassurances of family life. The family complex and its extension, the peer group, is Marisol's vehicle for taking our measure. By a fitting irony, Marisol, the stranded adolescent, the shy loner, the purveyor of portable identities, has been singularly equipped to register our victories and failures in forming and maintaining last-
ing attachments. That she celebrates such emotional adventuring as often as she mocks it, that she can gaze upon us with gentle good humor as well as anger¡ or despair, is an index of her deep concern for the gestures and connections of ordinary life. At a time when much of the art in vogue may very well exhaust itself in its quest after high drama, MarisoI's steady seismographic focus seems claim enough on our attention. 0 About the Author: A vis Berman is a New York
City-based writer and critic. She specializes in the v is ual arts.
BRIDGES OF KNOWLEDGE BLUEGRASS BEAT FESTIVAL ATTRACTIONS
A record 338,890 foreign students from around the world enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities during the 1983-84 academic year, according to an annual study conducted by the New York-based Institute of International Education (liE), the largest U.S. nonprofit, voluntary organization in the field of international educational and cultural exchanges. Up 0.6 percent from the previous year, the number of foreign students (which included 30 percent women) comprised almost 3 percent of all students attending American institutes of higher education. The largest group of students, the study notes, came from Taiwan (21,960), followed by Iran (20,360), Nigeria (20,080) and Malaysia (18,150). Other countries with large numbers of students in the United States include Canada (15,150), South Korea (13,860), India (13,730), Venezuela (13,440) and Japan (13,010). As in past years, the sUbjects most preferred by foreign students are engineering (78,160), business management (63,000) and mathematics and computer sciences (30,850). "This is natural. For one thing, the United States is tops in these specialties. Again, a majority of foreign students, who are from developing nations, choose these subjects to be best equipped to carry on the developmental tasks of their countries when they return," says an official of the Institute of International Education.
usiness
America, an official of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has lauded India on )its economic performance in the __ =-" first six months of this year. Writing iri"the August 20 issue of the magazine, Monroe Aderhold said, "Two significant sectors in India's economy-agriculture and petroleum-achieved record levels during the first half of 1984, generating a sense of optimism that pervaded the entire economy." He added, "While uneven growth persists in some sectors, the overall economy is expected to grow at an estimated 7 percent during 1984 and into 1985." Praising India for its successful efforts to narrow its trade deficit from $ 7,400 million to $5,100 million in 1983, the Business America article noted that the trend "is expected to continue because of increased petroleum production." On India's balance of payments, Aderhold cautioned that although in the immediate future the position appears favorable because of continued remittances from Indians living abroad, "problems may start in 1986 due to debtservicing obligations and poor prospects for concessional assistance." About Indo-U.S. collaborations in business, he said that the prospects have brightened in recent years as a result of the Government of India's new policy "to open the economy to more imports of foreign investment." In 1983 the Indian Government approved 673 joint ventures (mostly licensing agreements), compared with only 85 in 1981. "U.S. firms were involved in 135 of them." The scope for further strengthening of business ties is tremendous, according to Aderhold. Among the areas in which the two countries could collaborate to mutual benefit in India are industrial and defense-related products, computerized banking systems, electric power-related equipment, communications, petroleum exploration and production, petrochemical industry, food processing and specialpurpose machine tools. In concluding his article, Aderhold listed steps that the U.S. Department of Commerce is taking to draw the attention of Indian business leaders to American technology. Among the events the department is sponsoring this month are an oil-and-gasfield technology seminar in India and a tour of Indian financial executives to the United States to study electronic banking facilities there. In November it will hold a miningand-extraction-equipment catalog show Ln India.
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n August 30 India's Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited (HDFC) and the U.S. Agency for International Development .~ (USAID) signed a new agreement under which HDFC will be able to borrow $20 million on the U.S. capital market as the first phase of a $60-million program, which has the approval, in principle, of the Government of India as well as the U.S. Government. Under the agreement, signed by U.S. Ambassador Harry G. Barnes, Jr., and HDFC Chairman H.T. Parekh, the U.S. Government will provide a guarantee for HDFC through its Housing Guaranty Program. Earlier, HDFC raised $30 million in the United States under another agreement with USAID. These funds are utilized to finance low-income houses allover India.
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Festival of the United States in India began in January this year. ~ Perhaps its climactic moment came when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, played to appreciative capacity audiences in New Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay last month. "The response of the Indian people has been overwhelming to all the other events that have been presented so far by the Festival," says William Thompson, cultural attache of the American Embassy, New Delhi, anq a member of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, which sponsors and organizes the American festival in India and the Festival of India to be held in the United States next year. The Subcommission is now actively assisting the Festival of India committee headed by Pupul Jayakar. The Subcommission maintains an American secretariat in New York and an Indian secretariat at the Indian Council of Cultural Relations in New Delhi. "Slide lectures by composer Philip Glass and performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in January were big draws," says Thompson. "So were the two exhibits, Modern Artists as Illustrators, from the
Museum of Modern Art in New York (which toured four Indian cities from January to April); and the American Porcelain Exhibition, from the Smithsonian Institution, which opened in Calcutta in August, and will go to Madras (Oct. 15-30) and Bombay (Nov. 9-22)," he adds. (This month the Ambassadors of Opera from New York will perform in five Indian cities-see page 43.) "Some of the Festival events," says Thompson, "will spill over into 1985, and possibly 1986." These include major exhibitions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the University of California in Los Angeles, from the Armand Hammer COllection and an exhibit of the arts and crafts of the Hopi Indians (see SPAN September 1984), which was originally scheduled for late 1984. Later in 1985, there will be a Video Festival by the American Film Institute. The Subcommission is also developing plans to bring at least two major American theater companies to India next year. "Simultaneously there will of course be seminars, workshops and exchange of scholars, artists and writers between the two nations," Thompson says. "These activities are at the core of the Subcommission's charter."
In the world of music where "overnight success" is rare, The Bluegrass Cardinals have been lucky. Since the troupe was formed in 1973, it has played to full galleries in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia, and earned accolades from critics and audiences alike. On an average, the Cardinals give some 200 concerts a year around the world, traveling some 100,000 kilometers in the process. This month, The Bluegrass Cardinals will perform for the first time in India: New Delhi (Oct. 25), Jamshedpur (Oct. 27), Ranchi (Oct. 28), Hyderabad (Oct. 30), Madras (Oct. 31) and Bombay (Nov. 2). Bluegrass music's roots go back to the mid-1940s. On a Saturday night in 1945, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs got together in Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, to combine their talents and form the nucleus of the first band to perform the complex and captivating music that much later came to be called "bluegrass." The music is derived from country ballads-the so-called hillbilly and cowboy music-with an emphasis on skillful playing of stringed instruments and ensemble singing. The band's phenomenal success rests on the group's substantial creative abilities and the excellence and purity of their music. "Their singing is superb and the instrumental work is flawlessly to the point," writes Bluegrass Unlimited magazine. Says The Music Scene magazine of Switzerland, "The Bluegrass Cardinals have made a tremendous career which is almost unparalleled in bluegrass music. Their strength and reputation is built on a unique syncopated three-voice harmony which is incredibly lively." What "impresses most about this band is the sense of integrity they bring to their music," according to Stereo Review. The five-man Bluegrass Cardinals are led by baritone Don Parmley, who also plays the banjo. Parmley's son, David, is the lead singer and accompanies on rhythm guitar. Larry Stephenson plays the mandolin and acoustic guitar, and sings tenor. Mike Hartgrove is the band's fiddler, and sings background in its multiple harmony pieces. Jack Leonard plays the bass and sings tenor.
Professor Maini, an admirer of American ways, takes a nostalgic trip back to the country of his student days and feels that the best method of meeting people and getting to know America is to travel by a Greyhound bus.
Going Grevhound by DARSHAN
SINGH MAINI
One of Professor Maini's companions in the Greyhound bus (above). With Mrs. Maini at the Orlando Walt Disney World (far right). Professors Maini and Daniel Mark Fogel, editor of the Henry James Review, at Louisiana State University (right).
In one of his well-known wisecracks Mark Twain has Pudd'nhead Wilson (one of his alter egos) note in his diary: "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it." To envision for a moment the world today without America defies the imagination. One could paint a fanciful picture, but such an exercise would unquestionably be unsatisfying. It would require a complete rewriting of the history of mankind since the providential "mistake" of the intrepid Christopher Columbus. Melville, I think, came nearest to understanding the visionary aspect of the American "creation," though even he faltered when it came to The Grand Design of Things. So Mark Twain's quip remains a delightful epigram tossed off in the prodigality of his genius, and possibly hides a red herring. As we know, the creator of Huck Finn 'was himself "lighting out" in the territories of the imagination as a compulsive adventurer. And America alone could have appeased his free and foraging spirit on the spree, voyaging down the Mississippi of life! And so, when recently I visited the United States after a lapse of 14 years, I
thought of "doing" at least a part of the Twain territory this time. The South, in any case, had for a long time both perplexed and enticed my imagination, what with the Faulknerian stories of the Southern trauma, of incest and miscegenation, of familial shames and horrors and glories. Also, the call of the Deep South had a strange aura of romance, of song and dance and drama, of purple passion and high love. For my wife, visiting for the first time, it was truly a journey into the American past. Ideally, we should have taken a boat, wherever possible, and floated down through those vast stretches of land and wo.od and water that answer to the exotic names of Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Louisiana, but we had barely three weeks and a few hundred dollars at our disposal. The next best thing was to buy two open, international Greyhound tickets, and leave the rest to our spirit, ingenuity and opportunity. Believe me, there's no better way of exploring America today than the Greyhound coach if you want your ears close to the sounds of people and places.
No wonder Walt Whitman, the poet who best translates the numinous and nervous energies of his countrymen, called one of his great poems "Song of the Open Road," for no other symbol sums up so aptly the roving and freewheeling spirit of the American people. The dream of the road abides in fable and folklore, in song and story. And thus to our Greyhound odyssey. On a sweltering day in early September when New Yorkers are to be found loitering in different stages of undresssome young persons stripped to the barest essentials-we step into the cool luxury of an air-conditioned "Americruiser" that glides out of the mazes of Manhattan tunnels, bridges and traffic lights with the ease and grace of a ballerina. There are no hassles of any kind during checking in or checking out-orderly queues, baggage tags and receipts, punctual departures and arrivals. Everything seems to have been worked out in detail, from the ticketing procedures to the creature comforts within the well-appointed coach. And, I hasten to add, we are not boarding some special coach; each bus is
equipped with plush seats, rest room and Wayside telephone booths, parking other amenities. Only one thing worries us places, cafes, filling stations, motels, etc., somewhat-the question of reservations en keep appearing and dissolving in such an route. Odd as it may sound, there are no orderly manner as to create an illusion of advance bookings, one has to take one's a vast amphitheater. The needle invarichance on a first-come-first-served basis. ably stays steady, never rises past the And believe it or not, the system works, stipulated figure of 90 kilometers per and works beautifully and unfailingly, as hour, and before you wake up from the we were to discover during our journey dream of driving, the next port of call is announced! covering thousands of kilometers. Our first stopover is PhiladelphiaClearly, the majority of today's American population uses swifter and more that historic city which meant so much in convenient modes of travel such as the the making of the American story of freedom and of the American Constituplane, the car and the long-distance American ideals, "Amtrak" train, leaving the bus to those tion. Undoubtedly, who have more time and less money, values and perceptions were brought to more wanderlust and less care. In fact, their highest pitch for the first time on quite often a few seats remain unoccu- this soil. Our host, an Indian associate pied, and people seldom have to wait for professor of English, picks us up, gives us the next , coach. Of course, the frequency a quick spin of the major sights, then of the services and the smoothness of drives us to his home in one of the serene, interstate, intercity connections that re- spruce suburbs some 15 kilometers away. quire transfers contribute not a little to For the next 30 hours or so we savor the country air, saunter at will, visit a daz~ the rhythm and felicity of the Greyhound network. So, once the anxiety about zling shopping mall whose size, opulence getting stranded somewhere is allayed, and decor leave us fairly enchanted even we know that no one really misses the bus though our own purchases do not go in America, unless, of course, he's en- beyond a bauble or two. But the Greyhound ride runs into tangled in a metaphor! unexpected trouble at the very next It's time we turn to the well-groomed Greyhound drivers, whom the company check-in. A young operator in a gruff, prefers to call operators, presumably for husky voice refuses to admit us into "his" reasons of respect and propriety. Nattily coach on the specious plea that my w~fe, turned out in their light-blue shirts, who's doing duty for me in the queue striped ties, dark-blue trousers, peaked while I go to the adjoining kiosk for a cup caps and monograms, most of them in of coffee, doesn't carry the tickets on her their middle or late 40s, they strike one as person. He will not listen to her protests, fine examples of that middle-class Amer- and tries to sound high and mighty when I ica which is forever forming out of its own come back within a space of two or three compulsions. Some of them in their minutes and show him the tickets-a gold-rimmed glasses, with balding pates whole bunch of them covering our entire and bulging middles, could easily pass for . journey. He isn't impressed, and stands his ground. "There are no seats available professors, corporate lawyers or bankers. Like most members of the genteel tribe, on this coach," he announces with an air they seem to have cultivated an air of of finality. Perplexed and dismayed, we quiet dignity and efficiency, and are a felt step out of the queue till I see him presence in the coach without being admitting some last-minute arrivals. He obtrusive in any manner. Their driving sees my hackles rising, and begins to has become an art-no honking horns, wonder if it would not be politic to avoid no shouting or swearing, no argument or a scene. Sullenly, he signals us to step in, bickering. As the elegant operator navi- and we discover that there are still a gates his cruiser over endless distances of couple of vacant seats. An insult, a smooth, silken four-lane roads that seem reprimand, a sour meal, family trouble, to stretch like black ribbons into infinity, an unpleasant memory of a brush with leaving behind those ubiquitous green- one of my compatriots? What's biting the and-white traffic signs and hoardings man, we wonder. Well, it's best to leave every half-kilometer or so, you feel as it at that. For the truth is, this was the though you were flying on the road! only example of its kind, and it does not
affect our image of the Greyhound operator as such. Later, we are to meet more than a score of them, and their unfailing courtesy makes an abiding impression. Washington in mid-September, with its swarming tourists in gay-colored costumes, is a very pretty sight indeed. Again we go the. usual rounds, and see some of the notable national monuments, institutions and art galleries that make this capital city of spaces and noble edifices a unique experience in l'esprit Americain. The city spilling over into the suburbia of neighboring states is an expanding metaphor for the urges and essences that combine to make the American dream of town and country. We are once again cruising southward in a Greyhound coach, toward Drlando, Florida, our next stopover. It's a very very long haul through several states, and we watch the drama of the South come alive as the landscape changes in a slow, almost imperceptible manner. Farmlands and forests flash past, dissolving into tableaus of hamlets and towns. Men and women come and go, talking of bread and beans and beef, not Michelangelo. We are surprised, indeed, at the number of overweight women we meet at every stop. No wonder they have down there a place called Fat City! The Greyhound restaurants and self-service machines on the one hand, and coin-operated TV chairs and electronic games on the other, tempt passengers waiting in the bus stations to a continual spree of spending. No vendors are allowed anywhere near the coach, and if you take some food aboard, the leftovers have to be quietly disposed of when you sight a trash can. Even the night journeys present no problems. The rest rooms with their clean toilets, washbasins, towels and tissues are nearly as good as¡ those on the planes. You may stretch out in the reclining seats and relax, or find a couple of adjoining seats and curl up for the night. If you must smoke, you must retire to the rear seats, please! There's seldom a hitch or a problem. The operators change; the cleaners "do" the toilets and wash the windscreens-all in such a smooth style that there is no fuss, no loss of time. The queenly coach rolls on, hour after hour after hour, as though it were gliding on air. Arriving in Orlando next morning, we
hail a taxi to take us to International Drive where there is a unique conglomeration of hundreds of hotels and motels. We notice with interest .that the taxi displays in big letters SINGH'S CABS, but the driver tells us that this Singh is from the West Indies. So is Ralph Singh, Naipaul's hero in The Mimic Men, I muse. Bless the tribe, you'll meet them in the unlikeliest places on earth! That's the Singh for you! We lose no time, and are soon on our way to what one Florida legislator termed "the sovereign state of Disney" where the dreamer and creator of Walt Disney World was given a free franchise to
Another 18 hQors in a Greyhound coach. We are on our way to New Orleans. We run into all manner of American types-the young lovers necking and petting and kissing continually as though it were their last ride together, the drolls cracking jokes and making jibes, and the peanut crowd munching away to glory! Our Greyhound streaks into New Orleans as the morning sun lights up a vast stretch of the Mississippi River with its spread of cargo vessels, gay sailing boats and quaint schooners redolent of Spanish airs. Inevitably, the imagination conjures up those vistas of the past that invest this city of mixed cultures with poetry on the one hand and with an aura of iniquity and tragedy on the other. Great fortunes, great patrician houses, "In America no one misses marble mausoleums, flowering boulevards-and also slaves and whores and the bus unless he is searing memories. And out of all this entangled in a metaphor." agony and splendor came the sound of music-Jazz, Jazz, Jazz, all the way! New Orleans compels as few other American cities do, compels one to ponder the launch the biggest and the brightest show ironies of history and of fate. We take a five-hour tour, riding into on earth. We are literally lost for a day and a morning in a fairyland of fun and the heart of the city and through its vast frolic, of wonder and enchantment. It's suburbs. The coach operator sings out the all a whirl of screaming roller-coaster names of the famed Creole streets and rides and falls, of dancing dolls and plazas, of cathedrals and colleges and capering guys, of submarine cruises and university campuses, as we make our way rocket flights, of magic carpets and trea- toward the picturesque French Quarter. sure islands, of performing seals and But before we arrive there, we are called whales, not to speak of countless other to attention in front of a stately white inventions and games and gadgets. The mansion. This, ladies and gentlemen, is senses are unable to take in the full the house Hollywood built for its magbeauty and miracle of the place, such num opus, Gone With the Wind, to house being the scale of things and the endless the restless spirit of its great heroine, variety. After God's Creation, Walt Dis- Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett O'Hara-the ney's isn't to be dismissed lightly! A name sets a whole train of images in motion, and the passionate drama of that mortal couldn't have done more. We awoke from our beautiful dream at Southern belle is revived for the nonce, nightfall when we discover that the tour- amidst a tumult of wild thoughts and ist van has dropped us-at the wrong hotel. emotions. Then in a blaze of echoes we There's apparently a mix-up of namesglide past one of the streetcars named Days' Inn or Days' Convention Center, Desire immortalized by Tennessee Wilthere are so many similar names in that liams, past the park commemorating one 13-kilometer strip. But the winsome of the city's greatest sons of yesteryears, young lady at the counter soon dials all Louis Armstrong, the King of Jazz. The French Quarter is still the greatest likely possibilities around, locates our abode for the night, and promptly puts us draw in town. Here's a bit of American into QIe same erring van now summoned soil which is forever Old France: The to our aid without any extra charge. This French Market, Bourbon Street, the is a small gesture in itself, but .it does Vieux Carre with its antique shops and reflect a certain code that makes the colorful cafes, the Pontalba Apartments American hotel industry a pleasure to (still the most expensive residences in , deal with. town with a waiting list extending up to
four years and beyond), Pirates' Alley with its outdoor art galleries, the quaint red brick houses with their Spanish moss and patios-all these sirens waylay visitors, as it were, and exact their tribute. If you are lighter by a few dollars, it's to be expected. You have been inside an antebellum world, and you have seen something of its vanished glory. Baton Rouge-Louisiana's capital-is just two hours away, and the Greyhound discharges us there, timed to the minute. We are picked up by a university colleague, and lodged in an elegant suite in the University Faculty Club. The Louisiana State University campus is one vast sprawl of woods and water, of grounds and parks where the ivy-covered and moss-laden buildings, shining supermarkets and restaurants and theaters bring the old and the new together in a warm embrace. The evening suddenly turns cold and windy, defying the law of nature and the weather forecast, and it gives my wife the excuse to pull out her pashmina shawl which she has been dragging around all these days. Next morning when I deliver a scheduled lecture before the faculty and the graduate students, it gives me a sense of pleasure and pride to find two Indian women scholars among the audience. How vast is the imperium of literature and letters, I muse; how potent its sway! Fancy, a handicapped Chandigarh girl out there meeting bravely "the assault of reality," to use a Jamesian phrase. Which finally brings me to that noted James critic and scholar, Daniel Mark Fogel, and his handsome spouse, and a delightful evening at their suburban home with other Indian guests and the affable De Caros from the literature departmentall enveloped now in a glow of wine, wit and victuals. The return journey to ¡New York is along a different route for the most part. As the faithful Greyhound cruises along the Gulf of Maxico, sunlit beaches and small towns appear and disappear in an unending parade. Big cities, like Montgomery and Atlanta, are traversed as in a dream. And when, 30 hours later, New York lights beckon us into its psychedelic world, we are well past the threshold of 0 surprise. We have arrived. About the Author: Darshan Singh Maini, a Henry James scholar, is a former professor of English at Punjabi University, Patiala.
At the Feet of the Master music. A renaissance of Oriental ideas was sweeping the country. Yoga schools and meditation seminars were springing up in the most conservative towns; karma became a household word and khadi was seen everywhere. In 1966 there In April 1955, at the invitation of was a rumor that Ali Akbar Khan Yehudi Menuhin and the Asia Sociwas teaching somewhere in Califorety of New York, Ustad Ali Akbar nia. We tried to imagine what it Khan made his first visit to America. would be like to study with such a Accompanied by the late Chatur Lal master, to actually learn to play this on tabla, he performed at the rich and exotic music. Two years The author doing riaz on the sarod for his wife, a student later, I met a woman who had twice Museum of Modern Art, appeared on Alistair Cooke's Omnibus- televi- of Chitresh Das who runs a kathak school in California. been to India to study sitar. She confirmed that Ali Akbar Khan was in sion series and recorded a historic ------------------album. This visit marked the beginning of what was to become California and that he had recently founded a college there. in the West an explosion of interest in Indian music and culture. The following year I had a summer job in California so I That year I was in the first grade, just starting to discover the went to San Rafael to finally see the school for myself. It was in varieties of human expression. I could not have begun to a Unitarian church on top of a hill overlooking the city. imagine what impact this event would have on me. Between sessions, students were sitting here and there on the Ten years later I was a teenager of the 1960s-dissatisfied, grass practicing and comparing class notes. I vividly remember rebellious and searching for something I could not name. My the awe I felt as Khansahib drove up; I thought that perhaps tastes were eclectic; my friends and I talked often of travel, here was a guide who could inspire me in my search for deeper wore clothes of other times and places and listened to all types self-aw::'.reness. of music, from classical to jazz to the emotion-filled music of The next year I completed my anthropology studies, and our generation. aithough I had no plans, I felt free, as if my life were just One day my father brought me a record by Ravi Shankar. beginning. I loaded up myoId Volkswagen and set off for One side had the music of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali and California, auspiciously, with a student from India who helped the other had a classical raga. I loved it and began searching for pay for gas. My plan was to see what jobs were available, to more such music. I began to meet other peuple who listened to visit some friends and perhaps learn a bit about Indian music. It Indian music, read Indian philosophy or were learning yoga. is not often in life that the right thing appears in the right place Suddenly it seemed that we had "discovered" Indian music at the right time, but this was one such occasion: When I arrived and culture, and that America would never be the same. I found one friend was out for the day and the other was ill in In my college years at Reed in Portland, Oregon, and the bed. To entertain me, my Indian friend spent the next few University of Wisconsin at Madison I found myself studying hours instructing me how to play his sarod. Although I different belief systems in order to clarify and enhance my own understood next to nothing about the music, there was limited world view. I majored in anthropology, specializing in something that resonated deeply within me. Wpen I discovered Eastern religions. My friends and I sat crosslegged on the floor, that Khansahib was willing to teach anyone seriously interested burned incense, made curries and listened to Indian classical in learning, I immediately purchased a secondhand sarod and
An American disciple of AU Akbar Khan (seen above teaching a master class) describes how he fell under the spell of Indian classical music.
began preparing for my first lesson with him. Three days later I walked into the classroom, eager to learn, yet filled with trepidation about sitting before the great master. There were about 25 students tuning their instruments to the harmonium. One helped with my sarod while I looked around trying to imagine how each person had come to be there. Suddenly the room fell silent and everyone stood as Khansahib entered. He sat down at the harmonium, lit a cigarette and slowly looked aroun~ as we took our seats. For the next 45 minutes he led us through scales and exercises. Then he began composing quietly on the harmonium and singing a gat (composition) in sargam (solfage). The tabla joined, and the second time through a number of people began playing exactly what he was singing while I struggled to find the notes. More and more were playing and soon only a few of us were left staring at our instruments, at a loss for what to play. The lesson went on for two hours. As soon as a majority of the people had learned a line Khansahib taught a new one. At the end, I was completely exhausted but had at least managed to learn the gat. This first class was more than I had bargained for. It was clear this was no idle pastime but an all-or-nothing commitment that required concentration, dedication and long hours of practice. As the instruments were cleaned and packed away, George Ruckert, the academic director of the college and one of Khansahib's first American students, announced he would be teaching a review class the next day. For me (and I think for the majority of the new students) it was this class that would explain the complex rules of this musical system and unravel the intricacies of Khansahib's music. We learned Bhatkhande's system of musical notation, were taught exercises to develop technique and learned how to practice the difficult music given in each lesson. With these building blocks the classes became less traumatic, but it is Khansahib's teaching style to put the lesson material beyond the reach of the students. This was particularly true when he brought his sarod to class. He would play impossibly complex melodies and ornaments and then take them apart in slow motion, demonstrating repeatedly how to evoke the proper feeling. I despaired of ever learning even the basics of the music and one day confided in an older student. "That's how I felt when I started," he said, "and in a different way I still do. That is how Khansahib teaches. It's like the Sufi scatter method where everything is given at once, all levels simultaneously. You feel overwhelmed. But slowly, bit by bit, the pieces fit together and a complete picture emerges. The only problem is, as soon as you think you have it figured out, a new level appears and then a hint of a level beyond that. It never ends." Another friend who was listening added, "It's a bit cruel actually, but learning with Khansahib is like leaping into a fast-flowing river without knowing how to swim. Some sink and disappear almost immediately, others struggle for a while and give up. Some have a knack and manage to pick it up by themselves, but those who do best seem to learn from everyone around them." Thus encouraged, I returned to my practice room and undertook a daily regimen of vocal sargam and sarod exercises. I played until my legs were asleep and my knees ached from sitting crosslegged in the twisted sarod posture so unfamiliar to us chairbound Westerners. Khansahib seemed amused by the efforts of his new students and was always offering us words of encouragement. But I began to notice that the more accomplished a student became, the more was expected of him. Praise was rarely offered, and it seemed the most talented were given the sharpest criticism.
That was in 1971. The Ali Akbar College for Music (AACM) had already been going strong for four years. There were quite a number 'of students who had been studying with Khansahib since 1965 when he first came to America to teach at the American Society of Eastern Arts in Berkeley. The college had just rented a vacant military academy, the most impressive place it had yet occupied. There were two dormitories, many large classrooms and practice rooms, and a kitchen where we cooked for each other and shared our meals. About 150 students were enrolled at that time. They were an international group, including Indians. Some came from families for whom music was a generations-old tradition, from classical to opera to jazz to folk. Some had earned advanced degrees in Western rimsic. Some were professional musicians, and others had never played an instrument before but were drawn to the sound and spirit of this art. There were many like myself who had studied Western classical music as children, had stopped sometime in high school and had later experimented with different types of instruments. The college buzzed with activity almost 24 hours a day, and walking into the building often sounded like walking into an immense beehive. The sounds of sarod, sitar, violin, voice, bansuri (bamboo flute), tabla and kathak-dance bells filled the air. Shankar Ghosh had large classes of tabla students, and when they were not in class they were either practicing wherever they could find space, or standing in groups vigorously exchanging bols and tehais, reciting and drumming on tabletops, stairway banisters, their knees or whatever else was handy. Chitresh Das, the well-known kathak dancer from Calcutta, had 25 students whom he would drill rigorously throughout the day, imparting to them his passion for refinement, speed, strength and stamina. The complex rhythms of the bells and his shouts of .encouragement would echo throughout the building. Through this rich cacophony could be heard the tranquil sound of G.S. Sachdev's flute students practicing their long tones, five to ten breaths per note, striving to perfect their breath control, tone and pitch. There was always something exciting going on at the college. Pandit Ravi Shankar would drop in from time to time to teach a guest class and visit with the students. A feature film, Ali Akbar Khan in America, was made and the whole college was involved. There were regular festivals-from all-night student practice sessions and recitals, to concerts of visiting artists, to Chitresh Das' epic dance-drama productions, to publicity and fundraising functions such as Khansahib's 50th birthday celebration, when the 40-piece college orchestra played one night and he played the next. Those were memorable years. We were riding a ~ave of discovery and inspiration; every lesson opened new vistas of appreciation and understanding. I began to have glimpses of the deeper levels my friend had mentioned. The richness and vastness of the tradition and the mastery of my teacher often overwhelmed me. Here was a highly evolved emotional language, a systematic academic genealogy of ragas and moods and a deeply spiritual yoga of sound. After a few months in the dormitory or "ashram" as we fondly called it, I moved to a large house rented by the AACM. Sixteen students and eight children lived there. The house was filled with music, philosophical discussions and the laughter of children. I practiced in a tiny room under the front stairs where I had to be careful not to bump my head when I stood up. Across the hall were the offices, which also buzzed with activity, from the mundane affairs of any institution to the grandiose dreams and plans for the future. In my newfound state of
excitement I paid little attention to the quiet worried voices I heard at the end of every month. But for the administrators, who were Khansahib's oldest and most trusted students, there were headaches which love of music could not cure. Student tuition was never enough to support the college, and other sources of support were few and difficult to find. It was a constant struggle t<l match our dreams to our pocketbooks. Eventually, the necessity to find more modest and permanent accommodation began a five-year odyssey that displaced the students from our Maihar-like setting of Alauddin Khan's day and led us from a church school to a Girl Scout camp to a castle at a seminary to a suite in a shopping center, sometimes shifting thrice a year. Throughout this time funds were collected toward a permanent home and finally, in 1977, a modest building in San Rafael, California, was purchased. Today it houses the classrooms, the college's Alam Medina recording and production company offices, and the school store, which boasts the largest stock of Indian instruments and discs in the United States. Khansahib continues to teach four nine-week sessions per. year. His eight weekly classes include beginning, intermediate and advanced vocal and instrumental. There is a flute and bowed-instrument class and a class where Khansahib teaches his advanced students privately. (Classes in Hindi, music history, theory and appreciation as well as technique and review classes are taught by the advanced students.) The private lessons are a source of endless conversation and commiseration among students. We never know what to expect; we might be asked to playa fixed composition of our choice, or Khansahib might name a raga and ask us to begin at any stage of the alap, jor or jhala. He might listen, only occasionally correcting mistakes, or he might sing line after line while we try to catch the intricacies of his melodies. Or he might simply say, "Play," and sit back quietly listening, occasionally giving a sharp look at an out-of-raga phrase or a sour note, sighingduring an uninspired passage or, rarely, making a barely perceptible sound of approval. The pressure can be intense and it is a great challenge to be at one's best. Every instrumentalist is required to study vocal music, for it is at the very heart of the tradition. To me it seems it is in these classes that Khansahib teaches us what it means to be a musician in the fullest sense. He gives us a wide range of compositions, from dhrupad to khyal to thumri to bhajan. In each he will sing at length to demonstrate both the ang (style) and the proper creation of the raga mood. When the mood is thick and permeates the room he will often stop and say with a smile, "Okay, now you try." Invariably there is a ripple of Sri Swapan Chaudhury teaching a tabla class at the Ali Akbar College of Music near Los Angeles in California.
nervous laughter while everyone collects himself. Then we go around the room one by one trying to recreate the mood that had been so palpable a moment before. "Sing in tune," Khansahib will say, looking disgusted. Or, "Put some life into your music, you are singing like a dead fish. Try to reach out and touch my heart." He often refers to the deepest aspects of the music not directly, but by metaphor and anecdote. His stories and images are like poetry and give a strong and immediate sense of his intensely spiritual approach to music. He has said, "Each note is like a wild bird. If you give it love, it will come to you and sing, but if you disturb it, in a second it will be gone." There are many humorous moments as well, when he pokes fun at us: "You are playing like cartoon characters," or "Don't make your music like a TV dinner" (prepackaged and tasteless) . Khansahib periodically composes for the school orchestra known as the New Maihar Band, named after the orchestra founded by his father Alauddin Khan in the 1930s. The group has gone through many transformations, from the "everyone can play" 40-piece behemoth of the early days to the compact eight-piece group of today. Swapan Chaudhury is currently our tabla master. Whenever I drop by the school I hear him and his students playing and reciting bois in his classroom. When he emerges at the end of a long day, he gives a tired smile and sighs, "Eight hours of teaching today," and shakes his head. He has many enthusiastic students, some of whom have been )3laying 14 years. Like his predecessors Zakir Hussain, Jnanprakash Ghosh and Shankar Ghosh, he has organized a drum orchestra that performs at many school functions. I look forward to Chaudhury's solos and his programs with Khansahib, and when I work with him in Chitresh Das' concerts I invariably come away feeling enriched and inspired. Although California is halfway round the world from India, we have had continual contact with her greatest musicians. Such renowned artists as Ashish Khan and Dhyanesh Khan, Mahapurush Misra, Indranil Bhattacharya, Prakash Wadera and Lalita Ghosh have been on our staff, and visiting artists such as Ravi Shankar, Vilayet Khan and Imrat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, AlIa Rakha, Bahadur Khan, V.G. Jog, Pandit Jasraj, Laxmi Shankar and Birju Maharaj have performed and taught guest classes. India has made its mark on American culture, and today with films like Gandhi, Heat and Dust, The Far Pavilions, the upcoming Festival of India and the ever-increasing influx of Indian consumer goods, there is greater awareness of her history and culture than ever before. Although the "fads" of Indian music, yoga and meditation have passed, they have left in their wake groups of people who remain deeply involved. Some aspects have found their way into the mainstream of American culture. There are daily yoga programs on television, and meditation and deep relaxation techniques are used in hospitals and businesses. Yet it seems that America's romance with Indian music is over. Today's audience is a small, albeit steadily growing, group of surprisingly knowledgeable enthusiasts accustomed to hearing India's best artists. For the rest, the music remains an incomprehensible "ethnic" art form. This change had a profound effect on the AACM. As my generation drew away from the esoteric pursuits of youth and entered the middle-class mainstream in earnest, we found ourselves increasingly isolated. Each year a number of the "Old Guard" would put aside their instruments and enter businesses and professions that offered financial security and public acceptance. At the same time, the American economy took a
nosedive; the promise of comfortable living and abundant leisure was gone. Many of us were in our 30s, normally the time when jobs are secure and families are established. We were adults, yet musically still teenagers, living week to week from our earnings at odd jobs. I began to ponder these economic realities that hung like a dark cloud over the college. I had learned piano tuning my first year in California and over the years I was gradually able to support myself. Now I began to consider it a profession and devoted time to learning the intricacies of the craft. Although it took time from my practice, I realized that unless I was financially independent I would never be able to continue playing the sarod. I was notalone. A friend also became a piano technician. Others took computer courses or looked for jobs where their Western music skills could support them. Others re-entered university life teaching or doing research. All struggled to keep music a vital part of their lives. However, there was and still is a sizable group of students for whom the pursuit of comfort and security is too great a distraction. They include three-month students and 16-year disciples. A few have a benefactor who sends a small sum every month, others work here and there at odd jobs earning only enough to get by. Some live in small rented rooms while others live and practice in their cars or vans. A few, when money is short, even camp out in the woods. In spite of all these difficulties, of the many hundreds of students who have passed through the college's portals, there remain today more than 35 who have been playing more than 10 years, and five who began at Khansahib's first class in 1965. For those of us who have been studying for some time perhaps the greatest cause of concern today is what our future holds for us as musicians. In an area where India's top artists perform regularly, the opportunities for young artists of any nationality are limited. Although there are many large Indian communities throughout the United States, it seems that only a small minority is interested in classical music. The AACM does have two yearly concert series, one which features the college students, and a larger one where Indian artists predominate but a few students and ensembles are presented. Khansahib On the music school campus young people enjoy an introduction to the intricacies of Indian music.
occasionally presents his students at home and in India. Another opportunity for performing is provided by Chitresh Das. In his seven years with the AACM and in the years since he founded his own school, he has continually promoted the American students everywhere, including in India. He has given us solo spots in his programs and always uses from one to five musicians (in addition to tabla) in his solo and company performances. In his American programs he often forgoes. the traditional sarangi accompaniment and uses instead small ensembles playing both composed and improvised music. As an accompanist, my favorite part of his performance is the gat bhao where he dances a narrative story from Hindu mythology. As he weaves the tale, constantly changing characters in a fluid mime, the music must anticipate and accentuate the moods and movements of the drama. Every performance is different, and improvising in this manner is always inspiring and challenging. In 1981 and 1983 I had the good fortune to go to India and experience its rich and complex world of music. On both visits I spent most of my time in Calcutta, the intense cultural center of eastern India. My first visit lasted three months, during which I was an accompanist for Chitresh Das and his dance company (of which my wife is a member) on their 17-concert tour of north India. I met many musicians and students, and as I got to know them I gained a fuller perspective on my life at the AACM. What struck me were the similarities between Indian students and their American counterparts. We are both forced to make sacrifices for music. Although some students from musical families are supported well into their 30s, most have to work either in their family businesses or at other jobs that contribute to their joint family's income. The Indians are often surprised to hear of the difficulties that face the Americans, because to most Indians America seems to be a country of unlimited wealth. On my second visit I spent seven months in Calcutta studying and practicing, on a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. This was a rare (perhaps once in a lifetime) opportunity to immerse myself completely in my studies, to attend many concerts and to become part of the Indian musIc world. My sittings with Dhyanesh Khan and my daily,practice with tabla helped strengthen the foundation of Khansahib's teachings. Perhaps because I was something of a novelty, people were interested in hearing me play. I accompanied Chitresh Das in some of his Calcutta concerts and was invited to perform in a number of private concerts and for small music circles. It was a welcome change from home, where interest is limited and opportunities to play before an educated audience (aside from my fellow students) rare. Wherever I have gone or played, there is one question I am invariably asked. In India it is, "Why did you choose to learn our music?" In America the quizzical or uncomprehending quer~ is, "But why Indian music?" In answering both Indians and Westerners, I try to share the emotional depth and richness the music has for me, the excitement of a performance and the rare genius of my teacher. The blend of traditional composition and improvisation-where each artist is a composer and each performance is unique-makes this one of the world's most vital and inspired art forms. As I continue to study I find there is more. In Khansahib's words, "The music works like a breath of fresh air to help get rid of craziness and unhappiness. It is one kind of yoga. Real music is not for wealth, not for honors, or even for the joys of the mind, but it is a path for realization and salvation, which purifies your soul and mind and gives you longevity; and this is the way you can reach mukti (liberation) and peace." 0
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
oll"Frc.a: of TWI
P~INClPAL.
"It's one thing for the National Commission to commem on the quality of teaching in our schools. It's another thing for you to stand up and call Mr. Costello a yo-yo."
"No, Daddy didn't see all of the stork .... Just the big bill."
Amidst pomp and pageantry, the Republican national convention renominated the incumbents-President Reagan and Vice President Bush-as the party's standard bearers.
Republicans Seek 'Four On August 23, the Republican Party renominated Ronald Reagan for President and George Bush for Vice President at its national convention in Dallas, Texas. In his acceptance speech, President Reagan said that the choices before the electorate in this year's election are not "just between two personalities, or between two political parties. They are between two different visions of the future, two fundamentally different ways of governing-their [the Democrats'] government of pessimism, fear and limits or ours of hope, confidence and growth." Recalling the state of the economy during the Democratic Administration of President Jimmy Carter, the President said that the country was then in the throes of "double-digit inflation-the worst since World War I" and "the highest interest rates since the Civil War." "But worst of all," he declared, "Americans were losing confidence and optimism about the future .... Our country was in serious trouble abroad. Many of our allies mistrusted us. In the four years before we took office, country after country fell under the Soviet yoke. Since January 20, 1981, not one inch of soil has fallen to the communists. " The President added, "We can all be proud this pessimism is ended. America is coming back and is more confident than ever about the future. Today, of all the major industrial nations of the world, America has the strongest economic growth; one of the lowest inflation rates; the fastest rate of job creation-six-and-a-half million jobs in the last year-and-a-half; a record 600,000 business incorporations in 1981; and the largest increase in
real, after-tax personal income since World War II." The President's 55-minute address, which was repeatedly interrupted by applause and the chants "four more years" and "quest for the best: Reagan '84," spotlighted recurring Republican convention themes of hope, prosperity, peace and faith in a strengthened America. Addressing international issues, President Reagan said, "America is the most peaceful, least warlike nation in modern history. We are a patient and generous people. But for the sake of our freedom and that of others, we cannot permit our reserve to be confused with a lack of resolve. We are not going to betray our friends, reward the enemies of freedom, or permit fear and retreat to become American policies." On nuclear arms, Reagan stressed that America's "greatest challenge of all is to reduce the risk of nuclear war by reducing the levels of nuclear arms," adding, "There are only two nations who by their agreement can rid the world of these doomsday weapons, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. For the sake of our children and the safety of this earth, we ask the Soviets-who have walked out of our negotiations-to join us in ridding the earth of this awful threat." Ronald Reagan, who is bidding for a second four-year term of office, was born February 6, 1911, in the small town of Tampico, near Chicago, Illinois. He got his first taste of politics at Eureka College, when he was elected president of the student body. After graduating in 1932, Reagan found a job as a sports announcer for a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station. In 1937 Warner Brothers film studio offered him' a $200-a-week contract as an actor. He
MoreYears' served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a union, for six one-year terms. In the early Fifties, Reagan found his film career fading, and he became one of the first important movie stars to switch over to television. In 1962 Reagan, who began his political career as a liberal Democrat, switched to the Republican Party. Four years later he ran for Governor of California, and defeated two-term Governor Edmund Brown by almost a million votes. He easily won re-election to a second four-year term in 1970. As Governor,Reagan is best remembered for his sweeping economic reforms in the state. Inheriting a budget deficit of almost $700 million from the preceding administration, the state treasury showed a surplus of $400 million when he left the governorship in 1975. In 1976, Reagan challenged the incumbent President, Gerald Ford, for the Republican presidential nomination, and lost a close, hard-fought contest. Four years later, he defeated a crowded field of aspirants for the Republican nomination (including George Bush, the man he later chose for Vice President), and went on to win election as the 40th President of the United States. Earlier at the convention, George Bush accepted his party's nomination to be Reagan's running mate, pledging his "total dedication and energies to support President Reagan as he leads this nation into four more years of prosperity, opportunity and peace." Criticizing the Democrats as "the tax raisers, the free spenders, the excess regulators, the 'government knows best' handwringers," the Vice President declared, "You've had your chance. Your time has passed." Bush
then enumerated the achievements of the Reagan presidency and said, "Four years ago, we came into office to restore our economy, expand opportunity for all Americans, and secure a lasting peace. Much has been done. Much remains to be done. In 1984 America needs President Reagan in the White House for a second term to finish the job-to keep this country moving forward." On foreign policy, Bush said, "America has regained respect throughout the world ... because President Reagan stood firm in defense of freedom. And because President Reagan has made America stronger, chances for world peace-true, lasting peace-are stronger." Born in Milton, Massachusetts, June 12, 1924, Bush graduated from Philips Academy, Andover. In 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and at 18 became the nation's youngest commissioned navy pilot. He flew combat missions in the Pacific, and at the end of World War II Bush enrolled at Yale University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and captain of the varsity baseball team. After graduation in 1948, he cofounded Zapata Offshore Company in Houston, Texas, which pioneered in experimental offshore drilling equipment. In Houston, Bush became active in Republican politics. In 1966, he became the first Republican to be elected to Congress in Texas since the Civil War. In ] 970 he tried for the U.S. Senate but lost. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1974. Later, President Ford appointed him as the country's ambassador to China, and in 1975 as chief of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1980, Bush fought Ronald Reagan and other Republican aspirants for the presidential nomination, but lost. Later, Reagan chose him as his running mate. At its national convention the Republican Party also adopted a platform-a statement of principles and goals for domestic and foreign policies. On domestic policy, the 78-page document declares: "Our most important economic goal is to expand and continue the economic recovery and move the nation to full employment without inflation. " In its foreign-policy section, the platform reaffirms the party's resolve to seek peace through strength. "We reaffirm the principle that the national security policy of the United States should be based upon a strategy of peace through strength." About the Soviet Union's refusal to return to arms control talks unless America removed the Pershing II and cruise missiles from Europe, the document notes, "Soviet intransigence is designed to force concessions from the United States even before negotiations begin. We will not succumb to this strategy. The Soviet Union will return to the bargaining table only when it recognizes that the United States will not make unilateral concessions to allow the Soviet Union to achieve nuclear superiority. "The Soviet Union, by engaging in a sustained pattern of violations of arms control agreements, has cast severe doubt on its own willingness to negotiate and comply with new agreements in a spirit of good faith. Agreements violated by the Soviet Union include SALT, the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Helsinki Accords and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972. This pattern of Soviet behavior is clearly designed to obtain a' Soviet strategic advantage." 0
Cavelleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni performed by the New York Metropolitan Opera (above); La Boheme by Giacomo Puccini (far left); and a child visits the Witch . after a performance of the children's favorite Hansel and Gretel (left).
the very beginning of this music, excitement and anticipation. The established musical avant-garde of there wasn't any context for it; people weren't sure whether to take it seri- the Sixties, which espoused serial music (a ously or not," says composer Philip composing technique involving rows of Glass."On the first American tour in 1972, we tones) that was atonal and arhythmic, played for very few people, and there was a offered Glass no support or approval. Suplot of dismay on the part of the audience. If port did come, however, from the world of we play in those same cities now, we fill the the visual arts. For a long time Glass' house. We can play now some of the pieces ensemble had to perform almost exclusively that were played then, and the reaction is at galleries, museums and art colleges. As extremely different. Music has changed, and Glass sees it, these institutions, unlike the listeners have changed too. What they are music establishment, had no stake in the willing to listen to has changed. The lan- direction contemporary music might take. Glass continued to compose "this music" guage of this music has become more and slowly gained a reputation in America common." Philip Glass' music has not passively and Europe. His five-hour opera Einstein benefited from changes"in listening habits; it On The Beach, in which only vowel sounds has caused those changes. The past few and numbers were sung, was a large-scale years have brought wide recognition of the popular and critical success in 1976. His strength of his innovative compositions. The ensemble's Carnegie Hall debut in 1978 sold press often refers to his music as "minimal- out. The city of Rotterdam, Holland, comist," but it is not a term that Glass himself missioned another opera from Glass in uses. He simply calls it "this music," and 1979: Satyagraha, based on a portion of sees himself as part of a community of Gandhi's life and sung in Sanskrit. More composers-among them Steve Reich and attention followed, and his third opera, Terry Riley who have been developing a Akhnaton, was produced. Glass' work has new "musical language" since the mid- had an impact on pop music, and rock star Sixties. "We are composers," Glass has David Bowie has acknowledged its influence said, "who are interested in music based on on him. Recently, Glass signed a special repetitive structures and extremely stable, if lifetime contract with CBS Records-one not unchanging, harmonic situations. One that had previously been offered only to of the things which is so noticeable about Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. Philip Glass, now 47 years old, showed this music-and people either like it or hate musical talent as a child and was encouraged it-is that very fundamental musical conto develop it. He has had the sort of training cepts become very important." considered essential for an American comIn Glass' music from the early Seventies, such as Music In 12 Parts, it was not unusual poser: study at a good American school, in for him to base a very long piece on just a his case The Juilliard School in New York City, then to Paris where he studied with few notes of a major scale. The listener's attention was directed to the rhythm and the Nadia Boulanger. This was the path estabfact that layered musical phrases were re- lished by Virgil Thomson and Aaron Coppeated again and again, eventually growing land, and followed by many other composinto new phrases with the simple addition of ers. But Glass always had his ears open. a beat or two.' The changes in the music While a young composition student at Juilhappened slowly. but often the phrases liard, he was listening closely to a kind of involved were full of 16th notes rushing past music that was not taken seriously by at a rapid and unvarying tempo. The instru- some-Jazz. "For me," Glass has said, "Coltrane was mentation for these pieces was also a break the most important musician in jazz. When I with tradition. The Philip Glass Ensemble came to New York he was playing at the was founded in 1968, and is still performing today with very little change in personnel. It Village Vanguard, and I used to go and consists of two electric keyboard players listen to him a lot. This was about 1961. When I heard him, sometimes it sounded as (one of them Glass), three saxophonists, who sometimes double on flute, a female if he was just playing scales. I heard him many times; he made a big impression on singer whose voice functions as another instrument, and a sound engineer. An appa- me. There are some musical impressions rent objective of this instrumentation is to which become almost like musical images. achieve a sound that is very much a blend, in They become landmarks that are part of the world we live in. Harry Partch had that which there are no soloists. This unorthodox ensemble and its new music outraged some effect on me, too, and Berlioz has that effect on me today. These people have become who heard it, induced in others a trancelike or meditative state, while some listeners sat standards of musical language, and in an on the edge of their seats, tense with unconscious way we measure ourselves
A
against that. Though we may not try to sound like them, they become part of the process of recognizing ourselves." Glass' self-recognition did not happen quickly. "I finished Juilliard in 1964 when I was 27," he recalls. "My style then had very much to do with who my teachers had been. I never bought the whole 12-tone bag of tricks, though I wrote some serial pieces so I could learn what it was all about. I was, at that point, basically just a very good student. As a young man I had no clear voice of my own, but I did feel it was only a matter of time before it would emerge. It never worried me much; I felt that when the time came, I would know what I wanted to do. In the meantime, I felt there was a lot of music for me to learn from. So I wrote music like my teachers', and was rewarded with scholarships and grants, and they were very nice to me. I was a good boy." After graduating from Juilliard, Glass was a Ford Foundation composer-inresidence in Pittsburgh public schools for two years before going to Paris. Although by then he had written over 70 pieces, many of which had been published, "Boulanger started me from the very beginning, with basic counterpoint and the first book in harmony-but that's why I went to be tutored by her. "So I found myself in Paris in 1966 starting at the beginning again. I think that being suddenly alone and cut off from my musical community gave me a chance to think about what I wanted to do. At that time Pierre Boulez was running the Domaine Musicale concerts. He was really running new music in Paris with an iron hand. I went to those concerts and found a uniformity to the music that was shocking. There was no interest in range or variety of technique. Mercifully, for many reasons, I was completely outside that scene. But, finding myself outside, the question became: What was I going to do?" Glass took another look at his past work, and while he did, Boulanger was doing the same. "She looked at many samples of my w<?rk over several days without comment," Glass relates. "Then one day she pointed to one measure in one piece and said, 'This was written by a composer.' In a way she was right. There were piles and piles of music, and none of it was really mine." A turning point came when Glass took on a job notating Ravi Shankar's Indian music for French musicians to play on Western instruments. "At that point," explains Glass, "I had never heard Indian music, and it was a total shock. You have to realize that in 1965 or 1966 world music was not the coin-of-the-realm it is today. At
Juilliard we were taught very little about any music that was not from Western culture. We had inherited a colonialist view of music without even realizing it. Ravi Shankar's music probably would have passed by me entirely if I hadn't had the job of notating it-because by notating it, I found out how the music' worked. The job wasn't easy. Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, his tabla player, were helpful in many ways, but one thing they couldn't do was explain the music to a Westerner; they could only tell you how it worked for them. "For example, I notated one piece using bar lines, gave it to the French musicians, they played it, and Alla Rakha shook his head and said, 'No, the accents are wrong.' I tried barring it another way, but he still said the accents were wrong. Finally-and I remember this very clearly-Alla Rakha said, 'All the eighth notes are the same.' For days I couldn't understand what he meant! It was a terrible situation; we were in the recording studio with a deadline. This forced me to address myself to the mechanics of the music. Eventually, I discovered that the music was written in rhythmic cycles that repeated themselves. Only then was I able to notate the music in a way they could approve. "Soon after that I traveled to North Africa, Central Asia and India for six
months. I wanted to see those places and hear the music there. It's only been 18 years since that period, but now it's hard to imagine the musical naivete of myself and many other people at the time. Remember, this was before the Beatles discovered the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and before guitar players routinely took up the sitar." Glass then returned to New York City and found that Ravi Shankar and Alia Rakha were teaching at the community College of New York. "So I studied with them," recalls Glass, "not with the purpose of becoming a performing musician but to learn better how the music worked. It was a technical breakthrough that I wanted to make. The idea of rhythmic structure becoming the unifying principle of a piece was unknown to me until then. During that period I was remaking myself as a musician. It was then that I was able to find a voice which I would say was identifiably mine. I felt, 'This is my music!' And it's a place from which to start." Years before the idea surfaced in music, visual artists had declared the subject of their painting to be the paint itself and the process of painting. "If you ask what a piece of mine is about," offers Glass, "I could say, for example in the case of the 'Spaceship' music from Einstein On The Beach, that it is about a rhythmic expansion of a cadential formula. I think the emotional content of
the music is a result of who (he composer is, not something forced into it. I really am a post-Cage composer. What I understood from John Cage was that a piece of music is completed by the act of listening to it. The interface of the music and the listener is what the emotional content of the music is. In other words, to the old question, 'If a tree falls in the wilderness and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?' The answer is a very emphatic No! We need the listener to complete the piece. But in my pieces a specific emotional content wasn't the object of the piece, it was a by-product of the way I work, a by-product of the person who made the piece." As he has demonstrated in the past, Glass is not afraid to change, and currently he seems to be moving into a new phase. He now sees himself as a composer for the theater. Since 1975 almost every piece he has written is for theatrical rather than concert presentation. He says that none of these pieces are abstract in the way his music used to be. Glass enjoys the process of creating a theatrical work. "Suddenly you're involved with somebody else's creative vision," he has said, "and that's both the drawback and the positive feature at the same time. It's extremely taxing to work that way, and it's (Continued on page 50)
Ambassadors of Opera
Richard Kness
Sherry Zannoth
Joann
Opera, like fine wines, often does not travel well. Not because of cultural differences between nations but because most operas require elaborate sets and costumes and large casts. Convinced that opera should be heard-and that it would be appreciated-all over the world, Joann Grillo and her husband, Richard Kness, found.ed the Ambassadors of Opera and Concert Worldwide, Ltd., and proceeded to present operatic performances from Australia to Norway. Joann Grillo is a mezzo soprano who made her operatic debut in Aida at the age of 19 and three years later became one of the youngest artists to be engaged by New York's Metropolitan Opera. The inspiration to double as an impresario as well as a singer came to her in Korea in 1979, when executives of the Korean Broadcasting Company
invited her to organize a television special in Seoul, featuring singers from the Metropolitan Opera. She responded eagerly to the challenge and found other singers who wanted to broaden opera's international audience. Since then she has arranged small groups of top-notch singers who perform some of the best known arias and scenes in concert with Grillo piano accompaniment. The Ambassadors of Opera will be performing in India this month under the aegis of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture as part of a continuing series of American attractions in India in 1984. The performances will be made possible by grants from Phillip Morris Inc. and Pan Am World Airways. Besides Joann Grillo and Richard Kness, who is a tenor, the Ambassadors' troupe in India will include soprano Sherry Zannoth, tenor Carlos Montane, baritone Theodore Lambrinos and basso Mario Bertolino. Richard Foster is their pianist. The Ambassadors of Opera are scheduled to give concerts in New Delhi, October 3 and 5; Madras, October 8; Bangalore, October 10; Goa, October 12, and in Bombay, October 14.
The Job Is to Pour Out Your Heart I wrote my first poem when I was 9, visiting my grandparents in a rented beach house in La Jolla, California. It was Christmas 1941, and we regularly woke up to the sight of a thousand marines with black grease slicked on their faces storming ashore alongside tanks and jeeps and howitzers from landing barges in front of the house. My mother, the maid and I would carry out a pitcher of coffee and a plate of doughnuts, and about a dozen of the marines nearest us, after a glance at their sergeant, would politely swallow what they could, before heading into the sandy hills-then, within weeks, no doubt, overseas to the horrific casualties of the amphibious campaign. But my poem was about a frog that lived in the brook behind the house, whose man-shape and thin skin in a dangerous, adventurous world had touched my heart in ways a 9-year-old could deal with. John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow became my special heroes a little later, as I decided I wanted to be a writer; and each, I notice now, chose to write a slapstick tour de force about a slaughter of the innocents in which the innocents were frogs. I shared Steinbeck's affection for dogs as well, and Bellow's for lions and bears (brown Smolak, with teeth like date pits, riding the terrifying roller coaster, clasping the teenaged Henderson). Like Henderson the Rain King, I worked in a circus early on, and at times laid my life between the paws of lions in order to learn from them whatever I could. Bears now leave their sign within 30 meters of my house in Vermont, and when I've written about them I've first gone to one of my hunter friends for a chunk of bear meat from his freezer (though I never hunt and am pained by hunting), which I put in a stew pot over a wood fire until the house is full of bear smell, and live on that for the first draft. Though this might not be Bellow's method, a bear which set off on a comparable effort of transubstantiation would probably begin like me. I believe, incidentally, that those of us who care about bears and frogs haven't much time left to write about them, not just bec,!use-among the world's other emergencies-a twilight is settling upon them, but because people are losing their capacity to fathom any form of nature except, in a more immediate sense, their own. We ski or pilot boats and planes, and to reach "deeper" rhythms and ramifications in ourselves seem to prefer sidetracks such as drugs. Even when we speak of a literature which plumbs deep, we tend to mean that it examines narcissism, inertia; reasonless murder and other modern deadnesses or griefs that are as recent as they are "deep." However, very soon, I found the world scarier than I am pleased to admit. Visiting myoid prep school in Massachusetts on the 30th anniversary of my graduation, I didn't tour the wooden dormitories with nostalgia, as I'd expected to, but tiptoed through like Ulysses revisiting Cyclops' cave. Though I'd spoken condescendingly of the school as a place where attendance was taken 17 times a day and where for my bookishness I'd been assigned to a corridor called The Zoo, I'd always claimed to have been happy there. In those years, Steinbeck had been my favorite living writer. At his best he wrote with likable clarity, picturing in shorter works like The Red Pony and Cannery Row boys and men such as I wanted to be. His friendship with the biologist Ed Ricketts, which lay behind the appeal of Cannery Rowand is described directly in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, corresponded to some dream of mine of what friendship between men could be. Reprinted from The New York Times Book Review. Copyright All rights reserved.
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The New York Times Company.
I hoped for a writer-zoologist's career, so Ricketts-living with a series of girlfriends in a laboratory on the oceanfront in Monterey, across the street from a whorehouse whose inhabitants dropped in on him for advice, and half a dozen chummy bums who slept in a row of rusty steam pipes-seemed enviable. A natural man, he sniffed the food on his fork before he ate and yet worked hard, wading in the great tidal pools to collect specimens with a feeling of citizenship in a vaster, time-stunned concord of sea and sky which most writers have never attempted to convey. Steinbeck was the first writer I met. It came about because my "Zoo" roommate had an uncle who was designing the Broadway sets for Steinbeck's ill-fated play Burning Bright and kindly took the two of us to lunch with him at Sardi's. (My friend would have preferred to talk to Thomas Wolfe, but Wolfe was dead.) Steinbeck turned out to be a thick-shouldered man with a becoming ease and modesty. Neither a bully nor a toady to the headwaiter, he was staying at the Biltmore, and, although edgy about his title, the late rewrite job he was attempting and what the critics might say, he had remained enough of a man who cultivated cronies that the night before, he and his secretary had been interrupted by the hotel detective, who'd been tipped off by a prankster that he was entertaining a prostitute. He spoke with choosy fondness of New York City and his miserable first visit, when, fresh from several years of roaming the curriculum at Stanford, he'd worked as a hod carrier on the construction of Madison Square Garden. His upbringing had been middle-class-his father the Treasurer of Monterey County-so, as he glanced at the two of us in our white shirts and ties and sport jackets, such as would pass muster at the door of the dining hall at Deerfield Academy, but obviously wanting the wider experiences he and Wolfe had sought, he may have seen himself 30 years earlier. Thirty years after that lunch, I find my closer friends tend to be women Father than men and that the whores who haunt the waterfront in New York where I winter are mostly transvestites, not ladies of the night. I know Steinbeck sentimentalized his perceptions and couldn't account for the fact that the bouncer in Ed Ricketts' whorehouse killed himself with an icepick, for instance. By long acquaintance with animal lovers and champions of human underdogs, I know, too, that these enthusiasms which Steinbeck and I shared may hide substantial kinks of character (if never so many as those of people who harbor no sympathy at all for animals and underdogs). But Steinbeck's liberal spirit had its roots in a feeling that everybody should have a fair start -a revolutionary, most American perception which has kept his liberalism fresh. Saul Bellow captured my attention in college. It was not that I pored over his novels with an intensity Cervantes and Tolstoy deserved-not that I learned as much of writing about nature from Steinbeck as from Turgenev, or about solitude from Bellow as from Chekhov. But Bellow, who was warier than Steinbeck, yet readier to blurt out every intimacy, who was unable to write well at length about women but appeared to like women better than men, reached me in a way that mattered. It's important to have living models. That Faulkner, an adornment to world literature, ,vas walking about at the same time we were made an enormous difference to writers who started out in the 1950s. People met him on the stairs at Random House and never afterwards could take writing for the movies any more seriously than he did, for example. Though a
A distinguished American essayist comments on his craft. He believes his subject~, animals and persons, are here to thrive, not die.
young American can gawk at Gunter Grass, V.S. Naipaul and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and be astonished at their talent, even in the event that one of them eventually develops into a fiery, tenacious genius on the scale of Faulkner they are not his countrymen. If Bellow was no Faulkner, he excelled at making the most of what he had. Nothing went to waste; and, being a teacher by profession, he was more at ease with cub writers, less intimidating, though less superbly self-possessed, than Faulkner. I never quite considered that he had the intellectual hardware sometimes ascribed to him, but he caught the temper of his time with marvelous particularity. Also, I felt like him when I read him, and, in person, more akin. Twenty years ago he had not flowered into fashionability. One took a little ribbing on the Upper West Side, in Greenwich Village, and from the East Side Paris Review crowd if one did not prefer Mailer to Bellow then. Time magazine regarded him as "a smart Jew," he said, and he sounded as though The New Yorker could have been Heartbreak House for him, as for so many lesser writers, if he had let it be. Though he hadn't cut himself loose from his roots, as Steinbeck did in moving east, Bellow from his citadel in Chicago in 1964 smelled the poisons of New York's literary scene and, more than Californians like Steinbeck and Saroyan, was pained. Like Steinbeck in 1950, Bellow was ambitious to branch out to the theater, and he had written a similarly static play, The Last Analysis, starring Sam Levene-not, as he had hoped, Zero Mostel, who had had the bad taste to strut the boards in a new presentation called Fiddler on the Roof instead. An air of despairpervaded the rehearsals. On the spider-webby stage set, the desperate actors launched their lines as if still trying to understand them. Bellow's Reynard face had lost its shape and grownirregular in coloring. In his posture he resembled a man awaitingan announced pu~ishment. Indeed, on the night after opening night, the Belasco Theater was already one-fourth empty, though some soldiers and sailors had gotten free tickets
and stood about during intermission looking bewildered. But Bellow had just had a splendid pair of front page reviews for Herzog in The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune book sections to comfort him; and when, cublike, I asked which spread he liked best, he shrugged, like the writer I wanted him to be. He inveighed against the "professionalism" of American writing, by which he meant drawing from literary, not street-smart, sources, and he said there was "a line of succession," already fearing that he might become an institution and lose his anonymity, as his friend Arthur Miller had for different reasons after marrying Marilyn Monroe. Gingerly, elusive, with his sharp, shy smile, he said that writers were by nature eccentrics, and to accept that, to be honest with oneself, and then not to worry about one's personal reputation. Like Bellow, I lived as though life were precarious, as if the roof might fall in. I lived as though I didn't entirely know where next week's meals were coming from, and this not only because I admired Joyce Cary's caricature of the artist's life in The Horse's Mouth. My childhood had been teetery, and generally I'd kept a cache of cash around in case I felt a need to hit the road-as would have happened if the threat had been fulfilled that I might be required to put in an extra, postgraduate year at that prep school. With the bad stutter I suffered from, I suspected too that later I would not be able to depend upon the professorships and public-reading income with which other writers supplemented whatever their books earned. Nor did I necessarily expect to sell better than the American writers I admired most-Melville and Thoreau. I had arrived in New York from humble origins. That is, I was a WASP with an Ivy League education and a lawyer for a father at a time (a decade or more after Bellow's debut) when it was important for a young writer in the city to be an "ethnic" whose father was a bartender and to have gone to City College. My prep-school mate John McPhee and college classmate John Updike both needed to write twice as many books twice as well to gather an acclaim at all equivalent to what they would have won much more quickly if they had not been WASPs from the Ivy League. Yet, of course, we'd benefited from our sumptuous educations. I'd enjoyed an uncannily balancing pair of writing teachers-Archibald MacLeish, who taught me how to be usefully sane, and John Berryman, who taught me how to be healthfully crazy. And though my father, lawyerlike, wrote to my first publisher'S lawyer to try to stop my first novel from coming out, earlier he had traveled with me on a privileged vacation to western Canada, where in the mountains I experienced one of those visions of the work one hopes to do for years ahead such as Willa Cather describes in The Professor's House. Young professor St. Peter, "from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset," lay on his back in a little boat skirting the south coast of Spain and saw the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas, "snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz ... and the design of his book unfolded in the air above him," just as did the mountain ranges. Ten years later I returned to Canada to write Notes From the Century Before, my first and favorite travel book. My father grew up in Missouri with a paper route, a neighbor who kept pet coyotes, and the rest of it, working his way east in cattle cars and to Europe on a cattle boat. He was the first person of whom I endlessly asked the question that has been my stock in trade ever since: "What was it like back
then?" Though he became an elegant citizen who seldom wanted to remove his tie even on weekends, he retained that capacity to pile in the car and go and buy a couple of goats, stuff them in the back seat and bring them home, into the house to show me, when I was sick in bed. He gave me my first oysters at the University Club on Fifth Avenue when I was around 7, and I've always liked revisiting it or similar places because of my secret sense of still belonging. The money stopped when I was 21, and for the next 15 years I lived on an average of $3,000 annually; yet these memories of fancy clubs and summer resorts and suburban lawns manicured by gardeners named "Alphonso" or "Brooks" lent me a precious freedom from conflicting ambitions. Fame I did want as a writer, but money beyond financing the necessities meant much less to me. Choosing to be a writer, from my background, had involved surrendering the idea of money to begin with, and, when I saw colleagues standing around shooting their cuffs at publishing parties, yearning for somebody to advance them the wherewithal to buy a house like I'd grown up in, I felt lucky. My father was not a mover and shaker. He considered that a good lawyer never got his name in the papers. If a client ignored his advice arid got into trouble, a gamecock-peacock 'attorney should be hired whose delight it was to wrangle out the matter in front of a judge. He was interested not in power for himself but the smooth exercise of other people's power in an insulated world of adept phone calls and quiet meetings in high-up offices and on the golf course, where the arcane disciplines of the game-better than the pert procedures of a business lunchprevented a prospective partner from concealing the full gamut of emotions beneath the surface of his face. My father taught me, however, to betray less information and fewer opinions than I really had in asking questions and to cut my losses and not argue unduly if I made a mistake in a business arrangement, because most people are a mixed bag of honesty, dishonesty, charity and meanness; they may turn around if they have done you dirt and do you a favor to make up for it. He taught me that the choice of whom to work with, more than the words in a contract, is what lubricates a professional agreement and that the chief considerations may never be stated. All good advice for an interviewer; but, though he knew how to flatter individuals he wanted to talk to, I think he was too innocent to practice the ultimate flattery of putting himself at their mercy, as I have frequently done when far afield. He avoided confrontations but as a lawyer shared the interest lawyers and essayists have in figuring out how to go
against the grain of received opinion and attack "honorable men" occasionally. He would have approved of my going to school to Shakespeare's Antony for the purpose and beginning nearly any early controversial essay with some variety of "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." My first long walks as a boy were with my father on the golf course. If he teed off before the crowd, we might see a fawn and doe, or a mink, mobbed by red-winged blackbirds, crossing the fairway with a nestling in its teeth. I could talk easily to dogs, goats and pet alligators-though not to people-and so to the extent that stuttering directed my course as a writer, the choice for me all along may have been whether to become an essayist or to write about animals. After my first book, a circus novel called Cat Man, was published, several readers asked whether I didn't want to simplify things for myself and capitalize on my rapport with animals by setting out to wind up as Ernest Thompson Seton. Emphatically I didn't. My heroes were literary, and, besides, I wanted to pour my heart out, which Ernest Thompson Seton never had. The work of an essayist is, precisely, to pour out his heart. In fact, I recognized that one couldn't get to be as good a writer by writing about animals: first, because of the limits placed upon what a human being can observe of them; second, because to escape those limits and imagine one's way too deeply into the existence of an animal would remove the very itch that causes people to write books; and, third, because of the limitations inherent in animals. I was impatient, however, and remain so, of being patronized for writing about a primitive, eclipsed world, a child's world of folk figures. Somebody who writes much about animals now must deal with the death of whole constellations of creatures, perhaps half of creation in a lifetime. And thus it turns out that the naturalist's path has converged with the novelist's or essayist's in the great, ungraspable, unspeakable (even fashionable) subject of the death of the earth, which has lately seized so many people's imaginations. Still, I believe that we are here to thrive, not to die, or to "die" prematurely from timidity and discouragement. The evidence is everywhere, in the gaiety and speed of nature during the intense pursuits of getting food and lovemaking, and our own sense of peace and ebullience when we feel attuned to where we are-reaching back again within ourselves for that natural man who smells the food on his fork before he eats. A writer's job is to pour out his heart, and whether his immediate concern is the death of whales and rhinos, or the death of civilization, there will be small chance for him not to. D
crJLeCoumge of crurtles An Essay by Edward Hoagland Turtles are a kind of bird with the governor turned low. With the same attitude of removal, they cock a glance at what is going on, as if they need only to flyaway. Until recently they were also a case of virtue rewarded, at least in the town where I grew up, because, being humble creatures, there were plenty of them. Even when we still had a few bobcats in the woods the local snapping turtles, growing up to forty pounds, were the largest carnivores. You would see them through the amber water, as big as greeny washbasins at the bottom of the pond, until they faded into the inscrutable mud as if
they hadn't existed at all. When I was ten I went to Dr. Green's Pond, a two-acre pond across the road. When I was twelve I walked a mile or so to Taggart's Pond, which was lusher, had big water snakes and a waterfall; and shortly after that I was bicycling way up to the adventuresome vastness of Mud Pond, a lake-sized body of water in the reservoir system of a Connecticut city, possessed of cat-backed little islands and empty shacks and a forest of pines and hardwoods along the shore. Otters, foxes and mink left their prints on the bank; there were pike and perch. As I got older
the estates and forgotten back lots in town were parceled out and sold for nice prices, yet, though the woods had shrunk, it seemed that fewer people walked in the woods. The new residents didn't know how to find them. Eventually, exploring, they did find them, and it required some ingenuity and doubling around on my part to go for eight miles without meeting someone. I was grown by now, I lived in New York, and that's what I wanted on the occasional weekends when I came out. Since Mud Pond contained drinking water I had felt confident nothing untoward would happen there. For a long while the developers stayed away, until the drought of the mid-1960s. This event, squeezing the edges in, convinced the local water company that the pond really wasn't a necessity as a catch basin, however; so they bulldozed a hole in the earthen dam, bulldozed the banks to fill in the bottom, and landscaped the flow of water that remained to wind like an English brook and provide a domestic view for the houses which were planned. Most of the painted turtles of Mud Pond, who had been inaccessible as they sunned on their rocks, wound up in boxes in boys' closets within a matter of days. Their footsteps in the dry leaves gave them away as they wandered forlornly. The snappers and the little musk turtles, neither of whom leave the water except once a year to lay their eggs, dug into the drying mud for another siege of hot weather, which they were accustomed to doing whenever the pond got low. But this time it was low for good; the mud baked over them and slowly entombed them. As for the ducks, I couldn't stroll in the woods and not feel guilty, because they were crouched beside every stagnant pothole, or were slinking between the bushes with their heads tucked into their shoulders so that I wouldn't see them. If they decided I had, they beat their way up through the screen of trees, striking their wings dangerously, and wheeled about with that headlong, magnificent velocity to locate another poor puddle. I used to catch possums and black snakes as well as turtles, and I kept dogs and goats. Some summers I worked in a menagerie with the big personalities of the animal kingdom, like elephants and rhinoceroses. I was twenty before these enthusiasms began to wane, and it was then that I picked turtles as the particular animal I wanted to keep in touch with. I was allergic to fur, for one thing, and turtles need minimal care and not much in the way of quarters. They're personable beasts. They see the same colors we do and they seem to see just as well, as one discovers in trying to sneak up on them. In the laboratory they unravel the twists of a maze with the hotblooded rapidity of a mammal. Though they can't run as fast as a rat, they improve on their errors just as quickly, pausing at each crossroads to look left and right. And they rock rhythmically in place, as we often do, although they are hatched from eggs, not the womb. (A common explanation psychologists give for our pleasure in rocking quietly is that it recapitulates our mother's heartbeat in utero.) Snakes, by contrast, are dryly silent and priapic. They are smooth movers, legalistic, unblinking, and they afford the humor which the humorless do. But they make challenging captives; sometimes they don't eat for months on a point of order-if the light isn't right, for instance. Alligators are sticklers too. They're like war-horses, or German shepherds, and with their bar-shaped, vertical pupils adding emphasis, they have the idee fixe of eating, eating, even when they choose to refuse all food and stubbornly die. They delight in tossing a
salamander up' towards the sky and grabbing him in their long mouths as he comes down. They're so eager that they get the jitters, and they're too much of a proposition for a casual aquarium like mine. Frogs are depressingly defenseless: that moist, extensive back, with the bones almost sticking through. Hold a frog and you're holding its skeleton. Frogs' tasty legs are the staff of life to many animals-herons, raccoons, ribbon snakes-though they themselves are hard to feed. It's not an enviable role to be the staff of life, and after frogs you descend down the evolutionarx ladder a big step to fish. Turtles cough, burp, whistle, grunt and hiss, and produce social judgments. They put their heads together amicably enough, but then one drives the other back with the suddenness of two dogs who have been conversing in tones too low for an onlooker to hear. They pee in fear when they're first caught, but exercise both pluck and optimism in trying to escape, walking for hundreds of yards within the confines of their pen, carrying the weight of that cumbersome box on legs which are cruelly positioned for walking. They don't feel that the contest is unfair; they keep plugging, rolling like sailorly souls-a bobbing, infirm gait, a brave, sea-legged momentum-stopping occasionally to study the lay of the land. For me, anyway, they manage to contain the rest of the animal world. They can stretch out their necks like a giraffe, or 100m underwater like an apocryphal hippo. They browse on lettuce thrown on the water like a cow moose which is partly submerged. They have a penguin's alertness, combined with a build like a Brontosaurus when they rise up on tiptoe. Then they hunch and ponderously lunge like a grizzly going forward. Baby turtles in a turtle bowl are a puzzle in geometrics. They're as decorative as pansy petals, but they are also self-directed building blocks, propping themselves on one another in different arrangements, before upending the tower. The timid individuals turn fearless, or vice versa. If one gets a bit arrogant he will push the others off the rock and afterwards climb down into the water and cling to the back of one of those he has bullied, tickling him with his hind feet until he bucks like a bronco. On the other hand, when this same milder-mannered fellow isn't exerting himself, he will stare right into the face of the sun for hours. What could be more Iionlike? And he's at home in or out of the water and does lots of metaphysical tilting. He sinks and rises, with an infinity of levels to choose from; or, elongating himself, he climbs out on the land again to perambulate, sits boxed in his box, and finally slides back in the water, submerging into dreams. I have five of these babies in a kidney-shaped bowl. The hatchling, who is a painted turtle, is not as large as the top joint of my thumb. He eats chicken gladly. Other foods he will attempt to eat but not with sufficient perseverance to succeed because he's so little. The yellow-bellied terrapin is probably a yearling, and he eats salad voraciously, but no meat, fish or fowl. The Cumberland terrapin won't touch salad or chicken but eats fish and all of the meats except for bacon. The little snapper, with a black crenelated shell, feasts on any kind of meat, but rejects greens and fish. The fifth of the turtles, is African. I acquired him only recently and don't know him well. A mottled brown, he unnerves the green turtles, dragging their food off to his lairs. He doesn't seem to want to be green-he bites the algae off his shell, hanging meanwhile at daring, steep, head-first angles.
Photographs by SAM ABELL
Right: Stimulating
and
Above:
Living
soothing herbs are
counters,
Geiger
the stamen
replacing tea leaves in
hairs of spiderworts
the United States. On a
change from
tray with peppermint
to pink
tea
are (counterclockwise
to radiation
from bottom,
air pollutants.
chamomile,
left):
blue
when exposed and
lemon
eucalyptus, lemongrass
Left: Herbal aromatics,
and a garnish of
like this oil processed
citrus peel.
from clary sage, are fueling
Right, center: Owner of
a burgeoning
fragrance
industry.
Celestial Seasonings in Boulder, Colorado,
Below: Herbalist Joy
Morris Siegel (left) and
Logee
other herb entrepreneurs
explains
the history
are making inroads into
American
herbs,
Martin of
a domain still dominated
going
back to colonial
by caffeine-laden
times,
to a group
black-leaf teas.
Camden,
Left: This potpourri
of
herbs and spices includes (clockwise from top): Orange peel, sweet basil, English lavender, dainty bess rosebuds, lemon verbena, larkspur, bayberry,
vetiver root,
assorted ;osebuds, coriander, sage, bay leaves and juniper.
Maine.
in
erbs are staging a comeback. They have been prized for their flavoring, aromatic and medicinal qualities for centuries, yet for a while t' ey were overshadowed by synthetic dyes, perfumes and chemicals. Now scientists are re-discovering the virtues of herbs. Every age has produced a distinct herbal culture, reflected it in its religious ceremonies, cooking and medication. (In Hindu mythology, Hanuman brought a mountain of medicinal herbs to treat the wounded Lakshman.) And poets and writers have hymned herbs: "Rosemary, that's for remembrance," wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet, referring to the custom of decorating weddings and funerals with the fragrant sprigs of this evergreen symbol of never-fading love. Even today the culinary arts of many societies are based on the judicious use of herbs, which heighten the senses of smell, sight and taste. Since the early 1970s, as science revealed the adverse effects of synthetics on health and the environment, people have shown renewed interest in herbs. "A renaissance is blooming across the United States and around the world," writes Lonnelle Aikman in the National Geographic. "You can sense -and sniff-this back-to-nature trend in health-food stores and supermarket displays. They feature herbs not only for cooking but also for cosmetic use in lotions, lipsticks, shampoos, hair conditioners and similar products that woo buyers with fragrances and promises of everlasting beauty." That's not all. Industrial chemists are turning to herbs as a source of energy. One species of the Euphorbia genus, a weed known as the gopher plant, yields a milky latex full of hydrocarbons that can be
PhilipGlass
refined into substitutes for crude oil' and gasoline. The brown berries of the wild jojoba have become the source of a waxy oil with properties like the costly and rare sperm-whale oil, a prized industrial lubricant. U.S. agricultural scientists hope to develop a new and more potent insecticide from the garlicky seeds of the neem tree, native to India and anathema to bugs. Says Eleanor Gambee, past president of the Herb Society of America, "Researchers report that the insect-repelling extract is nontoxic to warm-blooded animals, and thus an environmentally safe pesticide." In the field of medicine, scientists are using the tools of modern technologysuch as high-resolution chromatography, mass spectrometry, nuclear and magnetic resonances-to identify and quantify the chemical ingredients of various folklore herbs; they seek clues to more effective and safer drugs for the future. In the 1950s, for example, they successfully isolated a minute amount of the cancer-fighting principle from the leaves of the Madagascar periwinkle (catharanthus roseus), which is still one of the most effective treatments against childhood leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. In fact, the history of medicine has paralleled the history of discovering drugs from plants. Morphine was first obtained from opium (papaver somniferum) in the early 19th century. A few years later, quinine was extracted from the cinchona bark (of Peruvian origin). In 1869 digitoxin was discovered as the active principle of the foxglove plant (digitalis purpurea), while digoxin, now more frequently used for congestive heart failure than digitoxin, was discovered in 1930 from digitalis lanta. Dried and powdered, the snakeroot plant
(rauwolfia serpentina) was in use more than 2,000 years ago in India to treat mental disorders and insomnia. Today it is stilI a leading drug to reduce blood pressure. Herbs are also finding increasing use as substitutes for salt and sugar, for sleeping pills and energizing drugs, reports Lonnelle Aikman. "Instead of table salt, some doctors prescribe dried and ground herbs to add interest to food. Combinations may include winter and summer savory, cumin, coriander, sesame and mustard seeds to taste. For patients denied refined sugar, there are alternatives in many kinds of herb honey. Weight watchers can make desserts with herbs such as sweet cicely or licorice. "From time beyond memory, herbal teas have been brewed as sedatives, on the one hand, and to promote alertness on the other. Herbalists consider tea made from valerian root to be one of the best tranquilizers known." Popular fascination with herbs is so great in the United States that big and small herb farms and nurseries are springing up everywhere in the country. One of the most ambitious is the National Herb Garden, dedicated in 1980 at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. "Doctors come here to study drug plants in the medicinal garden, one of our 10 specialty sections," says curator Holly Shimizu. "Historians check herb species in our colonial and American Indian plots. Businessmen inquire about industrial herbs and new perfumes, beverages and dyes to be extracted from still unexplored plants." In the hidden treasures that lie within the herbs, as Aikman says, "Nature speaks to us not only of beauty and history but also 0 of hope and progress."
continuedjrompage43
extremely rewarding. Perhaps it's that double-barreled effect of collaborative work that I find attractive. In theater the music is bent to theatrical needs, while in an abstract piece there are no perimeters of any kind to indicate what the music needs to do." At the planning stage of Glass' new opera Akhnaton, its director was to be Jerome Robbins of the New York City Ballet. Glass admires Robbins' sense of "theatrical time." While reviewing the libretto together, Glass recalls, Robbins told him that what he wanted at a specific point in the piece was a "big scene." "I understood what he meant. His reasoning was that at that point something was required to create the impact we've come to expect from an evening at the theater. This sense of what should be
happening when in the theater is extremely interesting to me." Glass sees himself as learning a new craft, a new vocation. Composing for the theater, Glass says, has brought about changes in his music that he did not anticipate.
There has been a perceptible shift in Glass' music, toward lush orchestral timbres, a greater sense of foreground and background, of soloist with accompaniment, and toward music that does seem, in fact, to evoke particular emotions. The sound of his earlier, more austere music is a powerful influence on young composers throughout the world, but Glass himself is ready to move ahead. "What's interesting about this music is that it continues to enlarge and to change," he has said. "It has turned out to have had greater potential for growth and range than many people anticipated when it 0 began." About the Author: David Garland is a New York City-based composer of songs for voice and electronic instruments.
crJLe Courage of CZUrtles
continued from page 47
The snapper was a Ferdinand until I provided times faster than they. It's like the nightmare him with deeper water. Now he snaps at my most of us have whimpered through, where we pencil with his down turned and fearsome mouth, are weighted down disastrously while trying to his swollen face like a napalm victim's. The flee; fleeing our home ground, we try to run. Cumberland has an elliptical red mark on the side I've seen turtles in still worse straits. On of his green-and-yellow head. He is benign by Broadway, in New York, there is a penny arcade nature and ought to be as elegant as his scientific which used to sell baby terrapins that were name (Pseudemys scripta elegans), except he has 1\'. scrawled with bon mots in enamel paint, such as contracted a disease of the air bladder which has KISS ME BABY. The manager turned out to be a permanently inflated it; he floats high in the water at an wholesaler as well, and once I asked him whether he had any undignified slant and can't go under. There may have been larger turtles to sell. He took me upstairs to a loft room devoted internal bleeding, too, because his carapace is stained along its to the turtle business. There were desks for the paper work and ridge. Unfortunately, like flowers, baby turtles often die. Their a series of racks that held shallow tin bins atop one another, mouths fill up with a white fungus and their lungs with each with several hundred babies crawling around in it. He was pneumonia. Their organs clog up from the rust in the water, or a smudgy-complexioned, serious fellow and he did have a few diet troubles, and, like a dying man's, their eyes and heads adUlt terrapins, but I was going to school and wasn't actually become too prominent. Toward the end, the edge of the shell planning to buy; I'd only wanted to see them. They were aquatic turtles, but here they went without water, presumably becomes flabby as felt and folds around them like a shroud. While they live they're like puppies. Although they're for weeks, lurching about in those dry bins like handicapped vivacious, they would be a bore to be with all the time, so I also citizens, living on gumption. An easel where the artist worked have an adult wood turtle about six inches long. Her shell is the stood in the middle of the floor. She had a palette and a clip equal of any seashell for sculpturing, even a Cellini shell; it's attachment for fastening the babies in place. She wore a smock like an old,. dusty, richly engraved medallion dug out of a and a beret, and was homely, short and eccentric-looking, with hillside. Her legs are salmon-orange bordered with black and funny black hair, like some of the ladies who show their protected by canted, heroic scales. Her plastron-the bottom paintings in Washington Square in May. She had a cold, she was shell-is splotched like a margay cat's coat, with black ocelli on smoking, and her hand wasn't very steady, although she worked a yellow background. It is convex to make room for the female quickly enough. The smile that she produced for me would have organs inside, whereas a male's would be concave to help him looked giddy if she had been happier, or drunk. Of course the fit tightly on top of her. Altogether, she exhibits every turtles' doom was sealed when she painted them, because their bodies inside would continue to grow but their shells would not. camouflage color on her limbs and shells. She has a turtleneck neck, a taillike an elephant's, wise old pachydermous hind legs Gradually, invisibly, they would be crushed. Around us their on the bins with a and the face of a turkey-except that when I carry her she gazes bellies-two thousand belly shells-rubbed at the passing ground with a hawk's eyes and mouth. Her feet fit mournful, momentous hiss. Somehow there were so many of them I didn't rescue one. to the fingers of my hand, one to each one, and she rides looking down. She can walk on the floor in perfect silence, but Years later, however, I was walking on First Avenue when I usuallyshe lets her shell knock portentously, like a footstep, so noticed a basket of living turtles in front of a fish store. They that she resembles some grand, concise, slow-moving id. But if were as dryas a heap of old bones in the sun; nevertheless, they an earthworm is presented, she jerks swiftly ahead, poises were creeping over one another gimpily, doing their best to above it and strikes like a mongoose, consuming it with wild escape. I looked and was touched to discover that they vigor. Yet she will climb on my lap to eat bread or boiled eggs. appeared to be wood turtles, my favorites, so I bought one. In If put into a creek, she swims like a cutter, nosing forward to my apartment I looked closer and realized that in fact this was a intercept a strange turtle and smell him. She drifts with the diamondback terrapin, which was bad news. Diamondbacks current to go downstream, maneuvering behind a rock when are tidewater turtles from brackish estuaries, and I had no sea she wants to take stock, or sinking to the nether levels, while water to keep him in. He spent his days thumping interminably bubbles float up. Getting out, choosing her path, she will against the baseboards, pushing for an opening through the wall. proceed a distance and dig into a pile of humus, thrusting He drank thirstily but would not eat and had none of the hearty, herself to the coolest layer at the bottom. The hole closes over accepting qualities of wood turtles. He was morose, paler in her until it's as small as a mouse's hole. She's not as aquatic as a color, sleeker and more Oriental in the carved ridges and rings musk turtle, not quite as terrestrial as the box turtles in the that formed his shell. Though I felt sorry for him, finally I found same woods, but because of her versatilit;, she's marvelous, his unrelenting presence exasperating. I carried him, struggling she's everywhere. And though she breathes the way we in a paper bag, across town to the Morton Street Pier on the breathe, with scarcely perceptible movements of her chest, Hudson. It was August but gray and windy. He was very sometimes instead she pumps her throat ruminatively, like a surprised when I tossed him in; for the first time in our pipe smoker sucking and puffing. She waits and blinks, association, I think, he was afraid. He looked afraid as he pumping her throat, turning her head, then sets off like a loping bobbed about on top of the water, looking up at me from ten tiger in slow motion, hurdling the jungly lumber, the pea vine feet below. Though we were both accustomed to his resistance and twigs. She estimates angles so well that when she rides over and rigidity, seeing him stilI pitiful, I recognized that I must the rocks, sliding down a drop-off with her rugged front legs have done the wrong thing. At least the river was salty, but it extended, she has the grace of a rodeo mare. was also bottomless; the waves were too rough for him, and the But she's well off to be with me rather than at Mud Pond. tide was coming in, bumping him against the pilings underneath The other turtles have fled-those that aren't baked into the the pier. Too late, I realized that he wouldn't be able to swim to bottom. Creeping up the brooks to sad, constricted marshes, a peaceful inlet in New Jersey, even if he could figure out which burdened as they are with that box on their backs, they're way to swim. But since, short of diving in after him, there was walking into a setup where all their enemies move thirty nothing I could do, I walked away. 0
Link to Life Donald Denny has an unusual, vital job, which can mean the difference between life and death to hundreds of persons. He locates donors of human organs and arranges transplants for people who need them. Helping Denny in his quest is a nationwide computer network that keeps track of what organs are available where.
The World of Willa Cather
Nehru Planetarium
"Willa Cather is the lyrical poet of the New World, the early America of the pioneers .... The strength of her characters springs from their identification with, and intense love for, this land," says Anna Sujatha Mathai, an Indian poet who gained a deep appreciation of the novelist's work when visiting the United States.
Evoking the beauty of its natural surroundings, New Delhi's new Nehru Planetarium is a tribute to the genius of awardwinning architect Mansingh Rana, whose philosophy is a blend of the teachings of his master, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his own perception of Indian culture.
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Short Wave: 13.9,16.9,19.7, 25.2, 25.6, 30.8, 41.6, 42.1 Short Wave: 19.5, 19.7,30.7, 30.9, 31.1, 42.1, 42.2, 49.1 Medium Wave: 190
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19.70, 25.41, 41.88 13.87, 16.83,
Short Wave: 16.83, 17.90, 25.41,30.91,31.45 Short 25.33
Pin Code MAIL TO: Circulation Manager, 24 Kasturba Gandhi
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Wave:
13.88, 19.44,
Short Wave: 13.87, 16.84, 16.87 Short Wave: 19.76, 25.07, 31.43, 41.49 Medium Wave: 190.05
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Short Wave: 31.45,42.22, Short Wave: 16.87 Short Wave: 25.35, 30.99
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Golden Days in L.A.
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I. Daley Thompson of Great Britain (center) crossing the hurdles in the' Decathlon. 2. Cheryl Miller scores against Kyung-Ja of South Korea as the U.S. team wins the gold medal by 85-55 points. 3. King Carl Lewis rv. Lewis of the U .S. re~ peated Jesse Owens' 1936 feat by winning four gold medals-in the 100-meter sprint, the 200-meter dash, the long jump and the 400-meter relay. 4. People's participation. On a given signal at the Opening Ceremony over 93,000 spectators unfurled colors that made the flags of participant countries. 5. Greg Louganis of the U.S. dives toward a gold in the lO-meter springboard event. He won another gold in the 10-meter platform-diving event, and set a new world record. 6. Two young Indians outside the Coliseum enjoying the spirit of the Games. 7. Gold-medalist marathoner Carlos Lopes of Portugal enters the Coliseum in a record time of 2 hours, 9.26 minutes. 8. rndian hockey captain Zafar Iqbal and goalkeeper Romeo James exchange pleasantries with well-wishers. 9. A sOlitary Joan Benoit (U.S.A.) strides in to win the women's marathon in 2 hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds.
Nelson Vails (Silver Medalist)
Mark Gorski (Gold Medalist)