April 1985

STEPHEN SONDHEIM Genius of the American MIsical Theater

The Bronx Zoo in New York City recently held a colossal party at which the guests of honor each weighed about three tons. It was the fourth annual Elephant Weekend at the zoo, and Happy, Patty, Grumpy, Tus, Maxine and Groucho were all spruced up for the occasion. (Above, 13year-old Happy gets a much appreciated scrub from assistant handler Patty Monahan.)

The elephants were painted in traditional Asian motifs, and visiting children played "elephant games," including Peanut Pickup races and Pachyderm Relays.

Indian culture abounded at the zoo. The "Bengali Express

Monorail" ferried people to and from the Wild Asia Plaza where they viewed dance performances (honoring Lord Ganesha, of course) by Indian artists Sumana and Sujana.

They were also treated to traditional Indian dances by the

Padmini Institute Dancers.

As a grand finale (after Grumpy played tug-of-war with the local Fordham University football team), an elephant feast was heW every afternoon of the Weekend.

Lavishly colorful costumes

were provided for the elephants by the Sri Lanka Tourist Board.

The Bronx Zoo is the founder and main contributor to St. Catherine's Island, a wildlife study habitat off the coast of Georgia (see SPAN May 1984).

Just as efforts are being made to save the endangered species of mammals, birds and reptiles nurtured on St. Catherine's Island, the Bronx Zoo is trying to bring the public closer to the animals.

Celebrations, such as the Elephant Weekend, and regular free days, are part of the endeavor to help big-city America understand the world we live in.

April 1985

SPAN Bombay to Boston

by Barnaby Conrad III

6 A Nation's Memory

8 Carnatic Mastersinger A Tribute by P.S. Sundaram

10 The Education of Robert Allen

by Joshua Hammer

14 Strategies for Global Economics

by Henry R. Nau

18 FocusOn ...

22

Management by Intuition

by Weston H. Agar

24 Pottering Around India

by Homayun Taba

28 A Diamond Guitar A short story by Truman Capote

32 The Real Mr. Capote Can Now Stand Up

by D.R. Mohan Raj

34 On the Lighter Side

36 A Gift of Speech

by Maxine A. Rock

38 Everybody's

Doing It

41 The Words and Music of Stephen Sondheim

by Samuel G. Freedman

48

Microscapes

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Mal Oettinger

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Editorial Assistant

Rocque Fernandes

Photo Editor

Avinash Pas rich a

Photographs: Front cover-Barbra Walz/Outline. Inside front cover, top-Martha Cooper, courtesy LIFE; bottom-William Conway!N.Y. Zoological Society. 2-5-courtesy ALMI Pictures Inc. 6-7-Jonathan Wallen. 8- Frank Wohl. 9-Avinash Pasricha. 1O-12-Š 1984 Barry Staver. 20, bottom-courtesy K.P. Uthappa. 21, top & bottomAvinash Pasricha. 24-27-courtesy Robert Bussabarger, except 25 by Avinash Pasricha. 28-Avinash Pasricha. 32-Jacques M. Chenet!

Newsweek. 36-37-Enrico Fcrorelli. 38-40-Mark Perlstein. 41-47Barbra Walz/Outline. Inside back covet, clockwise from top-Robert Woods; Charles Lewis; Leo Derlak; John Carnevale (2); Kurt Nassau.

Bac"\<cover-John Carnevale.

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 Raj Kumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited; Faridabad, Haryana.

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 48b.

The copyright credit for the article "Discovering the Presidency" in the March 1985 issue was inadvertently omilled. It should read: Copyright Š 1985 by The New York Times Company.

Reprinted by permission from The New York Times Book Review.

Front cover: It is impossible to separate the invent!venessof Stephen Sondheim's music from that of his lyrics. Each feeds the other. And together they make Sondheim one of America's most original composers. See story on pages 41-47.

Back cover: This computergenerated isotherm by John Carnevale is part of an exhibition on Microscapes, the hidden art of high technology, now touring the United States. See page 48.

The cultural span between the United States and India is bustling with two-way traffic. For many years Indians have been welcomed at American colleges and universities and Indian artists and musicians have studied in the United States, often achieving notable success. An increasing number of Americans have come to India to steep themselves in the arts of this country, often staying long periods of time or returning frequently until what had begun as simply an Indian influence became an integral part of their art.

In this issue SPAN explores the work of three artists in different disciplines who became so identified with India that their work is indelibly marked with the rhythms and patterns of this ,country: the film director James Ivory, the sculptor Robert Bussabarger and the late singer Jon Higgins.

James Ivory, who is now 57, began his career as a director in India 24 years ago with The Householder, which featured the charismatic Shashi Kapoor as a young husband adjusting to married life. As a boy in Klamath Falls, Oregon, a sleepy town of 16, 000 people, Ivory haunted the town's four movie theaters. Of a Saturday afternoon he would see a Popeye cartoon film, a Lone Ranger serial and two comedies. These early influences are undetectable in the 15 films he has directed, most of them in collaboration with the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the Polish-born writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Critics have noted that his filmmaking technique is closer to that of Satyajit Ray than to American directors of the past quarter-century. His latest film, an adaptation of Henry James' The Bostonians which shared first prize at this year's International' Film Festival in New Delhi , has the pace and ambiguity more characteristic of the best Indian films than of U.S. films. It was Indian paintings that drew Ivory to India in the first place; he remained to create his own works of art.

Veteran SPAN readers with good memories may experience a feeling of deja vu when they see this month's article on Robert Bussabarger. Indeed SPAN reported on his work during his first visit to India as a Fulbright research fellow in October 1962. In 23 years his work has evolved, its distinctive Indian flavor has deepened, and we feel this unassuming artist certainly deserves an update. Bussabarger was born in Indiana in 1922. As a young professor of art at Michigan State University he first came upon the wonders of Indian terra-cotta art in an American magazine, Craft Horizons. He returned to India repeatedly, holding exhibitions in Calcutta, BoTIlbay,Baroda and (just two months ago) at Art Heritage in the Triveni Kala Sangam gallery in New Delhi.

He teaches art at the University of Missouri, but he has also held extensive workshops in India. He fervently believes that the art of clay sculpture is vibrantly alive in India and his trips always include visits to small villages where craftsmen carry on a tradition that is centuries old. In 1962 SPAN's article by Lokenath Bhattacharya noted: "Bussabarger's sculpted figures possess a unique gusto ••.•They have a mythical quality at once fierce and whimsical." If you look at his works starting on page 24, we think you will agree that he has retained--and perfected-this quality.

Jon Higgins was another American who experienced an Indian epiphany. The first performance of Bharatanatyam dance he ever saw, in Connecticut, so enraptured him that he devoted his life to learning to sing Carnatic music. That was an extraordinarily difficult task for an American to undertake. His acceptance as a master of the art by Indian music experts was even more remarkable. Only by living in India and surrendering to the exquisite discipline of Carnatic music could he achieve his mastery. He helped spread the beauty of this music from south India in the United States before his untimely death at the age of 45. His loss is felt by music lovers in both countries.

-J .A.M.

Bombay to Boston

At the recent International Film Festival in New Delhi, The Bostonians won two top awards-Best Film and Best Actress for Vanessa Redgrave. (This British entry shared the Best Film prize with the Soviet film A Ruthless Romance.) The honors focused attention, once again, on the talented trio behind the film-producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The Bostonians, based on Henry James' novel, is one of their few "purely American" films. It stars Christopher Reeve (facing page), Madeleine Potter (above, left, with Reeve) and Vanessa Redgrave (above, right).

In 1961, an untested American director, James Ivory, and an ambitious young Indian producer named Ismail Merchant took a train from Bombay to Delhi to convince the Anglo-Polish novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (married to an Indian architect) that she should let them make a feature film from her novel The Householder-the script to be written by the novelist herself. Never mind that she had never even seen an actual film script before and that neither Ivory nor Merchant had ever made a feature film. But in those uncertain moments as they sat drinking tea in lhabvala's bungalow, a remarkably creative bond was initiated.

Eight weeks later they had a screenplay; a year later, a film and a destiny.

Twenty-four years and 15 feature films later, the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala trio is still at it. The Guinness Book of Records has listed them, once again, as the longest, continual film collaboration between producer, director and screenwriter. The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave them a full retrospective in 1983, and British critic John Pym has written a bookaboutthem, The Wandering Company, soon to become a film documentary.

Gradually the public in Europe and America is beginning to realize that Shakespeare Wallah, Roseland, Quartet, The Europeans and the recent saga about India, Heat and Dust, are all by the same team. Yet Merchant-Ivory Productions (MIP) continues to have a peripheral relationship with American critics and audiences, due to their penchant for social nuance rather than drama in flagrante delecti; a New York magazine critic recently accused them of "never having been guilty of putting an emotion on the screen," yet Heat and Dust drew raves from Judith Christ and Vincent Canby in The New York Times. James Ivory shrugs off the mixed reviews with no self-pity: "We're not quite arty and we're not quite commercial. ... It takes years and years for anyone to like you if you're different."

Their latest film, The Bostoniansstarring Christopher Reeve and Vanessa Redgrave, and based on the novel by Henry James-is, without doubt, one of the finest cinematic adaptations of James ever made.

The Bostonians, says James Ivory, had been on their minds for some years, since Henry James is a favorite of both his and

Ruth Jhabvala's. Though the book, in the words of James, is about "the situation of. women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation in their behalf," James Ivory was interested in delivering "just a good love story, although it will certainly be open to interpretation by many factions. I hadn't done a purely American film in a long time. I wanted a story without other influences or cultures. No Indians, no Europeans."

Jhabvala's script tells the story of Basil Ransom, a Civil War veteran who comes to Boston and meets his distant cousin Olive Chancellor, a spinsterish woman caught up in the suffragette movement headed by the aged Miss Birdseye (Jessica Tandy). Olive is threatened by her courtly southern cousin, more so when Basil falls in love with Verena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter), a maiden whom Olive is championing as a kind of feminist Joan of Arc. The romantic comedy is thickened by Olive's sister, Mrs. Luna (Nancy New), a comely widow who makes a play for Basil.

Christopher Reeve, known for his role as Superman, might seem an unlikely choice to play the somewhat hO!llespun chauvinist Basil Ransom, but apparently Reeve and Ivory had been discussing the project for years. Reeve was so committed to the project that he turned down a

Shas hi Kapoor and Felicity Kendall (above) in Shakespeare WalIah,oneoftheearly collaborative efforts of lames Ivory, Ruth Prawer lhabvala andIsmail Merchant (right).

$2-million role in the remake of Mutiny on The Bounty. "There have been three Fletcher Christians on screen, and I wanted to be the first Basil Ransom," he says.

Merchant, who does much of the casting, has a knack for getting big names at the right price. Two weeks before shooting started, they still hadn't found their leading lady when Merchant suddenly landed Vanessa Redgrave. The rest of the cast is superb, from Madeleine Potter and Jessica Tandy, to Wally Shawn (My Dinner With Andre) and Linda Hunt, winner of the 1983 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her unusual role as the male dwarf in The Year of Living Dangerously. Nancy New and Wesley Addy are veterans of MerchantIvory's first James adaptation, The Europeans (1979).

Cinematographer Walter Lassally is best known for the luscious light he gave to Tom Jones, but The Bostonians makes the sixth time he has worked with Ivory.

The interiors with Redgrave and Potter seem like Mary Cassatt paintings sprung to life-not surprising, since earlier in the summer Ivory had been thumbing through a Cassatt book to investigate period costumes. The actors were so dedicated to being Jamesian that, in their enthusiasm, they often overstepped the

script to return to the novel.

Redgrave's performance is outstanding. As she looks deeply into Madeleine Potter's rosy face, Redgrave's eyes become those of Olive Chancellor, a woman so impassioned by womanhood that her pupils actually dilate with an emotional intimacy that is. startling.

Christopher Reeve, in perhaps his best screen performance, is craftsmanlike and often charmingly cavalier. While shooting in Boston, Reeve analyzed the film: "The Bostonians is really about sexual warfare in Victorian drawing rooms, and it's something of a satire on the suffragette movement, on the press, on the American South, and on Yankee prejudices, as well as on spiritualism.

"Olive and Basil are a sort of flying wedge of opposite powers bearing down on Verena's emotions," says Reeve. "It's a classically structured story with a very satisfying, though open-ended, finish."

The Bostonians, like other MIP films, achieves something that Hollywood rarely attempts: to portray real human beings caught in the web of a particular civilization at a particular time.

Merchant and Ivory are content if each film earns them enough to go on to make another, without regard to trends or financial greed. This is not the way Hollywood works and, in fact, MIP's modus operandi is considered risky.

Doomsayers yearly predict that this time they won't be able to pull off their artistic-monetary juggling act.

"Nothing has become easier," sighs the 47-year-old Ismail Merchant. "With each film the stakes are raised and we risk more. That's part of the game." And when Merchant found himself short a half-million dollars of the $ 3-million budget of The Bostonians, he put the future profits of Heat and Dust on the table in New York and gambled. "If I had

waited for the money, we wouldn't have been able to make a film this year. You have to believe that the money will come, charge ahead, and then it just does," Merchant says.

Of their films, Merchant says with passion, "America is the richest and most highly advanced civilization on our planet. Why should the American people only be subjected to junky films about comic-strip heroes, million-dollar devices and violent action? I can't believe that this is all America-and the worldis interested in."

So what are Merchant-Ivory films about? "Society and time," Merchant says proudly, "that is what our films are about. For 20 years we have been trying D to say that."

About the Author: Barnaby Conrad Ill, who lives in Paris, is a contributing editor to Horizon magazine.

I

ANation's Memorv Above: Among the patent drawings at the National Archives is that of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, registered in 1794.

Above, right: These vertical wooden files were the Archives' first storage boxes; some are still in use.

Left: The first airmail service in the United States was started in 1918, using War Department planes and aviators.

Memorabilia of the event at the Archives include a photograph of the pilot William C. Hobson, a drawing of a mail carrier (a surplus De Havilland DH-4B) and navigation charts that were little more than road maps cut into strips.

The National Archives of the United States has been called variously the nation's memory, storehouse, attic and soul. The institution is known as the place where Americans can find their roots, as the country's Hall of Heroes and, by cynics, as the nation's wastebasket.

In the handsome National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in the 15 regional records centers, and in the seven Presidential libraries-which altogether make up the National Archivesare stored 3,250 million documents, 5 million still pictures, 11 million maps, 27,700,000 meters of motion pictures and 122,000 sound and video recordings. The range is breathtaking. The most important holdings are the nation's birth records-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the BiU of Rights-which, carefully guarded and preserved, are on permanent display. Less awesome are such homey exhibits as a handwritten letter from Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain to President Eisenhower, sending him a recipe for Drop Scones.

Every year the Federal Government generates some 200,000 cubic meters of records-the tax returns alone would fill 90 railroad cars-which are sent to the National Archives. These are appraised and honed down to the 1 to 3 percent that are of permanent enough value to be retained.

It comes as a surprise to many people to learn that the National Archives is only 51 years old. When the nation was founded, the government records followed the U.S. Congress around to wherever it was sitting, moving 11 times before 1800. The government's establishment in Washington determined in what city the records would be kept, but the lack of a fireproof depository still left the papers vulnerable. In 1921, a fire at the Commerce Department virtually destroyed the 1890 census and damaged census records back to 1790. This led, at last, to the passage of a bill in favor of a National Archives building. Architect John Russell Pope was chosen to design it, and construction started in 1932. The National Archives Act of 1934 officially established the agency.

Now, 51 years later, American records are uniquely accessible. All acts of the government-treaties, maps, trade agreements-are documented.

And a remarkably detailed portrait of the American people emerges through millions of military service records, hundreds of thousands of pension claim files and the immigration and naturalization documents of the vast immigrant population. Census records detail vital statistics, and federal court records register crime. And for comic relief, there are such oddities as the Declaration of Independence reproduced in alphabet noodles.

The photographs on these pages are by Jonathan Wallen and are excerpted from a forthcoming book, The National Archives of the United States by Herman Viola.

0

Carnatic Jon Higgins, a mastersinger of Carnatic music, was an American citizen who had lived long in India and made this country his second home. Tragically, Higgins, 45, was run over by a truck while he was out taking his dog for a walk recently. While his untimely death has left a deep scar on the practitioners of his chosen discipline, the human story of how Higgins, as a young student of history, suddenly became interested in Carnatic music is as moving as the depth and tenacity of purpose he displayed in life.

There was a performance of Bharatanatyam by its wonderful exponent, Balasaraswathi, in America in 1962. Among the audience was one studying history at that time, in Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The impact made on the young student was tremendous; it changed the course of his life.

It was not so much the dance itself as the music which accompa.nied it that sent Jon Higgins into a¡ different world. This, he decided, was the subject worth learning, not history. The dance was wonderful, unlike any dance he had seen till then. But not so much behind the dance as within it, and giving it life was the music, the soul within its body. And since at that time Higgins did not know any of the Indian languages in which the songs were composed, the music would only have been-as all music essentially is-a concord of sweet sound, a beat and a rhythm. This, altogether novel rhythm, was an exotic Cleopatra in whose pursuit a world would not be lost but found.

The New World was discovering for itself a newer, albeit older, world.

Mastersinger The rest of the story is a credit to the American foundations so ready to discover and encourage talent. A Fulbright fellowship enabled Higgins to come to south India for a year to learn Carnatic music.

Within a year his talent and devotion enabled him to take such rapid strides that the fellowship was renewed for a second year, and then (surely a record?) a third.

When Higgins, encouraged by his Indian teachers, made his debut at Tiruvayyaru at the Thyagaraja Aradhana Festival in 1965, at which it was an honor for even the masters of Carnatic music to be given a chance to perform, the audience of thousands must at first have been amused to see this tall, slim American youth daring to face them and to wrestle with the intricacies of the ragam and ta/am of classical Carnatic 1p.usic, like a Roman gladiator facing the lions. Was it fair of his teachers?

But quickly amusement gave place to attention, attention to critical evaluation, and evaluation to thunderous applause.

The young man was an artist, to be taken seriously.

Within a matter of two or three years he would have earned his right to be known as a Bhagavatar, a mastersinger.

When Higgins began, there were those who were pleased to remark, "He is all right for a foreigner. His pronunciation of course is a different matter."

It is not to be wondered at that even after three years, Higgins had not acquired a perfect mastery Inspired by Balasaraswathi (bottom, left), Jon Higgins took to Camatic music and became so fine an exponent of this art that he was given the title ofBhagavatar.

of sounds peculiar to the Tamil language. untouchable had stood centuries ago, to But with every year he improved and when I catch a glimpse of the idol from a distance as last heard him in Bombay some three years best he could. His musician friends stood ago, I had nothing but admiration for the with him, refusing to go inside the temple if manner in which he could get the cerebral Jon was not allowed. Then it occurred to exactly right, occurring as if to trip him up one of them to ask Jon to sing the famous twice iil the course of a couple of lines-in song, "Krishna, nee begane baro," a comthe words pazhani and mazhai. I may point position in Kannada meant to be words sung out that this is a tricky sound, peculiar to

by Yasoda, Krishna's fostermother, pleadTamil and Malayalam, and not managed at ing with him to hasten to her. When the air all well even by Indians, if they come from was filled with the vibrant melody of his other parts of the country. splendid voice there was no keeping' away Dozens of times I have heard viriboni the crowds that gathered round to hear him. with which most Carnatic musicians like to The priests, astonished, begged the singer to open their concerts, to clear their throats as come in, and what Kanakadasa could not it were and "get the frogs out." It was only achieve, the foreigner did. from Higgins that I heard this sung not in This sketch will not be complete without just two tempos as is usual but in threea few details regarding Higgins' personal slow, fast and superfast. life. "No man can be a hero to his valet," Genius, in that well-worn cliche, is 1 runs the proverb. The valet sees his master percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiratoo close, often in his unheroic nakedness. tion. Higgins, though he certainly had more But that other saying is also true: "Judge a inspiration than that, achieved his mastery man by what his servant says of him." through unceasing practice working day and Tulasi, the woman who cooks for my son, night, with the devotion of a bhakta, the used to be Higgins' servant when he was in dedication of a missionary.

He began of Madras. She burst into tears when she heard course with a tremendous advantage.

He the news of his tragic death. She is a came from a family of musicians, gifted Christian, but converted from a lower caste pianists and violinists in the Western style. of Hindus. No Brahmin would have treated He himself had a powerful voice which her the way Higgins did. Among the earliest could fill a cathedral, well trained and of the Tamil words he learnt were akka and disciplined.

During the years he was in anna, meaning respectively elder sister and Madras there was a continuous procession elder brother. He made it clear to his two in his house of teachers to train him-a domestic servants that they were, respectiveteacher of veena, a teacher of Tamil, one of ly, his akka and anna.

Telugu and perhaps also one of Sanskrit. He On the first occasion that beef was spared no efforts because he found these brought into the house and cooked, he offertasks to be pleasures. Yet only the man who ed some to Tulasi. The poor woman could not stand it. Sheep's meat was all right, but to works hard knows how exacting it can be.

At the end of one of his performances at eat cow's flesh was a sin and just not done.

Tiruvayyaru, an old master, offering HigBeef was never again brought into the gins his blessings, remarked, "You must house. have been an Indian in your last birth, born "By nothing is England so great," said actually in Tanjore."

Higgins said simply, Matthew Arnold, "as by her poetry." By "Whatever I might have been in a former nothing, I may say, is India so great as by birth, don't forget how I have to slave at my her religion and philosophy, Bharatanatyam studies in this one." and Carnatic music. But while our¡ religion A story not likely to be widely known and philosophy are more often preached was told me recently by V. Thyagarajan, a than properly understood or practiced, great friend and former colleague of Jon's.

Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music are still A party of musicians, Jon among them, preserved in their pristine purity in the went to Udipi to see the Krishna temple. south. That so wonderful an exponent of The American wore a dhoti and a kurta as one of these arts should have his life snuffed was his custom in Madras, with vibhuti and out so early is indeed a matter too deep kumkumum on his' forehead. But he was for tears.

0 much too fair-complexioned to be an Indian, and the priests would not let him enter About the Author: P.S. Sundaram is a retired the temple. The temple was a Hindu temple professor of English from Rajasthan University. and according to their logic, how could He is the author of a book on R.K. Nal'ayan and anyone who was not even an Indian be a has translated Subramania Bharati's poems from Hindu? So Jon stood whereKanakadasa the Tamil to English.

The Education of Robert Allen

It is a sultry afternoon in Rosser, Tennessee, a tiny hamlet near the Tennessee River consisting of one trailer and three dilapidated houses clustered beside a rural state road almost 200 kilometers northwest of Nashville. Inside one weathered shack many years past its last paint

job, Robert Allen, 35, sits at the supper table. A wood-burning stove stands in one corner. An outhouse in back is hidden deep in snake-infested underbrush. There is a well across the road for drawing water. "A while ago they raised the rent to $20 a month," says Allen, who

has lived here with his greataunt Bevie Jones for the past 21 years. "We used to pay $15."

It could be a hopeless scene, indicative of the worst poverty of rural America.

But this musty cabin is the site of a small miracle. As he sits at the table Allen is engrossed in a copy of Virgil's Aeneid, one of the more than 1,000 volumes he has amassed over the years in his personal library, which includes the classics of Greek, European and American literature. Until three years ago this self-taught lover of literature had never set foot in a classroom. "Books were a world to me," says Allen, a gentle, unassuming man.

After 30 years of near solitude, Robert Howard Allen now leaves Rosser to begin studying for a Ph.D. at Nashville's prestigious Vanderbilt University, the final step in a remarkable odyssey. For a man who has never known the luxury of indoor plumbing, never been to a movie theater and eaten at a restaurant only once in his life, it is an exhilarating-and frightening-prospect.

"I'm rather nervous about getting used to things in the big city-the crime and the traffic," Allen ,admits. Neither he nor anyone who knows him, however, is the least bit worried about his chances of academic success. According to Dr. Vereen Bell, chairman of Vanderbilt's English department, Allen's scores on his Graduate Record Examination were "better than anyone else's." [Allen is now at Vanderbilt. This article was written just before he left Rosser.]

As greataunt Bevie, 77, tells the story, Robert Allen's saga began "when he was barely more than a little nursing baby" in nearby Huntingdon, Kentucky. Robert's mother, who had divorced Allen's father before their son was born, "ran off with a shoe salesman" and left the infant in the custody of elderly relatives-his grandparents, three greataunts and a greatuncleo His father promptly disappeared.

"Last time anybody knew about him," says Allen, "he was either driving a taxi or owning a gas station. He doesn't seem to be doing either now. Quite possibly he's dead." As a boy, Allen was not permitted to attend school ("They was afraid his daddy would steal him away," says Aunt Bevie) or to play with friends Robert Allen at home with his loved ones a week before he left for Vanderbilt University: "My books will be the last thing I'll pack."

Republished by permission of Joshua Hammer from People Weekly, September 17, 1984. Copyright Š 1984 Time Inc.

11

outside the family. "I couldn't have anything to say about it," continues Bevie, who had no authority within the family patriarchy. "If 1had, he'd of went to school every day."

As an only child, Allen instead spent his days doing chores around the house, strumming on the banjo, "listening to the old people talk," and attending the Oak Grove Baptist Church, whose congregation, he recalls, "consisted of almost all old people." Occasionally a cousin his age would visit and talk about school. "It made me feel a little left out," Robert says. His sole brush with formal education in those 10ng years came when he was 6, shortly after county school officials had a court confrontation with his family about Allen's truancy. As a result Allen was given a "homebound" teacher, who came to the house twice a week to educate the boy. "That lasted about a year and a half," Robert says. "Then the county ran out of funds."

In place of regular schooling Aunt Bevie, who had finished the eighth grade, read to the boy constantly-"comic books and Uncle Scrooge," she recallsand taught him how to read. "Books were my playmates," he says of those years of loneliness: Every morning and evening, as well as d\Uringbreaks from his chores, Allen read anything he could get his hands on. He began with an old dictionary, then read chapters of Scripture aloud to his blind greataunt, Ida. Eventually the boy began to spend hours at Huntingdon's Carroll Comity Library, where the librarian "turned me loose," he says. His curriculum was precocious and eclectic: "Toynbee's A Study of History was one of the first books that really got to me." Allen says he preferred Aristotle to Plato, loved Shakespeare, Whitman and Wordsworth and "every line that Milton ever wrote."

By the time the family moved to Rosser in 1963, Allen had discovered that he could pick up secondhand volumes inexpensively at yard sales and auctions.

His greatuncle had taught him carpentry, chair caning and upholstery, and Allen bought books with the money he earned as an apprentice. The onset of puberty did little to distract him from his allconsuming literary appetite. "I didn't Withmentor, patron and greataunt, Bevie, who accompanied Allen to Vanderbilt.

give much thought to girls," he says. He often read three or four books at once, following his own course of study. During the two years it took him to wade through Will and Ariel Durant's ll-volume Story of Civilization, for instance, he simultaneously read literature written during each time period described, developing a broad sense of politics, lifestyles and philosophy throughout history.

Ironically, when he came of age and was forced to register for the draft, Allttn was rejected. "When they realized 1 hadn't been to school at all, that was that," he says. "They assumed I was ~~ illiterate, and 1 didn't give them any reason to think otherwise."

I In 1981 Allen found a minimum-w~ge janitorial job through a Federal Government program, working from March until he was laid off in June following a cutback in federal funding. He tried to find other employment. "I had an old truck at the time and I'd go around, but 1 couldn't find any sort of work," he recalls. Nor were Allen's job prospects improved after he took and passed a high school equivalency exam that summer. .

He then decided, he says, "to give college . a whirl." After taking the College Level ExamInation Program, he drove his truck to Bethel College-a small Presbyterian church school 24 kilometers from Rosser in McKenzie, Tennessee-and handed the results to the college's admissions director who looked at them in amazement. "He blew the top off the scores," recalls Bethel College President Dr. WIlliam Odom.

Thanks to those scores, Allen earned exemptions from 24 hours of freshman courses, including science ("I'd read the Popular Science library and watched Mr. Wizard on TV"). With regard to languages, "I could read a French newspaper," Allen says, "but Racine was a little beyond me." He had more trouble in math, however. "I still have to take my shoes off to count my toes," he jokes.

Far more serious were the adjustments the unschooled man had to make after 30 years of isolation. Each morning he drove to school from Rosser in a jalopy "that was barely held together by wires," recalls Odom. "When I first saw him, he was in rags and his pants were frayed," says Naomi Blanks, 67, chairperson of Bethel's humanities department. "There were safety pins holding his sweater

together. He looked odd." In addition his teeth were rotten and he was lacking all sophisticated social amenities. At the same time his classroom performance was impeccable. He was "as well read as many of Bethel's professors," says Odom. "He has a way of storing things in his mind and then quoting them that's just amazing," remembers Mrs. Blanks.

"He could have put us down and made us feel inferior, but he didn't. In class he was modest. I never felt intimidated by him."

During Allen's three years at Bethel the faculty established a fund that enabled him to get new teeth and eventually to buy a suit for graduation. "I think the suit was something of a compromise for Robert," says Odom. Earlier that year Allen had been encouraged by the director of human resources to get new clothes. "If people are going to like me," Allen responded at first, "they're going to like me the way 1 am." In Ifact Robert made several friends during his years there, although he never dated. He won the school's poetry contest and in his senior year topped the class with a 3.92 grade-point average, earning him the school's highest scholarship award.

Now he and Aunt Bevie are headed for an apartment in Nashville. At Vanderbilt, Allen will join 10 other students in the graduate English program and receive a full doctoral fellowship plus a monthly stipend of about $700, a welcome addition to the $300 monthly pension Bevie has received since her husband died five years ago. "Registering for school, settling into a new place, moving, getting used to life in a city, it seems like a lot," Robert admits. After earning his degree Allen says he hopes to return to Bethel as an English professor-"If they'll have me. 1 feel I owe everyone there a lot."

Only a week before the climactic move three walls of Allen's bedroom remained covered from floor to ceiling with shelves of books-all of them dusted and carefully arranged. "My books will be the last thing I'll pack," he says. "I want them around for as long as possible." Then Allen wandered back to the cluttered living room and¡ reopened the Aeneid, quieting his exhilaration about the future with the reassurance of the past.

D About the Author: Joshua Hammer is an assistant editor with People Weekly magazine.

I Throughout the Reagan Administration's first term, critics charged that it had no international economic policy save for carrying out its domestic program. The administration, it is argued, has "relegated international economics to a lower priority than any administration in the postwar period" and has formulated its domestic economic policies "in almost total disregard for the outside world."

This charge betrays elements of a mindset that dominated discussion of international economic policy during the 1970s.

From a perspective more appropriate to the 1980s, Reagan Administration international economic policies reflect a coherent analysis and attack on the major economic ills of the previous decade. Understanding this alternative perspective is essential to balance the policy debate as well as to hold the administration, whose policies do not always conform to this alternative perspective, accountable to its own standards.

The alternative outlook rests on the simple proposition that the world economy is only as good as the national economies that comprise it. If national economic policies promote sustained, noninflationary growth, economic relations among states are unlikely to be perverse. But deficient national policies, regardless of international arrangements, will probably produce little but global economic malaise and instability.

This self-evident proposition was nevertheless forgotten during the 1970s. Then, global economic problems were traced largely to the malfunctioning of the international economic system itself. Trade and capital flows had become so sensitive and complex, it was argued, that national policies, suffering from divisive special interests at home, could not cope with the new realities. Neither could limited international institutions.

Interdependence required more centralized and comprehensive mechanisms and institutions to manage the world economy and to make national policymaking effective once again.

This globalist view has been so dominant that reasserting national authority and tilting toward converging national, rather than global-institutional solutions under the Reagan Administration have been branded disdainfully as' economic nationalism or, even worse, economic isolationism. Yet events in the early 1980s and the initial results of Reagan Administration policies are making the case for an alternative approach.

The alternative approach reverses the globalist logic and places national policymaking at the foundation of world economy. It emphasizes the need for domestic economic performance among major countries to converge around a few, fundamental indicators-low inflation, flexibility of markets and open international economic boundaries. If these conditions exist, trade and capital flows flourish and reinforce domestic growth and stability, as well as the effectiveness of national policymaking.

The differences between domesticists and globalists are relative, not absolute. Both care intensely about the world and not just about the U.S. economy, and both rely on national and international policy. Domesticists prefer to act at the national Copyright

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1984 Carnegie

Policy magazine. \Vinter

Endowment 1984-85.

for International

Peace.

Reprinted

with permission

from Foreign

level but seek international consensus on key aspects of national performance, which ultimately limits national choice.

Globalists prefer to act at the international level, in part to secure more, not less, autonomy and effectiveness for national policymaking.

The domesticist view is rooted in an evaluation of the performance of the postwar international economic system.

The domesticists contend that, for all its faults, this system has achieved higher sustained rates of growth and development than any previous system over a comparable period in history, and for developing countries as well. From 1950 to 1980 world output tripled and per capita income doubled. Average annual gross national product (GNP) and per capita GNP increased by the same rate in some 60 middle-income developing countries as in the industrial countries. Taking comparative purchasing power into account, real per capita income in the middleincome developing countries actually grew twice as fast as in the industrial countries. In the remaining 90 or so low-income countries, real per capita income rose by less than one-fifth of these increases. Yet from 1950 to 1979, literacy rates in low-income countries increased from 20 to 51 percent, life expectancy went up from 41 to 57 years, and child mortality declined from 28 to 12 deaths per thousand.

The domesticist attributes these results not simply to historical inevitability or postwar reconstruction, but rather to deliberate policy choices in three basic directions.

First, the postwar system gave pride of place to noninflationary domestic policies as the source of world economic growth and stability. This priority was reflected in the commitment by all other countries besides the United States to a fixed exchange rate in relation to the dollar and a commitment by the United States to maintain the value of the dollar in terms of gold.

Underlying the gold link was an even more fundamental U.S. commitment to domestic price stability, which became increasingly important during the 1950s and 1960s as the dollar became the principal international reserve currency. Until about 1960, U.S. gold reserves could cover outstanding liabilities against the dollar. During the 1960s, however, these liabilities grew to many times the value of U.S. gold reserves, and the willingness to hold dollars abroad depended more and more on the price competitiveness of U.S. goods and capital assets. Domesticists argue that foreign perceptions of declining U.S. competitiveness, because of the U.S. Govern.ment's inflationary guns-and-butter policies during the late 1960s, eventually destroyed confidence in the U.S. dollar and the fixed exchange-rate system.

Second, the postwar system sought to liberalize trade, at least in manufactured goods. The decision to allow comparative advantage to work at the margins as governments moved toward lower barriers-totally free trade was never the objective-was decisive for postwar prosperity, particularly when compared with the prewar system. The latter system avoided price inflation, too, but sacrificed prosperity to protectionism. The commitments to freer trade and to price stability, fixed exchange rates and domestic policy discipline

were inseparable. The idea was to prevent countries faced with balance-of-payments deficits or surpluses from altering their exchange rates-except in circumstances of fundamental disequilibrium-or to impose new trade barriers, except for a limited-safeguards clause provided by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

The commitments to price stability and liberalized trade also implied a third commitment. That was to preserve a relatively flexible domestic economy, tilting at the margins toward market forces and market pricing to promote efficiency. Since the international means of adjustment permitted by the system were relatively constrained, balance-of-payments adjustments would have to be made largely through domestic changes.

Governments were obliged to facilitate this adjustment and to ensure that economies retained enough flexibility to move resources readily from declining to growing sectors.

What went wrong in the 1970s? The most common explanation is offered by the globalists. In this view the unique postwar economic dominance of the United States inevitably disappeared, as postwar allies and erstwhile enemies prospered and increasingly differed with the United States on fundamental economic policy objectives. These differences, which could not be resolved at the bargaining table-despite historic U.S. attempts to stabilize exchange-rate relationships-would have to be accommodated by greater flexibility in the marketplace.

Domestic flexibility, which ensured adjustment under the old system, gave way to greater international flexibility. Floating rates absorbed some of the requirements for domestic adjustment and relaxed the need for consensus on economic fundamentals. What is more, floating rates came just in time, as the oil shocks further widened national economic policy differences.

The domesticists agree with this analysis, as far as it goes.

But they believe that this analysis overlooks and perhaps excuses the central reason for the loss of U.S. competitiveness and the collapse of worldwide commitments to price stability, market forces and freer trade. The culprit, as they see it, was U.S. domestic policy, specifically, the growing budget deficits and accelerating money growth that began in the late 1960s and that represented such a sharp break with the past. The Federal deficit swelled from an annual average of $4,400 million between 1961 and 1966 to $8,700 million in 1967 to $25,000 million in 1968. After a small surplus in 1969, the budget sank deep into the red during the following decade, with deficits reaching $60,000 million in both 1976 and 1980. Similarly, money growth exploded from an average of 3.4 percent annually from 1961 to 1966 to 6.6 percent and 7.7 percent annually in 1967 and 1968. Between 1969 and 1979, money growth averaged 6.3 percent per year. Largely as a result, U.S. average annual inflation rates increased from 1.8 percent between 1960 and 1967 to 4.5 percent between 1967 and 1973

and to 7.9 percent from 1973 to 1980. During the same period, average annual U.S. unemployment rates rose from 4.4 percent to 6.1 percent.

According to the domesticists, this decline in U.S. policy discipline and performance did not result from, but actually contributed to, the decline in U.S. power relative to its competitors, and imposed inflation and instability on them through the international marketplace.

The breakdown of price stability made it harder to resist protectionism. As it became clear that floating exchange rates did not provide the expected insulation from policy differences, and as daily capital movements exploded in volume, many countries, including the United States, found ready excuses to erect new barriers to trade. Tariff barriers continued to decline under the agreements of the Tokyo Round, but nontariff measures, including quotas and subsidies both for declining and for new high-technology industries, began to spread. New doctrines emerged, declaring free trade an anachronism and calling for various kinds of comprehensive government economic planning and industrial policy.

The collapse of price stability and the erosion of free-trade commitments both facilitated and reflected the loss of commitment to market forces and flexibility. Through the 1970s the role of government grew inexorably, as citizens demanded more and more from their public authorities. For the seven major industrial countries combined-Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and West Germany-that have participated in the Western economic summits, the ratio of total public expenditures to gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 29 percent in 1967 to around 37 percent by the early 1980s. In the middle-income developing countries, central government expenditures alone grew from 18 percent of GDP. in 1970 'to 26 percent in 1980. State-owned enterprises in these countries, often required to pursue nonmarket as well as market objectives, mushroomed-in Brazil from fewer than 150 to almost 500; in Mexico from fewer than 200 to more than 500; in Tanzania from fewer than 100 to 400.

Domesticists believe that these developments weakened market forces and market pricing and further reduced national and international economic efficiency.

Twice during the 1970s the United States tried unsuccessfully to achieve international consensus on economic issues through diplomatic bargaining. First, at a conference at the Smithsonian Institution, President Richard Nixon sought to restore monetary order after he cut the dollar loose from gold.

And at the 1978 Bonn summit President Jimmy Carter tried to convince West-Germany and Japan to loosen their fiscal policies and serve as locomotives for worldwide economic growth. But both times America squandered its diplomatic bargaining power by pursuing inflationary domestic economic policies that weakened its power in the marketplace. In the 1980s, domesticists urged a reversal of this approach: an assertive use of U.S. economic power in the marketplace based on noninflationary policies and a relatively passive U.S. economic diplomacy, for example, at the annual economic summits. Domesticists be-

lieved that this combination could work because U.S. power in the international marketplace, exploited effectively and enhanced through noninflationary policies, remains much greater than its power at the bargaining table-a fact that frequently irritates U.S. allies. If the U.S. economy, therefore, could be revitalized and steered back to price stability, market incentives and freer trade, the world economy might be induced to follow.

The domesticist approach underlies much of President . Reagan's international economic program. This is not to 'say that¡domesticism's premises are shared consciously or fully by individual administration officials or even by the President himself.

Yet it is also a mistake to argue that the Reagan Administration has had only a domestic economic strategy.

In fact, the administration's policy has consistently emphasized the primary importance and role of domestic economic policies as the key to stable and prosperous international economic relations, not as an end in themselves. Reestablishing sound U.S. domestic policies was the fulcrum for restoring the proper emphasis on price stability and market incentives in the world economy as a whole. Rather than ignoring the effects of U.S. policy changes on the world economy, domesticism stressed their global importance.

Restoring the domestic economic foundation would help stabilize exchange rates and then rejuvenate international trade. From the outset, and through the depths of the ensuing recession, the Reagan Administration championed freer trade.

Far from pure rhetoric or cynicism, this view reflected the domesticist conviction that freer trade is the chief economic rationale for having a world economy. Without freer trade, no new growth through comparative advantage is possible.

The emphasis on domestic policy reform and on "the magic of the marketplace" became the leading themes of administration policies toward international development and finance.

These themes were first laid out comprehensively in September and October of 1981 in President Reagan's address to the World Bank, in his pre-Cancun speech in Philadelphia, and in statements at the North-South summit in Cancun, Mexico.

Progress toward domestic stability and freer trade, the administration contended, would rejuvenate international financial flows that ultimately depend on real transfer of goods and services to be redeemed. Direct investment and commercial bank lending would increase as countries acquired more predictable access to foreign markets. Financial transfers through the international development institutions could then supplement these commercial flows rather than substitute for them, as was feared in the case of the then-proposed World Bank energy affiliate.

True to its domesticist precepts, the Reagan Administration played down international institutional solutions, maneuvering to deflate enthusiasm for global negotiations on North-South issues. Above all, the administration felt that the dialogue and policies of international institutions should not weaken the incentives for domestic policy reform. Initial administration attitudes toward the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were thus understandably skeptical. This institution was perceive-d as drifting away from its primary role as lender of last resort and thereby weakening its leverage for economic adjustment by making more generous, longer-term loans earlier in the adjustment process. In the world of high debt and inflation

inherited from the 1970s, the administration valued the IMF more for its policy than for its financing role. The administration concluded that until IMF policies shifted-again, at the margins-caution on new funding made sense.

Exporting Disinflation From these policy premises the Reagan Administration has achieved remarkable success in revitalizing U.S. and, to a lesser extent, world economic recovery and growth. Yet in a number of ways, its policies fall short of its own standards and certainly those of a domesticist.

In its first year the administration concentrated on its domestic economic program of restoring price stability and renewing growth incentives. The expectation prevailed that both lower inflation and renewed growth could be achieved simultaneously, and that the impact both at home and abroad would be beneficial. Under these circumstances, even though the United States was now operating in a much more flexible international environment with floating exchange rates, it seemed reasonable and appropriate to discontinue daily and sustained exchange-market intervention. Such intervention only weakened the impact of U.S. policies in the international marketplace through which, in domesticist fashion, the United States sought lower inflation and improved market incentives around the world.

By 1982 Reaganomics had achieved major tax reductions, less significant spending cuts, gains in deregulation, and, through .support of the Federal Reserve Board, an extremely tight money-supply policy. The outcome, by whatever causal sequence, was large current and projected budget deficits, high nominal and real interest rates, a strong dollar, a decline in exports and general economic activity, and lower inflation at the cost of sharply increased unemployment.

The lack of early success in revitalizing the U.S. and world economies led to an acceleration of administration diplomacy, albeit of a domesticist rather than a globalist variety. At the Versailles, France, summit in June 1982, the Reagan Administration elaborated its concept that sound domestic economic policies in the major-currency countries should converge around common indicators of low inflation and greater market flexibility over a medium-term, two- to three-year period. It recommended as a coordination vehicle the new multilateral surveillance process that brings together semiannually at the highest political level the five major-currency countries (France, Great Britain, Japan, the United States and West Germany) and, on an informal basis, the managing dir.ector of the IMP. This new mechanism supplements the IMP's bilateral surveillance authority over exchange-rate policies of member countries and focuses on disciplining domestic economic and financial policies among the major-currency countries as the fundamental and lasting route to exchange-rate stability, whether the formal exchange-rate regime is fixed or floating.

The multilateral surveillance concept differed from earlier globalist prescriptions for economic policy coordination in at least three important respects. It focused on domestic policy consequences, not policy instruments or direct negotiated policy adjustments; it emphasized a medium- rather than a short-term perspective and it minimized formal arrangements.

The strong U.S. recovery in 1983-1984 vindicated these policy shifts and, through unprecedented U.S. trade deficits, has sparked initial worldwide economic recovery. For calendaryear 1984, U.S. growth was projected at 6 percent and, for the industrialized world as a whole, at 4.25 percent. Meanwhile, inflation in the industrial countries dropped from an average of 13 percent in mid-1980 to 4.5 percent in mid-1983, and remained steady thereafter. Disinflation and renewed growth have lagged in the developing world, but the IMF projects an average growth of 4.3 percent in 1985.

Moreover, data from the President's Council of Economic Advisers suggest that the current U.S. recovery has not been solely or even primarily a conventional Keynesian phenomenon. Real GNP has grown at a rate of 7.1 percent annually during the first six quarters of the current recovery, compared with 5.9 percent annually for the typical postwar recovery. While personal consumption expenditures have contributed about the same percentage share to the current recovery as to previous recoveries-55 percent-nonresidential fixed investment, mostly producers' durable equipment, has contributed twice its usual share to the current recovery-25 percent compared with 12 percent.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Administration's ,domesticist di-' plomacy in the international arena has focused attention on the right issues. Indeed, now that sustaining the recovery is the key issue, the multilateral surveillance process is precisely where Reagan's policies should be tested against their premises.

Massive U.S. budget deficits cannot continue much longer without deleterious domestic and worldwide results, including devastating consequences for the developing countries.

One can agree with the administration's view that it matters not only when but also how the deficit is reduced. A return to indiseriminate or automatic tax increases, coupled once again with special-interest-oriented, log-rolling spending policies, could bring back the era of stagflation as surely as deficits. But the,ultimate test of the Reagan approach is its ability to achieve politically its preferred solutions to the deficit issue.

Three Trade-Policy Phases Reagan Administration trade policy has gone through two phases and is now entering a crucial third phase. In the first phase, true to its domesticist outlook, the administration gave priority to its domestic economic program. While this program was being put in place, Reagan's trade record was mixed.

Restrictions were imposed on Japanese automobile imports but lifted on South Korean and Taiwanese footwear imports. Once the administration's domestic program was adopted in July 1981,its preferences for multilateral freer trade became clearer.

In February 1982, the United States launched the Caribbean Basin Initiative and prepared an overly ambitious agenda for multilateral free trade for the OA IT ministerial meeting held in November 1982.

In 1983the Reagan policy entered a second phase, pressing for international consensus on a multilateral trade round at the annual economic summits while using U.S. market power to initiate bilateral and regional free-trade discussions-with Canada, Israel and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, among others-as a way to catalyze a consensus for multilateral

talks. Aided by recovery, this strategy registered some success.

Now the administration's domesticist trade policy is entering a crucial third phase, where the bilateral and regional free-trade agreements, if they proliferate, as in the case of the recent U.S.-Israel free-trade area, may undercut multilateral, nondiscriminatory negotiations. Much depends on how new worldwide attitudes toward the multilateral trading system, bred in the economic travails of the 1970s, sort themselves out and how U.S. actions influence these attitudes.

Developing-country attitudes, especially those of the newly industrializing countries (NICs), are crucial to a new trade round. The Reagan Administration recognized this by advocating a North-South round at the GAIT ministerial meeting in 1982 and by initiating informal trade policy discussions in May and September 1984 between the Quadrilateral Group countries-Canada, the European Community members, Japan and the United States-and key developing countries, including Brazil, India, Mexico, the Philippines and South Korea. These discussions reflected some willingness to move away from sterile institutional issues of the 1970s toward more pragmatic policy questions: trade problems left over from the Tokyo Round and characteristics of a new trade round. The issue now is whether these talks lead to partial negotiations with individual countries or groups of several developing countries, producing discriminatory arrangements and possible confrontation with nonparticipants, or whether they build toward nondiscriminatory, multilateral trade negotiations. The Reagan Administration cannot press its bilateral and regional approach too far without forcing countries like Brazil and India back into confrontation. The market power approach to liberalization works only if it yields multilateral consensus; otherwise the world cracks apart into trading blocs.

Industrial policy advocates are unlikely to succeed in pressing their trade views unless the bottom drops out of world economic recovery. Their call for more direct government involvement in deciding comparative advantage and actively managing markets is simply impractical. This approach will politicize all aspectoSof commercial relations between countries, severely straining goodwill and political ties.

'Finally, those pushing monetary policy reform in advance of trade liberalization may eventually be won over to new trade talks as convergence of domestic economic performance helps stabilize exchange rates. As some high-level U.S. officials have stated privately, once greater exchange-rate stability through lower inflation and more open and stable capital markets is achieved, the choice of exchange-rate regimes becomes a less weighty issue. Commitment to a specific exchange-rate regimefixed, floating, or gold-is much less important thall the more fundamental underlying commitment to price stability.

For the longer-term phase, the Reagan Administration has stressed the third leg of the domesticist triad-trade-Iiberalizing negotiations. The fundamental solution to the debt problem, Special Trade Representative William Brock argued in the Summer 1984 issue of Foreign Affairs, is more exports, not fewer imports. Significant, new access to foreign markets requires reciprocal trade agreements, since only this traditional technique energizes exporters to oppose protectionist pressures , from industries hurt by imports and ultimately makes domestic politics work for trade liberalization. Larger and )TIore predictable access for Third World exports, as opposed to the year-to-

year uncertainties created by the current preferences, will then not only help restore these countries' creditworthiness but also attract more foreign investment.

U.S. international economic policies today not only reflect a coherent and cogent analysis of world economic problems in the 1970s but also have worked remarkably well. What is needed now is not a fundamental change of direction but some modifications in line with domesticist standards. The budget issue remains central to U.S. hopes to restore price stability, market incentives and freer trade. Thus far, it can be argued, the large deficits and high dollar, irrespective of their origins or connection, have on 'balance been pluses. They have revived both domestic and increasingly worldwide consumption while providing cash balances and net capital inflows in the United States that permitted corporate investment to playa much larger role in this recovery than in previous postwar recoveries. Moreover, as consumption now slows in the United States while investment shifts to plant capacity rather than equipment, interest rates and net capital flows into the United States may decline somewhat, releasing resources to fuel the embryonic investment phase of recovery abroad.

Nevertheless, unless America is in an entirely new era-and thus understands nothing about the economy-budget deficits of $200,000 million cannot be less frightening in terms of their long-term worldwide effects than deficits of $60,000 million in 1976 and 1980. From a purely economic perspective, cutting spending will do more to sustain the recovery than ~ax increases, since the level of government expenditure, not the deficit, is the ultimate drain on private resources.

The stakes for the Reagan Administration are high, both for its political place in history and for the credibility of its outlook, which could influence economic policy for decades. If it fails, rather than domestic price stability, market incentives and freer trade underlying the world economy, the financial crisis will come to dominate all else. Government aid will be needed, either in the form of inflationary monetary policies in the industrial countries or through legislative appropriations, to hold a faltering world economy together.

No one could welcome this sequence of events. Higher U.S. interest rates will increasingly make debt management impossible and politically antagonize the developing countries, which are already trying to force the governments of industrial countries into more direct involvement in debt reschedulings and new lending. This government-to-government approach could revive the sterile North-South confrontation and highly structured global negotiations that marked the 1970s.

The domesticist perspective offers better prospects for the 1980s. The Reagan Administration has rightfully reasserted U.S. power to lead the world back to the domesticist triad of world economic rearmament: low inflation, market incentives and freer trade. But now it cannot escape the tenets of its own theology. The domesticist perspective offers a useful and longoverdue intellectual template both for appreciating the fundamentally correct international economic policy course charted by the Reagan Administration and for appealing to the administration to follow through on its own domesticist priorities.

0 About the Author: Henry R. Nau is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washin~ton University , Washington, D. C. From 1981 to 1983 he served as senior staff member of the National Security Council responsible for international economic affairs.

â&#x20AC;˘ I Versatile

Vibes Generous Gesture Enterprising Women Here's

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In the world of jazz, a new voice hasemerged.Thevoice isthatofJay Hoggard(above) who, at 30, has beencalled"The mostdazzlingnew vibraphonistin jazz" by The New York Times. He hasbeen namedone ofthe 10best young jazz musicians of the 1980s by USA Today, and Record World calls him "one of the brightesttalents in jazz.... He's a consummatemaster of his instrument,and he's personalized it in a way few other vibraphonists have managedto do."

Nowthis versatile jazz musician makeshis debut March 27 in India withhis ensemble, which bears his name-The Jay Hoggard Quintet.

Thequintetincludes Jerome Harris (electric bass), Vernon Reid (guitar), Onaje Allan Gumbs (keyboards)and Pheeroan Aklaff (drums).During its two-week tour, the quintetwill perform in Bombay, Goa, Bangalore, Madras, Calcutta and Delhi.

Hoggard,born on September 28, 1954,has been steeped in music sincechildhood.He took lessons in pianofrom his mother and in saxophonefrom a neighbor when he was in fourth grade. A few years later he discovered his passionthevibraphone.However, Hoggard got his first taste of serious music at 12when his father took him to a DukeEllington concert, and introducedhim to the Duke. "That was the real turning point to knowing that I really did want to play music and really did want to play jazz," says Hoggard. "After this experience, I took up the vibraphone seriouslyand started practicing up to 12, 13 hours daily."

Hoggard studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. After graduating and teaching high school for .a year in New Haven, Connecticut, he moved to New York City and soon found himself in demand on the club scene and for studio sessions. He performed as a free-lance vibraphonist with Anthony Davis, Chico Freeman, James Newton, Cecil Taylor, Ahmed Abdullah and Michael Gregory Jackson, and quickly built a reputation with his mesmerizing performances as the new vibes player in town. Later he formed his own ensemble.

As a musician and composer Hoggard creates a musical style that reflects a spectrum of sound including Latin, Reggae, African, rhythm and blues, and light funk.

Hoggard's versatility is reflected in his approach to his instrument.

He can treat the vibes like a solo instrumental voice, play chordally like a pianist, or aggressively like a percussionist.

As a composer, Hoggard was awarded a Creative Artist Public Service Fellowship by the New York State Council on the Arts for a percussion composition in 1983.

Hoggard has cut dozens of albums, which reflect the breadth of his musical world view. "Solo Vibraphone," "Mystic Winps," "Tropic Breezes" and "Under the Double¡Moon" show his creative, innovative and improvisational mastery, while "Days Like These," "Rain Forest" and "Love Survives" showcase the contemporary, outgoing nature of his vibes.

Members of the Jay Hoggard Quintet are an equally talented and creative lot. Jerome Harris has performed as bassist with such jazz notables as Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Ran Blake and Michael Gregory Jackson. He accompanied Lake to Africa in 1982. Vernon Reid, according to The New York Times, "has the makings of a commanding style in modern guitar."

Onaje Allan Gumbs, who plays keyboards in the Hoggard Quintet, also composes and arranges music for other performing artists such as Woody Shaw, Betty Carter and Norman Connors. PheeroanAklaff, the quintet's drummer, excels equally as a percussionist, vocalist and songwriter.

Women are one of the fastest growing groups of new entrepreneurs in¡ the, United States. In the last 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of. women in business increased by over 70 percent.

Ranging from young mothers who manage part~ time cottage industries around their children's schedules to those who prefer being their own bosses, women own more than 3 million businesses, which contribute some $40,000 million a year to the U.S. economy.

Typical of these women entrepreneurs is Debbi Fields, who dropped out of college in 1977 to open a cookie store, much to the chagrin of her mother, who thought the project was crazy, and would be a financial disaster for the family. Eight years later at 27, Fields owns a chain of 150 cookie stores across the country.

Fields' phenomenal success recently won her the 1984 Up and Coming Entrepreneurial Woman award from Women Business Owners of New York, Inc., an organization which aids women in their businesses.

Advicing young women aspiring to enter the hitherto male-dominated domain, Fields says: "You really have to love what you're doing, and what I really loved doing was baking cookies."

Another entrepreneur, Judith Sans, who began as a one-person company 20 ye?rs ago, selling homemade face cream door-to-door, echoes a similar theme.

"Today women have every opportunity in the world to get into business," she says, "so long they are sure what it is that they want to do and are determined to work for it." Now Judith Sans Internationale is an outfit with an annual turnover of $5 million. The company manufactures a line of natural beauty products and owns a chain of beauty spas.

"I see women having much higher aspirations today than they did a few years ago," notes Linda Wolfe, a former counselor at the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Women's Enterprise. The office conducts workshops on business management and opportunities. It also publishes periodicals on everything from accounting to marketing, and grants loans to help women in business. "Until a few years ago, women were content to have part-time businesses that they could manage themselves. Today their goals are set much higher. They have businesses that have an impact on the local economy and national economy," adds Wolfe, who herself recently started a consulting firm.

This first X-ray image of a live human blood cell (below) has been made by IBM scientists in Yorktown Heights, New York. They obtained the highly detailed view using a microscope technique that flashes X-rays lasting only 1,000 millionth of a second. The never-before-seen details, IBM scientists say, will enable researchers to learn more about the actual mechanisms activated in blood cells when a hemorrhage occurs. This could lead to better understanding of blood disorders, strokes and some heart diseases.

Priorto this development, scientists were able to capture only dried, or dead, platelets (bottom) on X-ray plates, which resulted in considerable loss of detail.

.,.

Late last year the hospital in Ammathi village in Karnataka had a windfall. It received a check for $ 8,550 from a young Indian eye surgeon, Dr. Motilal Raichand, at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Oakbrook, Illinois.

Raichand is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago doing research in the development of laser and other retinal surgery techniques. How he came to make the gift is a warm and touching story.

In 1981 Raymond Hibbeln, an American engineer, visited India with his wife. During their six-week sojourn, they traveled all over, and while in Coorg they were guests of one K.P. Uthappa at Pollibetta, Kodagu. On Uthappa's suggestion, the couple visited the hospital in Ammathi.

After their return to the United States, the Hibbelns kept up their interest in India "by attending workshops, concerts and lectures on India at the University of Chicago, and making friends with Indians living in the area." However, in April 1983, the husband was taken ill with detached retinas of both eyes, and was referred to Dr. Raiehand, who performed the surgery.

During. his convalescence in the hospital, Hibbeln often talked about India with Raichand, and the two became friends. When he gave Raichand a check for $8,550 as fee, the surgeon told him to donate it to an Indian charity of his choice. The Hibbelns decided to donate the money to the village hospital they had visited on their trip to India; (Photo shows K.P. Uthappa, left, presenting the $8,550 check to C.M. Poonacha, former Governor of Orissa and a trustee of the hospital.)

nder a recent agreement, the United States has pledged about Rs. 13 million for rehabilitative assistance to the handicapped in India. During the five-year project, the U.S. National Institute of Handicapped. Research (NIHR) will assist the Indian Ministry of Social Welfare in establishing and supporting six model District Rehabilitation

U~

Centers in the country for a comprehensive rehabilitation services delivery systems in rural areas. Some 12 million people suffer from hearing, vision and motor disabilities in India.

The majority lives in villages.

Three NIHR experts are already in India to conduct a three-week training program for master trainers, who in turn will train personnel at the pilot projects in Bombay, Madras, Luck-

now and Bhubaneshwar.

Inaugurating the training program in New Delhi last month, Roma Majumdar, secretary in the Ministry of Social Welfare, underscored the need to help the handicapped in rural areas, and expressed the hope that the setting up of the centers will go a long way toward bringing much-needed rehabilitation services to the handicapped in Indian villages.

Above: Mickey Mouse hugs a young admirer in Delhi. Top: Accompanying Mickey on his 3D-country tour as part of Disneyland's 30th anniversary celebrations is Melissa Tyler,the amusement park's "1985 ambassador to the world." Top, right: At Disneyland, Mickey with his equally famous contemporaries (clockwise, from top) Goofy, Donald Duck and Pluto.

Guess who was in Delhi recently? Mickey Mouse, the most endearing cartoon character invented

by Wait Disney 60 years ago. But age has not withered him; nor custom staled him even marginally.

Riotously colorful, with huge ears and wearing exaggeratedly oversized shoes, and young as on the day he was born, Mickey descended on Delhi on February 22 to the unbelieving delight of his myriad fans both young and old, who turned out on the lawns of Oberoi, Intercontinental Hotel to meet their hero. Some children approached him shyly, putting out a tentative hand to touch his face.

The bolder ones shook hands with him, asking for his autograph. Still others wanted to be photographed with the most popular mouse in the world. Wearing his usual big smile, Mickey obliged one and all.

During his too brief visit, Mickey also addressed a press conference, and his message, in essence, was: "Smile, the world looks better that way."

Mickey Mouse was in Delhi as part of a 30-day, 30-country whirlwind tour to celebrate the 30th birth anniversary of Disneyland.

Focusing 'on the number 30, commemorating Disneyland's anniversary, gifts will be awarded to every 30th, 300th, 3,000th, 30,000th, 300,OOOth, 3,000,000th guest entering the park this year ..

Prizes range from commemorative Disneyland passports for every 30th guest to General Motors cars for the 30,000th, 300,000th, 3,000,000th visitors. It is esti-' mated that an unprecedented 400 automobiles will be given away in this 12-month period of the 30th anniversary celebration.

Tomorrow's' managers will face ex- military and health. The findings are tremely complex situations in which they dramatic.

Without exception, the top managers will need to make decisions under circumstances where the complete data in every organization rated significantly higher than middle- and lower-level mannecessary for traditional decisionmaking processes will be unavailable, inade- agers in their ability to use intuition on the job to make decisions. quate, or too costly to gather quickly.

Executives use intuition in a variety of They will be dealing with a changing world and a workforce that will make ways. According to American Banker, Robert Bernstein, chairman of Random increasing demands for real participation in the decisionmaking process. Man- House, believes that "only intuition can agers will need to rely less on formal protect you from the most dangerous individual-the articulate incompetent." authority and more on intuitive judgment William G. McGinnis, the city manin order to handle the shift to bottom-up, horizontal organizational communication ager of Crescent City, California, relies on his intuition in public meetings when with sensitivity and persuasiveness; Managers will need a new set of skills he has to make immediate judgments.

For example, in a city council meeting, he to cope with this shifting environment. will often size up the reaction of the Until now, the predominant management council members as they listen to testiapproach has been the logical, analytical, "left-brain" style. Business and public mony on alternative proposals and base his recommendation on his intuitive administration schools across the United assessment of what the council will find States have stressed linear, deductive reasoning based on case studies of prob- acceptable. "When you have to react quickly with intuitive thought processes lem solving.

But a new model is developing, one you base your decision on what's occurpatterned after the emerging successful red in the past," he says.

Successful executives tend to rely less Japanese management style that blends analysis with insight. Shigeru Okada, on fact-gathering and more 'on their head of one of Japan's largest department instincts. Any time decisions must be stores, explained the reason for his com- made quickly or an issue is so complex pany's success in American Banker: "It that complete information is not availwas due to our adoption of the West's able, the managers who have developed pragmatic management combined with their intuition will have an advantage over those who have not. And in the spiritual, in.tuitive aspects of the East."

More and more leaders are copmg with rapidly changing, complex world of the rapid changes by sharpening their intui- future, these situations will be more and tive, inductive skills, and intuition's value more common.

Just what is this mysterious process? in business and management is already becoming clear. Over a period of two Psychologist Carl Jung calls intuition one years, I tested the intuitive abilities of of the four basic psychological functions, more than 2,000 managers across the along with thinking, feeling and sensaUnited States at all levels of responsibiltion. It is the function that "explores the unknown and senses possibilities and ity, in a wide variety of organizations-business, government, education, ,implications which may not be readily apparent."

Copyright Š 1983 World Future Society. Reprinted by permission Webster's dictionary defines it as "the from the August 1983 issue of The Futurist, published by the World act or process of coming to direct knowlFuture Society, 4916, St. Elmo Avenue (Bethesda), Washington, D.C. 20814. edge or certainty without reasoning or

inferring; immediate apprehension or cognition. " But it may be be~ter understood with a more personal definition. For example, frequently we have an intuitive understanding of a person or a situation but are afraid to act on the basis of this instant awareness. Instead, we play the mental "tape" we have been socialized to follow: "You had better wait, gather more facts, get to know the situation better." Thus we delay decisions and actions, pushing our immediate impressions of situations into our subconscious. Only after actual day-to-day experience with a person or situation do we allow our feelings to surface to our conscious mind and we come to realize that those initial instincts that we failed to act upon were correct.

"That little voice inside of you is the distillate of all your experiences," says Richard Brown, former pres~dent of Towle Manufacturing, who bases many of his decisions on intuition.

Fully developed intuition is highly efficient-a way of knowing immediately. It is fast and accurate. We can process a wide array of information on many levels and gain instantaneous cues as to how to act. We have the answer although we do not understand all the steps or know how our mental system processed the information.

Intuitive abilities will become more and more valuable during the coming period of surprises, complexities and rapid changes. The organizations of tomorrow will require a breed of executive trained in these decisionmaking techniques.

Signs are already evident that management education programs are beginning to create courses designed to develop intuitive skills. For example, the Stanford University Business School is currently offering a course on "Creativity in Business" that emphasizes the right-brain approach. By 1990, the leading management training programs, both private and public, are likely to place just as much emphasis on the training of intuitive, precognitive right-brain skills as they presently do on deductive, analytical left-brain skills.

As businesses realize the potential of intuition and the importance of these other brain skills, they will learn how to use personality tests and other methods to match an individual's brain skills with job requirements in ways that can raise both productivity and job satisfaction.

The kind of brain skills needed for various jobs vary by organizational type, level of management and occupational

specialization, with some tasks calling for left-brain skills, some for right-brain skills and still.others for integrative skills that combine both kinds of thinking.

An individual's particular abilities can be determined using a combination of tests. A basic personality test can help determine what kinds of occupations would be most appropriate for an individual. The organization might then administer a portion of the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory that measures the person's potential capacity to use intuition in decisionmaking. Finally, the brain skills-left, integrative, or right-a person is actually using on the job to make decisions can be tested.

This testing of new employees could aid greatly in the process of selecting and placing personnel.

From the employees' point of view, Daniel Girdano and George Everly report in Controlling Stress and Tension that workers' health is closely linked to whether their brain skills are properly matched to their jobs; whether they are in touch with their dominant brain styles; and whether they are in fact using their dominant brain styles on the job. An organization with an effective placement program that takes into account brain styles and position requirements will benefit from the decrease in health costs

Resources for Developing

Your Intuition A number of recent books, articles, and tapes explain what intuition is, how to develop it, and how to use it to make decisionsin your work and personal life.

An excellent and inexpensive paperback that is a good introduction to the whole subjectis Awakening Intuition by Frances E. Vaughn (New York: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1979).

If you wish to measure your intuitive ability,several tests are available. Recommended is the intuitive portion of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, available from Consulting Psychologist Press, Palo Alto, California. A test to measure precognition-The Mobius Group's Psi-Q I and II Test-appeared in the October 1981 and 1982 issues of Omni.

For a discussion of the practical use of intuition in management situations, st:e "HowDo You KnowWhen to Rely on Your Intuition?" (The Wall Street Journal, June 21,1982)and "Trust That Hunch" (Success, August1982).A videotape on "Using Intuition to Be More Effective at Work and in Your Personal Life," produced by Walt DisneyEnterprises, is available from ENFP Enterprises, Caprock, Texas.

SAMPLE QUESTION FROM AN INTUITION TEST Which word in each pair appeals\to you more?

1. theory vs. certainty 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

build VS. invent statement vs. concept facts VS. ideas concrete VS. abstract theory VS. experience literal VS. figurative

Answers at end of article.

normally borne by individuals and their organizations.

Knowledge of brain skills can improve a company's productivity in other ways, as well. Test results can be used to choose work teams for various projects in ways that enhance maximum performance.

Such factors as the degree of intuitive or analytical skills required, the most advantageous mix of brain types and the personality types that would ensure the most effective team effort can be taken into account.

Brain-style testing can also improve communication within an organization.

For example, at Walt Disney Enterprises the creative people had a hard time' understanding and communicating with the production and financial group-and vice versa. The intuitive "imagineers"the artists, writers and craftsmenapproached a problem quite differently from the analytical "engineers" or "financiers." The rift began to heal and communication began to improve only after each group saw the results of the brainstyle tests and understood the basis for their colleagues' thoughts and actions.

Individuals will also find ways that their own careers can benefit from brain-style testing. My own test results indicate that those managers with higher levels of intuitive ability are likely to be particularly effective in such fields as personnel, health, public affairs and public relations, advertising and marketing, and crisis management-areas that demand imagination, creativity and other right-brain skills.

Women and those with Asian backgrounds score consistently higher in intuitive ability, suggesting that members of these groups should consider actively developing and marketing their intuitive skills as an effective vehicle for career advancement in the organizations of tomorrow.

All too frequently, we reject new and different ways of solving problems because we are accustomed to a particular way of doing things. Often it is only in

crises-business failure, loss of health or loved ones-that we reach for alternative methods, allowing our inherent intuitive skills to surface and be of assistance to us.

Fortunately, however, we do not need to experience serious traumas in order to develop our intuitive ability. Individuals interested in using intuition on the job or for career advancement will find that there are several techniques for developing their ability.

Intuition becomes more efficient as we become more open to our feelings and more secure through experience in its ability to provide the correct cues. The first rule is to believe in it. What we believe we can do is one of the most important factors in determining what we can in fact do. For example, chief executive officers who believe in their ability to make decisions guided by intuition also have the highest profit record, according to a report by Douglas Dean and John Mihalasky in Executive ESP. The second rule is practice makes perfect. We all possess the ability to use intuition to make decisions, but all too frequently we fail to develop our capacity to the fullest. A blind person can develop his or her sense of touch to the extent of "seeing" colors through sensing the relative degree of heat given off by the intensity of the hues. With effort and persistence, we can develop our intuitive ability in the same way.

The third rule is to create a supportive environment in which intuitive skills are valued. There are tests, exercises and games-involving such techniques as meditation, guided imagery and dream analysis-that serve to focus our attention within rather than without.

More executives and organizations are likely to embrace such positive efforts to increase intuitive abilities as the need for new skills to cope with the shifting organizational climate increases. Managers who continue to rely solely on empirical evidence that has been sifted, digested and analyzed may lose out to the leaders who have the confidence and competence to follow their intuitive instincts in times of rapid change.

0 About the Author: Weston H. Agor is professor and director of the Masters in Public Administration program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is also a consultant on the use of intuition in management for several American organizations, including Walt Disney Enterprises and Rockwell International.

The "right-brain" type answers are: 1. theory; 2. invent; 3. concept; 4. ideas; 5. abstract; 6. theory; 7. figurative.

1. Bowl with Horse and Rider Stoneware, 30 em diameter 2. Ganesh Motors Glazed earthenware, 25 em.

3. Horn Player Glazed earthenware, 33 em

8. Horn Player Stoneware, 34 em 9. Cross Glazed earthenware, 20 em 10. Devi Stoneware, 33 em

Green Faced Bottle Glazed earthenware, 15 em Bhu Devi Ceramic, 183 em Two Women with Bird Stoneware, 23 em Young Woman's Head Enamel accents on unglazed stoneware, 18 em

Pottering Around India

by HOMAYUN

TABA

American sculptor Robert Bussabarger (right) travels frequently around India, interacting with rural artists and holding exhibitions and workshops.

61 and after more than three decades of teaching, when many think of retiring, American sculptor Robert Bussabarger (whose works were exhibited in Delhi recently) acts as if he' has just started college. This is characteristic of his vitality, enthusiasm and willingness to explore new frontiers in design and ceramic art forms. His life is fueled by his art: For some artists, it's that easy.

Bussabarger spent a major part of last year traveling in India, working at different art centers, exhibiting his works and interacting with the artists who share his medium-ceramics.

But this was no maiden trip to India. Bussabarger became interested in the terra-cotta sculpture of India during the late 1950s. This interest has led to seven trips to India so far, two of which have been for a period of almost a year each. His first visit in 1961-62-as a Fulbright research scholar-took him to Calcutta and from there he traveled extensively. He photographed India's terra-cotta sculptures and temple architecture.

His research culminated in a book, The Everyday Art of India (coauthored with Betty D. Robins).

A second Fulbright-Hays research scholarship brought him back to India in 1968-69. This time he exhibited his work in Calcutta and Bombay. He spent almost a year during 1977-78 in India on sabbatical and held an exhibition at Gallery Chemould in New Delhi before leaving for home. He returned in 1980 on a research scholarship from the University of Missouri (where he has been teaching since 1953).

The following year, on the invitation of the Craft Council of Western India, Bussabarger joined hands with a couple of distinguished potters from abroad to conduct a workshop at the J.J. School of Arts, Bombay. It was part of a movement to infuse new life into Indian pottery. The lectures and demonstrations were aimed at three categories of audiences-the traditional village guild craftsmen, small industries and private corporations, and educated artists. Bussabarger and his fellow potters had brought with them new techniques and aesthetic ideas and a new interpretation of Indian motifs and themes.

Discussing the impact of the workshop, he says, "I don't know whether it worked quantitatively and statistically, but in the minds and attitudes of some of the 150 or so people who attended the workshop, it may have created some sparks of interest to go and do something in the future."

During his visit to India last year, Bussabarger worked at the ,Design Centre in Calcutta, at Baroda University and at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, where he held a workshop. In Navgaon near Alibag in Maharashtra, he helped a community ceramic center build its own kiln. In Monghyr at the Bihar School of Yoga, where his wife Mary Lou has contacts as a yoga instructor, he involved the resident sanyasis and others in a project that used Ganga clay in making a variety of objects.

His trips to India have not been confined to lecturing and demonstrating at art colleges. He has delved deep into the hinterland to see the works of potters in the villages of Bengal, Gujarat and south India. The fact of his being a professor and speaking a foreign language has not been a handicap, for there seems to exist a universal language of nonverbal expressions which works perfectly well among potters. "Verbal language does not satisfy every need. If-hard pressed, I'd resort to sign language, frantic gestures or the services of an interpreter," Bussabarger says.

Often the camera helps to break the ice more rapidly than words. The smiling, posing villagers, eager to possess shiny color pictures of themselves, would become more amenable and communicative. On a visit to the potters' village at the edge

A

\

of the city of Monghyr, people gathered around, "wondering what this funny foreigner was going to do. So I just picked up a few wet pieces that were already made and were set out to dry, and I reshaped them into some animals and whistles. I also tried their traditional wheel. There was no need for words."

His aim in making these trips has been to pass on to these potters, besides his enthusiasm, some of his technical expertise so that they could improve the quality and the durability of their pottery, and also learn to diversify. This they must do-or be virtually wiped out-as plastic household items replace the products of village potters.

Bussabarger has keenly observed the way rural potters work, sticking to the traditional-often tedious-methods.

He marvels that no more than 25 percent of their pieces are defective and even these are recycled and used, among other things, for the construction of their kilns. For villagers, the cost of clay is practically nothing. It is fuel, in the form of wood, that constitutes their major expenditure. "If they cannot get fuel, they cannot manage to produce pots for sale and so they are in turn unable to buy fueL ... It becomes a vicious circle."

Bussabarger is fascinated by the "reverential attitude" to craft, particularly pottery, in India. In the United States, he says, there is a lot of experimentation going on in techniques, but in India, apart from a few artist-potters working in their own studios, the vast majority of potters who live and work in villages stick to traditional themes and methods. The extensive use of pottery here has also surprised him. "There is no place in the United States for the kind of pottery you find in India such as the water and cooking vessels, which are used daiiy in the villages so extensively. The potter in India remains an integral part of the socioeconomic system. It is not so in America."

It isn't only Indian art that has fascinated him. The folk art of any country is a major source of his inspiration. He has been to Mexico, South America and other places where folk art still exists. He has written several articles to throw new light on some of the traditional themes.

Bussabarger's interest in art finds two expressions-in his creations and in teaching the art. As a teacher, he admonishes his students not to ape him but to try to find their own identity, He practices what he preaches. His works are not a copy of the models he chooses but an appropriation of details that are internalized, resulting in the creation of works that reveal a distinctive personal style. "I am always striving not to make my art a copy of Indian art, but only to extract its essence."

Top: Bottle Man, stoneware, 16 em Above: Horse, stoneware, 15 em

Incorporation of Indian themes can prove to be a tricky affair in the hands of a foreign artist not fully in tune with the pulse and rhythm of India. However, where others may have faltered, Bussabarger walks with sure-footedness and achieves many a breakthrough.

In transforming Indian motifs and themes, he comes out with new combinations. There are abundant variations, yet he does not spread himself thin. Some of his pieces may give an impression of being crude but on closer examination they turn out to be subtly detailed. In some, one notices a seemingly effortless mingling of myth and reality. It is here that traditional motifs re-emerge, this time in a wholly modern setting. In one such piece, Brindavan Luxury Bus, some inhabitants of the Heavenly Abode take to wheels in a bus equipped with a video.

During his visits to India, Bussabarger has met a crosssection of people, from the very rich to the very poor. "I have a very broad perspective of what India is all about. This is something that no one can take away from me, and I can project this image of India to other people."

He acknowledges the contribution of India to his worldview.

"I have learned a lot here. The intangible qualities of life-the sensitivities of producing in a kind of natural, organic way that the Indian potters have. This greatly appealed to me."

There is a striking lightheartedness about Bussabarger's ceramic sculptures. They seem to be participating in a fun fair.

Often the pieces are whistle forms that do, in fact, whistle. His

creations demonstrate liveliness and appear willing to communicate without being obtrusive. They are invitational in a unique way.

But if Bussabarger's works are communicative, he himself is not; to make him comment on any of his pieces is next to impossible. His habit of sloughing off questions has earned him the title of "Sphinx" among his students.

Almost always, career paths tend to establish corresponding social attitudes. This does not seem to have happened to Bussabarger. He is a professor with hardly any traces of pedantry-a teacher who is as interested in his art as in his teaching. He says, "The intensity of art wears you out if you do it constantly." Consequently, he finds teaching acts as an escape valve.

Besides the compositional strength born out of technical proficiency, rich personal experience and a fertile imagination, his works are on the whole a celebration of life and an indication of the artist's coming to terms with his own world and the world around him. "Life," he says, "faces us with pain and pleasure, good and bad, all the opposites combine together. It's there, but that means you're right in the middle, and if you can keep your balance, it's more like life as it really is." He comes across as a naysayer to the kind of pessimism which has taken a big toll of the artists who keep company with a sense of angst and futility.

In an article entitled "The Artful Academic," Michelle Ruess of the Columbia Daily Tribune wrote this about him: "For all his talk, Bussabarger harbors no grand illusions ab0!1t .his career. The purpose of his exhibition is to sell his work, and someone might use one of his sculptures as an ashtray. That's all right. 'I am not creating icons that have power in themselves,' he says. 'If someone else can have it, that's what it's for. I have oodles at home. n, What preoccupies him is getting all he can out of his work each time, and whether his work or he himself will be forgotten in connection with it, seems least important to him.

This American locomotive, dragging behind him his wagons of artistic creations, does not seem to be losing steam. "I want to do better than before. To me, it's a never-ending search for beauty and aesthetic statements. I guess to be smug is anti-art," Bussabarger says.

0 About the Author: Homayun Taba is a writer, reviewer and yoga¡ teacher who lives in Bombay.

ADiaDlond GUitar A short story by Truman Capote

The nearest town to the prison farm is twenty miles away. Many forests of pine trees stand between the farm and the town, and it is in these forests that the convicts work; they tap for turpentine.

The prison itself is in a forest. You will find it there at the end ()f a red rutted road, barbed wire sprawling like a vine over its walls. Inside, there live one hundred and nine white men, ninetyseven Negroes and one Chinese. There are two sleep houses-great green wooden buildings with tar-paper roofs.

The white men occupy one, the Negroes and the Chinese the other. Ir. each sleep house there is one large pot-bellied stove, but the winters are cold here, and at night with the pines waving frostily and a freezing light falling from the moon the men, stretched on their iron cots, lie awake with the fire colors of the stove playing in their eyes.

The men whose cots are nearest the stove are the important men-those who are looked up to or feared. Mr. Schaeffer is one of these. Mr. Schaeffer-for that is what he is called, a mark of special respect--is a lanky, pulled-out man. He has reddish, silvering hair, and his face is attenuated, religious; there is no flesh to him; you can see the workings of his bones, and his eyes are a poor, du.llcolor.

He can read and he can write, he can add a column of figures. When 'another man receives a letter, he brings it to Mr. Schaeffer. Most of these letters are sad and complaining; very often Mr. Schaeffer improvises more cheerful messages and does not read what is written on the page. In the sleep house there are two other men who can read. Even so, one of them brings his letters to Mr. Schaeffer, who obliges by never reading the truth.

Copyright Tiffany's

Š

1950 by Truman Capote. Reprinted from Breakfast

by Truman

Capote,

by permission

of Random

House,

at Inc.

Mr. Schaeffer himself does not receive mail, not even at Christmas; he seems to have no friends beyond the prison, and actually he has none there-that is, no particular friend. This was not always true.

One winter Sunday some winters ago Mr. Schaeffer was sitting on the steps of the sleep house carving a doll. He is quite talented at this. His dolls are carved in separate sections, then put together with bits of spring wire; the arms and legs move, the head rolls. When he has finished a dozen or so of these dolls, the Captain of the farm takes them into town, and there they are sold in a general store. In this way Mr. Schaeffer earns money for candy and tobacco.

That Sunday, as he sat cutting out the fingers for a little hand, a truck pulled into the prison yard. A young boy, handcuffed to the Captain of the farm, climbed out of the truck and stood blinking at the ghostly winter sun. Mr. Schaeffer only glanced at him. He was then a man of fifty, and seventeen of those years he'd lived at the farm. The arrival of a new prisoner could not arouse him. Sunday is a free day at the farm, and other men who were moping around the yard crowded down to the truck. Afterward, Pick Axe and Goober stopped by to speak with Mr. Schaeffer.

Pick Axe said, "He's a foreigner, the new one is. From Cuba. But with yellow hair."

"A knifer, Cap'n says," said Goober, who was a knifer himself. "Cut up a sailor in Mobile."

"Two sailors," said Pick Axe. "But just a cafe fight. He didn't hurt them boys none."

"To cut off a man's ear? You call that not hurtin' him? They give him two years, Cap'n says."

Pick Axe said, "He's got a guitar with jewels all over it."

It was getting too dark to work. Mr. Schaeffer fitted the pieces of his doll together and, holding its little hands, set it on his knee. He rolled a cigarette; the pines were blue in the sundown light, and the smoke from his cigarette lingered in the cold, darkening air. He could see the Captain coming across the yard. The new prisoner, a blond young boy, lagged a pace behind. He was carrying a guitar studded with glass diamonds that cast a starry twinkle, and his new uniform was too big for him; it looked like a Halloween suit.

"Somebody for you, Schaeffer," said the Captain, pausing on the steps of the

sleep house. The Captain was not a haTd man; occasionally he invited Mr. Schaeffer into his office, and they would talk together about things they had read in the newspapers. "Tieo Feo," he said as though it were the name of a bird or a song, "this is Mr. Schaeffer. Do like him, and you'll do right."

Mr. Schaeffer glanced up at the boy and smiled. He smiled at him longer than he meant to, for the boy had eyes like strips of sky-blue as the' winter evening-and his hair was as gold as the Captain's teeth. He had a fun-loving face, nimble, clever; and, looking at him, Mr. Schaeffer thought of holidays and good times.'

"Is like my baby sister," said Tieo Feo, touching Mr. Schaeffer's doll. His voice with its Cuban accent was soft and sweet as a banana. "She git on my knee also."

Mr. Schaeffer was suddenly shy. Bowing to the Captain, he walked off into the shadows of the yard. He stood there whispering the names of the evening stars as they opened in flower above him. The stars were his pleasure, but tonight they did not comfort him; they did not make him remember that what happens to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of¡ eternity. Gazing at them-the stars-he thought of the jeweled guitar and its worldly glitter.

It could be said of Mr. Schaeffer that in his life he'd done only one really bad thing: he'd killed a man. The circumstances of that deed are unimportant, except to say that the man deserved to die and that for it Mr. Schaeffer was sentenced to ninety-nine years and a day. For a long while-for many years, in facthe had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tieo Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome.

Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.

Mr. Schaeffer hung his head. The glare of the stars had made his eyes water.

The sleep house usually is a glum place, stale with the smell of men and stark in the light of two unshaded electric bulbs. But with the advent of Tieo Feo it was as though a tropie occurrence had

happened in the cold room, for when Mr. Schaeffer returned from his observance of the stars he came upon a savage and garish scene. Sitting cross-legged on a cot, Tieo Feo was picking at his guitar with long swaying fingers and singing a song that sounded as jolly as jingling coins. Though the song was in Spanish, some of the men tried to sing it with him, and Pick Axe and Goober were dancing together. Charlie and Wink were dancing too, but separately. It was nice to hear the men laughing, and when Tieo Feo finally put aside his guitar, Mr. Schaeffer was among those who congratulated him.

"You deserve such a fine guitar," he said.

"Is diamond guitar," said Tico Feo, drawing his hand over its vaudeville dazzle. "Once I have a one with rubies.

But that one is stole. In Havana my sister work in a, how you say, where make guitar; is howl have this one."

Mr. Schaeffer asked him if he had many sisters, and Tieo Feo, grinning, held up four fingers. Then, his blue eyes narrowing greedily, he said, "Please, Mister, you give me doll for my two little sister?"

The next evening. Mr. Schaeffer brought him the dolls. After that he was Tico Feo's best friend and they were always together. At all times they considered each other.

Tico Feo was eighteen years old and for two years had worked on a freighter in the Caribbean. As a child he'd gone to school with nuns, and he wore a gold crucifix around his neck. He had a rosary too. The rosary he kept wrapped in a green silk scarf that also held three other treasures: a bottle of Evening in Paris cologne, a pocket mirror and a Rand McNally map of the world. These and the guitar were his only possessions, and he would not allow anyone to touch them.

Perhaps he prized his map the most. At night, before the lights were turned off, he would shake out his map and show Mr. Schaeffer the places he'd been-Galveston, Miami, New Orleans, Mobile, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands-and the places he wanted to go to. He wanted to go almost everywhere, especially Madrid, especially the North Pole. This both charmed and frightened Mr. Schaeffer. It hurt him to think of Tieo Feo on the seas and in far places. He sometimes looked defensively at his friend and thought, "You are just a lazy dreamer."

It is true that Tieo Feo was a lazy fellow. After that first evening he had to

be urged even to play his guitar. At daybreak when the guard came to rouse the men, which he did by banging a hammer on the stove, Tico Feo would whimper like a child. Sometimes he pretended to be ill, moaned and rubbed his stomach; but he never got away with this, for the Captain would send him out to work with the rest of the men. He and Mr. Schaeffer were put together on a highway gang. It was hard work, digging at frozen clay and carrying croker sacks filled with broken stone. The guard had always to be shouting at Tico Feo, for he spent most of the time trying to lean on things.

Each noon, when the dinner buckets were passed around, the two friends sat together. There were some good things in Mr. Schaeffer's bucket, as he could afford apples and candy bars from the town. He liked giving these things to his friend, for his friend enjoyed them so much, and he thought, "You are growing; it will be a long time until you are a grown man."

Not all the men liked Tico Feo. Because they were jealous; or for more subtle reasons, some of them told ugly stories about him. Tico Feo himself seemed unaware of this. When the men gathered around him, and he played his guitar and sang his songs, you could see that he felt he was loved. Most of the men did feel a love for him; they waited for and depended upon the hour between supper and lights out. "Tico, play your box," they would say. They did not notice that afterward there was a deeper sadness than there had ever been. Sleep jumped beyond them like a jack rabbit, and their eyes lingered ponderingly on the firelight that creaked behind the grating of the stove. Mr. Schaeffer was the only one who understood their troubled feeling, for he felt it too. It was that his friend had revived the brown rivers where the fish run, and ladies with sunlight in their hair.

Soon Tico Feo was allowed the honor of having a bed near the stove and next to Mr. Schaeffer. Mr. Schaeffer had always known that his friend was a terrible liar.

He did not listen for the truth in Tico Feo's tales of adventure, of conquests and encounters with famous people.

Rather, he took pleasure in them as plain stories, such as you would read in a magazine, and it warmed him to hear his friend's tropic voice whispering in the dark.

Except that they did not combine their

bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers. Of the seasons, spring is the most shattering: stalks thrusting through the earth's winterstiffened crust, young leaves cracking out on old left-to-die branches, the fallingasleep wind cruising through all the newborn green. And with Mr. Schaeffer it was the same, as breaking up, a flexing of muscles that had hardened.

It was late January. The friends were sitting on the steps of the sleep house, each with a cigarette in his hand. A moon thin and yellow as a piece of lemon rind curved above them, and under its light, threads of ground frost glistened like silver snail trails. For many days Tico Feo had been drawn into himself-silent as a robber waiting in the shadows. It was no good to say to him, "Tico, play your box." He would only look at you with smooth, under-ether eyes.

"Tell a story," said Mr. Schaeffer, who felt nervous and helpless when he could not reach his friend. "Tell about when you went to the race track in Miami."

"I not ever go to no race track," said Tico Feo, thereby admitting to his wildest lie, one involving hundreds of dollars and a meeting with Bing Crosby. He did not seem to care. He produced a comb and pulled it sulkily through his hair. A few days before this comb had been the cause of a fierce quarrel. One of the men, Wink, claimed that Tico Feo had stolen the comb from him, to which the accused replied by spitting in his face. They had wrestled around until Mr. Schaeffer and another man got them separated. "Is my comb. You tell him!" Tico Feo had demanded of Mr. Schaeffer. But Mr. Schaeffer with quiet firmness had said no, it was not his friend's comb-an answer that seemed to defeat all concerned.

"Aw," said Wink, "if he wants it so much, Christ's sake, let the sonofabitch keep it." And later, in a puzzled, uncertain voice, Tico Feo had said, "I thought you was my friend." "I am," Mr. Schaeffer had thought, though he said nothing.

"I not go to no race track, and what 1 said about the widow woman, that is not true also." He puffed up his cigarette to a furious glow and looked at Mr. Schaeffer with a speculating expression. "Say, you have money, Mister?"

"Maybe twenty dollars," said Mr. Schaeffer hesitantly, afraid of where this was leading.

"Not so good, twenty dollar," Tico said, but without disappointment. "No

important, we work our way. In Mobile I have my friend Frederico. He will put us on a boat. There will not be trouble," and it was as though he were saying that ithe weather had turned colder.

There was a squeezing in Mr. Schaeffer's heart; he could not speak.

"Nobody here can run to catch Tico.

He run the fastest."

"Shotguns run faster," said Mr. Schaeffer in <1 voice hardly alive. "I'm too old," he said, with the knowledge of age churning like nausea inside him.

Tico Feo was not listening. "Then, the world. The world, el mundo, my friend."

Standing up, he quivered like a young horse; everything seemed to draw close to him-the moon, the callings of screech owls. His breath came quickly and turned to smoke in the air. "Should we go to Madrid? Maybe someone teach me to bullfight. You think so, Mister?"

Mr. Schaeffer was not listening either.

"I'm too old," he said. "I'm too damned old."

For the next several weeks Tico Feo kept after him-the world, el mundo, my friend; and he wanted to hide. He would shut himself in the toilet and hold his head. Nevertheless, he was excited, tantalized. What if it could come true, the race with Tico across the forests and to the sea? And he imagined himself on a boat, he who had never seen the sea, whose whole life had been land-rooted.

During this time one of the convicts died, and in the yard you could hear the coffin being made. As each nail thudded into place, Mr. Schaeffer thought, "This is for me, it is mine."

Tico Feo himself was never in better spirits; he sauntered about with a dancer's snappy, gigolo grace, and had a joke for everyone. In the sleep house after supper his fingers popped at the guitar like firecrackers. He taught the men to cry ote, and some of them sailed their caps through the air.

When work on the road was finished, Mr. Schaeffer and Tico Feo were moved back into the forests. On Valentine Day they ate their lunch under a pine tree.

Mr. Schaeffer had ordered a dozen oranges from the town and he peeled them slowly, the skins unraveling in a spiral; the juicier slices he gave to his friend, who was proud of how far he could spit the seeds-a good ten feet.

It was a cold beautiful day, scraps of sunlight blew about them like butterflies, and Mr. Schaeffer, who liked working with the trees, felt dim and happy. Then

Tieo Feo said, "That one, he no could catch a fly in his mouth." He meant Armstrong, a hog-jowled man sitting with a shotgun propped between his legs.

He was the youngest of the guards and new at the farm.

"I don't know," said Mr. Schaeffer.

He'd watched Armstrong and noticed that, like many people who are both heavy and vain, the new guard moved with a skimming lightness. "He might could fool you."

"I fool him, maybe," said Tico Feo, and spit an orange seed in Armstrong's direction. The guard scowled at him, then blew a whistle. It was the signal for work to begin.

Sometimes during the afternoon the two friends came together again; that is, they were nailing turpentine buckets onto trees that stood next to each other. At a distance below them a shallow bouncing creek branched through the woods. "In water no smell," said Tico Feo meticulously, as though remembering something he'd heard. "We run in the water; until dark we climb a tree. Yes, Mister?"

Mr. Schaeffer went on hammering, but his hand was shaking, and the hammer came down on his thumb. He looked around dazedly at his friend. His face showed no reflection of pain; and he did not put the thumb in his mouth, the way a man ordinarily might.

Tico Feo's blue eyes seemed to swell like bubbles, and when in a voice quieter than the wind sounds in the pinetops he said, "Tomorrow," these eyes were all that Mr. Schaeffer could see.

"Tomorrow, Mister?"

"Tomorrow," said Mr. Schaeffer.

The first colors of morning fell upon the walls of the sleep house, and Mr.¡ Schaeffer, who had rested little, knew that Tico Feo was awake too. With the weary eyes of a crocodile he observed the movements of his friend in the next cot.

Tico Feo was unknotting the scarf that contained his treasures. First he took the pocket mirror. Its jellyfish light trembled on his face. For a while he admired himself with serious delight, and combed and slicked his hair as though he were preparing to step out to a party. Then he hung the rosary about his neck. The cologne he never,opened, nor the map.

The last thing he did was to tune his guitar. While the other men were dressing, he sat on the edge of his cot and tuned it. It was strange, for he must have known he would never play it again.

Bird shrills followed the men through

the smoky morning woods. They walked him; it was as though he were a turtle single file, fifteen men to a group, and a stranded on its back.

While he struggled there, it seemed to guard bringing up the rear of each line.

Mr. Schaeffer was sweating as though it him that the face of his friend, suspended were a hot day, and he could not keep in above him, was part of the white winter marching step with his friend, who sky-it was so distant, judging. It hung walked ahead, snapping his fingers and there but an instant, like a hummingbird, whistling at the birds. yet in that time he'd seen that Tico Feo A signal had been set. Tico Feo was to had not wanted him to make it, had never call "Time out," and pretend to go thought he would, and he remembered behind a tree. But Mr. Schaeffer did not once thinking that it would be a long time know when it would happen. before his friend was a grown man. When The guard named Armstrong blew a they found him, he was still lying in the whistle, and his men dropped from the ankle-deep water as though it were a line and separated to their various sta- summer afternoon and he were idly tions. Mr. Schaeffer, though going about floating on the stream. his work as best he could, took care Since then three winters have gone by, always to be in a position where he could and each has been said to be the coldest, keep an eye on both Tico Feo and the the longest. Two recent months of rain guard. Armstrong sat on a stump, a chew washed deeper ruts in the clay road of tobacco lopsiding his face, and his gun leading to the farm, and it is harder than pointing into the sun. He had the tricky ever to get there, harder to leave. A pair eyes of a cardsharp; you could not really of searc~lights has been added to the tell where he was looking. walls, and they burn there through the Once another man gave the signal. night like the eyes of a giant owl.

Although Mr. Schaeffer had known at Otherwise, there have not been many once that it was not the voice of his changes. Mr. Schaeffer, for instance, friend, panic had pulled at his throat like looks much the same, except that there is a rope. As the morning wore on there . a thicker frost of white in his hair, and as was such a drumming in his ears he was the result of a broken ankle he walks with afraid he would not hear the signal when a limp. It was the Captain himself who said that Mr. Schaeffer had broken his it came.

The sun climbed to the center of the ankle attempting to capture Tico Feo. sky. "He is just a lazy dreamer. It will There was even a picture of Mr. Schaefnever happen," thought Mr. Schaeffer, fer in the newspaper, and under it this daring a moment to believe this. But caption: "Tried to Prevent Escape." At "First we eat," said Tico Feo with a the time he was deeply mortified, not practical air as they set their dinner pails because he knew the other men were on the bank above the creek. They ate in laughing, but because he thought of Tico silence, almost as though each bore the Feo seeing it. But he cut it out of the other a grudge, but at the end of it paper anyway, and keeps it in an enMr. Schaeffer felt his friend's hand close velope along with several clippings perover his own and hold it with a tender taining to his friend: a spinster woman pressure. told the authorities he'd entered her "Mister Armstrong, time out ... " home and kissed her, twice he was Near the creek Mr. Schaeffer had seen reported seen in the Mobile vicinity, a sweet gum tree, and he was thinking it finally it was believed that he had left the would soon be spring and the sweet gum country.

No one has ever disputed Mr. Schaefready to chew. A razory stone ripped open the palm of his hand as he slid off fer's claim to the guitar. Several months the slippery embankment into the water. ago a new prisoner was moved into the He straightened up and began to run; his slettp house. He was said to be a fine legs were long, he kept almost abreast of player, and Mr. Schaeffer was persuaded Tico Feo, and icy geysers sprayed around to lend him. the guitar. But all the man's them. Back and forth through the woods tunes came out sour, for it was as though the shouts of men boomed hollowly like Tico Feo, tuning his guitar that last voices in a cavern, and there were three morning, had put a curse upon it. Now it shots, all highflying, as though the guard lies under Mr. Schaeffer's cot, where its were shooting at a cloud of geese. glass diamonds are turning yellow; in the Mr. Schaeffer did not see the log that night his hand sometimes searches it out, lay across the creek. He thought he was and his fingers dri(t across the strings: 0 still running, and his legs thrashed about then, the world.

The Real M~ Capote Can Now Stand UP

by D.R. MOHAN RAJ

Since the advent of television about 1950, the successful American writer has been faced with a situation in which the glare of the media and resultant instant public. recognition distract him from his real business: writing. Frequently the media create a celebrity image that takes public attention away from the writing. Interviews about books in progress seem to become as important as the work itself. Advance excerpts appear in magazines, raising expectations that the book may not satisfy. Along with Norman Mailer, Truman Capote best exemplifies this phenomenon.

Capote's instinct for self-promotion was nurtured by the nihilistic narcissism of the era, enhanced by his .extraordinary skill in understanding and manipulating the media.

As a child from a broken home, Capote (born September 30, 1924) endured unsettling experiences, some of which he later recaptured with poignancy in his fiction. He achieved early fame as a writer: Capote was 22 when he won the O. Henry Memorial Award for his short story "Miriam," and his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was being widely discussed before he was 25. His flamboyant personality seeJ;Ils to have taken over thereafter, influencing his output as well as critical evaluations of it.

Capote acquired a celebrity image not entirely reflective of his true character as a writer. His ready wit and dazzle at parties and in television interviews, the calculated use of provocative photographs of him in magazines and on the jackets of his books and his seemingly exaggerated claims on behalf of his later work, confirmed the generally accepted view of him as an enfant terrible. After his death on August 26, 1984, Time magazine said: "As much a member of the glitterati as of the literati; Capote was a gossipy, party-loving sybarite with a gift for self-prorItotion and TV talk-show repartee."

Whether oriIot that assessment is fair, Capote's death gives us a chance to look at his writings themselves, without his promotional hyperbole. And when we search in them for artistic use of language, we find that they reveal him as something more than an extension of his noisy public self. He was at least as lean, self-critical, conscious, painstaking and unsparing a literary craftsman as any writer of this era: a sculptor with words, a lapidary artist (as one critic called him), a master of nuance and detail.

Nowhere is Capote's striving for excellence, for the right phrase or description to convey his vivid and evocative images, more evident than in his shorter pieces. Although he wrote them throughout his 35-year career, most of them were produced during the first decade and a half.

"A Tree of Night," one of the earliest of Capote's stories but by no means his best, demonstrates '(Iearly his ability to invoke a whole world of meanings and images in a single description: It was winter. A string of naked light bulbs, from which it seemed all warmth had been drained, illuminated the little depot's cold, windy platform. Earlier in the evening, it had rained, and now icicles hung along the station-house eaves like some crystal monster's vicious teeth.

Except for a girl, young and rather tall, the platform was deserted.

The girl, Kay, typical of Capote's innocents adrift in a world that seems mysteriously malevolent, has boarded a train: The coach was a relic with a decaying interior of ancient red-plush seats, bald in spots, and peeling iodine-colored woodwork. An old-time copper lamp, attached to the ceiling, looked romantic and out of place. Gloomy dead smoke sailed the air, and the car's heated closeness accentuated the stale odor of discarded sandwiches, apple cores, and orange hulls.

Some eight or nine pages later in the story, Kay has had enough of the rail coach and its people, and steps out to the front of the observation platform. A man whose presence in the coach has been troubling her for some time also walks out, but she does not hear his footsteps: It was a subtle zero sensation that warned her finally; but some seconds passed before she dared look behind.

He was standing there with mute detachment, his head tilted, his arms dangling at his sides. Staring up into his harmless, vapid face, flushed brilliant by the lantern light, Kay knew of what she was afraid: it was a memory, a childish memory of terrors that once, long ago, had hovered above her like haunted limbs on a tree of night. Aunts, cooks, strangers-each eager to spin a tale or teach a rhyme of spooks and death, omens, spirits, demons. And always there had been the unfailing threat of the wizard man: stay close to the house, child, else a wizard man'll snatch you and eat you alive! He lived everywhere, the wizard man, and everywhere was danger. At night, in bed, hear him tapping at the window? Listen!

Once the mystery has been resolved, Kay's tension too must ease: As Kay watched, the man's face seemed to change form and recede before her like a moon-shaped rock sliding downward under a surface of water. A warm laziness relaxed her.

In two later stories, "A Diamond Guitar" (1950, see page 28) and "A Christmas Memory" (1956), Capote economizes even more, chiseling his sentences to an exquisite nicety.

His 1951 novella, The Grass Harp, acknowledged to be partly based on personal experience, is a breezily narrated story about a conflict between two elderly sisters over a "home-based dropsy-cure business" and the preference of a boy, their cousin, to share self-imposed exile in a tree with one of them. Although Capote disliked a critic's using the word "fantasy" about this book, his story does focus on the poetry of wonder and delight surrounding lives lived spontaneously, "untarnished by conformity and common sense."

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), adapted into a movie, is better known and perhaps more widely read. In it Capote strikes, says critic Paul Darcy Boles, "the deep note of human existence ... beyond moral condemnation, wry laughter, or the world's assessment." Capote is noted to have achieved "art," going beyond a mere "decorator's accomplishments": "a rare individual voice, cool even when exasperated, never more sure of itself than when amazed, sounds through every sentence."

In this short novel, Capote created one of his most memorable characters, Holly Golightly, who is described on the book's jacket as "a bad little good girl adrift in New York, surrounded by wolves and waifs." Time magazine said of her: "She's a cross between a grown-up Lolita and a teen-age Auntie Marne. A piquantly wacky ex-hillbilly who lives in a Manhattan upper East Side brownstone, she is a kind of expense account tramp ... alone and a little afraid in a lot of beds she never made." Capote uses Holly's pet cat as an integral element in the story. He is a "poor slob without a name," Holly informs us: I haven't any right to give him (a name): he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am 1. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet.

Holly's quest for such a place has not quite ended when the narrative draws to a close. Planning a getaway from New York and the United States, she dumps the cat amid garbage cans but, feeling a twinge of remorse, moments later, goes back to get it. The cat is gone, and Holly is distraught. The narrator promises to find the cat and care for him while she is gone. He does, but the cat has found a new home: He was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged.

Recalling that, the narrator now has hope that Holly, too, has found her destination.

Critics have called attention to Capot~'s ability in his short fiction to enter the worlds of children and of haunted personalities. Some have noted a purity of art in the highly imaginative stories that mirror claustrophobic worlds-at times eccentric, but always controlled. Capote's varied prose is equally at ease "in situations of dark and frightful nightmare, and of extravagant comedy." While Capote can "express the inner eye," and invoke a whole world-view in a few lines, his prose is also "journalistic enough to be very easy and pleasant to follow."

Critic Carlos Baker viewed Capote's achievement in his earliest short fiction thus: "If the Mad Hatter and the Ugly Duchess had had a child, and the child had almost grown up, these are almost the kind of stories he could be expected to write." Implied in that awed but double-edged comment is criticism echoed by others that Capote's stories are full of unrealistic characters and fanciful plots and show indifference tomoral or societal issues. Capote's starlCeseemed objectionable, according to the canons of sociological and naturalistic prose predominant in the American fiction of the 1930s and 1940s.

A clear indication that his concerns were consciously formal or aesthetic, rather than moral or sociological, is provided by the circular patterning of several of his stories. Capote wants to showyou the touches of color and shade and the tonal values he can add to embellish an event already hinted at. In many of the

stories the narrator is himself a writer, justifying the selfconsciousness of much of the writing. Observe, too, his motifs: adolescent boys, poignant childhoods, eccentric and lovable old women, fascinating younger women of questionable manners, stray cats, changeling faces, guitars and other symbols of the creative urge. Their experiences make the Capote stories meaningful in a moral or social way that his critics ignore. And all his characters seem to have the will to prevail over the odds assailing them.

Capote's most ambitious work was In Cold Blood (1965). In it, he claimed to have created a "serious new art form" called the "nonfiction novel," by blending talents and techniques from the worlds of fiction and journalism: imagination, coupled with a 20/20 eye for visual detail (an exceedingly selective one, worthy of a "liter~ry photographer"); the ability to empathize with personalities outside the writer's usual range; prodigious research, and the ability to transcribe verbatim long conversations without using notes or a tape recorder, a task for which Capote said he had trained himself over long years. Neither a mere journalist nor a mere novelist could accomplish all this, Capote argued.

Having dabbled throughout his career in the traditional literary nonfictional modes-sketches, essays, travelogues and interview pieces-Capote had also written a fuller narrative report for The New Yorker on a tour of the Soviet Union by the Porgy and Bess musical show. The report, published in book form as The Muses Are Heard, used the "techniques of the comic short novel," he claimed. But when Capote read in The New York Times one morning in November 1959 of the murder-seemingly motiveless-in rural Kansas of a typical American family, the Clutters, he felt as though the event he had been seeking had at last arrived: "Almost instantly I thought, well, this is maybe exactly what I want to do, because I don't know anything about that part of Kansas. It all seems fresh to me. I'll go without any prejudices. And so I went."

For the next six years, Capote was fully absorbed in his research on the Clutter murders. He collected 6,000 pages of notes and enough boxes full of documents to fill a couple of rooms. Capote estimated that some 80 percent of his research was not used directly in the book; but the intimacy he gained with his subject doubtless enabled him to handle it with great authority and insight. Incidentally, it helped Capote's cause that the crime provided a subject or theme "that would not darken or yellow with time."

Where Capote differed from the conventional or classical journalist was in the use to which he put his research. By selecting from the diaries and recollections of participants and eyewitnesses those symbols and images most evocative of their thought processes, and by arranging them in a pattern suggesting some motivation even in seemingly senseless acts, he lent a coherence and meaning to his tale beyond the reach of most journalists. And by restricting himself to the given material, the actions and memories on record, he abstained from the resource most freely available to conventional novelists, the power to invent situations that would provide a more unified perspective, a better shape, to the medley of seemingly chaotic events. Thus Capote achieved a tale authenticated doubly-by the actual corroboration of participants and eyewitnesses, and by the artistic ordering he provided it.

Predictably, the work was faulted on both grounds. Some (Text continued on page 48)

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Literary Machinations

,by DAN

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GREENBURG

My mechanic was having trouble with his novel. Knowing I was a novelist, he asked if I could help. I told him to bring it in and I'd have a look, He told me he needed it back pretty soon. I told him it was my busy season but I'd see what I could do.

My mechanic came by a couple days later to see what I had found. .

"Well," I said, "I opened her up and took a look, and I'm afraid you've got a little trouble in there."

"Serious trouble?" he asked.

"Probably not too serious. The timing's off on four of your six characters, and two of the others ought to be replaced."

"Do you think I could do the work myself?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Don't know how handy you are," I said, "or what tools you got. You own a thesaurus?"

"A what?" he asked.

"That's what I thought," I said. "No, I don't think you ought to do the work yourself. You get it all apart, you might not be able to put the. pieces back together again."

"Maybe you could help me," he said. "I'd pay you, of course. " "Like I said, it's my busy season. Also I'm not cheap$37.50 an hour. Plus parts."

"Parts?"

"You know-typing bond, carbon paper, type-writer ribbon, correction fluid, Scotch tape-that kind of thing."

"Well, do you think you could give me an estimate?"

I scribbled a figure on an index card. He looked at it and whistled. \ "Remember, that estimate doesn't include syntax either," I said.

"Don't you think this is a little on the high side?" he asked.

I gave him the names of a couple of my novelist friends and suggested he get competitive bids. He said he didn't really know their work and guessed he'd stick with me.

"When do you think I could pick the manuscript up?" he asked.

I told him to check with me in about a week.

One week later to the day, he dropped by.

"Is it ready?" he asked.

"Afraid not," I said. "Once I opened her up and really took a look, I discovered a few more problems."

"Like what?" he asked.

34

~ L. -- -

Copyright © 1984 by the New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission from The New York Times Book Review

"Well, for one thing," I said, "there's a lot of cheap imagery in there that ought to come out-similes, metaphors, personifications-they're just clogging up the action. You also have some defective aphorisms. Then there's a hole in your plot about a mile wide that needs to be filled up. Plus which your whole superstructure is rusty and falling apart."

He seemed really upset. "What about those two characters you said ought to be replaced?"

"I'm afraid it's worse than that," I said. "If it was me, I'd replace all six of them. They're really shot. It's not just their left out their timing that's off, it's their motivations-you motivations when you hooked them up, and now I can't even get them to turn over, much less speak."

"I can't afford to replace all six of them."

"Well then, maybe they can be rebuilt," I said. "But you definitely need to replace your protagonist."

"My protagonist?" he asked.

"I'm afraid so."

He smiled sheepishly.

"Look," he said, "I'm not even sure I know what a protagonist is."

I pointed.

"It's this guy right here, see?"

He nodded.

"Why does he need to be replaced?"

"He's weak. He's not going to be able to go.the distance for you. He's going to give out on you in midplot, and when he does he's going to tear the hell out of the whole thing-jt'll be a real mess."

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My mechanic looked a little queasy. 1 almost felt sorry for him.

"Listen," 1 said, "I hate to have to be the bearer of such bad news, but 1 figured you'd want to know the truth."

"I know," he said. "I appreciate your honesty."

"Another novelist might give you an entirely different story, tell you all you needed was a superficial tuneup-wider margins, a retype job, stuff like that-and just forget about your protagonist and all the rest of it. But that's not the way I operate. " "I know that," he said.

"I'm a professional, and I've got a reputation to maintain. I send you out of here with only wider margins and a retype job, and a day later your protagonist gives out and your whole novel self-destructs-how's that going to make me look?" 1 asked.

He nodded miserably.

"How long before my protagonist gives out?" he asked.

1 shrugged.

"Hard to say. Could be he'd last you all the way up to the climax in the 12th chapter. Could be he'd give out in the first 30 pages. You just can't tell with a weak protagonist. If it was me, I'd pick up a new one, slap it in there and be done with it."

"How hard would it be to find one?" he asked. "A used one, 1 mean. I don't know if 1 can afford a new one."

"Well, let me think," I said, scratching my head. "A novelist 1 know has just scrapped a trilogy he's been working on for some time now. You could maybe make a deal with him on his protagonist. In a piece that long, even a minor character could work as a protagonist for you. After a little customizing, I mean."

"Could you give this guy a call and see if he'd be willing to sell me a minor character? A protagonist from a work that size has got to be out of my price range."

"I'll call him," I said. "Of course, I don't know how anxious he's going to be to cannibalize a whole trilogy to sell you just one minor character."

"Look," he said, a pasty smile on his face, "maybe you could ask for a special favor."

"I could," I said. "Unless .... " "Unless what?"

"Unless you've ever done any work on his car," I said.

0 About the Author:

Jewish Mother.

Dan Greenburg is the author of How to be a

"I've decided to get rid of all the yes-men, nay sayers, and equivocators. What do you think, Parker?"

"You're right, dear. This lens really does bring him in close. " Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS. Inc. Š 1983.

Inside the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, a squat gray building at the end of a narrow, twisting road in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, a roundeyed, young chimpanzee named Sherman watches as a researcher drops food into a box. Sherman notes that the box is padlocked shut, so he strides to a colorful keyboard embedded in the wall and lights symbols that say "give key." A second chimpanzee, Austin, observes Sherman's request and then selects a key from a tray of tools. Austin hands the key to Sherman and watches closely as Sherman inserts the key into the padlock, twists it, and removes the lock. Then Sherman opens the box, scoops out the food, and gives half the prize to Austin.

Across town, at the end of another winding road, is the Georgia Retardation Center. In a small room on the first floor is a keyboard just like the one used by Sherman and Austin. A young woman namedCissy sits in front of it. She smiles, and punches the keys to ask, "Roycegive-cookie?" Speech pathologist Royce White grins, hugs Cissy and hands her a cookie.

This, too, is a major accomplishment.

Cissy is 18, but has a mental age of two-and-a-half years. Using the computerized system developed for the chimps at Yerkes, Cissy is pioneering a way for researchers to teach the profoundly retarded to communicate with symbols. She is learning to use language.

"Before this, there was often no hope for children such as Cissy," says Duane M. Rumbaugh. Now, with the Yerkes keyboard system, these children can punch a key and see the symbol, whereas spoken words are more transient, and may be lost to them for this reason.

"Now Cissy can live more like a human being," Rumbaugh adds. "To join the human society, you must be able to communicate symbolically."

Rumbaugh is the man who came up with the idea of the computer-based language system. He coordinates the language project at Yerkes and at the Georgia Retardation Center and is chairman of the psychology department at Georgia State University, also in Atlanta.

Rumbaugh decided to teach language to chimpanzees in the fall of 1970. "I felt that many of the initial symbol acquisition processes could be best understood by training a primate, which does not begin to symbolize spontaneously as do normal human children, I hoped that what we learned could then be applied to those

.

A Gift of Speech

The thrill of achievement on Cissy's face as she punches a button to ask for juice and on the faces of speech therapists Caren Millen and Royce White reflects the success of a research program aimed at helping profoundly mentally retarded children to communicate.

profoundly mentally retarded children who also have not been able to learn to talk of their own accord."

Other researchers had already taught apes to use sign language, but signing was often impossible for many retarded children, according to Rumbaugh, because of the poor motor control that frequently accompanies retardation.

So Rumbaugh teamed up with Harold Warner, chief biomedical engineer at Yerkes. With funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, they and a supporting team of specialists devised a flat, colorful, upright "language" board. This keyboard displays symbols called lexigrams ..

Lana, a female, was the first chimp to use the machine. She learned the symbols far

more readily than the researchers had initially expected. One day Lana spotted her trainer with an orange. She knew the fruit and liked it, but had been taught no symbol for the object; she did know, however, a symbol for apple and one for the color orange. So Lana made up a request, "Please- Tim-give-apple-that-isorange." Lana got the orange. And Tim, her teacher, made up a new lexigram for the fruit.

Lexigrams can be composed of any of nine different elements, such as a straight line, a wavy line, or a circle. These same elements, in different combinations represent items such as popcorn, juice, shirt, shoes, cup, bathroom and so on. Still other symbols are the names of the children-or the chimps-who use the keyboard, and the names of the participating researchers. The lexigrams are used instead of traditional English words because, says Rumbaugh, "at the time we formulated the project it was cheaper, in terms of the computer's keyboard, to use

an arbitrary symbol than written English.

Also, we doubted the apes' capacity to differentiate printed words."

Cissy doesn't need written English. If she wants popcorn, she punches lexigrams to say "Royce-give-popcorn."

Each key lights up as she punches it, and flashes the appropriate lexigram on a set of projectors above the keyboard. If the word sequence is reasonably accurate, Royce will give Cissy the popcorn. Cissy not only obtains her reward, but she can see the symbols she used to attain her goa!. Cissy also recognizes that some objects are as yet unnamed. That is, she has not learned to use any symbol to stand for certain objects. She has, of her own accord, selected previously unassigned. symbols for such new objects and then continued to use those symbols when appropriate. Thus, she has, in a sense, invented names which she and her teacher then continue to use to communicate more effectively.

"It's a new approach to language training," says Rumbaugh. "It's taken us farther in the treatment of mentally retarded peopie than we ever thought we could go."

Dorothy Parkel, who put Rumbaugh's ideato work in the language laboratory at the retardation center, said she was "somewhat skeptical" about the project at first.

Rumbaugh, Warner and Parkel hope to devise portable, battery-powered units for the children to carry in their pockets and small keyboards that will hook on to TV sets so that retarded children can talk to their families. Right now, Cissy and some of the other four children in the program are using nonelectronic portable keyboards that permit them to communicate outside the language laboratory with the staff members of the Georgia Retardation Center.

There will, however, always be limits for such profoundly retarded children.

Cissy, whose brain was damaged by fumes from a leaking gas furnace when she was one year old, may never develop reasoning ability much beyond that of a toddler. "But before we began language training, Cissy whined frequently," says Parke!. "It was hard to get her out of bed.

But now she gets up, dresses and looks forward to life. She smiles. She can even say some words. She can make herself happy."

Cissy does seem buoyantly happy now.

She can skip to the machine, plant herself solidly in the chair and begin a lively symbolic discussion with Royce. Before she learned to use the machine, she

floated in a gray mist of human misery. chosen for the project because they knew Her new language has penetrated the very little language but did exhibit some mist and made Cissy into a person ca- reasoning abilities.

According to Rumbaugh and Parkel, pable of the kind of joy she radiates when even severely retarded children have Royce says, "Good job, Cissy!"

Equally important, Cissy is now able to more cognitive capacity than chimpanempathize with and comfort others. When zees. Parke I believes that language skills a struggling photographer became frus- "can help these children to learn to use trated because she could not get a clear their limited cognitive capacity far more camera view of the computer, Cissy smiled effectively. " "How do we normal people think?" she softly, patted the photographer on the asks. "We think with language; we tell shoulder and murmured: "Good job."

Rhoda, another retarded child in the ourselves things. When I'm driving, I tell project, shows the "most dramatic" be- myself to stop for bread on the way home. havior change because of her new ability I'm thinking. I'm planning. I can't see the bread yet; it's only a concept. to communicate.

"These kids can be taught concepts.

"Rhoda's the youngest one here in our research; she's 10," says Parke!. "She We can teach them to plan for the future, displayed severe behavior problems. She even if it's only a little bit ahead in time. had terrible tantrums during which she So far we've given them symbols for tore all her clothes apart. She was di- things, and this is where language agnosed as autistic. She shrank from begins."

A year ago, Rhoda and the three boys being touched. She couldn't even look you in the eye. A few months of learning could only grunt and point shakily to objects they needed. Cissy was the only language has changed Rhoda." child in the project who had some verbal Now she acts more like a normal, bouncing youngster. She hugs Royce and approximations for objects. She said another speech therapist, Caren Millen. "da," for example, but it could mean doll She reaches for people's hands. She even or dog or door. Now, Cissy can be more smiles at strangers. One day she will be specific about what she means. All she has to do is touch the right lexigram on able to live outside an institution.

Three boys, ages 13, 16 and 19, may the keyboard. The ability to be specific also be able to live useful lives outside the enables Cissy to think, and to make retardation center because of their lan- plans. She waves her arms with exciteguage training. These five children were ment when she tells Royce-with symbols-that she'll soon go home. Cissy Therapist Royce White hugs Rhoda whose new can anticipate a future event. ability to communicate has transformed her Do these developments constitute a from a tantrum-throwing problem child panacea for all severely retarded perto a normal, bouncing youngster. sons? "No," says Rumbaugh. "My tentative estimate is that only about one-third of the retarded children with mental ages not in excess of three years have a substantial capacity for language learning.

Some of the kids we have worked with learned very little. The children who have progressed, who have a mental age of anywhere from 18 to 30 months, will always need¡ some help. But Cissy, for example, has increased her Yerkish vocabulary to about 150 words as a result of the program. She's also been able to verbalize-to talk-much better. Rhoda can't talk yet, but she's trying. So are the boys."

The scientists say we are only beginning to understand the prelinguistic .cognitive processes in children and in chimpanzees. But they have already learned enough from the chimps to change the lives of retarded children and en~ble them to move from an impoverished domain to one of rich social 0 exchange.

Ever~

In their pursuit of fitness and health, Americans are exercising more than ever: The President's Council on Physical Fitness reports that over 113 million Americansnearly half the population-participate in some form of regular physical exercise. For example, 102 million swim, 34 million jog and 12 million play racquetball regularly.

Some 5,000 multipurpose health clubs are in operation all over the United States.

They offer such facilities as weight rooms, exercise classes, running tracks, racquetball courts, swimming pools, sauna and whirlpool baths. Many offer nutrition and sport medicine clinics and child-health care.

In addition, health clubs promote a social atmosphere through such activities as tournaments, aerobic dance classes, athletics and fruit juice-and-salad sessions. For many, health clubs are replacing discotheques as the preferred place to socialize.

body's Doing It

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK PERLSTEIN

Improved flexibility, coordination and muscle strength are some rewards of regular exercise. In addition, studies show that exercise helps prevent heart attacks and clogged arteries. Exercise is also prescribed as therapy for certain types of diabetes and asthma.

Health clubs employ experts to demonstrate and supervise correct use of equipment and to monitor individual performance. Newcomers undergo stress tests to measure their heart rates and physical strength, after which individual exercise programs are drawn up.

Computerized readouts on treadmills, rowing machines and stationary bicycles give the user such data as resistance pressure, speed and distance covered. Variable-resistance exercise machines strengthen various body parts.

One organization in the vanguard of health care is the YMCA, which has built 1,000 fitness centers across the United States in recent years. The photos on these pages were taken at a new YMCA 100,000-sq-meter fitness center in Dallas, Texas.

0

-:1 â&#x20AC;˘

n the wall of Stephen Sondheim's study, amid the classical records and linguistic journals, there is a photograph of a man looking at a painting. The man is Sondheim and the painting is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. The photograph captures Sondheim during the rare public moment of a creative process that usually transpires in the privacy of his study, in the ultimate privacy of his mind. Sondheim is staring into Seurat's world--just as Seurat, brushes in hand, once stared at the Parisians in the park on the Grande Jatte-in order somehow to convey that world, to transmute it into words and music. The terminus of those efforts is Sunday in the Park With George, the Sondheim-James Lapine musical that opened last April at the Booth Theater in New York. In a subliminal way, the show may be the closest Sondheim has ever come to an autobiographical work, because it turns on the idea of imagination, of creativity itself.

Sondheim's creativity is, perhaps more than anything else, a function of the comfort he feels in being an observer in a wide world. Of all the songs he has written, the one he considers one of the most personal is "Someone in a Tree," about a little boy eavesdropping on the treaty negotiations that will open Japan to the West. "It's that sense of being related to history," says Sondheim, who is 55 years old, "and to events that are far outside of your own importance, and far beyond you. It's the same feeling you get when you're a city boy and suddenly you get out in the country and look up at the stars and realize there's a universe and you're part of it. It's that cosmic feeling, again, that city boys get when they're out in nature, in fields and mountains. It's that sense of relating to things outside and larger than yourself, and of looking back on the past, what the past means.

That covers a lot of territory."

Yet Sondheim has always worked, and preferred to work, in territory surveyed by others. He gives voice in song to characters who have been created by a playwright, in situations defined by a director. Of all Sondheim's shows, Sweeney Todd is the only one he initiated. Collaboration is the very essence of creativity in the theater, but in Sondheim's case the professional choice also coincides with a personal one: He is that paradox, a theater person who abhors the limelight. Few people outside the theater

O

Copyright Š 1984 by .he New York Times Company.

Reprinted by permission from The New York Times Magazine.

community would recognize him on a street, and when he has had to appear onstage in several tributes to his work he has felt profoundly fidgety. "I would much rather stand in the background," Sondheim says.

In his 13 shows Sondheim has staked out a turf as big as the emotional landscape of post-World War II America.

Even when the shows have been set abroad or in the past, their themes have addressed contemporary topics-or universal ones, Sondheim might aver-by way of metaphor. He has treated the travails of modern marriage in Company, injustice and revenge in Sweeney Todd and idealism and compromise in Merrily We Roll Along.

His lyric concerns and fascinations find their equivalent in Sondheim's compositions, which have one foot in the Tin Pan Alley tradition and the other in contemporary classical music. The combination has its critics. There is the famous story of how Ethel Merman refused to let Sondheim write the music for Gypsy. Jule Styne, who did compose the music for Gypsy, once said of Sondheim, "If he's the hope of musical theater, he's got to write melody." .

Many of Sondheim's shows have had long runs but-with the enormous costs of mounting a musical on Broadwaymost have been financial flops. Somewhat typical was Follies, which ran for a year but lost its entire $800,000 investment. Yet that very clash between high art and popular appeal is central to the creative tension, the dynamism, in Sondheim's work.

"Every time I've done a show and someone has said, 'Gee, that's odd,' I always had a rationale for why it wasn't," Sondheim says. "With Company, we were aware we were telling a nonlinear story. And every now and then, Hal Prince [the director] or George Furth [the librettist] would say, 'Do you think it's going to bother people that it doesn't have a plot?' And then I'd say, 'No, there's so much entertainment value.

There's a funny song and this and that.' " But audiences and critics have not always concurred.

Yet Sondheim is an artist of big risks, big dares. Michael Bennett, Sondheim's peer and his collaborator in Follies and Company, made innovations in musical theater that redirected its mainstream, and works of his like A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls rest firmly in the groove of commercial theater.

Harold PrinceSondheim's most regular collaborator, has ventured into opera, the direction

some think Sondheim should take. But Sondheim has neither left the musical form nor advanced it as much as he has personally redefined it. It is not surprising that Sondheim's favorite American musical is Porgy and Bess, for Gershwin's 1935 work, like many of Sondheim's, stands at the ambiguous crossroads of theater, opera and folk or popular music. "I've never read the original reviews," Sondheim says, "but I wonder if people had any idea what they were listening to. Did they think it was an avant-garde musical?

Did they think it was an opera? What did they think it was? I would love to know whether they thought it was somebody getting above himself, that it shouldn't be done on Broadway, whether they were startled at an all-black show. I have no idea what they thought. I just know it was the most rewarding musi ever written for the American musical theater, the bestand it was never a success. It never made its money back."

In pondering Porgy and Bess, Sondheim is pondering himself. And in the mix of influences he represents, Sondheim resembles no one in the history of American music or theater more than Gershwin. The first major influence on Sondheim was Oscar Hammerstein 2d.

The story is embedded in theater lore: Young Sondheim-born on March 22, 1930, in New York-moves to Pennsylvania with his mother after his parents are divorced; meets neighbor boy, whose father is Oscar Hammerstein 2d; as piano student, becomes protege and surrogate son to Hammerstein; writes his ¡first musical, By George, in boarding school and asks Hammerstein to critique it coldbloodedly. "It's the worst musical I ever heard," Sondheim recalls Hammerstein telling him, "but that doesn't mean it's not talented."

Says Sondheim, "I was never allowed to be self-indulgent because I was brought up by a taskmaster from an e~rly age.

The first influence I had was a highly professional, highly rule-conscious man.

He didn't say obey the rules, he just pointed them out. He said, 'Writing does not consist of saying, Oh, I like that word. Writing consists of choosing.'

That's an unusual lesson to learn at 15, or even at 21." Sondheim counts among his other theatrical influences the composers Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern "for their harmonic language," and the lyricists Cole Porter for playfulness, Yip Harburg for an antic imagination, and both Dorothy Fields and Frank Loesser for their command of conversational, colloquial language.

Yet Sondheim had diverged from that tradition long before he wrote Follies in the early 1970s. He considers 1959's Gypsy the conclusion of the Rodgers-andHammerstein lineage and, after writing its lyrics at the age of 28, said, "That's the last of those I want to do." Sondheim came under the sway of classical composers during college, and his fellowship after graduation with the avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt was as important in some ways as was his adolescent apprenticeship to Hammerstein. "They represented two different fields," Sondheim says. "One was theater, the other music. What I was learning from Milton was basic grammar-sophisticated grammar, but grammar. It was a language, whereas what I learned from Oscar was what to do with language. They are twin pillars, but it's like one is red and one is white. I learned from Milton the means of holding an ear over a period of time, how you keep someone listening for 45 minutes so that at the end they feel they've heard a piece. And that's not what I learned from Hammerstein."

What Sondheim might have added was that Hammerstein typified art for mass consumption, while Babbitt once wrote an essay titled "Who Cares if You Listen?" To this day, Sondheim listens almost exclusively to modern classical music. He is most influenced by Ravel and Rachmaninoff, secondarily by Prokofiev, Copland and Britten. Near the turntable in his study on a recent day lay the discs of David Del Tredici's "Final Alice" and Steve Reich's "Music for a Large Ensemble." Sondheim does not listen to much popular music but, tellingly, the group that has most impressed him is the Talking Heads, probably the most musicallyventuresome rock group today.

Sondheim has come to subsume all his influences so thoroughly that they cannot be readily identified in his work. He also has resisted any concession to trend-so much so that he sometimes wonders if he is passe without knowing it. It is impossible to imagine Sondheim consciously writing a rock composition like Bernstein's Mass. And in his lyrics, he tried to avoid slang since it can become dated, even inventing curses for his characters in West Side Story.

But Sondheim's voice is not a static thing; it does not exist in a vacuum. His voiceis largely defined by the projects he has selected. Beyond the emotional terrain he has tackled, he has made musicals out of seemingly unlikely sourcesPlautus (Forum), Aristophanes (The Frogs), a Bergman film (Night Music),

Grand Guignol (Sweeney Todd), Kabuki (Pacific Overtures) and now, with Sunday in the Park With George, Seurat's divisionist art. "He doesn't duplicate himself, does he?" says Michael Bennett.

"He'll tackle things no one else would think of. You can't think of any Sondheim show that's like any other."

;\!

thelevel of individual characters, Sondheim has said, "I like neurotic people. I like troubled people.

Not that I don't like squared-away people, but I prefer neurotic people." He elaborates on the notion: "What 'neurotic people' means to me is people with conflicts.

And that's like saying I like to write about character. I don't like to write about oversimplified people unless it's for something like farce, like Forum. Songs can't develop uncomplicated characters or unconflicted people. You can't just tell the sunny side and have a story with any richness to it. Good drama is the study of human passions." But at times Sondheim has written so convincingly for troubled and angry characters that even his collaborators have winced at the onslaught. Company was originally to close with Robert, the bachelor llmid unhappily married friends, denouncing wedlock as akin to hell in a song sardonically titled "Happily Ever After." Sondheim himself called the song "a scream of pain," according to Craig Zadan's book Sondheim & Co., and Harold Prince said, "If I heard that song I wouldn't get married for anything in the whole world."

Sondheim ultimately replaced the song with "Being Alive," a declaration that commitment, however flawed, is better than loneliness. It is musical theater's equivalent of the "We need the eggs" speech with which Woody Allen ended

Annie

Hall.

But it is rare that Sondheim has to replace a song because he does not even begin to write one until the playwright has written the surrounding scene, and, preferably, the entire book. "I like writing within parameters," Sondheim says.

"I love for the playwright to create the characters, and then for me to explore them as if I were an actor. What I do is interpret and create simultaneously."

Early in his career, Sondheim learned the importance of writing in character, the skill that is perhaps his greatest. He still cringes at one line he wrote in the lyrics to West Side Story-Maria saying, "It's alarming how charming I feel." "There always comes a time," Sondheim says, "when you have to face the cast. And if an actress says to you, 'Excuse me, but if I'm

from the streets how do you want me to read this alarming-charming deal? Am I imitating something I heard on TV?' You have to be prepared for it. It's not just so you can show your fellow songwriters, 'See how in-character I write.'

It's because there's an actress who hilS to sing that. And eventually it's naked and it's got to be right. Context is everything. " At the same time, Sondheim's lyrics are notable for their sophistication. He is, after all, a New York sophisticate himself, someone who has lived most of his life in a 1O-by-30-block morsel of Manhattan, someone who subscribes to Verbatim, the language quarterly. In his lyrics, one hears words like "acquiesce" and "ameliorate," references to Proust and Pound. In "The Little Things You Do Together" in Company, ~ondheim built a rhyme on "pursue," "accrue" and "misconstrue." He has invoked multiple and virtually simultaneous narrators in such songs as "Now/Later/Soon" in A Little Night Music and "Someone in a Tree" in Pacific Overtures.

Sondheim's actual writing process in. cludes very little formal research-a few art-history books for Sunday in the Park With George, a few chapters of Japanese history for Pacific Overtures. Rather, he merges himself with the characters. For each song, he keeps a separate folder with notes on the characters, their backgrounds and personalities, their home furnishings and attire. Sondheim described the process for "Could I Leave You?" from Follies, a song in which a middle-aged woman names all the elements of her empty marriage. "For that song," he recalls, "I made lists of what Phyllis [the character] might have had in her house, phrases she might use. I was trying to give a portrait of her life by making a list. When she talks about the things she's going to leave by leaving her husband, I picked things not because I thought they were funny but because I wanted to give a sense of her life. 'Passionless lovemaking once a year' tells you a lot in one sentence. The telling detail is the essence of playw~ighting, of all writing."

The folders are only one part of a standard songwriting process for Sondheim. He always writes while lying on the couch in his study; until recently, he wrote almost exclusively at night. He always works with a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. He always uses Blackwing 602 soft lead pencils ("They wear down quickly so I feel like I'm getting a lot done") and a separate legal

pad for every stanza in a song. When Sondheim revises a song, he writes it on an unsullied pad.

Sondheim's way with words fits into a broader aspect of intellect, his love for puzzles. He has, in fact, called lyricwriting "an elegant kind of puzzle."

Sondheim has regularly competed in the word games in The New York Times, The London Times and The Nation magazine.

He has designed word games for New York magazine and once created his own Monopoly-style board game, titled "Hal Prince" and based on a 36-week Broadway season. A collection of puzzles-from Rubik's Cube to elaborate three-dimensional jigsaws-fills his Turtle Bay town house.

Like many musicians, from Stravinsky to Babbitt, Sondheim is a skilled mathematician. He initially intended to major in math at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, before opting for music. The relationship between the two disciplines, Sondheim feels, is clear.

"Music is the organization of a certain finite number of variables," he says.

"Language has an infinite number of possibilities; diatonic music does not.

You're juggling a group of known forces.

And what makes up the diatonic scale has a clear mathematical basis. The relationships of notes to each other, the needs of dissonances to resolve into consonance, have a mathematical principle. When you look at an octave, it's not just two Cs; there's an eight there. It's almost subconscious, but if you study music, you must be aware of these things. It's a language. It's almost computerese. " But it is impossible to separate the invention of Sondheim's music from that of his lyrics. For him, there is no clear dividing line between the two tasks; each feeds the other. When he inserted a half-note rest in one of the songs in Sunday in the Park With George, for instance, it was not only to syncopate the music but to give the character time to change her mind.

"I take a huge amount of notes on songs, both musically and lyrically," Sondheim says, "so that by the time I start composing, I have so much to draw on. I always start with at least half a page of what the¡ character should be talking about, or the things I want to bring out in the song. It's not even an outline; it's like free-associating what the song should accomplish, or could accomplish. Then Atop his piano and beneath the personalized paperweights lie Sondheim's works in progress.

comes the winnowing-down process of how much can this song take. You can make points A, Band C, but you don't have room for D, E and F. And as you do that, you eliminate certain colors and it becomes more apparent what the song should be about. And that leads to a refrain or to a line of some sort.

"A refrain or an opening line will often suggest a melodic idea, which I will then go to the piano and test. About 20 percent of the time, it comes out to be something I've already written. About 20 percent of the time, it's something somebody else has written. And then every now and then-the other 60 percent-it's something to build on. That's one way a song happens.

"The other way it happens is to sit at the piano with a page of dialogue that I'm trying to work the song into-along with any notes I may have-and just kind of read or hear music and start to fiddle at the piano until something occurs to me. It might just be punctuation or some underscoring. And often in those punctuations will come a suggestion of a whole musical atmosphere. And once you have a musical atmosphere-which could be any~ thing from a running figure to a.chord change-you have a way to start some melodic ideas. They're not related to a conscious lyrical phrase, but it gives you a basic melodic rhythm and that can spring into other things." o make a somewhat abstract process more tangible, consider the creation of one song, "Send In the Clowns" from A Little Night Music.

Sondheim wrote the piece-probably his best-known song, and notable for its theater and circus imagery-for what was originally to be a spoken scene between two former lovers., Fredrik and Desiree.

"We had assumed the actress we hired for Desiree wouldn't be able to sing," Sondheim recalls, "because she had to be glamorous. And so the vocal burden was to be on everyone else in the show. But then we got Glynis [Johns] and she could sing in a certain style, a breathy musicality. So Hal [Prince] felt we could give her a place to sing. I said, 'Where?' He said, 'In the bedroom scene.' I said, 'The trouble is, it's Fredrik's scene.' Hal said, 'Let me fiddle with it directorially and then come see it.' I came to rehearsal and indeed Hal had directed it in a way that Fredrik was the dramatic force, but Desiree was the emotional one. Having seen that, I was able to see a way.

"I wanted to use some theater images

T

because she is an actress. I was aware that I had to use irony to prevent it from becoming sentimental, because she is not a sentimental character and the show, while full of sentimentality, is ultimately ironic, because it's about flirtation rather than love. There's a light, dry quality about it, rather than a sweet quality.

That made me think she should ask questions rather than make statements.

"The first thing I did was discuss the motivations with Hal and Hugh [Wheeler, the librettist] and write a page of sentences about what she was feeling, things like 'The hardest human thing to do is sever a relationship,' and 'You like to suffer,' and 'You're afraid of your own age.' I started with short phrases, partly because I thought someone who was wounded wouldn't speak in long phrases.

Also, Glynis' voice is most effective in short phrases. But it most of all had to do with Desiree being someone who doesn't want to give in to the depth of her feelings.

"I started working on lyrics with 'I thougl}t ... ' and 'We are a pair of fools, aren't we?' Then I went to 'It's really funny.' Then, 'Isn't it perfect? Doesn't it fit?' And then, 'Isn't it fun?' And then I said, 'Aren't we a pair?' Also, one of the first words I had her using was 'farce' because it's a theatrical term. ¡"By the time I got to the second or third or fourth lyric sheet, I already had the rhythm of phrases that went da-dada-dum. 'Isn't this' and then I had words like 'rich' and 'bliss.' And from having that rhythmic pattern, I had a series of short ironic questions, with comments on the questions. Desiree's a lady who comments on herself as she goes along. The rhythm also suggested the melody. Glynis can handle an octave and two or three notes more, but she can't sustain. And that was another reason for the short phrases. She's not a lyric singer, more of a chanteuse."

But there is a quirk in Sondheim's writing process, according to friends and colleagues, a tendency to procrastinate, both in choosing a project and actually writing it. They point to the gaps of several years between many of his shows, the fact that many of his greatest songs"Being Alive" in Company and "Comedy Tonight" in Forum to name two-were written while the shows were out of town.

Sondheim rarely writes songs outside of specific shows-a 50th-birthday ditty for Harold Prince being one of the rare exceptions. "He backs into most every project," Prince says. "He spends most of his time figuring out why the project

shouldn't be done. 'It doesn't sing' is the typical Sondheim reply. If the devil ever had an advocate, it's Sondheim." Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator on many of Sondheim's musicals, says of his writing process: "Like most composers and writers I know, Sondheim works only under great pressure. That's part of a composer's temperament. I know very few w,ho work slowly and methodically.

We worry and fret a great deal-and when the situation is desperate the work is turned out in the fever of necessity."

Sondheim strongly disagrees with the image of himself as a procrastinator. He does not love working, but once he commits to a project, no one doubts his energy and perfectionism. The intervals between his shows, Sondheim says, are more a function of the time it takes to

make sure I'm wntlOg the right one.

I don't want to write a good song if it's the wrong song. It's a lot of work for nothing."

Beyond caution, Sondheim, even with four Tony Awards to his name, still harbors self-doubts. "The most interesting thing about Stephen Sondheim," says Michael Bennett, "is that he has very little sense of being Stephen Sondheim.

We have a lot of conversations about how he thinks he hasn't succeeded. He projects failure much more than success. " "When I first hear a song sung," Sondheim says, "I'm worried that I'm going to be embarrassed by what I wrote.

So I try to postpone the moment. Because as long as I'm singing at the piano, raise money for a musical than the time it it sounds swell. But out there in front of takes him to write one. Then, too, there other people with perfo ers, it's got to is his well-known habit of not writing carry its own weight and I'm worried it songs until after he has seen the script; won't. I'm less nervous than I used to be. even then, he cannot determine the key The agony is at a lower level. But it's not free from nerves, from and octave range for each song until the entirely apprehension. " cast has been chosen.

One of those dreaded moments arrived But there exist some personal reasons a few weeks ago. In a downtown refor delay, for the reticence to commit to hearsal studio, Sondheim went to hear shows. "The reason I look at things from Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Petersa negative point of view," Sondheim says, who play Seurat and his mistress in "is that until I look at all the potential Sunday in the Park With George-go pitfalls I can't decide (a) whether it can through a song titled "Color and Light." be written or (b) whether I can write it.

It is a deceptively simple song. The Those are two different things. I'm reaccompaniment consists of a series of minded of Oscar Hammerstein turning single notes, played as a little dissonant down My Fair Lady because he said, 'It all takes place in that studio.' And that's round; many of the lyrics consist of exactly what Lerner and Loewe saw in it. Seurat muttering, "Blue," "Red," and It takes so long to write a song. I want to so on, for the colors on his palette. But iI1 that seeming simplicity is the summation of months of thought-of staring at the Left: A bookcase in his¡ living room displays part painting of La Grande laue, of reading of Sondheim'shuge up on Seurat; of those Blackwing 602 collection ofantique pencils and legal pads and folders of puzzlesandgames. notes, both lyrical and musical. Each Right: Sondheim in his study dissonant note, each muttered word, is a pores over his preliminary re-creation in sound of an individual dot, notes for the music of Sunday one of those five million individ.ual dots in the Park With George. from which Seurat created a painting, a Above: Sondheim in unity. discussion withJames "It certainly relates to music," SondLapine, director of Sunday in the Park With George. heim says. "Seurat experimented with the color wheel the way one experiments with a scale. He used complementary color exactly the way one uses dominant and tonic harmony. When you start thinking about it, there are all kinds of analogies. It started from the painting and the more I found out about Seurat, the more I realized, 'My God, this is all about music.'"

D About the Author: Samuel G. Freedman reports on the theater for The New York Times.

Mr. Capote critics pointed

continued from page 33

to minor

factual

inaccuracies,

and said Capote's

selection and arrangement amounted to a suppression of some of the evidence. Others felt he had been needlessly shackled by his insistence on nonfiction, and could have achieved more by giving freer rein to his imagination. picayune, almost claims that Capote have invited such book, instead of

in direct

Some of this caviling

proportion

to the great

seems

and lofty

made for his work. In sum, Capote seems to treatment by talking too much about the letting it speak for itself.

For In Cold Blood is a successfully told tale of two real-life criminals, the society that bred and nourished them, the promise their lives may have held, and the ruins they made for themselves and others around them. Capote's manipulation of point of view, both to highlight injustice of the society and the

the criminals' view of the system by which they felt

victimized, and to provide a representative summary of how members of society viewed those criminals, is at all times masterly. Capote preserves the purity interest in the tale throughout-though and, more importantly, weaves an atmosphere

of his prose, maintains several segments of it

the ending, were already known-and of suspense and high drama that

is

almost impossible to denigrate. The book echoes many characters, motifs, images and situations from Capote's earlier fiction, almost as if they had anticipated magnum opus. Here is evidence-if

the real-life setting of his evidence were needed-

that Capote's fiction was well grounded, even if he is accused of selectively using material in In Cold Blood that consolidates his earlier concerns.

Which writer is not selective, whether journalist

or novelist?

Quite a bit of Capote's writing has been adapted to other media-theater, TV, film-with varying degrees of success.

Writing may be an analytical and a synthetic process, but its results are often organic. This is particularly true of Capote's work, because of his feel for the language and its rhythms, and for the art of narrative prose. Capote is frequently conscious of this seamlessness, speaking of people's faces or shapes in terms of an apple, an orange or a pear, as if man is always hard put to match the works of perfection-"something

nature. nature

Those fruits are a mark of has made just right."

Capote

also spoke of a book as something akin to a seed: "Instead of presenting a reader with a full plant, with all the foliage, a seed is planted in the soil of his mind." Capote seems to be telling us that written tales achieve their best effects when they match the organic material tory

they relate

passage to The Grass

to or describe,

as in this introduc-

Harp:

When was it that I first heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp. ... Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color when it has with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, grown red as sunset, when scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices. ... It must have been on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is knows the stories of all the the grass harp, always telling a story-it people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.

D

About the Author: D.R. Mohan Raj, currently an information editor with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISA T), near Hyderabad, taught journalism for several years at Osmania University.

Microscapes Since the dawn of history, when the first humans looked toward the heavens, man has been trying to understand the mysteries of the infinite. In today's scientific age, that search also leads inward, as attempts are made to penetrate the invisible world of matter and molecules, atoms and particles that make up our everyday world.

Strange shapes ano colors, dramatic images and. beautiful landscapes-all invisible to the naked eye-are revealed in a series of stunning photographs from the world of microelectronics.

Collected from work carried out by researchers and photographers at American Telephones & Telegraph' (AT&T) company, 47 of the dramatic views have been gathered into an unusual exhibit, "Microscapes," now touring the United States.

The photographic rendering of materials and processes, used by AT&T in the production of Western Electric advanced communications systems designed by Bell Labs, makes visible elaborate mosaics on tiny thumbnail-sized silicon chips, the subtle effects of stress and corrosion on metals and plastics, the complex inner structure of hair-thin glass filaments, the irradiation of silicon by laser, the electrodeposition of gold and copper.

The variety of technologies used to photograph the materials, prQcesses and products of the microtechnologies make up a technology of their own. These are: • Photomacrography: This technique moderately magnifies (generally from 2 to 25 times) small objects.

• Photomicrography: In this, the eye of a compound microscope is replaced with a camera; the resulting images can be hundreds of limes an object's actual size .

• Scanning electron micrography: Using an electron microscope, a narrow beam of electrons scans the outside surface of an object, producing an image that appears dimensional.

• Transmission electron microscope: Using an electron microscope, a beam of electrons pierces a thin sample of an object, projecting a shadow image which is recorded on photographic film.

• Thermography: Temperature

variations in the amount of heat, or infrared radiation, emitted by a subject are recorded with this technique. It is especially useful for monitoring operations where temperature control is critical.

• Interferometry: With this technique, scientists are able to visualize invisible density in a disturbed medium. The process involves splitting a light source into two beams, then recombining them on photographic film.

• Polarization: Light vibrates differently when reflected from surfaces of differing thickness or optical density. By passing the light through polarizing filters, the vibrations can be limite to a specific pla'ne rather than going in all directions, and the differentiation between portions of a subject can be record~.

By using two polarizers, both contrast and colors can be produced, and the stress in transparent materials can be shown.

The subjects of many of the abstract images resulting from the use of these sophisticated techniques may not be readily identifiable. But the inherent color, line and form are exciting and give new vision to high technology.

Says the collector of .the photographs, Leonard Stern of AT&T, "We were trying to approach technology in a way that wasn't literal.

Our object was not simply to reveal technology, but to lead the audience to appreciate it through images that have an art value of their own."

0 Clockwise from top: Scanning electron micrograph of resolidified silicon after laser irradiaton. Photomacrograph, fiber optic and epi-illumination of a corrosion study of solder flux on copper mirror.

Photomicrograph with polarization reveals complex structure of lightguide being drawn.

Metallograph, photomicrograph with reflected light of iron-plated copper soldering iron tip (cross section). A heat map (thermogram) of glass preform from which lightguides are drawn. Tin dendrites grown from meltphotomacrograph of pure melted tin with cooling carefully controlled.

The Art of Glass The designers of Steuben Glass, the 50-year-old American fine art glass firm, create dazzling works of art. They "are full of the same inventiveness and joy, fire and light that flowed from all the great glassmakers of the past."

Hope for Hearts A new array of diagnostic and treatmen! tools has brought gown the rate of heart attack fatalities in the United States. Dr. Denton Cooley, the noted heart surgeon who has performed thousands of open heart operations, was recently in India, and talked about the future of the artificial heart, the ethics of organ transplantation and the success of Indian doctors in the United States.

Children's Magazines In both the United States and India, children's magazines are growing up. While in the United States the trend is toward specialty magazines, in India publishers are taking pains to see that magazines for young people are better written, illustrated and printed.

Trends in Teaching The educational reform movement in the United States, which started by urging higher standards for students, is now concentrating equally on improving the quality of teaching by such innovative projects as vocational training and peer-teaching.

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